Ask HN/YC: How do you feel about Feel (a Twitter for emotions)? - <AUTHOR>

In a nutshell, Feel is a Twitter for emotions - when you post, you share an emotion first (happy, drunk, tired, inspired, etc), and an optional reason (text, check-ins, videos, photos, songs, etc).
The main differentiator is that Feel times how long you "Like" something. Instead of a one-time "Like", you convey how strongly you "feel" posts based on how long you hold down a "feel" button and how many times you press it.
As an author, your focus shifts from the superficial (what you're doing, food porn, a random link) to the "why" (how you feel, the emotion underlying what you're sharing). As a reader, you're not just incrementing a Like counter; you're communicating how much you empathize with your friend.
Also exciting: emotional trends (how UCLA feels today, or the reactions to #yc or #obama)
—
I've been flying solo with design/dev for 3-4 weeks. I surprised myself with what I came up with in that time, but there's still a lot missing and ample room to improve on implementation/security/UX/marketing/etc issues. Right now I'm in a private alpha with <100 friends, but I'd love to get your feelings on Feel (so punny.)
For a better idea of Feel, you can follow me @randy (can also provide my temp Feel password - email in profile). From YC, Kevin Hale (@rbg) and Joseph Walla (@joseph) also took the time to try it out (thanks!), so you can follow them too.
Thank you for your time! Excited to hear your feedback/questions.
(PS: I applied for YC S14. Somewhat of a risk to put this out there right before they announce interviews, but either way I'm committed to growing Feel through various deadlines/targets in the next few years. Either way, it's a huge value add to get honest, insightful feedback from a community I respect.)
To Feel, go here: http://feelapp.co <comment><USER2> Sounds pretty awesome, could definitely see the demand case for this. What stack is it built in? Are the updates real time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Currently using MEAN. The notifications use websockets for real-time updates, but eventually I'm planning on extending that to the feed and other areas.</comment></comment>


They Just Don't Listen': SF Kimchi Maker Saw 'Food Tech' Practices Up Close - <AUTHOR> https://www.kqed.org/news/11831806/they-just-dont-listen-sf-kimchi-maker-saw-food-tech-practices-up-close-in-her-kitchen <comment><USER4> The article is a little misleading. I too operate without VC funding and behave in a ways similar to the small business owner -- because I am one. But to apply the philosophy of a small business to a startup would be a big mistake. Startup founders and their VCs behave the way they do, because they are optimising for different things than a small business owner like me. I am optimising for survival, a startup founder is optimising for the expected size of the outcome. The possibility of ruin in that expected outcome is taken into account in the VCs calculation. As long as one is clear about what one is optimising for, both strategies are fine. Problems only begin when you take VC money and behave like a small business owner. Or behave like you have VC money when you are, in fact, a small business owner.

<comment><USER5> > As long as one is clear about what one is optimising for, both strategies > are fine.

I know this is HN orthodoxy, considering the audience and our beneficent hosts.

But I think this assumption bears questioning. Is the startup model _really_ morally equivalent? Clearly we wouldn't say that _all_ cost functions a business could optimize are all equivalent. So why should the traditional small business and startup model be assumed to be equivalent?

And moreover, even if it is morally equivalent... is it really that good of a strategy? By which I mean two things: 1) is it a fit strategy in of itself, and 2) is it good for the entire business ecosystem?

As food for thought... why hasn't Silicon Valley adequately considered a "slow-up" model that combines the traditional survival and sustainable growth focuses with the advantages of massive cash influxes and rapid iteration towards a viable product (even if that means pivoting)?

I think the answer is clear: venture capitalists want a return, and a large one, before they die. Is a business model optimized for generating returns before investors die really a healthy strategy to have so much capital allocated towards? Especially when these businesses in particular (tech startups) can often have such a large impact on culture and society.

<comment><USER6> I have a startup to sell you on. It's called Brydge. We have a radically non- linear revenue model which resembles a perpendicular hockey stick. We currently have no revenue, but revenues will quintuple each year until you die, at which point we expect to make ten billion dollars per year. We are looking for a 10 million dollar investment for a 30% stake. You are also entitled to 100% of our revenues until you die. In expected value terms, that's a great deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Notice that the article never tells you what advice they didn't listen to, and mentions a single mistake by a single company. The only general principle that's useful (as opposed to the obligatory observations on age and race) is hiring people with food industry experience.

<comment><USER8> Silicon valley startups ignore established industry expertise, burn cash in silly ways, dont prioritise business sustainability and try to reinvent the wheel with a strange mixture of ignorance and arrogance? No, never happened before!

<comment><USER9> Sometimes you lose. Sometimes you invent the modern consumer electric car and the modern commercial space program. The beauty of SV startups is just that - high variance.

<comment><USER10> The trick is to ignore survivorship bias every step of the way

<comment><USER9> Oh no, it's the opposite. Established companies could be established for no good reason. ULA was in space, they're the experts, but they could be beaten. The incumbent could be just a result of survivorship bias. _That 's_ what presents an opportunity. If the incumbent is just very good at the product, the only part you can disrupt is margin (or verticalize or something, but lets set aside that) and you don't want to be in a price war unless you're uniquely suited to it. So you don't fight those guys.

So you count on the market leader being disruptable, which is often because they're just there as accidental survivors.

<comment><USER10> What you write makes a lot of sense in terms of successful startup strategy. It doesn't detract from the vacuity of your original statement on "high variance". When you cherry-pick two data points- from the same founder, even- while ignoring the high rate of failed startups, it makes for quite an empty fallacious statement indeed. One might as well argue for the merits of big government statism by singing the praises of the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, while contrasting them with the DMV.

<comment><USER9> Well, yes, you can and you'd be right. That's how existence proofs work. State funded projects make great moonshots, yes, and you have some great examples.

It's a great argument for Big Government statists that governments are capable of large scale technological progress out of the reach of common corporations.

<comment><USER10> But no one was disputing the existence of successful, even wildly successful startups. People are criticizing startups that behave ignorantly and arrogantly. (And quite frankly, give the entire scene a bad name.) You are attempting to play devil's advocate by pointing out that some flout conventional wisdom and established practices and succeed. Very well, we can all agree that those enterprises exist. The question is if they exist in any appreciable number, which is very debatable- again, due to the simple arithmetic of very low startup success rates.

You are celebrating lottery winners. The existence of that very few does not justify bad behavior from (some of) the rest. Your proof is facile.

<comment><USER9> It isn't bad behaviour. It's just a failure. No harm in trying things that don't work. It doesn't look anyone misrepresented themselves. They came in, sucked, and got taken out by the market. The fact that they didn't listen hardly matters. It's not bad behaviour to not listen to advice from your landlord.

I'm not playing Devil's Advocate. I genuinely think it is good that people are trying different things. They're exploring the state space and I enjoy that.

If they were actually misrepresenting themselves or their ability to pay, or reneged on their debts without going out of business (which is a well- understood way to renege), or something like that, sure. But it looks like everything is on the level and the article is just saying that all of these guys who tried it weren't good at it. That's not a crime or even morally problematic.

<comment><USER10> People aren't saying they're behaving criminally. If anything, their behavior is both mockable and foolish- out-of-touch, operating in an SV bubble, detached from the needs of real-world people would their businesses ostensibly serve, and perhaps representative of the excess that dumb money empowers. They're _gauche_.

(And yes, during times of mass unemployment and rising economic uncertainty, moralizing does start to creep in; when mom and pop stores are dying by the tens of thousands, VC-funded fail does seem like bad taste, at least. Fair's got nothing to do with the creation of this perception; but optics are optics.)

Is it wrong to have higher standards for this industry? Less sloppy business practices, more empathy for the world at large? More curiosity and respect for established wisdom? What's the point of learning from "fail fast, fail often" if the failures are just going be the same mistakes over and over again, caused by foolhardy founders and negligent investors? Infinite samsara wheels, doomed by hubris.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nothing wrong with trying to disrupt some industry - but I think the way too many startups handle it is, well, almost arrogant.

Traditionally, businesses grow very incrementally - in almost all aspects of the business. From the product itself, to infrastructure, etc. It's all mostly done on a need basis.

When demand ramps up, you expand. But at the very core, there's a product/products which have been developed probably since before the company itself. It's the secret sauce, if you want. Of course, later down the road, some products unfortunately take the backseat in a business - but that's another story.

With a lot of disruptive tech-fueled startups, it's a bit different - <USER2> start with some idea or desire of disrupting something, or identifying inefficiencies in traditional systems, through use and/or observation, or through surveying people.

So too often, you get people / entrepreneurs with limited domain knowledge, that try to learn and solve/improve some complex business or field.

Again - there's nothing wrong with trying to improve something, but throwing cash at something you may not know too well, can be a quick way to just wasting money.

A lot of energy and resources are going towards trying to engineer some system which is ready to scale, IF demand explodes. It's the software engineering equivalent of writing "enterprise" software from the go, pouring cash on ridiculous servers, and hiring a team of expensive sales engineers - <USER3> though you barely have a MVP. You're still in the early stages where you need to direct most of your focus on creating a _great_ product.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've recently been watching a lot of the Y-Combinator YouTube videos. One idea that comes up a lot is that you should listen to the problems that users have but not their solutions. It's an idea along the line of "If I'd asked what they wanted, they would've said 'A faster horse'." In other words, you would take away "Faster transportation" and discard "Faster horse".

