Behind Amazon's HQ2 fiasco - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-03/amazon-s-hq2-fiasco-was-driven-by-bezos-envy-of-elon-musk <comment><USER2> Bloomberg still has not retracted their spy chip story ([https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the- big-h...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how- china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies)).

Until then, I would take anything you read in Bloomberg w/ a grain of salt.

<comment><USER3> Was it confirmed that it was made up?

<comment><USER4> It was denied. No one else was able to confirm the existence. Bloomberg never mentioned it again. Does not sound like a solid story.

<comment><USER5> > Bloomberg never mentioned it again.

If they're unable to determine the veracity of the story, they should retract it. If they're convinced of some elements of the story but not others, they should say so.

The failure to follow up with either affirmation or retraction seems dishonest.

<comment><USER6> The thing is, if they were unable to determine the veracity they _would_ have retracted it.

<comment><USER7> If they had been able to determine the veracity of it they would be able to tell us the ways that they did. Not just silence.

<comment><USER8> Discussing sources is tricky business for journalists, but given the pushback, it seems like at the very least Bloomberg should have conducted some follow-up investigations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's easy to look at Jeff Bezos and say ego-driven billionaire jealous of Elon Musk. That's a fun narrative.

On the other hand, why should Amazon leave money on the table to be happily scooped up by other companies. Forget Tesla, Washington state was giving billions of dollars in subsidies to Boeing, while Boeing was cutting jobs in Washington. The city council of Seattle was feuding with Amazon for "for making the city too expensive". The city is _complaining_ that Amazon is making some of their citizens too rich.

I think his frustration would be understandable as businessman, and not as envy.

Of course the whole system is perverse and corrupt, but hate the game, not the player.

<comment><USER10> > The city is complaining that Amazon is making some of their citizens too > rich.

The city would prefer that Amazon's presence has benefits for citizens as a whole - or at least didn't make their live worse - rather than enriching a few. Seems reasonable to me.

<comment><USER11> Then the reasonable solution is for the city to tax the enriched citizens and distribute the taxes to the rest of the citizens so that they benefit as a whole.

But, what really happens, is the "city" or "city council" wants is to score political points, because a tax would also impact themselves and their friends and family. Everyone wants someone else to pay to benefit citizens as a whole, when obviously the fairest way is to pass a tax applicable to all "enriched" citizens.

<comment><USER12> Seattle council has voted for an income tax on highly paid residents (2.25% on everything above $250k), but income taxes are nominally unconstitutional in Washington State. It's been working its way through the state courts for years. So far the lower courts have ruled that an income tax may be constitutional (this would be a first, in Washington) ... but only if the rate is equal for all earners (So the Seattle tax still fails).

<comment><USER11> Interesting! Then their ire should be directed towards Washington state laws, not Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Employees with experience negotiating deals around the country anticipated problems, but their red flags were ignored by those eager to please Bezos"

... this is eerily similar to one of the major drawbacks of an authoritarian regime, where everyone tries to please the Great Leader while no-one dares to express any unpleasant truth.

<comment><USER14> One person's "ignored" is another person's "accounted for." It could easily be that the folks who made the decision recognized this risk, but decided it was worth it. That looks about the same as ignoring the risk to someone who is not privy to the machinery that makes the decision.

I see this happen all the time in the organization I work for. Some folks say that X won't work, product team tries X, and if it ends up not working, they say, "You ignored our feedback on X!" But you just can't really know whether they ignored your feedback, or whether they considered it and decided not to act on it for any of a number of reasons. IMO, the "ignored" narrative is pretty uncharitable, even if it is the natural and easy one to assume. It feels good to be vindicated. It feels less good to think about how teams are dealing with vast numbers of competing constraints, and sometimes have to take gambles (a central feature of which is the possibility of loss).

It seems like this type of thing happens all the time. Almost every time something bad happens, there was some naysayer who predicted it. But you never hear about the cases where the critics were wrong. The classic Slashdot comment r.e. the iPod is the counterexample that proves the rule. It's such a notable comment because naysayers are almost never so blatantly and visibly cited for their incorrect calls.

Anyway, it's not even clear that the team was wrong to discard this feedback. They got their tax break, didn't they? Along with a bunch of bad PR at the time. But I had totally forgotten that this thing even happened until this article brought it up. I'll probably forget again by next week, and so will most everyone else.

<comment><USER15> There's a standard solution for this problem, namely numeric probabilities and prediction markets. If an internal prediction market had given an 80% chance of this happening, that's meaningful in a way that individual ambiguous naysayings are not.

<comment><USER16> Are there any examples of corporations running internal prediction markets? That sounds fascinating and I'd love to read about exactly how they made it work, because I can see about 100 problems with this being the "standard" solution.

<comment><USER17> Google ran one internally for some time maybe 10 years ago. (Maybe still does, for all I know.) IIRC it was for points, maybe transferable for massage credits or something, so no huge economic incentive. I have no idea if it was in any way effective, actionable, or even seen by executives with decision making power. Based on the quantity of discussion on the mailing list I suspect it was mostly used by a pretty small set of people, so I'd have some doubts about its predictive power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Billionaires trying to out-compete each other in the size of the public handouts they're receiving :))

I never understood why in the US (and in more and more other places as well) it's considered legitimate to give billions to private profit-seeking corporations so they can do the kind of stuff that private profit-seeking corporations do anyway: hire people, build stuff etc.

<comment><USER19> Because there are positive externalities to a company choosing to do that in your city. If a big corporation chooses to place a HQ in your city, you get an influx of people into the housing market, of consumers into your service industry, of tax payers into your district, etc. While I agree, a lot of these payoffs end up being small compared to the giant sums offered, the theory behind incentivizing companies to come to your district absolutely makes sense, and is exactly what politicians and government workers should be doing. Their job is to plan for the next 30+ years, not the next 6 months where the price point for the incentives is all negative.

If you're going to make $5B in the next 10 years because of a corporation, and giving them $1B now to incentivize them to come to New York instead of Chicago makes a ton of sense. I'm making those numbers up, but that's the thinking.

<comment><USER20> Where does the 5B come from? They dont pay federal tax, they are getting state and local tax breaks, and providing jobs that have suffered wage stagnation since the bailouts. Politicians do this because they get their pockets stuffed, and then in turn Amazon and Bezos make bucket fulls of cash too. It is crazy to allow tax breaks for company's that largely don't pay taxes to start with, especially extremely profitable companies.

<comment><USER21> >Where does the 5B come from?

These were thousands of SWE jobs. Amazon would have paid significant payroll taxes (which are federal but that doesn't fit the narrative so people ignore it) and their employees would have paid millions a year in city and state income taxes, property taxes, etc. Getting a high-paying company like Amazon in your city is a huge economic boon and is totally worth up front tax breaks. Remember, it's a tax break, you're just agreeing not to take money you already don't have.

>It is crazy to allow tax breaks for company's that largely don't pay taxes to start with, especially extremely profitable companies.

Again, Amazon pays tens (maybe hundreds) of millions in taxes every year. You're just repeating a political talking point based solely on what they pay at federal income taxes (due to loss carry-overs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How was this a fiasco? They got $762 million to do what they were going to do anyway.

<comment><USER23> It may have been a fiasco for the local governments bidding on it.

<comment><USER24> I live 1.5 miles from the Crystal City HQ2 site in Alexandria, VA. Are there affordable housing, transportation, and public safety issues we have to address? Of course. Will we benefit from addressing these problems to add 25,000-35,000 jobs? Far more than the cost/difficulty of solving these problems.

We are thrilled to have them. We would much rather contend with growth problems than a loss of tax revenues, reduced property values, list employment, or low quality jobs. We have subsidize part of their expansion, but the growth will pay back that investment in 5-7 years. We can live that ROI.

EDIT: cleanup/clarification

<comment><USER25> > We are thrilled to have them.

The royal We?

Your comment would read better if you didn't claim to speak for some group - presumably anyone living within a few miles of the HQ2 site. I'm sure that many people could be found there that strongly disagree with your confident predictions:

> We have subsidize part of their expansion, but the growth will pay back that > investment in 5-7 years.

<comment><USER26> A similar story played out here in Seattle. Amazon transformed SLU into a business hub, bringing tens of thousands of high paying jobs to a previously underdeveloped neighborhood.

<comment><USER27> Crystal City is hardly underdeveloped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What a beautiful illustration of how ego-driven decision making can be at the highest levels—both Bezos' decision to solicit incentives to compete with rivals, and local NYC officials' plan to torpedo the deal out of spite for being left out of the process.

</comment><comment><USER29> [https://archive.md/pGGNV](https://archive.md/pGGNV)

</comment><comment><USER30> I think it's interesting how other states have to fight so hard to get companies to move there and yet, CA one of the least business friendly places, can take it's growth completely for granted.

</comment><comment><USER31> Amazon is so heavy handed in how they interact with the public. They don't seem to understand or care that much for PR and give off this hyper capitalistic vibe that turns off many people. Even for American society, they feel extreme. As the article states, "Fuck you, we're Amazon".

<comment><USER32> > They don't seem to understand or care that much for PR and give off this > hyper capitalistic vibe that turns off many people

Markets keep rewarding a behavior/product so nothing is going to change.

Amazon.com is convenient and fast for most people. Kindles are great for most people. AWS is default for most people. 2-day shipping is great for most people.

As long as most people find their products and services preferable, I'm afraid bad PR won't change a thing (see: stock performance )

<comment><USER31> I don't see a super strong connection between Amazon's business power and how they present themselves. You can make boatloads of money and also still come off as somewhat presentable and not some uncaring monster.

There are plenty of companies that operate like that. Amazon just chooses not to. As the article pointed out, it's how Bezos rolls, for better or for worse.

<comment><USER33> That's true, but do you want PR or truth?

For better or worse, Bezos has always been true to himself and his vision for the company. Without any market pressures to dissuade him, he has never lied and pretended to care about anything more than money, status, and further company success.

There is nothing wrong with this. The purpose of government is to set up rules to harness the market so even uncaring monster companies still must do "good" in order to succeed and walk away with money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > When Elon Musk secured $1.3 billion from Nevada in 2014 to open a gigantic > battery plant, Jeff Bezos noticed. In meetings, the Amazon.com Inc. chief > expressed envy for how Musk had pitted five Western states against one > another in a bidding war for thousands of manufacturing jobs; he wondered > why Amazon was okay with accepting comparatively trifling incentives. It was > a theme Bezos returned to often, according to four people privy to his > thinking. Then in 2017, an Amazon executive sent around a congratulatory > email lauding his team for landing $40 million in government incentives to > build a $1.5 billion air hub near Cincinnati. The paltry sum irked Bezos, > the people say, and made him even more determined to try something new.

<comment><USER35> This is so 100% pure CEO thinking it hurts.

<comment><USER36> It really feels to me comically childish behaviour.

You are at the top of the world and yet you still need more marbles then anyone around you. But why would you care?

<comment><USER37> Matt Levine in "Money Stuff" yesterday: One thing to say here is that the people who are Econ-101-rational tend to be the ones who make the most money. Every time you read about a workaholic billionaire and think "boy, not me, if I had a billion dollars I'd be on the beach," the answer is always "well that's why you don't have a billion dollars." If you have the characteristics that enable you to make a billion dollars, you don't usually turn them off once you get there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> So this is what we've devolved to: ultra-rich tech overlords competing with each other for government handouts.

Things are fixing to get interesting if Bernie gets the nomination...

<comment><USER39> Tax incentives are different than handouts. At any rate, it's certainly nothing new and you could attribute this sort of thing as playing a part in the United States's economic success.

<comment><USER40> Tax incentives are where entrenched power get to take from the collective social good while not pitching in. How are they not handouts? It's like taking food from the lunch lady and paying half the price because your dad is rich.

States fighting amongst themselves to give the most generous handouts doesn't ensure national success. Perhaps that makes sense in regards to national tax incentives but not state ones.

Spinning getting divided and conquered and screwed into offering an unfair tax deal just to get Amazon in your state as the key to economic success is some trickle down shit. Why not have solidarity amongst states and tax Amazon fairly? Instead of having to shoot yourself in the foot economically years down the line when you have to adopt costly self-destructive measures to reverse the economic inequality you entrenched for no good actual reason?

<comment><USER39> I grew up in Florida. Disney transformed central Florida from a rural agricultural economy to a thriving tourist destination in the 60s thanks to economic incentives which included exemptions for state building codes. Yes, Walt Disney World has its own building codes. Almost 60 years later and Orlando is thriving.

I think the fact that tax and regulatory incentives work so well should underscore the importance of keeping taxation and regulation to the minimum necessary. When taxes are high and regulations are too stringent, it can choke an economy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why German bread is the best in the world (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/germany-best-bread/index.html <comment><USER2> It is not. Lithuenian and Polish dark bread is best.</comment>


Secrets about numbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.numbergossip.com

<comment><USER2> I wonder what percentage of queries is 42?

</comment><comment><USER3> Awww, "I'm sure 1234567890 is a fine number, but I do not yet know any interesting gossip about numbers bigger than 9999." And I agree with zoba, "i" would've been a good one to include.

Given that the number properties are based off things that can be calculated from the number, why is there such a small limit? I mean, preventing 500-digit numbers makes sense for sheer computational difficulty, but only 4 digits?

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice one. I entered 3.14, but the results page didn't mention anything about PI. Looks like it just rounds the entered number. Pity! :) But it's still cool!

<comment><USER5> Interesting page, the rest of the site is good reading too.

I tend to use Wolfram Alpha quite a lot for this: e.g. <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3.14>

<comment><USER4> Definitely, me too. I just thought it would be a good first test to just enter the first digits of PI. :)

<comment><USER6> I thought the obvious first number to try was 69..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm sure 0 is a fine number, but I only like to talk about positive things.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very nice page. More on her page <http://www.tanyakhovanova.com/>

<comment><USER9> And her son got his MIT CS PHD last year - with Sussman as his advisor.

PDF of the thesis: [http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/49525/MIT- CSAI...](http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/49525/MIT-CSAIL- TR-2009-053.pdf?sequence=1)</comment></comment>


Why Start ShareMeme Now? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sharememe.com/2008/09/20/why-start-sharememe-now/

<comment><USER2> What does it do though? It's not very clear.</comment>


'No Evidence' yet That Recovered Covid-19 Patients Are Immune, WHO Says - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/25/844939777/no-evidence-that-recovered-covid-19-patients-are-immune-who-says <comment><USER2> WHO are such a worthless disaster at this point. There are three options: immune for life, immune for X period, where X is the period where antibodies exceed viral load of inbound virus, or permanent viral latency. Look at other coronaviruses, take a best guess, rapidly pursue clarity, make the right trade offs in you area based on available data. Given how easily spread this thing is, it won't take long for the answer to be obvious.

<comment><USER3> Those three options can be very blurred.

Some people may have different responses, including due to different age, genetics, and health.

Some strains may have different results than others.

Reducing all those variations to one of three fundamental descriptions may therefore be highly misleading.

While I agree with your statement "look at other coronavirus ... based on available data", I'll point out that there simply isn't enough data to determine if an "immunity passport" is operationally meaningful because, to quote the NPR piece quoting WHO, "No study has evaluated whether the presence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 confers immunity to subsequent infection by this virus in humans."