I can see how, from the perspective of this article, people who talked to you and listened to what you were saying and then never implemented or tried your suggestions would seem like negligent fools who never listened. The reality might just be that they are trying to do something very different.

I get the sense that this article is scorning the VC backed food companies but I don't know why. They are spending their time and money working on hard and valuable problems. Scorning them is easy, since they'll probably fail, but it also strikes me cynical and soulless. Better, in my view, to wish them luck and to realize that a VC backed food tech start up probably will have different hiring patterns and employees than a small food business.

<comment><USER13> Hyunjoo isn't a user.

She is a professional, with years of experience in the space that various startups are trying to "disrupt".

That's years of hard-won, hands-on experience that would benefit _anybody_ trying to enter the market.

Which the average San Francisco startup -- both the founder and employees -- totally ignore, because (a) she's over thirty-five years of age; and (b) she doesn't have a degree from Stanford/Berkeley/Harvard.

We see this a lot in Japan when SV startups open shop here.

<comment><USER12> There are a variety of food tech startups, some of them would see her as a (potential) user.

"User" maybe isn't the best word, but she's definitely the kind of person who has problems that food tech startups would care about solving. If people are ignoring her, they shouldn't be. But neither should they (according to my interpretation of Y-Combinator advice) be following her solutions. If Hyunjoo knew how to solve these problems, they wouldn't be unsolved problems and there would be no startup in solving them.

My point was that if people are listening to your problems and not solutions, it may feel like they're ignoring you, even if they aren't.

<comment><USER14> What problems are you talking about that she doesn't know how to solve? Many of these startups seem to be the lack of a solution in search of a problem.

<comment><USER12> I don't know enough about food tech to say what their problems are. I think, generally, the problem is that food service doesn't scale that well. Food service scales linearly for employees and space and cost. If you could figure out how to scale it better you could feed many more people for less money and solve a huge problem for the world.

<comment><USER13> > I think, generally, the problem is that food service doesn't scale that > well.

Maybe?

First and foremost: my knowledge of the industry is limited to a passing interest. I've investigated opening a restaurant, have worked in precisely one professional kitchen, and worked in front-of-house as well.

That said, it depends on what you mean by "food service" and "scale".

Fresh ingredients, prepared with great care, served by a professional staff... yeah, that doesn't scale. It takes years to learn to work with "whatever is available in-season", and finding good people is hard in any industry -- waiters at high-end restaurants do not make minimum wage, I assure you.

But the price is too high for most people, other than as perhaps a special occasion. The French Laundry isn't about to open up in rural Alaska.

Reasonably nutritious food that is both fast and cheap? We have that. Your choice between canned or frozen.

American processed food tends to go nuts on the additives, but that isn't a requirement, and I'd say the Europeans overall do a much better job on this front.

You get a lot less variety, but more quality.

Likely this is an artifact of our history -- preservatives were a godsend before the logistics revolution of WWII made its way into civilian life. American food scientists also went vitamin-crazy early in the 20th century, which combined with the introduction of convenience meals (TV dinners) and fast food, transformed the American culinary landscape into enriched breads, artificially-colored drinks, and "low-fat" snacks (which are _horribly_ unhealthy).

China has a similar problem, funnily enough.

Communism is all about stamping out the slightest differences between people, so during the cultural revolution, preparing and eating your own food was viewed as "counter-revolutionary", and thus banned. Everybody ate in communal kitchens, and never learned to cook with their parents and grandparents.

Killed millennia of culinary history, and is partially why there's so much processed food and so many restaurants in China today.

Anyhow, there are restaurant chains here in Japan that literally serve up nothing but reheated frozen food -- Saizeriya is a good example. It's basically the Japanese answer to Olive Garden (which I believe does the same thing!)

So, you've got options from fresh and gourmet, all the way down to Chef Boyardee served on a posh plate.

What doesn't scale?

<comment><USER12> Prepared food at restaurants doesn't scale. If you want to serve X customers it takes Y employees and Z space, or N _cost_. If you want to serve 2X customers it takes 2N cost, and if you want to serve KX customers it takes KN cost. This is what I mean by not scaling.

If deliveries worked better, maybe you could reduce the space you needed. If robots worked better then maybe you could reduce the number of employees. If there was some other solution, perhaps you could do better in all sorts of ways.

I don't know much about food tech, but I assume this is the kind of problem that food tech startups are trying to solve. Either way, food tech startups are trying to solve a problem and do something that Albrecht is not. Albrecht is, presumably, not trying to build food automation or work out a new way to deliveries, but is rather selling Kimchi. I'm not writing that to diminish her work, just to point out that she is in a different field than the food tech companies.

Albrecht may have problems that food tech companies would like to solve (e.g. "It's a burden to have to have so much kitchen space when I have relatively low demand") but she doesn't have solutions that are applicable to the food tech companies, because if she had those solutions then she wouldn't have the problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Before the pandemic, she says the company was super late paying her for the > products she sold them.

> "It was not a lot of money, but it made me really upset," Albrecht says. "I > don't know why they run the business like this."

This is a well established albeit scummy practice and very common. They do it basically as a way to borrowing from you for free.

My family used to do a lot of business with grocery stores. Except for Walmart, none of them paid on time. Plenty made you chase the money constantly.

<comment><USER16> There is an entire software company dedicated towards optimizing around this.

Like, if you invoice net-90, then they will wait, and there is software that lets you compete with others to minimize the discount to get money now versus later. It's a crazy world.

<comment><USER17> Really? Can you name the company? I had some "is this a good idea for a start up" conversations with someone like 5 years ago who had a similar idea but didn't pursue it and I'd love to be able to point to a company that was actually doing it.

<comment><USER16> [https://c2fo.com/](https://c2fo.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What ever happened to the "do things that don't scale" saying? Every time I see a food tech startup, flush with automation tech, I cannot help but wonder who has the money to throw away on such obviously flawed plans.

<comment><USER15> > such obviously flawed plans.

People are willing to question the "obviously flawed" part. Lots of logistics people said that that Amazon was "obviously flawed" because you can't move goods independently to the consumer cheaper than you can move them in a truck to a store.

Turns out, you can.

<comment><USER19> But that was always the case? At least as late as 2001, they had weekly milk delivery in Moncton, New Brunswick. It cost the same as milk in a store. You put your order in an envelope with some cash for next week. It wasn't just milk, you could get most non-frozen dairy that way.

Is it at all the same as Amazon? No. But it shows that you can be profitable delivering low value items right to peoples doorstep.

<comment><USER15> It certainly was not always the case, but I think people assumed that it would be the case going forward (and given that grocery delivery has not recovered, it probably still is the case in grocery).

Walmart was the established model for "best practices" in selling general goods for a long time. Now, the Walmart model is showing its weaknesses, which people assumed did not exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think some investors are naive about the food cultures. Here's some advice for you. Food is personal. It's extremely hard to change the way people eat. Most of you are busy changing the world. You like the convenience of tapping a button and get what you want in a few minutes. You'd think that everyone would like to enjoy the same convenience.

Food is personal. Name a favorite dish. You'd not know who invented it. Nobody knows how we got Chicken Tikka Masala. Food is decentralized. Attempts to centralize food cultures will fail. Conscious people are careful about what they eat. They'll end up cooking their own food. They're suspicious of the big food companies.

Don't think about simplifying food, cutting down time. If you go down that path, you'd end up with another junk food company. Think about how to get people to eat healthier. That's the only thing I care about. I think many people will eventually realize this.

<comment><USER21> >you'd end up with another junk food company

i'm not sure if i can agree with you on this. if i can create a successful junk food brand like mcdonalds, i'd do it in a second.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Many of the people she knows trying to make a living selling food are > immigrants, women and people of color — far different than the food tech > would-be entrepreneurs. "They are young, white," she says, "the kind of > people you see in a J. Crew catalog."

> There is also a big difference in who they bring in to work at their > companies. Albrecht hires local workers to make her kimchi, many of whom > have worked preparing and handling food for years. They look very different > from the workers at the food tech companies.

> "All these people they hire are also from Silicon Valley companies who have > no experience in a food manufacturing company," Albrecht says. "Often these > positions are for logistics, operations, marketing, all those people. Those > are the people they hire."

Amazing what is an acceptable thing to be upset about these days.

<comment><USER23> I don't see the article being "upset" about anything? If anything Albrecht seems to mostly find the startups comical, at least until they stop paying her bills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The point is not to sell food. The point is to separate credulous VCs from their money.

<comment><USER25> Selling selling food

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If I ever want a landlord who is going to trash me in the press while I am renting, I know where to look.

<comment><USER27> Or you could see it as the often-overlooked perspective of an immigrant with a successful business in a traditional industry who is witnessing and exposing the absurdity of the valley capital bubble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Seems like disrupting the food business is fraught with risk. Most restaurants work in pretty small margins. I guess using machines to eliminate labor is one way. One easy way to increase profits is to sell alcohol. Much better profits and if done right, easy to stop waste.

<comment><USER29> I'm a musician, so I spend a lot of time in restaurants. ;-) I was chatting with the chef / owner of a fairly successful restaurant, and he told me: "Every chef dreams of making their living selling food, but quickly learns that their income comes from the bar."