What do you do when there isn't data? Issue immunity passports on the untested hypothesis that it will be fine?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There literally massive evidence - second infections with SARS-CoV-2 are rare. This would only be the cases if the initial infection provided protection.

What is more of a question is how long this immunity lasts. The evidence to date is not long just like the other coronaviruses.</comment>


Congress' Copyright Cowards: the Members Who Could Betray Internet Users - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/stop-fast-track

<comment><USER2> This sounds a bit like "Pirate Cinema" (the book) come true.</comment>


Building a Web Application that makes $500 a Month – Part I - <AUTHOR> http://tbbuck.com/building-a-web-application-that-makes-500-a-month-part-i/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, blog post author here. Over the last 18 months I've learned an incredible amount from the users here on Hacker News, and I figured that it's about time I started giving something back.

None of my web apps make serious money, but they bring in enough to make a difference to life, and I'm hoping that my articles will help others get on the same path - if not somewhat more successfully! ;)

Please feel free to ask me any questions. I'm aiming to have the next part written and live by early next week.

<comment><USER2> please don't split your articles.

however, it was a good read. thanks.

<comment><USER3> Splitting isn't a huge deal to me. It's hard to write sometimes, and getting a bit out there helps you get the rest out there.

Now, paginating articles (you know, it's not like there isn't infinite vertical space). That is a different story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love the tone of your writing (both in the post and on TweetingMachine), it's modest yet confident.

Some feedback:

* [Edit: Looks like it's right there in the center and I'm just blind. :)] I couldn't find the pricing after the 10 day trial anywhere. This frustrated me and made me not want to try it at all without knowing what I was getting into.

* Twitter frowns upon auto-follow/unfollow services. You should be very careful with this. I recently had to make changes to my own service because the Twitter API policy team didn't like me telling people who unfollowed them.

Great work, I look forward to the second part!

<comment><USER5> > I recently had to make changes to my own service because the Twitter API > policy team didn't like me telling people who unfollowed them.

Just curious: which section of the Twitter API ToS do you read as restricting notifying them of people that unfollowed them? I know that the API policy explicitly prohibits automated unfollowing and restricts automated following, but haven't ever seen anything that addresses notifications of a someone unfollowing another user.

<comment><USER4> They referenced Section II.4.B, namely since native Twitter apps don't "organically display" unfollows, you should not as well.

> Respect the features and functionality embedded with or included in Twitter > Content or the Twitter API. Do not attempt to interfere with, intercept, > disrupt, filter, or disable any features of the Twitter API or Twitter > service, and you should only surface actions that are organically displayed > on Twitter.

<comment><USER5> Ah, that does seem to follow from the quoted section. Thanks for referencing it, I appreciate it.

It's a big bummer as a potential Twitter-hacker, too. I can see why they wouldn't want clients & add-ons to surface unfollows, but it blankets quite a bit of functionality, and then it comes down to an issue of selective enforcement. Sigh.

<comment><USER4> You're welcome.

The way I read it is "don't do things we don't already do" which is a really bad constraint, effectively forbidding any kind of innovation. I can understand the spirit of their selective desire to address this specific violation, but I'm not convinced it's as much of a problem as they're making it to be.

Oh well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey I remember when you launched! I even gave you some "business" advice - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1166641>.

Well done, waiting anxiously for the rest of your story (you drama queen :-P).

<comment><AUTHOR> Me? _Drama_? Never! ;)

Seriously, thanks for the initial advice, it helped me hugely! :-D

<comment><USER7> Make sure you buy the guy who recommended themeforest a beer. He sounds very wise and probably is totally awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, he has his moments ;-p It'd be ideal if suddenly it earned enough to buy a couple of tickets from Canada to Warsaw so that this guy and his +1 can collect a pint in person :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I absolutely love reading articles like this that are grounded in reality where the point of the app is to actually make money. The fact that you are making any money at all brings value to what you have to say that all of us can learn from. I think most entrepreneurs will agree that it is that first sale that is the hardest part. I look forward to your next article!

</comment><comment><USER9> It looks like what you are getting at is that the design is important. I don't think your original design is a bad starting point, much better than any designs I've come up with for my projects.

It'd be nice if you got into the details of integrating a themeforest theme with an existing code base. A reason I've avoided buying a theme, don't know what I'd do with it once I had it.

<comment><AUTHOR> _It'd be nice if you got into the details of integrating a themeforest theme with an existing code base._

Honestly, it's pretty simple: you have the HTML for each page that is demonstrated. Chop out the relevant bits for headers, footers, and then any tables etc. that you might need, copy across the various css, js and images directories and you're done! It really doesn't take long. Sometimes the themes come with PHP versions as well, but not always.

If you want to test yourself, why not try downloading an open source theme (e.g. <http://www.oswd.org/>) and take a look at what's in the HTML? I can't guarantee it'll be an identical process, but it should be fairly similar :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hey everyone, I have a semi-related question (since it's briefly mentioned in the article): is it possible to make a decent salary exclusively by doing freelance work through vWorker (rentacoder) and the likes?

<comment><AUTHOR> I found it not too troublesome to earn between $2,000 and $3,000 a month. By Polish standards (even after tax) that's really not bad, but I realise it might not be that great in, say, London or New York.

<comment><USER11> I would certainly _love_ an article about how to do that. In my limited experience, it's actually pretty hard to make decent money through these sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, it's like reading my own history, especially the beginning, the _knowing_ that gazillions of people will be clamoring for what you build. It's tough when you find that 99% of reactions are "meh..."

</comment><comment><USER13> Hey guys,

not sure if anyone has realized, but for SaaS projects the Extended version of the theme is required. So $1000 is what he should have paid for the admin panel...

I hope no one involved with ThemeForest finds out :)

<comment><USER14> Can anyone elaborate on this? From the regular license description:

 _The main thing you cannot do is offer the item up for resale either on its own or as part of a project. So you can use the item in a free game, but not in a game that is on sale. You can use the item in a website, but not in a web template that you sell._

Here are the full legal terms: [http://themeforest.net/wiki/support/legal- terms/licensing-te...](http://themeforest.net/wiki/support/legal- terms/licensing-terms/)

Specifically, I wonder if you are referring to this line:

 _(d) Unless you have our prior written consent, you must not directly or indirectly license, sub-license, sell or resell or provide for free the Work or offer to do any of these things. All of these things are referred to as Resale._

 _(g) You must not incorporate the Work in a work which is created for Resale by you or your client._

I wonder what they mean by "indirectly selling" the Work. Does this apply to SaaS? What about Freemium products?

<comment><USER15> Taken from [http://wiki.envato.com/buying/licenses-buying/themeforest- re...](http://wiki.envato.com/buying/licenses-buying/themeforest-regular-and- extended-license-usage-examples/)

 _Regular License Examples - The Regular License could be used for any of the following: Single website (commercial, personal, or non-profit). Single website for a client (commercial, personal, or non-profit). Single intranet site project.

Extended License Examples - The Extended License could be used for any of the following: Template for a web service such as WPMU. Part of a software package for sale._

To me that reads like in this case, the Regular license would be fine. The extended license seems more about situations where your customers will be creating their own unique and publicly accessible content using the template (You start up a blogging service www.omgblogs.com and someone could create their blog at mahblog.omgblogs.com then pick from a template you got from ThemeForest)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Get around the blogger problem by generating a referral token for each blogger to use in linking to your site, and show them the token/link in their account page.

Make the rules so that a blog post referral only requires a single click - that way you can verify that the blog post is from who they say they are

Once you have that infrastructure, you can use it as a more generalized referral system for people that want to tweet out a link to your product, etc. For eg. every tweet referral signup gets you a free month

There are hordes of freelancers out there who do nothing but affiliate marketing. For those types, you want to send them 30-50% of revenue. There are entire products to do this for you - cj.com et al. Their referrals made up over 50% of new users on a product I worked on previously.

<comment><USER17> >Get around the blogger problem by generating a referral token for each blogger to use in linking to your site, and show them the token/link in their account page.

this would solve the problem of people who don't produce clickthroughs getting paid, but it wouldn't solve the problem of looking scummy, and if you have a bunch of duplicated content all over the place, you look scummy, and the person who actually wrote the content is going to be cheesed.

Reputation management (which is to say, wanting to not look scummy) is the primary reason why I don't have a referral system. Well, that and I'm not willing to put that much cash in to customer acquisition. But it's primarily about reputation; It's hard enough presenting a consistent message when you have two or three employees.

Even if you only care about money, reputation is worth quite a lot.

I'm sure there are ways to do affiliate marketing without looking scummy, but it's not obvious or easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm happily surprised that the word "lifestyle" hasn't been dropped yet in this thread.

<comment><USER19> At $500/mo, this is more like a "weekend-style" business, providing some nice walking around money even if not enough to pay the bills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thanks for writing this up! We're currently going through a similar experience. The good news is that we went from 1 signup a month to quite a few per day (with a few days at over 100 new signups) -- mostly by following things that we've learned here on HN.

A few weeks ago, my co-founder was getting pretty bummed out and was starting to look like throwing in the towel...then we managed to get covered in a few places simultaneously (finally, months of contacting the editors of various popular sites paying off) and we had more new traffic than we new what to do with.

Exciting stuff!

<comment><USER21> Sounds like your hard work paid off indeed! Care to elaborate on how you gained users? Did you only email editors, or did you have other strategies as well? What were your pitches like? I'd love to hear!

<comment><USER20> I'm working on a blog post that'll probably provide some more (and different details) but here's our story:

Well, since we launched only a few months before, we were still a little scared as to how the site and service would scale (and how much our server bill would jump). So we wanted to grow kinda slowly so we could manage it effectively.

Our strategy then was to reach out to editors or writers of smaller sites that seemed like they were in our milieu, and see if any of them showed any interest. I think we contacted...30 or 40 editors.

We actually didn't get any coverage at all, which was really disheartening. But we kept plugging away on the site and the app, adding a couple additional features. In the meanwhile I kept sending out emails, filling out forms. Users kept trickling in.

We also started using our own app ourselves, sending out Momentomails to our friends and to each other. Making sure the service was live and validating the idea...building up expected user patterns, establishing acceptable levels of service quality...etc.

One thing we found slightly disturbing, was the large number of sites that offer different levels of review prioritization depending on if you email them and expect some free coverage, or if you pay them. And I suppose I can see how that could be an interesting revenue channel, but if I wanted to pay somebody to cover me, I'd probably just buy ad space...so it felt kinda scammish and we decided not to do that. Our service should either be interesting and useful on its own, or we should keep working on it until it is.

On a whim, I decided to send out a contact to some bigger sites, Lifehacker being one of them. Still nothing.

About two weeks after submitting to Lifehacker, this happened: [http://lifehacker.com/#!5787941/momentomail-sends- messages-f...](http://lifehacker.com/#!5787941/momentomail-sends-messages- from-gmail-or-yahoo-accounts-in-the-future)

I'm not sure how much getting covered on Apr 1st hurt us or not (we answered a few user contacts answering if we were real or not). But we had a massive spike in new traffic. Massive. We couldn't even see some of our previous spikes on the graph it was so huge. We floated around the top 10 hot sites on LH for two or three days so the spike extended out for awhile.

So far, LH has been the only major site to cover us, but it's let us observe how things spread on the internet. If you search for Momentomail in google, you'll find dozens of pages where we show up, almost all reposts or links to LH's story. A few tweets bounced around the tweetosphere...(or whatever it's called)...and very interesting -- foreign translations of the LH post, showing up a few days later, sent us echos of the initial spike.

Suddenly a rush of Italian users, or Turkish users, or Indonesian users. We haven't gotten the metrics yet, but anecdotally, it looks like about 20% of our new signups are now coming from Spanish language countries...which is pretty exciting.

It's definitely slowed down, and we're still kind of processing all this new traffic, but there's a steady stream of new signups everyday. We've found a few bugs were squashing. Once we add a couple planned (and highly requested features) we'll probably go around and recontact many of the sites that we contacted before...but also the sites that carried our story from the initial Lifehacker story.

In case anybody is interested, some fun notes: we run on GAE, and we had our quota set to a cap of about $5/day, before the LH story, we'd barely even showed up on the quota data (we'd only been using the free service). The week of the LH story, the quotas showed some activity, but we never broke Google's free quota. So our hosting fees so far on GAE are $0. It's definitely a cost effective way to bootstrap a new product. (though secretly we hope to have to "good problem" of having to increase our quota cap).

<comment><USER21> Wow, great! Thanks for all of the details. Really helps to put things into perspective. Sounds like you're doing all the right things and hustling away.

The reason I'm curious is because I "launched" my first web app a few months ago. In actuality it was just a feeler to see how the product faired in the wild - core functionality was there, but greatly lacking features. The only place I shared was HN and it was received tremendously well. It hung out on the front page for the majority of the day, resulted in thousands of hits and hundreds of signups, with more trickling in during the weeks following. At the time, I was reluctant to promote anywhere else before incorporating a few new features. Unfortunately, I was pulled away by more demanding projects, so I haven't had time to make all of the changes and features I had planned on (or marketing), resulting in significantly decreased traffic.

Now that my other projects are winding down, I can focus more time on building and promoting this app. Stories like yours help a bunch, so I appreciate the details.

Could I get your e-mail address? I'd love to stay in touch, but I don't see it anywhere in your profile.

<comment><USER20> yeah!

I updated my profile.

It's banehn and I'm on gmail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Thanks for posting this. What do you use for handling the recurring billing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now I use the most basic of PayPal business accounts. With IPN notifications, it's pretty simple to get up and running quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is great, look forward to reading the second part.

At first, the price seems expensive, but when I think about it, it's really not. You are offering a lot of functionality when it comes to scheduling tweets and that's a feature people will find super useful (unfortunately a lot of those people may be spammers, but at the end of the day as far as your concerned, your business is your business and theirs is theirs).

I'm not a huge advocate of freemium and I would not suggest lowering the price, however you may want to extend the free trial period a little longer.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I'm not a huge advocate of freemium and I would not suggest lowering the price, however you may want to extend the free trial period a little longer._

Thanks for the positive feedback :) Regarding the free trial, I'm kinda hesitant, as if you can't decide after 10 days, will another 10 really make that much of a difference? That said - I accept I could be wrong ;) How long do you think would be fair?

<comment><USER24> You want it to be long enough for your customers to integrate it into their habits. If they tend to be slow to decide (low conversion for a given trial period length), then they might just need more time to depend on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is interesting. In the next piece can I request you go into a bit more detail about how you increase in traffic flow to your site...basically what marketing did you do?

</comment><comment><USER26> Thanks, an interesting read that puts a lot of the other "I'm so amazing because my rails app makes me and my uni buddies £50k a month" into perspective.

But I'd echo the comments above - would be good to see the next posts go up soon in particular to what you actually started doing differently that saw it increase. Maybe others here will be able to build on that to give some advice to turn that $500 into $5k :)

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm not sure why you are using prgmr over Linode, Slicehost, or the Rackspace Cloud servers. The others have really simple backup tools.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because prgmr is _cheap_ and I wanted to keep costs under control from day one. :)

For example, there's no point in me paying for a nice control panel when I can set up Apache or nginx in no time on my own. I'm not a super sysadmin, but I know enough to quickly write a script that backs up code and database to Dropbox at regular intervals and so on. So paying for those extras? Not sure I see the point when you're not even covering hosting costs :)

<comment><USER28> Friendly reminder: test restoring from that, regularly. After your hard drive crashes is a bad time to learn that, e.g., zipping up a folder of MySQL files is not exactly backup best practice.