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> There seems to be an agenda here. But juat because a few companies failed (and in venture it's 65% - 90%) not all fail. That's the venture capital business model and it's given us Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Instacart, Impossible Foods, and probably a dozen goods and services we use every day. You don't build these kinds of businesses as a lifestyle business.

<comment><USER10> The majority of those companies you listed were not VC funded, or at least they were not the same sort of hyper-growth-chasing unprofitable unicorns that are the modern startup poster children.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "A tenant with a meal kit company wanted to automate filling a container with a few ounces of sauce, so Albrecht says they bought a giant machine to squeeze sauce into cups. It came in on a big pallet, and it was a huge operation to assemble. Albrecht says they were really excited about this machine.

But when they finally got it hooked up, it didn't work as expected. She can't help laughing while she tells the story. "When the sauce comes out of this machine and lands into the little saucer cup it doesn't land 'pretty' enough. So they just stopped using it. They just left it there." The giant machine sat hulking on a pallet, unused, for months."

You can't make this stuff up. Silicon Valley season 8 material right there.

<comment><USER31> It's such an ignorant, yet arrogant way to run a business, especially considering many of these startup founders were likely pretty young with little to no industry experience.

Having an experienced business owner running an actual, profitable business in your midst should be treated as a gold mine of information.

I have actually seen an attitude of "don't listen to or hire industry veterans because they are stuck in the old way of doing things and if they knew any better, they would have already disrupted the industry."

Few if any highly successful "disruptive" companies completely reinvented their segment.

Uber wasn't the first taxi company, it wasn't even the first ride sharing company. Heck, they weren't even the first app based taxi service. Airbnb was preceded by VRBO by about 15 or 20 years.

<comment><USER32> It's feels like you are missing the scale.

The people with current industry experience have techniques and knowledge about running a profitable and sustainable business. That doesn't get you hyper growth. That gets you a solid business.

You get this kind of growth from accidentally finding the magic formula that creates massive growth. You actually want someone that doesn't know what they are doing because they are more likely to trip over the answer that most people were smart enough to avoid.

You want people that will make mistakes. Successful startups are as much happy accidents as they are talented people performing hard work.

<comment><USER33> When I read you're comment, I am not getting many positive vibes about those startups.

Contrast the language. With traditional businesses you have positive terms like profitable, sustainable, and solid. With the startups you evoke terms like hyper growth, magic formula, and (from other people's posts in a similar vein) disruptive. It makes the traditional businesses sound like they are directed towards long term objectives as well as societal needs like stable employment and viable products. It also makes the startups sound self-serving. These are people who take a gamble for a disproportionate return. They are primarily interested in the short term, so they end up being parasitic. They aren't providing society with things like stable jobs or products that will have a lasting impact. Claiming that a business is disruptive does not really fix that, since a business can only be disruptive if the gamble pays off.

Perhaps society should be looking towards more traditional approaches to entrepreneurship if we are to have a chance to fix our woes. Yes, I understand that it had its issues. On the other hand, these gambles on hyper growth are consuming a significant amount of investment dollars for outcomes that are of dubious merit.

Edit: made the second half of the second paragraph less of a grammatical mess.

<comment><USER10> It makes them sound like the business equivalent of mad scientists, or at least alchemists and water-witchers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I would prefer if Silicon Valley went back to creating new technology instead of forcing themselves into established markets where their main advantage is that they can burn a lot of money and underprice ("disrupt") the competition.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's very important to make fun of people who are trying to make something work and making mistakes. It's a lot easier and more comfortable than trying to do something myself. My intellectual curiousity is truly satisfied.

</comment><comment><USER36> Interesting to contrast the tone of this article with this one where the landlord is also giving advice to a tenant: [https://sf.eater.com/2020/7/15/21325582/bernal-star- moonstar...](https://sf.eater.com/2020/7/15/21325582/bernal-star-moonstar- buffet-trader-joes-robot-chefs)

</comment><comment><USER37> Required (fiction) reading for anyone interested in this space: "Sourdough: A Novel" by Robin Sloan. It's fantastic!

</comment><comment><USER38> > They just don't listen

 _Quelle surprise_.

</comment><comment><USER39> To quote one of my favorite banter from Skyfall(2012) between Bond and Q.

 _> Q : Age is no guarantee of efficiency.

> Bond : And youth is no guarantee of innovation._

At the end of the day, we all can learn from each other... Different perspective brings different insight.

</comment><comment><USER40> In the past stock market existed to provide capital for business. Now the stock market is the business for many startups they are not listing to get capital rather to make profit for it's stake holders.

</comment><comment><USER41> As a complete aside, I really love their kimchi, it's probably the best store- bought kimchi I've had.

</comment><comment><USER42> APRN reported EPS of 0.08 (estimated was -0.45 according to tradingview), at least they are positive.

</comment><comment><USER10> Monetizing the engineer's disease

[https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term- Enginee...](https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Engineers- Disease)</comment>


These May Be The Droids Farmers Are Looking For - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/11/mobile-farm-robots/ <comment><USER2> There's something very refreshing to read about a startup that isn't in software. Not to say there's anything wrong with software, but I--like a lot of HN readers, especially in the Bay Area--tend to hear orders of magnitude more news about web apps than robots.

The really exciting thing, of course, is that there are CS techniques and ideas that can be applied to both: machine learning springs to mind immediately. Robotics and web programming aren't entirely dissimilar which is exciting--if I get bored of what I'm doing now, I could reasonably go into robotics or several other seemingly unrelated fields.

<comment><USER3> I 100% agree. We read about so many Crowd-Sourced-Cloud-Based Social Location- aware ridiculous web apps that spring up every day that allow you to "throw a sheep" at your friends that it's getting a little ridiculous. That's why people keep shouting "bubble!!!" -- because we aren't really solving any true problems.

If these droids were upgraded to water, move, feed, and monitor plant health, it would be a huge revolution to the industry and actually _increase the efficiency_ of a necessary industry.

It makes me a little sick to see Color getting 41 million, Shaker getting 15 million, and this great startup gets 5. Priorities people...

<comment><USER4> The great thing, and also the terrible thing, about web apps is that they're universal. Make an app somewhere and anybody with a computer can get at it, usually without paying very much. It's a great opportunity for people to make things. It's also a shame, because most web apps encourage people to spend more time in front of a computer (instead of helping them take care of business more quickly than they would otherwise, so they can close the computer and get back to everything else), and because as wonderful as computers are, they're limited in their impact on the physical world.

Further complicating the matter are advertisers, who are still desperately seeking the next frontier once print and television ads die. Advertisers like web apps, because web apps have lots of users, and that means lots of potential targets. Robots? Not much advertising potential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a great step in the right direction, but I'm really hoping to read more about robots that do things I care about. Like reduce the cost of food. I'm not really in the market for ornamental shrubs right now. I'm really getting impatient waiting for my humanoid butler to go on sale.

</comment><comment><USER6> I haven't ever worked in a nursery but it looks like they're just moving plants around from one group to another five feet away. Is that the actual use case, or will they be moving the plants longer distances?

<comment><USER7> Clearly people who work in nurseries do more than move plants back and forth 5 feet away, but this is an interesting step in the right direction. When I worked in a nursery in high school I had 2 primary tasks a) keep the plants watered b) help customers load their cars with big items. I've read about projects that use water sensors to enable plants to request water individually as they get dry. Adding a water tank and a sprayer to these little robots might be an interesting addition if it isn't cost prohibitive. I look forward to seeing more applications of technology in agriculture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't wait to see produce that is organically farmed by robots.

<comment><USER9> It'll be interesting if there will be a new super organic which means nothing artificial involved.

<comment><USER10> Robots don't have the same fundamental problems as pesticides.

<comment><USER11> That doesn't mean that marketing types won't try to convince people with more money than sense that hand-harvested produce is somehow superior to robot- harvested produce. Even if nobody believes that BS, some wealthy people will pay more for something just because the knowledge that most people can't afford it makes them feel more exclusive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> that's really cool, and it's nice for manual labor to be aided by some automated help, though dare to say, precursor to wall-e anyone?

</comment><comment><USER13> Combine this with Farmeron and you have a winner.

</comment><comment><USER14> I couldn't help but think of the first 'action' scene in this hilariously bad Tom Selleck movie, which involves a runaway harvesting robot: <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088024/>

(That will only be of interest to HNers if you get a kick out of watching wildly inaccurate futurist visions. And Gene Simmons.)

<comment><USER15> I think Silent Running is the more apt film choice here - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> funnier yet are the over weight people standing on the side watching.

</comment><comment><USER17> I bet building robots that appreciate and buy those plants will be the market of the future.</comment>


How to sleep a million years (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://idea.popcount.org/2013-07-19-how-to-sleep-a-million-years/ <comment><USER3> An example usage from the article:

        $ time sleep 12
        real    0m12.003s

        $ time ./fluxcapacitor -- sleep 12
        real    0m0.057s

In the author's words:

        Fluxcapacitor is really good at speeding
        up client/server or protocol tests.

        Actually fluxcapacitor was originally
        created to speed up the sockjs-protocol
        test suite. It wasn't possible to mock
        up a time library - we needed to run
        the tests against any sockjs http server,
        whether it's in erlang, node.js or
        python. It turns out the only way to run
        timeout-related tests in a reasonable
        time is to use fluxcapacitor.