<comment><USER29> I'd expand this to actually take the time to implement (or make yourself) a system to automate said backups and maybe even testing them automagically. You'll probably end up using the same set of scripts for all your beginning projects and it'll be worth having.

<comment><USER30> Don't forget to check logs to make sure your automation actually works.

Periodically make full restore from bare metal or fresh VPS image using your backups and following written procedure.

Make corrections if something does not work as expected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Love how he cited the crappy design as the main reason why the app sucks ... Then proceeds to put the minimum effort into design to adress the problem. Give a designer a chance to work for you, you will end up with a result that is better but more importantly unique.

</comment><comment><USER32> Greatly written article, but I wish it hadn't been pulled apart into three separate posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The reason why I've separated is time - I thought it would be better to release them as I write them, rather than make everyone wait several weeks :)

<comment><USER32> I can definitely see it from your perspective: not only does it take less time to write one article rather than three [and probably less pressure as well!], it gives you content for your website (not to mention a steady stream of visitors wanting to see your content, rather than just one big group of visitors then nothing).

From my perspective though, it is unfortunate: I'm interested in the story, but I don't know if I will be interested enough to check back a few weeks from now to see the updates, perhaps because I forget the URL, perhaps because I don't see a post on HN about it, or perhaps because I just forget. I also think I'm spoiled by the internet: I want things now! :)

<comment><USER33> Solution: RSS! I'm a google reader user, and when I find things like this, I toss them in there. If it's not interesting enough going forward, I can always unsubscribe. Of course, if the author is using twitter/facebook/whateverelse to hype posts, you can use those to similar effect, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> My solution is looking at integrating MailChimp's offering once the traffic's died down a bit. I should have done it before really, but am reluctant to further stress a server that's already getting a bit upset ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I like how you build the tension towards the cliffhanger. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER35> Will you continue this story?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely! I'm hoping to have the next part up by next week :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Great read. However, I wanted to mention that this is actually a story and not a guide.

</comment><comment><USER37> Ok, maybe I'll be the loan dissenter - and a torn one at that. I really think this is a great article and I think this is information that _should certainly_ be shared out...

I have one nitpick with what the author states that bothers me greatly.

Bare with this statement - I am not against what he did, but this is the biggest worry in hiring any outside dev to do any work for you, and thus has a clear and real issue for the market and industry overall:

The only thing that I feel is a little weird is that we have a developer who says he saw a bunch of requests for an application that does X.

he then turns and build the application to do X himself.

This in and of itself _is fine_ \-- but it _will certainly_ wind up pissing people off/alienating people entirely.

The point is that the valley mantra is "ideas are worthless, only execution matters* -- then it makes all devs look like they are just sitting around waiting to leach off others ideas and execute on them themselves for personal profit.

I don't think there is a clear win-win situation here, I just want to point out that the way _this_ article is written, it seems to prove out the worry of the non-dev side of the world == "What is the risk of trying to recruit a developer for my idea, then they just turn and build it for them selves?" (MZ Comes to mind)

This means that ideas ARE NOT worthless, they do have value. Surely, only if you can manage to execute on them - but if the ideas were so worthless in-and- of themselves why arent the millions of developers constantly outdoing themselves with utterly amazing works. They aren't. It takes a great idea AND great execution to matter.

<comment><USER38> phlux, didn't we have this argument before? ;)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2061369>

To try and clarify further: ideas are not worthless, but they also don't have value. How can that be? Simple, unless an idea is coupled with execution its value is zero. This is what leads to the phrase 'ideas are worthless' which is misleading IMO when phrased that way.

> why arent the millions of developers constantly outdoing themselves with > utterly amazing work

That statement is flawed on many levels. First, the percentage of the population with a high level understanding of technology is small, and the percentage of those who are developers is smaller, and the percentage of those that are great developers is smaller still. So saying "the millions of developers" like there really are that many working directly on tech innovation in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the US is questionable at best.

Now, if you're asking why don't the "great" proportion of developers do amazing work the answer is that they do. They are the reason you can view and post on Hacker News with a working OS, or listen to thousands of songs on a device as small as your hand, and on that same device check email, play games, download thousands of apps, and make phone calls, etc. In other words, great developers are _busy_ building things. Many amazing things. Some developers build things for companies, and some venture out on their own to build new and innovative things like Twitter, Groupon, or Facebook, some of which work and many which don't. But there certainly are _many_ amazing pieces of technology that have been built so far, and there are many more to come... These won't all come at the same time, but the tinkerers are out there... building, trying, failing, and trying again. They are doing the hard work of executing, and for a small fraction of them, it will pay off.

Edit: Let me put the idea challenge back on you, phlux. If your belief is "idea" people are certainly only held back from their $ millions in success by not being developers, why don't they borrow, sell, or mortgage $50K on their house etc. and just get the idea built and cash in? It's that easy, right?

<comment><USER37> Ok, I think I need to clarify what I believe an "idea" to be. So, this is both to you and Random42...

To Random42's point, simply having an _idea_ like: "Wouldn't it be cool if cars could fly" is obviously worthless.

I think that I was not clear enough:

I think of an idea as a vetted plan. An idea, based on an understanding of a problem and a market, a vision on how it will make money. A design a spec and even mock-ups.

Far more than a simple statement of wishful thinking.

For me, whenever I have "an idea" I take it as far as I can take it sans having it developed.

For example, I have a current "idea" in the medical space (which is where my current full time focus is) that is a patient entertainment system.

This idea is based on several years of full time health care systems design experience designing two hospitals each with a budget of more than $500 million. It is an iterative evolution of a previous idea which we implemented and built and released open source, and a solid understanding of the market, the challenges and the sales cycle. Further, it is arrived at with the inclusion of hospital IT and Clinical staff that I have worked with on two projects -- and input from the founder of one of the existing market leading companies in this space.

I have a product spec, financial model, business plan and mock-ups.

This is my "idea" -- it is not worthless because it is a proven, fully informed documented product plan.

I still need development and a host of other things to accomplish this.

I have millions of simple wishful thinking ideas as well, but for anything that has value - real potential I go through the above.

I apparently was not clear with what I thought an _idea_ was... I hope this makes my perspective a little more clear.

<comment><USER38> > For me, whenever I have "an idea" I take it as far as I can take it sans > having it developed.

But that's the problem. You know why? Because _anybody_ can do this. You can have one million people do this, for one million years, and you know what you'd end up with? Nothing.

Don't get me wrong, it's great that you also attach careful research to your idea, but that only serves to lessen the risk you've overlooked obvious reasons for it to fail. It doesn't mean it won't fail. If your idea was guaranteed to succeed then crossing over into development wouldn't be a problem. You'd be able to get the money somehow. I know many ordinary people who have set aside as much as $50-100K just by being focused. Or you could get investment, or a SBA backed bank loan. But idea people won't actually work to do these things, because they know the truth: their idea may end up failing (being worthless when actually tried). Either that or the other truth: even once an idea is developed _it takes time and effort to grow it into a success_.

<comment><USER37> Um, no. I am building this. I am not just sitting around thinking up some idea and wishing it were true.

I am very early in my own development abilities, but I have a technical co- founder, a hospital that has agreed to pilot this and experience in my field which informed the design of the idea.

I think I see way to much arrogance on HN. It appears that you guys are so eager to try to find why things shouldn't be built, when maybe its better to figure out why things should.

I love how you all assume that one comes up with an idea, then just sits around and attempts to wish it into existence.

Lets take a poll. How many of you here think of yourself as a mediocre developer?

I'm willing to bet that many are under the impression they are some Ninja Star developer and that NOTHING in this world can possibly work unless you personally come up with it.

<comment><USER38> > Um, no. I am building this. I am not just sitting around thinking up some > idea and wishing it were true.

Well, now we're talking! :)

You are under the wrong impression. It's not that hackers don't want to see idea people succeed, it's that we don't have much respect for people who are on the sidelines and all talk with no action. I'm a developer, but first and foremost I'm an entrepreneur. If a person is willing to put their neck on the line while facing risk and uncertainty, they have my respect. I don't care if they can't even set up a Wordpress blog.

I wish you best of luck with your venture! It's not about arrogance; it's about action. You're _in the club_ as far as I'm concerned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> it would be good if you also describe

what kind of architexture you are using for the app and why - what frameworks , languages ( django, jquery )

also what other tools you are using for development/testing and why ( github, eclipse, firebug etc.)

</comment><comment><USER40> Thats an inspiring story and informative tips..Iam on my way to build one small app. I am expect atleast half of your earnings. Thats also big for me... as pocket money. Waiting for your next part.

</comment><comment><USER41> The fact that this article is so popular is sort of sad.That shows that a lot of people on HN are not making $500 a month from their web apps .We should have higher goals than this.

<comment><USER42> I agree, kinda.

I'm glad for the author's success so far (and, as another HNer said, that the word "lifestyle" has not yet reared its head in discussion).

On the other hand,back in October, about how my products had brought in $216,000 in revenue in 2010 to date (from $0 in 2008), and I got maybe 30 votes on HN, barely made it onto the front page:

<http://unicornfree.com/2010/i-made-216668-from-products/>

Which leads to me to wonder: Why is this $500/mo (after 1.5 yrs) essay so popular, but nobody was interested in mine?

For me, it's not just about getting the hits, but getting my message out there (I am all about making & SELLING paid products, not "startups"), so it's a question of effectiveness.

I've observed that HN seems most interested in rags-to-minimum-wage stories, and rags-to-riches stories, but not much in between (which is where I fall -- now). But there's probably also something else going on, whether it's me, my essay, or the audience.

If anyone has any ideas/pointers, I'd love to hear them.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I've observed that HN seems most interested in rags-to-minimum-wage stories, and rags-to-riches stories, but not much in between_

 _If anyone has any ideas/pointers, I'd love to hear them._

Hi, original post author here! :) I think the main difference between our two posts is that mine goes into more detail about _how_ I created the app and bought in revenue, whereas your posts lists only that you're already making serious dough (incidentally, congratulations! :)), and how your revenues have grown - not a lot about how to get there in the first place.

 _Why is this $500/mo (after 1.5 yrs) essay so popular_

I'd like to take issue with this point, although please do correct me if I'm seeing criticism where none was intended :) This is obviously not a full-on startup - I don't work eight hours every evening on it; in fact I barely put in that many hours on it per _month_. Maybe I need to clarify this in my next blog post. Either way, I don't understand why you're knocking it for being 1.5 years old.

<comment><USER42> Hey, mootothemax, I wasn't knocking you! Sorry if it came across that way. I only added the time frame because our time frames were the same.

If we look at stories like ours PURELY as inspiration fodder (vs personal sagas), wouldn't you prefer to read about somebody who ended up with a hundred thousand instead of a hundred? :) That's not to downplay your success at all, because you've gotten what you've wanted in the way you wanted. That's what success is about, IMO.

Thanks for the tip about the specificity, I bet you're right & will try that approach next time.

<comment><USER43> Leaving aside such issues as time of the day/week when articles were posted (I have no idea if that has played a factor in this case) I agree that the specificity issue is likely to be applicable.

> wouldn't you prefer to read about somebody who > ended up with a hundred > thousand instead of a hundred?

How about if it's presented as "$100,000 with full time hours" compared with "a $100 with a few hours"?

From my perspective at least, I view an article about how to achieve "a $100 with a few hours (spread over a year)" as seeming more attainable and accessible than one about "$100,000 with full time hours (spread over a year)". I'd think "Hey, maybe I could do that" about the former and more "That'd be cool to do that" about the latter.

I like that you've got a "mission" to show that what you've achieved is attainable for others as well and I look forward to reading more about how.

<comment><USER42> Thanks for the feedback! You actually told me something very important, indirectly -- our SaaS app got to $1500/mo (start) to about $4,500 on a very part-time basis, before we put much time into it. Clearly I should talk about this part of the story more.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unicorn: The ultimate CPU emulator - <AUTHOR> http://www.unicorn-engine.org/# <comment><AUTHOR> This has been posted before but yesterday, they released the first public release [http://www.unicorn-engine.org/Version-0.9/](http://www.unicorn- engine.org/Version-0.9/)</comment>


JavaScript (and Node.js) Continues to Eat the World - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/presence-product-group/javascript-and-node-js-continue-to-eat-the-world-d41918a0615b <comment><USER2> Meanwhile I'm moving more of my software into PostgreSQL. What I started as a dumb data store has gained foreign keys and check constraints, multi-join views and recursive queries, even some crazy functions. Some day I hope to move authorization into it: instead of opening the database with an all-seeing user, open it as the current web user, who has a corresponding user account in the database, and is restricted to seeing data through GRANT and CREATE VIEW.

So my web apps are becoming strongly concentrated in the edges: more and more business logic and control in the database; more and more user interface logic in the browser. It is mattering less and less what runs between them, be it PHP or Node. That section's job is mainly to take the data out of the database, wrap it in templates, and send it on its merry way.

<comment><USER3> Are you sure about that?

Using a connection pool to the database is a form of optimization. Otherwise, you need a connection per user. This is not being done even in network where is was easy to do that for years (i.e. those using Kerberos auth for users, where the webserver just could forward Kerberos tickets to the database).

<comment><USER2> I've heard of others using connection pooling but have never gone for it. I have read about problems where certain things can get left around or intermingled among users that shouldn't be. For example, a database transaction that doesn't cleanly close: the next user can walk right into the middle of it.

I'm sure it saves some time, but so far the speed-up hasn't seemed worth the risk, and I've been at it for about a decade. We use one server for few thousand corporate users a day, and everything is usually fast. When things are noticeably slow, it is usually from a page loading too much JavaScript, images, etc., that it doesn't really need. When it's the database, it's because of a poorly written query taking a few seconds. Rewriting the query resumes normal operations: split-second page loads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really liked this post because it painted why JavaScript is a good language to use across so many projects. I've always loved node.js despite the many quirks but enjoy getting to use it for nearly every aspect of work. I'm hoping arduino will support JavaScript directly in the near future as well!

<comment><USER5> The simpler ATmega-based Arduino boards don't have the chops to run a JavaScript runtime. The 328P used in the Uno only has 32KB of program storage and only 2KB of RAM! The Zero, which is ARM-based, has 256KB of storage and 32KB of RAM. That's still probably too little to run a full JS implementation, but it might work if the JS is precompiled before being sent to the device.

Compare with the NetDuino, which runs the .NET micro framework. It has 1.4MB of program storage and 164KB of RAM. And even that is dealing with a binary program representation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is the link between Medium and JavaScript? I see a steady flux of JS- related articles on Medium. I generally can't stand Medium because it's full of hype.

<comment><USER7> What is the link between craft beer, mustaches and fixed-gear bicycles?

<comment><USER8> Handle bars?</comment></comment></comment>


Thank you, Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://blog.garrytan.com/thank-you-y-combinator <comment><USER2> Thank you, Garry Tan.