        You might ask how fluxcapacitor works.
        In short - it uses ptrace to catch
        syscalls like clock_gettime or
        gettimeofday and overwrite the kernel
        response with a fake time.
        Additionally it short-circuits
        syscalls that can block for a timeout
        like select or poll. For technical
        details see the README.

It seems that this library might be useful to anyone needing to test communication protocols by helping tickle those edge cases that happen with timing.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, this is amazing. It allows for a whole different aspect of troubleshooting (or maybe even fuzzing?). What happens if two different pieces of software have to communicate but can't agree on the time? Is there an annoying caching bug that normally only gets triggered every few days?

<comment><USER5> (author here) That's the intention! Protocol development, protocol testing. Think - leap seconds. While we don't support having different timer for each process yet, this is easy to imagine.

Also - this is somewhat similar to golang race detector in spirit - <USER2> for explicit synchronizations.

The general idea is that you should be able to run multiple processes within the thing, and that they should be able to just talk to each other freely.

There are a number of "protocol simulators" out there, but I always found them academic. I wanted to build a tool that will allow me run and test and do code coverage of my code, without having to wait forever for timeouts and timers to kick in to test rare branches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is cool but it should be used with caution. The time your thread spends sleeping may be reduced to nothing, but the time it spends working won't be. This could lead to all kinds of scenarios (timeouts, deadlocks, etc) that are _only theoretically_ possible in realtime. It may or may not be useful to encounter these cases.

Edit: also worth mentioning that a good way of doing this kind of testing when you have full control of the code is by abstracting access to time operations to go through an interface and injecting mock/fake time objects.

But you don't always have access to the code, so I think this tool is very useful.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like a good way to discover those timing-dependent scenarios before they happen in production ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > You might ask how fluxcapacitor works. In short - it uses ptrace to catch > syscalls like clock_gettime or gettimeofday and overwrite the kernel > response with a fake time.

In Linux, ptrace is not re-entrant. This means you can't use fluxcapacitor on itself, or any other program that uses ptrace, e.g. a debugger.

</comment><comment><USER9> I tried patching for macOS then quickly gave up.

Here's a patch to get you started: [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/bab9c0fcafd9a03acfaa89741f...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/bab9c0fcafd9a03acfaa89741f26eb36)

I don't know whether it even makes sense to try porting this to macOS, but good luck.

<comment><USER10> You may want to take a look at task_for_pid and other Mach APIs–ptrace is crippled on macOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Finally, sleepsort is practical!

<comment><USER12> Sleepsort is fastest sorting algo in some cases already. It complexity: O(max(input)+n). It bad algo for CPU, of course, but should be OK for massive parallel architecture or a FPGA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Unfortunately my operating system (bash?) can't express dates after the year > 2550

Can anyone explain what happened here?

<comment><USER14> Very good question - nothing near that date shows up on this very exhaustive list: [http://skeena.net/kb/big%20list%20of%20critical%20dates.html](http://skeena.net/kb/big%20list%20of%20critical%20dates.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This may have just made my production cluster WAY faster! ;)

</comment><comment><USER16> Hey, there's a great song about this! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSgQiltRqNI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSgQiltRqNI)

</comment><comment><USER17> Very cool. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like it captures filesystem effects like 'mtime' or other ways the real time can leak out implicitly.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is fantastic, I was working on some tests for a scheduler, I can speed up running these tests using fluxcapacitor!</comment>


Ask HN: What to do when ghosted halfway through an interview process - <AUTHOR> I'm interviewing at a company I'm very excited about. The interview process has 3 steps: traditional screening/culture fit call with a recruiter, technical challenge with an engineer and then an onsite.
I've passed the two initial steps with flying colors (or so I though). The recruiter call was great and he verbally confirmed that he enjoyed the talk and would move forward my application. The technical challenge was good as well; I completed it in maybe 1/3 of the total available time and had good rapport with the engineer.
This was two weeks ago. The recruiter had initially said that he would definitively answer any emails I sent his way. I have sent two: one last week, one today. I have received nothing in response.
This isn't my first time doing an interview and I'm not new at the industry (this is a throwaway account). I'm wondering if maybe the engineering team is just taking longer than usual to convene and make a decision, maybe holiday schedules or something, but still I feel I should have received at least a ping back from the recruiter. I would definitively expect this if I had had poor performance, but that wasn't the case so I'm a bit aghast about how things are panning out. <comment><USER2> Whenever I find myself in a situation like this, I always ask myself "what can I do to move things forward?"

The answer is always to not wait for other people. They have their priorities and you are rarely one of them.

Call the engineer you spoke to.

Call the recruiter. Don't email: find his number and call him.

Call anyone else there you had contact with.

It's perfectly normal to want to know what's going on after any phase of an interview. Be proactive.

</comment><comment><USER3> There can be all sorts of reasons for this, many completely outside your control, and possibly outside the control of your recruiter.

In one of the first situations where I had to hire someone, I got caught up in politics during recruitment. I kept procrastinating on the difficult conversation I needed to have with somebody I interviewed. I'm not proud that I effectively ghosted somebody, but the whole thing made me feel so rubbish that I wanted to stick my head in the sand. Another time, somebody told me they'd called all the candidates - turns out he only called some of them due to an innocent mistake.

In your position, I'd make clear that you're worried about losing other offers, so you need a response by end of Thursday or you're going to withdraw your application (or something like that). See if you can also go through the generic company address, in case somebody's off sick and not dealing with emails.

<comment><AUTHOR> >In your position, I'd make clear that you're worried about losing other offers, so you need a response by end of Thursday or you're going to withdraw your application

Won't that sound a bit like a threat though?

During the initial phone call, I did make it clear that I had other offers coming in in December (which is true), so maybe the recruiter just has that deadline in mind.

<comment><USER3> I guess you're worried about coming across aggressive because it could put them off. In my experience, you can phrase that "assertively" \- something like:

> Hi, I imagine you either haven't seen my email or haven't been able to reply > for some reason yet. I'm really keen to follow up our initial chats because > I liked my interview and the company, so I've been nervous about sending > this email in case it comes over as aggressive or impatient. However, I am > in a position where I could lose other opportunities if I don't give them an > answer, and I don't want to lose those if I'm no longer a candidate for the > position here. If I don't hear back from you by Thursday night, I'll have to > assume that you're not interested in continuing on this occasion. I'm > available on email and mobile, and I would really appreciate a follow up so > I know what to do next.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where is the company located? I know that in some regions, 'ghosting' is a common way to reject candidates. (Which I find absurd). But maybe the recruiter is just sick/sacked/scum. Do you have the name(s) of the technical interviewer? Perhaps you can contact them directly(company email addresses typically follow the same pattern).

<comment><AUTHOR> >Where is the company located?

Canada.

>Do you have the name(s) of the technical interviewer?

Unfortunately I don't remember his name.

<comment><USER5> Searching through LinkedIn might jog your memory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I worked for a company once that went through an extended period of "cost controls." The end result was a cycle of hiring and hiring freezes, and many people would start interviews during a hiring period and then partway through the interview process would get caught in a hiring freeze.

Some HR people basically stopped responding to interviewees during these hiring freezes. It was stupid and extremely unprofessional. We had some great candidates who got caught in this.

Maybe your recruiter went on vacation and didn't set their out of office properly. Or maybe it is a case of severe stupidity like what I described above.

Either way, it's not your fault. I'd wait a week or two and email again. If you really like the job/company I'd try to find somebody who interviewed you on LinkedIn and contact them. Otherwise just forget it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Follow up. They get busy often. The common advice is to spend 80% focus on recruiting when recruiting, but usually companies that are hiring have a lot of excess things to do. They may hesitate as they have no manpower to start training people, but deep down inside they know they need to. I've been in some companies where they waited about 2 months to get back to the best candidate.

You also have to keep in mind the secretary problem here. Once rejected, an applicant cannot be recalled. You could be among the top 3 candidates, but there are still 20 uninterviewed, and they want to hold it out as long as possible.

</comment><comment><USER8> The same that I'd do when a girl I'm dating don't reply my invitations:let it go and go for the next one. Obsessive behavior rarely leads to fruitful outcomes. They might have their own reasons not necessarily related to you. Move on.

</comment><comment><USER9> Just move on to the next one. A lot of recruiters and companies lack professionalism and will just ghost you. Could be for any number of reasons related or unrelated to you.

</comment><comment><USER10> Could be all kinds of reasons, most having nothing to do with you. Agree with others that there's little harm in being a squeaky wheel--ping them several times at reasonable intervals.

Beyond that, though, always ask yourself whether you want to work for a company that seems incompetent or rude in their recruiting. They're generally on their best behavior now. What will things be like after you're hired?

</comment><comment><USER11> The recruiters work hard to get you placed at a company. Ping the recruiter and let him work hard for you. The people interviewing you are working and you don't know what kind of fires or priority shifts have occurred. It's a hard pill to swallow but you're most likely not the #1 priority on anyones mind.

No malice is probably intended by the team, they just forgot about you.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have to give some props to facebook. Even though I didn't get the job the recruiters there kept me in the loop the entire way.

</comment><comment><USER13> Move on.