Garry is one of the nicest, most helpful people I know. 5 years ago, he took a meeting with us, even though we had a barely functioning prototype, and helped us prep for our YC interview. After our first meeting, he even offered to meet up again. I was blown away by how generous he was with his time. We got into YC and he's been an incredible advisor ever since.

He's one of the few people I like to think of when I think of Silicon Valley at its best. He genuinely loves product and the creation process. He's hugely helpful and he's a great person, through and through.

Look forward to seeing what he does next!

<comment><USER3> Garry gave me one of the best advice over 6 years ago.

[http://cl.ly/image/1e3o2W450h3w](http://cl.ly/image/1e3o2W450h3w)

<comment><USER4> It's one of the advices I couldn't do anything with. Good thing you could.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> End of an era! While a lot of ex-founder partner/VC people seem to think mostly about nation-building, vision, and the marketing buzzwords you'd find on an analytics dashboard, Garry's advice is always extremely concrete and close the the metal. When success came, he never rolled down his sleeves and stopped building and that's something most of us around here can really respect.

Enjoy your time away Garry, excited to see what you build next!

</comment><comment><USER6> You're one of a kind, my friend. Our industry needs more Garry Tans. So... I guess what I'm saying is make more babies!

</comment><comment><USER7> Working with Garry at YC was one of the highlights of my career. He simply cares more about other people than anyone I've ever met, which makes him both a dream colleague and friend.

</comment><comment><USER8> Garry is an incredible person and like most remarkable people he is also deeply humble. This kindness and approachable spirit, I think, allow him to be a great student of founders, startups, and cultures. I've learned quite a bit from Garry about how systems evolve and operate. He is a very rare person and a gift to the startup world.

Thanks Garry for all that you've done for the YC community. I wish you the very best in this next leg of your journey.

</comment><comment><USER9> Garry was the partner we leaned on most at Ridejoy. He believed in what we were doing, helped us cut through to the highest priority work, and gave us tough love when we needed it.

Thank you Garry for being an amazing YC partner. I'm sure we'll be hearing about what you work on next soon, and in the meantime, enjoy the well-deserved R&R!

</comment><comment><USER10> Garry's advice and support throughout YC (and afterwards) was unparalleled, but more importantly, he's just a really good person. I'll never forget when he broke out Photoshop during office hours and redesigned our app on the spot!

Congrats and enjoy some much deserved time away!

</comment><comment><USER11> Hi Garry. I interviewed for W11 with my brother Andy. We flew out from Boston. We rented an RV and lived in it for a week before the interview. That fall was the first year the interviews were split between two rooms. We pitched a startup that helped people rent things (bouncy castles, excavators, photo booths etc) for temporary use. The interview didn't go well. I was fumbling all over and remember feeling hopeless. Then you stepped in and asked a bunch of optimistic product questions, driving the interview to a better place. We didn't end up getting in, but to this day I still remember the experience I had with you and consider the interview one of the best things I ever did. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER12> Garry really is as remarkable as all these comments are saying. He has an original mind and a kind heart and that's a damn fine combination. I'm so glad to know him. Yay Garry!

</comment><comment><USER13> Garry is one of the best human beings out there.

One fond memory that resonates well with how he thinks and works with other people was in an office hour we had with him. I asked him why he does what he does and his response was simple: "I do this to help people get out of the rat race."

Thank you, Garry, for everything.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, that's a pair of shoes that will be very hard to fill. Enjoy your rest and I'm really curious what you'll be doing next.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't know Garry super well but in our few conversations I found him to be one of the smartest and most generous founders I've come across.

Enjoy the time away, Garry!

</comment><comment><USER16> Every office hours session we had with Garry we came away buzzing, the man has an amazing ability to inject raw enthusiasm when you are questioning yourself the most.

I wish him all the best in his future endeavors!

</comment><comment><USER17> Garry, you provided feedback on a YC application in 2008. Thanks again for the help then, and all the best moving forward.

</comment><comment><USER18> Congratulations on a great tenure at YC and best wishes for whatever's next! Your advice and friendship at YC are one of my fondest memories of our time there.

</comment><comment><USER19> Garry is a hero. He is extremely nice, very kind, and has more empathy for the founder than anyone I know. Whatever he does next, I wish him happiness and success.

</comment><comment><USER20> Garry, Thank you for your advice while we were there. I think I came in with my startup around the same time you came in as a partner.

I was always impressed with your calm demeanor and thoughtful pointers. YC is, in many ways a frenzied whirlwind for founders and it was great to have people like you around who made me feel that everything was going to work out OK.

And it did.

Best of luck on your future endeavors.

</comment><comment><USER21> Thanks Garry. I met you once in Waterloo, Canada in 2011, and you convinced me that I should start my own startup. I didn't start one yet, but I will be doing that some day following your advice.

</comment><comment><USER22> We'll miss you, man. Enjoy your family time.

</comment><comment><USER23> Will definitely be missed. Garry is exceptionally kind, sharp, and helpful in an organization full of exceptional, kind and helpful people. Hope to work with you again, but love the decision you're making to spend time with family. Can't go wrong with investing in family time!

</comment><comment><USER24> So is this a sabbatical or is he actually stepping away from YC?

<comment><USER25> I am actually stepping away. You can think most clearly when unattached.

<comment><USER26> Garry, what about Quora? Will you still be active there? I am a bit of your fan on there..

<comment><USER25> Haha, I love Quora too. Yes, will do my best to help there.

<comment><USER26> Ok. Great:).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Never got a chance to meet Garry but always enjoyed following his blog and the insights/advice he shared. He always seemed incredibly genuine and vested in the success of others. Best of luck in this next chapter, Garry!

</comment><comment><USER28> I will miss you so much Garry!

</comment><comment><USER29> Garry is unbelievably caring and helpful (I'll never forget his casually brilliant omnigraffling). We're all lucky that the world contains Garry Tan :)

</comment><comment><USER30> Garry has been incredibly impactful to us, even after we graduated YC. Can't wait to see what's next!

Enjoy your time abroad, Garry.

</comment><comment><USER31> Having made the same choice and taking time off after my child was born, I totally understand. Thanks Garry!

Although I then went and started a startup, so I guess slightly different. :) Turns out starting the startup has actually given me a lot of time to spend with the kid since I work from home! Hint hint. ;)

</comment><comment><USER32> Garry was endlessly supportive and encouraging through all the tough times at YC. He'll be missed!!

</comment><comment><USER33> Garry is (and always will be) the man. Have fun in Europe!

</comment><comment><USER34> Enjoy you time in North Spain Garry! You've choosen a very good destination. Take care where you go in winter time, the weather (wind)is not always outdoors/kids friendly as it is the rest of the year. Please, get in touch if you need advice from a local.

</comment><comment><USER35> Big thanks for everything Garry, good luck in whatever comes next and enjoy the well earned rest!

</comment><comment><USER36> Thank you Garry for everything you've helped me with. Good luck with your new adventure!

</comment><comment><USER37> Garry! Garry! Garry!

Thanks for all you do for YC and the community. Congratulations on your new adventures!

</comment><comment><USER38> The world needs more people like Garry Tan. He's one of the kindest, humble, and most genuine people you'll ever meet. Garry helped us tremendously during and after YC.

Can't wait to hear to see what you end up doing next! Thank you, Garry!

</comment><comment><USER39> Thank you, Garry! Your perspective, advice and support was invaluable through YC.

</comment><comment><USER40> Congrats Garry! Spending time with family. Thats what it's all about.

</comment><comment><USER41> Enjoy Garry! I was just in the south of France, it was a very different world and one of the best trips I've taken. Let me know if you're looking for any recommendations.

</comment><comment><USER42> One of the greatest (and nicest) guys around. Best of luck Garry!