Simply if they had their ducks in a row AND they wanted you they'd call you. Either of those could be negative. None of those three combinations require your input.

</comment><comment><USER14> You might be a good candidate, but the recruiter has scheduled another interview next week with another candidate, and might want to see all candidates before answering.

<comment><AUTHOR> I considered this as well, but I don't see the harm of updating the candidates on this, from the recruiter's point of view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The company doesn't feel it has gone as well as you do or they would be in touch quickly. Most likely, they want to interview other candidates. They aren't ghosting you but I bet they will take a month or two before they tell you they are moving forward with other candidates. It's a weird system used by bad companies.

That or the recruiter already placed another candidate or left the firm. Two weeks is a long time.

</comment><comment><USER16> Have you called the recruiter? Remember that they don't get paid unless you get placed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I only have his email, and I have emailed twice already.

<comment><USER16> You work in IT. There is categorically no way for you to only be stuck with an email address.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Build your own startup.</comment>


Nielsen: iPhone sales climb as Android sales flatten out - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/06/iphone-sales-back-to-driving-growth-of-smartphones-in-the-us.ars <comment><USER2> Seems quite a good result for Android. Apple added Verizon and doubled their addressable market yet they fell short of doubling their sales, even after a dip following the announcement as people waited to buy.

I was expecting a one time drop for Android before the same trends continued, looks like they managed to keep it level.</comment>


Learn by example. See a color scheme applied to a design system twice a month - <AUTHOR> https://www.colorsandfonts.com/newsletter.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is how it works.

Color Schemes. \----- The color schemes that we are gonna work on are based on the ones in Colors & Fonts. We are going to take a Design system and apply the chosen color palette.

UI. \---- The color will be presented on a Design System including buttons, forms, inputs, and components.

Files. \--- An image will be provided to download and you will be able to copy to Figma and 8f need it the .fig comes with. Also, you get a SASS and JS file with the variables to download from GitHub if you want to implement the colors right away.

I hope the color palettes are worth it for you guys.

reach me out here or twitter [https://twitter.com/Mike_Andreuzza](https://twitter.com/Mike_Andreuzza)

have a great day everyone:- )

/Mike</comment>


Life of solitude: A loneliness crisis is looming - <AUTHOR> http://theglobeandmail.com/life/life-of-solitude-a-loneliness-crisis-is-looming/article15573187/ <comment><USER2> When I was in college a classmate of mine would come by every day or so to my dorm. He would just hang out, talking about class or whatever. I couldn't understand why he kept coming over, but I was too polite to mention anything.

Turns out, he came by because we were friends.

In fact, we had been friends the whole time, but I didn't know it! What I missed is that the stages between meeting people and friendship look a lot like hanging out. It seems quite arbitrary -- why this activity, this person? But the hanging out stage _is_ necessary. Unless you text them, knock on their door, set up a gaming night, or go on a road trip, it is hard to grow closer.

So the next time you meet someone remember they are probably like you: a bit nerdy, a bit lonely. Just reach out and spend time with them for no reason, and then maybe, someday, you'll discover that you too are friends.

<comment><USER3> I've never really grasped the concept of "hanging out". I feel a get-together has to have a tangible purpose, be it solving a problem, playing a game, cooking or whatnot. Hanging out without a specific "agenda" has always felt forced, awkward and in the long term boring, resulting in me gradually withdrawing from most social circles I've found myself in. I guess I don't get the point of abstract friendship for its own sake.

<comment><USER4> 'Abstract friendship'? Only real, organic, laugh and cry friendship is worth having. I can't even imagine what an abstract friendship is - maybe 'liking' someone on Facebook?

<comment><USER3> Probably "abstract" wasn't the best term; "context free" maybe? As in, there's little common ground and few if any goal-driven activities involved. You don't "get together to do X", you just "hang out" or "meet up" without a particular reason in mind, and it basically boils down to everyday smalltalk, shooting the shit and mindless drinking. I guess that alone is rewarding enough for normal people and helps keep loneliness at bay but it doesn't do much for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> this applies to me. I'm very alone pretty much most of the time. Not really had friends and not great at making them. For the last 11 months I've tried going out and being the most positive person I can, to be a friend to as many people as I can but I don't know if it's working or not. Just talking to people, listening to them, smiling at everyone.

It feels like I'm just a grinning idiot, that no one takes me seriously, that I have to completely change everything about me and who I am so before long I'm not the same person in the slightest; I have to pretend to be someone else.

I know I'm not the best person I can be but how much harder and longer do I have to fight to make it?

I hate the weekends and look forward to Mondays because I can go out and meet co-workers. Friday afternoons I fill with a heavy dread. It sounds ridiculous to talk about it out loud because it makes me sound so...high-school. I feel like a loser talking about it, now, just like how I felt like a loser in elementary through high school, and grad school. It feels dumb now. I'm an older man, now. I think most days people won't notice I'm gone until the bugs don't get fixed and a few years later they find me in my condo after I hung myself in the closet.

<comment><USER6> Please do just one thing: make an appointment with a therapist to see if you have depression.

<comment><USER7> At the risk of sounding negative, I've found that this is probably a waste of time, because most therapists are utter garbage...

And, it's really no surprise, really, if you look at the average salary for therapists. I imagine that most of the ones who could actually help you are running high-priced practices treating Arab princes and basketball players...naturally they are not going to be found in the provider directory for your insurance...if you even have insurance... (US perspective here)

<comment><USER8> At the risk of sounding positive, I've found therapy to not be a waste of time, despite therapists being generally mediocre.

As long as they're not an asshole, having someone listen to you and prompt you with questions is incredibly therapeutic. It also helps immensely that you can be confident about your privacy. Just getting it out sometimes is what you need. None of the therapists I dealt with when going through anxiety/depression issues really grokked what was going on in my head (my impression, but perhaps, like a parent, they really did know all along). However, a few 45 minute sessions of speaking and prompting got things off my chest, and my mind redirected on far more positive things than "I'm not good enough", "I'm going to die alone", "No one would miss me if I didn't wake up tomorrow" and other delightful thoughts.

<comment><USER9> _As long as they 're not an asshole, having someone listen to you and prompt you with questions is incredibly therapeutic._

That makes therapy sound like renting a friend. I don't mean that in a snarky way at all, maybe that's even a good definition in some cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I actually live a quite isolated existence. I dont really like most people and am very happy this way (I can read, program, play games, make music etc. in peace and not deal with the tediousness of having to interact with people I find boring) However, I do _occasionally_ meet other people (maybe a bit like me in some ways) and we get on incredibly well. Every week or two when we feel sociable I will meet one of them for intense session of something. Also the people I really get on with could be any age/sex, one is a 50 yo man, another is a 20 yo girl.

<comment><USER11> As I think the article points out somewhere, loneliness and being alone are different things...you can feel lonely in a crowded room, and all that. You have people to interact with when loneliness starts creeping in...so good! It just sounds like your threshold for isolation turning into actual loneliness is higher than most people.

I think my threshold is pretty similar, but the danger comes in when those few people you have to interact with move away or otherwise become unavailable, then it can become hard to meet new people because you're so out of practice.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, see my comment below. It was really amazing and life-affirming to meet my new friend 2 years ago, but if you just keep a baseline level of meeting new people I think its statistically likely you will meet one. This does mean u have to go to events and things with lots of people, but only once every few months + it can involve something you love like music or games or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Part of the problem is that loneliness has a terrible feedback loop. Isolation makes you bitter and desperate and then nobody wants to be around you. Do it too long and your culture starts diverging from the main and connecting with new people is like crossing a river.

<comment><USER13> Then that culture is broken.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

<comment><USER14> How convenient for you, chomsky, godel, bertrand russell, dirac, von neumann, montaigne, francis bacon, stoics, and almost all classical great humans to modern great humans had friends and were at least somewhat social give me a break. I know it must be comfortable for you, they're all sick and I'm not so now I don't have to be uncomfortable and try a little.

<comment><USER13> I am quite sure that if someone told them that they had to drop their work or being in order to be friends, they would have found a different friend.

The point is that it is OK to have a different culture, OK to be you, OK to be a light unto yourself. You will find friends, probably more. You do not have to adopt the culture forced upon you if it is not yours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> While I've made plenty of bad decisions myself, I think a large part of why I've always been extremely lonely and isolated is that I was raised with very little sense of family or community. Growing up an only child, my parents apparently never thought it was worth me meeting the 80% of my cousins that lived in the same country, but somewhat far away. My parents themselves had scant friends or associates (at least during my memory) and hardly ever anyone over to visit the house.

That's why if I'm ever somehow in the position to have a child of my own, I won't be able to. I wouldn't trust my ability to raise anything but an ice cold stranger.

<comment><USER16> for what its worth, I think that since you know how bad it is, you know the true value in keeping in contact and thus will work for it more and be a better parent because of it.

I have to spend conscious effort to maintain my network of friends and its hard for me because its not automatic and not something I was brought up to do. I inevitably drop the ball sometimes and forget someone and have to get back into contact and reestablish our friendship. Because I know what lonliness does to me and I don't want to ever be that way again.

So if I am ever lucky enough to have my own child, I am certain I will do all I can to make sure they never feel the same. I will fight so no child of mine will ever have to bare the scars that I bare, and that resolve will make me a better parent.

<comment><USER17> This. Relationships take effort. Often, one will think "Why should I make the effort? Why should I make the move? The other person has not contacted me?" But it is better to make the move and contact other people. Because a friend has not contacted you for a while does not mean they don't want to keep contact. They may be feeling lonely and down or overwhelmed.

<comment><USER18> I'm mostly just feeling that other people have plans no matter how trivial and I don't want to interrupt them or force them to interact with me out of politness.

<comment><USER19> Other people absolutely have plans. They have them all the time. They have those plans because _someone called them up and made those plans_.

Get used to hearing no. The only way to do that is to be told no a lot. The only way to be told no is to ask in the first place.

It's not easy. It's still not easy for me. I go through long phases where I've given up and refuse to invite people to things or tell them about things I'm going to because I'm unwilling to deal with the feeling of frustration that comes with their being busy or having plans. And then I pick myself back up and ask them and sometimes they _are_ busy or they _do_ have plans. And that sucks. And I make another go at it and hey, they're free that evening! It can happen! And suddenly that evening turns into a great evening.

So ask. Call them up and ask. Or text them. Or email them. They're slightly less likely to respond, but for different people, those media work better. Try to do the leg work for them: the less thinking they have to do, the easier it is to say yes.

<comment><USER18> I'm not afraid of hearing no. I'd be relived to hear no. I don't want to cause them to say yes when they don't want to just because they like me or they think they should.

Also most of my plans do not come from people calling me.

I guess my reservation towards calling other people comes from not wanting to cause trouble to other people just like the ones they would have caused me if they called me.

I have no objection to call my friends when I need information or a thing they probably won't mind lending me and would say they mind if they did.

I probably need contact with people but I don't like it. It's like when you know you need to eat but you don't realy have the apetite.

<comment><USER19> > I don't want to cause them to say yes when they don't want to just because > they like me

But that's the only reason they would say yes. Unless they're just using you as a source of information or as someone who can lend them a thing.

Are you afraid that people like you? That they think they should like you?

I feel that the right response here is to link you to Aristotle's conception of friendship: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philia)

You seem to have nothing but friendships of utility. Your friends are people who can give you information or lend you things, and who trouble you when they call upon you for the pleasure of your company. That's the kind of friendship a lobbyist talks about having with the local senator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In poor countries, like India, you have no privacy at all. The overreaction, in rich countries like the US, is to buy privacy the richer you get.

But Americans take it to extremes, buying huge houses that allow them to go days without interacting with another person. In fact, not having to deal with other people is considered a desirable luxury. Sit at home and eat and watch TV and shop. I know people who drive (down their very, very long driveway) just to get to the front gate and mailbox.

The Indian situation is probably closer to our evolutionary roots.

<comment><USER21> As a recent college graduate in the US, this is exactly how I feel.

In college, there was very little privacy. I shared a room with a roommate, and that room was one of two in a shared suite, with two other people in the other room and a common bathroom shared by all four people.

I now share a 2br apartment with a roommate. I have a private bedroom, but a shared living room and kitchen.

My apartment happens to be in the shadow of a very rich neighborhood, and the grandest homes here are secluded far off the road, often completely invisible to passersby, hidden behind dense foliage. They signal their existence to you through their formidable and ostentatious gates, but beyond that you have no glimpse of the private estate of the totally unknown and unseen owner. The owner has spent a vast sum of money--enough for most people to retire on, if not doubly or even triply so--just to build a completely private oasis in the heart of the city.

For a lot of people here, that is the end-game: make millions, then spend most of it hiding yourself from the rest of the world.

<comment><USER22> If you're interested in this phenomenon, you might like Paul Fussell's _Class: A Guide Through the American Status System_

[http://www.phenomenologycenter.org/course/status.htm](http://www.phenomenologycenter.org/course/status.htm)

<comment><USER23> Thank you for linking this. This was a very insightful read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I always feel that many in the U.S., by far my largest cultural exposure, consider a false stoicism as mature and wise. I find it closed and boring. Many may be doing this due to being rewarded for keeping your mouth shut and punished for sticking out. It also seems that too large of a percentage who don't do this are predators, in one way or another. This makes it worse.

The best place that I have found people to open up and be themselves within a day, is at a bar. Even if they just got there and have not had a bit to drink.

I find almost everyone interesting if they open up. I am an introvert by nature, so it doesn't bother me much. If I was more extrovert, I would probably be going mad.

<comment><USER24> _I always feel that many in the U.S., by far my largest cultural exposure, consider a false stoicism as mature and wise._

That's a trait we inherited from our cultural progenitors the British. And in general we don't take it to the extremes they do. On the broad spectrum of human cultures, Americans are fairly "chummy" and open, or at least seeming openness is encouraged. The problem is, we expect others to be open, but we also expect them to be like ourselves. So we punish people who open up and turn out to be different. So they clam up.

 _The best place that I have found people to open up and be themselves within a day, is at a bar. Even if they just got there and have not had a bit to drink._

You think American bars are good? Try Japanese bars. American bars, to me, are usually noisy, crowded affairs where it is difficult to even say a few words to someone let alone have a conversation. This is particularly true where I live (Boston area), where the bars are often packed for the Red Sox/Patriots/Celtics/Bruins games. But the bars I went to in Japan were _tiny_ and intimate. Only five or six people could be in there drinking at once and it is far easier to strike up a conversation. Particularly if you are a Westerner.

Japanese society is about as serious and as punishing of individuality as it gets in the developed world. The Japanese bar scene is thus correspondingly lively and full of sincerity, even in tiny bars where there's barely any room to move your elbows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> So what can we do to fix this?

I mean, we're hackers, right? We build things that solve problems.

What can we build to solve this problem?

Some initial thoughts:

1) Personally, I've observed that video chat comes a lot closer to genuine human contact than anything else digital. Better video chat technology would be useful. Also, ChatRoulette but not terrible?

2) Infoproducts - perhaps it's time for an update of "How To Win Friends And Influence People" with more emphasis on the "Win Friends" part? There's a surprising lack of solid information on how to actually make contact with human beings.

3) There are loads of dating sites out there, but no friend-making sites. It's gotta be a solvable problem at least to the (terrible but usable) extent that dating sites have solved the finding-a-partner problem.

4) Nootropics? Cranial stimulation? Brain-training for chronically lonely people? Something even crazier?

<comment><USER26> Creating an ad system where you post what you can offer to do and what you want, like an offer and demand system, and allow to search by location.

Orient this on activities and jobs, and allow people to post their interests so that people can find people that have the same interests in the area. You'd only need to ask users what they want to share, and disallow for people to search beyond their area.

<comment><USER25> I think this has been tried, although I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head.

It'd be really interesting to find out why it didn't work well.

<comment><USER26> I think it's a niche market because it would deal with businesses, and also with people who are lonely which is the subject of the article.

I don't think it would really be a success at first, but the fact facebook never tried something like that always frustrated me. I guess they did not implement it because they don't want to put complex features like this, and that's understandable. But sometimes an economy can work much better when detailed information is available about what's around your home, which is not the case today. Companies do use advertisement, but single individuals don't and companies don't wait for people to search for their product, and I'm sure there are ways to advertise yourself if you skip the dating stuff, and let everyone post their interests so it can searched and found by people around you. Advertisement only gives voice to people who can afford it because there are too few room for it.

The real problem here is the number of participants (you need a big sample if you want users to find matches) and how it cannot be datamined.

I think it would work if it was anonymised and if it would encourage private talks.

I don't understand why google did not try that, they know how to effectively sort data by topic and category.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Gee whiz, if only there were some kind of worldwide computer network where everyone could meet people who share common interests -- for free!

<comment><USER28> I've been on the internet for a while and that's worked for me maybe once, and it was by mere coincidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The article mentions Portland as an example of city planning which encourages interaction and social cohesion. Are there any other examples that spring to mind for U.S. cities? I'm looking to relocate and this is high on the list for me.

<comment><USER30> Portland has a high suicide rate.

<comment><USER31> Grey skies for 7 months will do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is a big reason why we created [http://happen.io](http://happen.io). Facebook mimics real-world connections and puts them in cyberspace, but studies show it makes people feel more isolated. We wanted to create something for people to improve their _real-world_ connections, not just their digital connections.

Happen.io makes it so that individuals can add their own events (like parties, celebrations, nights-out, family get togethers, club meetings, block parties, etc) and post them for others to find and save in their own list. Events can be public or private, for a group or not. It's mobile optimized so that people can use it on the go, not cooped up in their apartment.

It doesn't take much to feel a sense of connection. I think it really just takes a few good friends and a few groups to feel a part of. But a lot of people are missing that, and sites like Facebook and others sometimes turn into a place to show off how great their life is, not a way to meet new people or find real activities to do with others.

Why can't there be a place that just shows you things going on near you that others are invited to? With all this tech to connect people, how come people 100 yards away from each other never meet or get to know each other? How come it's so hard to find something to do or people to be with outside a list of your facebook friends? Why isn't there a place for an regular person to post their activities and events so that other regular people can find them and make new friends?

That's what we are trying to make happen at happen.io. It's sort of a long- tail event platform. There's already eventbrite for ticketed events, but this is for any event, including small get-togethers. And there's facebook and other event sites that use facebook's social graph, but that makes it so you only see events of your friends, not just whatever may interest you regardless of who set up the event.

It really is a disappointment in this digital world we become more connected to devices but less connected to each other. We need to turn that around.

</comment><comment><USER33> "Economics basically says you should be concerned about your own short-term interests. There's more division in society, more segmentation; there's less identity with a national or global persona, but rather on the family or the individual. People aren't as loyal to their employers, and employers are certainly not as loyal to their workers."

I thought that mainstream economics has been moving towards the other direction. More socialized policies, more emphasis on the collective that individual property right and rights in general, ever expanding role of goverent in the name of greater good for the society at the cost of individuals etc.

<comment><USER34> I don't buy this mechanistic explanation. Society has gone through progressive levels of specialization and this has never been a problem before, so either there's a really drastic "nonlinear" effect, or there's something _different_ about this society.

My personal suspicion is that it has more to do with people broadly thinking that "others" are not good enough for them.

<comment><USER35> Could you elaborate on your suspicion?

<comment><USER34> Yes, it's a bit of an extrapolation. For my social time, I go social dancing. I still get a little bit lonely from time to time but I don't think it's all that bad. But in any case, what I see happening is that when people get rather good (or even if they don't; if they THINK they are rather good) they stop dancing with people who are not as good as them. Since it's an activity where being social is also coupled to having a skill; that's an easy habit to get into, as you're encouraged to "dance up". In any case, invariable the people who don't "dance down" isolate themselves and wind up alienated from the community.

Increasingly we're becoming a credentialed society; while social strata are not necessarily inherited, there is definitely class-based stratification that people tend to not breach. It's totally rediculous; there's a guy who empties the trash bins at the end of the day at the lab I work in. He's a smart guy and super resourceful (he owns his own business, so he would have been eaten alive otherwise). And most of the PhDs are just... not friendly towards him. Why not? Is it below their station in life to interact with him?

<comment><USER36> _> And most of the PhDs are just... not friendly towards him. Why not?_

Insecurity. "They're not as good as me, I will be seen as lesser for associating with them."

Personally, I automatically distrust people who won't bullshit with a taxi driver or exchange quick comments about the local sports teams with a delivery guy (and no, you don't have to like sports to do that).

<comment><USER37> Well to be fair, I used to make small talk with taxi drivers, but when I noticed a sizable portion of those talks devolve into idiotic racist rambling I just stopped. Sorry to those who aren't stupid. (I'm a white male so maybe they just thought I'd be receptive to their 'the foreigners are taking our jobs' (I use the word 'foreigners' here where in reality they mostly used other words unsuitable for polite company) complaints because I tried to start some friendly chatter about their job or the weather or what was in the newspaper that morning?)

Look, I'm not advocating social stratification, but I understand the drivers that cause it, and 'insecurity' or 'they think they're better' are just a small portion of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > _In the West, we live faster, higher in the air, farther from our > workplaces, and more singly than at any time in the past._

Nothing in life is free. 'We' have to pay for our new lifestyle.

</comment><comment><USER39> Maybe there could be a new kind of social network, one where in order to maintain your online friendship connections, you have to occasionally/physically get together with your friends and if it doesn't happen it means that the connection doesn't really mean anything so you gradually lose it. This would automatically accomplish what some people with hundreds of fb friends try to do by cleaning up their friend list by asking those who want to remain friends to reply.

</comment><comment><USER40> In my late twenties, a combination of things helped me somewhat (I am still lonely, but not nearly as much)

* Psychotherapy (it takes time to find a therapist that clicks, though)

* Antidepressants

* Not trying to hide it from my colleagues / family (the period when I did that was a miserable one)

* A few well-intentioned friends from work

* Family support

* This guide : [http://www.succeedsocially.com/](http://www.succeedsocially.com/)

* Meetup et al.

<comment><USER41> If you don't mind me asking, which antidepressant, and what effect does it have on you? Considering getting on them myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> My 7 year old nephew can't tell the difference yet between the carefully scripted dialogues we hear on TV and the impromptu ones we hear face to face.

Social media has enriched our online-interactions at the expensive of face-to- face.

We can find exactly the person we want to talk to - virtually, and maybe in person - why deal with anyone else?

</comment><comment><USER43> _Loneliness, it turns out, is as bad for your health as smoking, or being obese. The research that Prof. Cacioppo has done with colleagues also adds to the growing body of work that shows how bad loneliness can be for your health. It shows that loneliness suppresses the immune system and cardiovascular function, and increases the amount of stress hormone the body produces. It causes wear and tear on a cellular level, and impairs sleep. As he writes in his book Loneliness, "these changes in physiology are compounded in ways that may be hastening millions of people to an early grave."_

Can anyone link to any research supporting these claims?

<comment><USER44> It's generally weird to me that newspapers articles seem to be exempt from the expectation to cite their sources.

<comment><USER45> They also consider themselves exempt from the common practice that text in quotes contains sentences the people quoted have actually said or written.

I.e., the author may as well have pulled it out of her ass, and you would be none the wiser. That's old school quality journalism for you.

<comment><USER46> Yeah this is pretty absurd. I've been "quoted" a few times in newspapers and they got my statements completely wrong. Just flat out changed the wording (and therefore meaning) of what I said.

The Globe and Mail is as authoritative and reputable as they get, but this isn't saying much. The media is just a shit show in general.

Having said that, even more pathetic is people who get their information from internet forums asking journalists to cite sources.

The authority hierarchy goes like this: Academic writing > Books by credentialed people > YouTube videos by credentialed people > Websites by credentialed people > Newspapers > Yahoo! Answers > Hacker News comments > Wikipedia.

<comment><USER47> Crowd-sourcing citations, conventional wisdom, and syllabi seems rather distinct from "the authority hierarchy", and the ROI is far more massive the further up that food chain you are, right? probably worth keeping in mind...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The reason for this: as a modern Western society, we no longer have much in common, we no longer have communal rituals, and we share very little in values. Thus people drift apart and worse, "friendship" has come to be an act of convenience.

<comment><USER49> Exactly. I'm surprised, this comment is not further up. If you are all about self-actualization, keep pushing your limits and experience new things, it is hard to maintain deep friendships if your friends don't move in the same direction and at similar speed. Same problem with romantic relationships. We're so much about individuality that we become incompatible with the majority of people. For many its not about being shy, or a lack social skills but that we like to do our own thing and easily end up lonely because of that.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you monitor MySQL queries? - <AUTHOR> I want to monitor the queries which impact performance on a very busy (Percona) Galera cluster. I've yet to find a monitoring tool which can handle this. What do you use? <comment><USER2> Innotop is great for watching things live. To review long or resource intensive queries, the Percona toolkit scripts create excellent summaries of the MySQL slow query log.

I use them to send these weekly reports to our developers: Slow queries, lock waits, transactions with the most rows affected, transaction by highest statement count, largest statements by rows affected, busiest tables, queries doing full table scan or full join, and busy writes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will have a closer look at the Percona toolkit scripts for reporting (one of which I already use for failover).

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not sure if this will work/help on Galera but on a single mysql server I have used mytop [0] to watch for long running queries on the fly. Nothing beats the slow query log though for monitoring for problem queries. I only use mytop when there is an active issue I'm trying to debug.

[0] [http://jeremy.zawodny.com/mysql/mytop/](http://jeremy.zawodny.com/mysql/mytop/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I was looking at mytop at one point, but the package manager wanted to pull in standard mysql dependencies, which I wasn't interested in - I guess I could create custom package without these and try it out.

But in general, I am looking for a more passive monitoring solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The ELK stack[1]. If you don't use the ELK stack for everything already, it might be considered an overkill as a _safe deployment_ would take at least three nodes with 8GB of RAM at least.

[1] [https://www.phase2technology.com/blog/adding-mysql-slow- quer...](https://www.phase2technology.com/blog/adding-mysql-slow-query-logs- to-logstash/)

<comment><AUTHOR> We're already using the ELK stack for other things and I will definitely be trying this out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shameless plug: I work at VividCortex[0] and we're building a database monitoring SaaS. Someone else wrote "nothing beats the slow query log though for monitoring for problem queries" ... give our tool a shot and see how it compares :).

[0] [https://www.vividcortex.com/](https://www.vividcortex.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://blog.box.com/blog/optimizing-mysql-performance-at- sc...](https://blog.box.com/blog/optimizing-mysql-performance-at-scale-with- anemometer-2/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks interesting! Thanks!

[https://github.com/box/Anemometer](https://github.com/box/Anemometer)</comment></comment>


Using Machine Learning to Detect Malicious URLs - <AUTHOR> http://fsecurify.com/using-machine-learning-detect-malicious-urls/ <comment><USER2> Very nice, but that ain't "machine learning", of course.</comment>


Eugenics 2.0: We're at the dawn of choosing embryos by health, height, and more - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609204/eugenics-20-were-at-the-dawn-of-choosing-embryos-by-health-height-and-more/ <comment><USER2> I expected there to be more discussion. This is literally Gattaca, about to take place. [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/)

<comment><USER3> My opinion is that you can't stop it because it is a byproduct of other things that are desirable (the difference between CRISPR'ing pigs to be less fatty and CRISPR'ing humans to be less fatty will become increasingly less of a technical difference, and more of an ethical one), and most of the scariest parts of these changes are only scary when they're concentrated and controlled.

The best solution to this is to democratize it by making it less expensive.</comment></comment>


Diigo: public annotations on the web - <AUTHOR> http://www.diigo.com/ anyone using it? <comment><USER2> I tried that one, which indeed seemed to have a potential, but after a few days of usage, I bumped into some issues like: \- I can't see the public annotations \- my own annotations only show up about 75% of the time (refreshing several times) \- small community \- somewhat confusing doc

I do see an interest in having public web annotations. So I'm asking, are there any good annotations tools out there? What are the references?

</comment><comment><USER3> What's the difference between this and Third Voice?

<http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2001/04/42803></comment>


Ask HN: Where do you get your news? - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious where HN readers get news, both tech and non-tech.  Obviously hacker news is assumed if you're reading this. <comment><AUTHOR> Hacker News, Facebook, and Twitter are probably my primary sources at this point.

Secondarily: Economist (iPad app, I'm a subscriber and try to send the paper editions to /dev/null), Foreign Policy (iPad app, although it sucks), Foreign Affairs (kindle subscription), and news.google.com, particularly in the "editor's picks by publication" area.

I listen to Bloomberg and CNBC in the car (and sometimes BBC News or Fox News). CNBC in particular feels like YouTube comments; it's either masturbatory technical analysis, or such horrible fundamental analysis ("Intel had better be worried because server CPUs have lower margins than mainstream!", which is false -- it's a smaller market but higher revenues) that their technical analysis is better. BBC satellite radio rarely has actual news, though, and while Fox News frequently has programs calling themselves news, it's horribly biased. I miss VOA, AJ-E, or the real BBC international services.

If I end up at NY Times, Tech Crunch, Venture Beat, The Verge, The Atlantic, etc. due to a link on HN, Twitter, or Facebook, I sometimes browse around the site a bit more to see if there are other interesting articles, but rarely if ever go on my own. (The Verge is probably my favorite "new" publication.)

I compulsively read Mac Rumors and semi-compulsively read Digital Photography Review.

I also use Instapaper and periodically go through longform, longreads, etc. to add new stories, but I think I have a backlog of about 800 articles now. I mainly read those on airplanes or when donating blood or otherwise stuck, particularly if it's a public environment where I can't view work related materials.

I still use Google Reader, and have it split into folders for tech, economics (becker-posner!), and survival/military (some journals of people in Syria, journalists working in North Africa, and people in the firearms/tactical equipment industry). I'm terrified that Google might kill Reader someday.

xkcd and what-if are probably the only entertainment publications or comics I read regularly. Next after that might be Steam's daily deals.

I tend to add any interesting-sounding books to my Amazon wishlist, and purchase kindle and audible books pretty freely (a $10 book is far more expensive in time than money, and if it contributes one strong and correct thought, may be worth it)

Quora used to be a great way to get primary sources to talk about timely topics -- e.g. I could ask "why did Slide sell for a relatively small amount to Google" and get Anon User answers from (presumably) Slide early employees, public answers from known Slide people, etc. It seems to have fallen off from that now, due to a change in user population and recognition that Quora is "public" and any answers posted there should be treated as such. More interesting discussion happens on Facebook friends or friends-of-friends posts, now.

I basically stopped reading mailing lists outside of very tactically focused computer security and policy. I used to really enjoy Cypherpunks and some other lists like that, but they're basically dead now -- facebook and twitter have essentially supplanted them.

</comment><comment><USER2> MetaFilter.

When big news events pop up, enough information streams in through the (excellent) comments that I can keep informed about context and unfolding situations. When there's no big news, there are interesting links.

The fact that any user can submit a story means that the content is always eclectic, and also that other people are often skeptical of how interesting a post really is. I enjoy having that perspective a lot. It's useful to have other people telling you not to sweat the small stuff – gets rid of one of the problems more "focused" news sites have, which is the groupthink and insistence that This Is Important.

(There's groupthink on MetaFilter, of course, but the minority voices have a specific place to go and speak their mind. Over the years I've lurked/been a member, I've noticed that the tone of the site get better and better as more heated discussions of what's right and what's wrong have guided MeFi in the right direction.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I run a website <http://www.younews.in> and I have a personal section where it aggregates from my preferred sites: Hacker News, Reddit /r/science, BBC most shared, NYTimes most shared, The Hindu most read...

</comment><comment><USER4> I am working on a project where I pull content from various sources and organize it by topics. News is one of the types of content I look at. For example, if you were interested in Xbox news you could follow this topic:

<http://www.findingfarm.com/?topic=tech-xbox>

Then there is a "feed" page where it shows the latest for the topics you're following. It is a work in progress, but it gets a little better week by week.

</comment><comment><USER5> BBC, Digital Spy, Tech Crunch, HN, Facebook/Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER6> HN, Reddit, Google News, Daily Kos, 538, and BoingBoing. Also Facebook and Twitter to a lesser extent.

</comment><comment><USER7> HN, reddit, Google Finance, Bloomberg, NPR.

</comment><comment><USER8> NPR, Twitter</comment>


Google will pay $500 million for illegal pharmacy ads - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/24/us-google-idUSTRE77N4A220110824 <comment><USER3> So wait - how come Google can be held to the fire for a half BILLION dollars, but there still has not been ANY significant arrests or even fines over the derivatives fiasco (and no significant legislation passed to stop it from happening again).

It boggles the mind.

<comment><USER4> Because when Obama takes bribes from pharma companies they ask him to let Americans die rather than be able to buy lifesaving medicine from Canada, whereas when wall street bribes Obama they're only asking to be allowed to steal trillions of dollars.

<comment><USER5> I'm no Obama fan, but... come on, dude.

<comment><USER4> Right, because I'm sure Matt Taibbi is lying about Obama getting wall street off the hook:

[http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/obama- go...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/obama-goes-all-out- for-dirty-banker-deal-20110824)

And I'm sure that Obama did not actually make Michelle Leonhardt the DEA administrator at the request of big pharma.

<comment><USER3> Yup, I just read that one this hour.

Also see this one:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/business/schneiderman- is-s...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/business/schneiderman-is-said-to- face-pressure-to-back-bank-deal.html?_r=1)

and

[http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall- stre...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in- jail-20110216)

And remember that's Rolling Stone and Matt Taibbi is also rather left leaning from what I can tell off his wikipedia entry (I'm more progressive than him and I believe Obama is making one mistake after another for reasons I cannot fathom).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's very sad. As a consumer, if I google "cheap <drug>" and somebody outside the US is willing to sell me <drug> at a lower cost and/or with fewer bureaucratic hoops to jump through than a local provider, that is _exactly_ what I want and expect to see featured in the Google Ads that get served up. Google was providing the _public good_ of regulatory arbitrage - <USER2> willing buyers with willing sellers.

It's a shame Google had to knuckle under.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why can't Canadian pharmacies sell drugs in the US?

<comment><USER7> Answering my own question: to protect the profits of American Big Pharma. Big Pharma gets to write the laws they want in DC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like extortion.</comment>


Ask YC:Suggest an online finance app to use for my startup - <AUTHOR>

What online money management/finance/accounting service do you use to manage your business? I am not looking for personal finance services such as buxfer and mint. <comment><USER2> I would use a basic spreadsheet until you actually get to revenue or have got some outside funding in the door. Keep those fixed expenses as close to zero as possible.

For managing startup financial and strategic goals though PlanHQ is really nice (<http://www.planhq.com>) I just wish they had a basic minimal free version to hook pre-revenue startups who could then switch to a premium plan once things progressed.

Many of the top VCs have their startups on PlanHQ to give everyone visibility into progress (strategic and financial)

</comment><comment><USER3> I haven't used them but have heard good things:

<http://freshbooks.com>

Couple bonuses for me: \- there's an API to use \- easy to use \- scalable pricing \- they're Canadian

</comment><comment><USER4> I've got these guys bookmarked for when I need them: <https://www.clarityaccounting.com/>

EDIT: I can't comment at all on their actual services.

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://corduroysite.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> You should use a spreadsheet (Google or Microsoft will do) until you are actually taking payments of any sort, and use whatever capabilities your bank provides through their online banking as well.

<comment><USER3> I'd have to disagree with this. I think if the persona is serious about setting up a business they should spend the money to get it setup correctly to start off with. The reason for this is that it's a lot easier to do when you don't already have customers and you can take the time to do it properly.

One caveat though is of course it takes money to set it up properly. I think that in the long run though it will pay off big time.

<comment><USER6> I think that many start-ups fail because they try and build enterprise systems at the outset, for their small business.

You just gotta do what works and what's fast, and focus on your product. It's not that hard to scale up your finance system later when you have some money.</comment></comment></comment>


Solu: The world's smallest general-purpose computer – #1 on Product Hunt - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/tech/solu <comment><USER2> discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10398750](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10398750)</comment>


3 unspoken blockers prevent professors from teaching open source comm. part. - <AUTHOR> http://opensource.com/education/10/11/three-unspoken-blockers-preventing-open-source-participation

<comment><AUTHOR> How do we fix these blockers...for example, blocker 1) At some schools, if you make it on campus, for campus, or with resources from campus, guess who owns it? Campus

I went to a state-owned institution, so doesn't that mean that the tax payers ultimately own it?</comment>