</comment><comment><USER43> Thanks for the help Garry, enjoy!

</comment><comment><USER44> I would love to be able to write software full time. Alas, without a Uni degree, it looks hopeless. I wish software was my life's purpose :-(

<comment><USER45> Hey, you don't need a piece of paper from the man to tell you what you can do :)

<comment><USER25> Amen! No permission slip needed.

<comment><USER46> I think you'll find that many of us don't have a college degree. There's no ticket needed to play.

<comment><USER44> That's extremely encouraging :-)

My dream is still to do a University degree in Computer Science.

I'm currently swotting up on as much mathematics as possible. One of my biggest issues is not with computing so much as math. I just cannot work at the pace that a Uni course requires because I have to _understand_ it.

For instance, it took me some time before I realised that the determinant of a matrix was really just the "size" of the matrix. And I couldn't get through trigonometry till I worked out why the trig functions were called what they were called - eventually with a bit of help from Dr Math (that guy is awesome) I realised that you just create triangles in a unit circle and work out the Latin meaning for each of the lines:

[https://sherlockchrisblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/trigfu...](https://sherlockchrisblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/trigfunctionlines4.png)

[https://sherlockchrisblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/03/trigonome...](https://sherlockchrisblog.wordpress.com/2015/11/03/trigonometric- functions/)

I'm trying to put down my "discoveries" in a blog, but until now I didn't realise that Wordpress allowed for LaTeX and included the ams package.

My blog is here:

[https://sherlockchrisblog.wordpress.com/](https://sherlockchrisblog.wordpress.com/)

I guess I'm doing this because I was heavily involved in Wikipedia years ago, and I'd still like to contribute to society, even if I'm just rehashing material.

I intend to finish documenting what I know about trigonometry, then I'm going on to differential calculus and beyond. After that, I guess linear algebra and then as much discrete mathematics as possible! In particular I'm interested in Cantor's aleph numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Gary, our conversations were insightful and sharp. I always enjoyed the cut of your jib -- you'll be missed. Enjoy your adventure!

</comment><comment><USER48> It was the best of times, <3 <3 <3!

</comment><comment><USER49> We'll all miss seeing you at YC Garry!

</comment><comment><USER50> Garry Tan provided some great feedback on my teams YC application, thanks man. I wish you the best moving forward!

</comment><comment><USER51> Garry, thank you for everything!

</comment><comment><USER52> Garry is amazing. All the best!

</comment><comment><USER53> Nice choice of destination for family time and relax... Welcome to Spain colega.

</comment><comment><USER54> I like his priorities.

I got interested in the Meteor.js framework a while back when I saw a quote from Garry something roughly like: this is what web development should be like

It must feel great for Garry knowing he has helped so many people.

</comment><comment><USER55> End of an Era.

</comment><comment><USER56> Garry is one of the most incredible people we worked with at YC. Thanks, Garry!

</comment><comment><USER57> Garry is the real deal.

</comment><comment><USER58> Congratulations Gary!

</comment><comment><USER26> All the best Garry.

</comment><comment><USER59> Best wishes to Garry on his new adventure!

</comment><comment><USER60> Looking forward to see what's next

</comment><comment><USER61> Garry, thank you for your kindness :)

</comment><comment><USER62> Take care! One thing that I want to point out (and it's something I hate to point out) but would it be a good idea to edit out the upcoming trip and how long it'll be? Normally it's the best idea to not post, publicly, where you're going and how long you'll be gone for and Gary is semi-well known.

Just throwing that out there.

<comment><USER62> I'm curious why I was downvoted so much. This is a real safety issue that has been used to break into many homes. Why would my suggestion be bad / downvoted? I was hoping for at least ONE comment to tell me why they downvoted me =/</comment></comment>


Garbage Collection is Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.lb-stuff.com/gc.html <comment><USER2> Yes, in some scenarios you can associate the lifetime of a resource with the lifetime of a storage location, but this simply does not work in all cases, probably only in a small fraction of all cases. And then? How do you handle resources that have no single obvious owner? How do you determine if the resource is still in use when you are done with it in one place? You implement some kind of reference counting? You keep the resource alive until you reach a point where you definitely know it is no longer in use? You turn your code upside down and force it into a single owner structure destroying the semantics of your code on the way?

<comment><USER3> "Yes, in some scenarios you can associate the life time of a resource with the life time of a storage location"

In what cases is this not possible? I model the resource as an object and that object has a memory location.

(Yes, in a non-deterministic GC, you can't do this for expensive resources, but that's a problem of GCs, not an in-principle problem).

EDIT: I am guessing the parent actually meant "associate the life time of a resource with the life time of a _single, non- /never-shared_ storage location". The statement as written is one I have seen proponents of non- deterministic GCs make.

<comment><USER4> For example, two lists both contain a reference to the same object. Neither one is a sole owner, and you can't safely destroy the object until both lists are destroyed.

<comment><USER5> Then the lists should only have a weak_ptr to the object.

Something is handling both list [1], that something could own the object, or maybe something external to that. Giving ownership of the object to both list is a design error [2].

[1] e.g. if the two list are an implementation detail of a data structure, the data-structure itself could own the objects in the lists.

[2] Do non-deterministic garbage collectors that handle cycles allow you to have a resource with multiple owners? Yes. Should you do it? No, god, please don't.

<comment><USER6> It's only a design error when you don't have a GC.

Imagine you have an arbitrary long lived connected cyclic graph that can be incrementally updated from multiple short lived worker threads. With a GC, this is a no brainer: just put the objects in the graph. No workarounds, no extra tracking.

Without a GC, on removing a node, you have to walk to essentially do a mark/sweep of the graph to find dead nodes that were connected through the node you removed.

<comment><USER5> Have a vector of shared_ptr that own the objects in the graph and build a graph with weak_ptr ?

Removing an object is just as easy as removing an element from the vector. (If you test the weak_ptrs on use, that's actually the only thing you would need to do).

<comment><USER4> Isn't that equivalent to using a shared_ptr directly, just unnecessarily complicated?

Reference counting works fine as long as you don't have cycles, of course.

<comment><USER5> The solution above works even if your graph has cycles. Of course if you know that it doesn't you can just build the graph with unique_ptrs.

<comment><USER4> It works with cycles, as long as you can know exactly when you want to remove something from the graph (as opposed to having it be removed when no longer referenced). Reference counting works fine that way too, though. It's a bit more work, but you just dive into the structure and manually remove references which breaks any cycles it may be involved in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Meh, GC has its uses. It helps that the vast majority of resources are indeed memory, so it makes sense to special-case.

Although in some situations it isn't acceptable and it's interesting to look at what languages like Rust do about it. It ends up guaranteeing safety, but with not much more effort than GC.

</comment><comment><USER8> Idiomatic Rust code follows the RAII pattern and does not use garbage collection; we've been finding that it works very effectively.

<comment><USER9> Of course it helps that Rust has notation for object lifetimes. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Zero-suppressed Binary Decision Diagrams (ZDD) requires reference-count based garbage collection in order to be efficient. RAII isn't a viable replacement.

See for example [http://ashutoshmehra.net/blog/2008/12/notes-on- zdds/](http://ashutoshmehra.net/blog/2008/12/notes-on-zdds/) \- "ZDD-bases, which though conceptually easy to understand, are non-trivial to implement efficiently because behind the scenes, lots of things have to be taken care of: o New nodes are born and old ones die — nodes have to be efficiently allocated, ref-counted and garbage-collected."

Or from [http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/labs/vlsicad/ece667/reading/som...](http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/labs/vlsicad/ece667/reading/somenzi99bdd.pdf) :

> One would like to release the memory used by those BDDs, but there are two > problems. First, some subgraphs may be shared by more than one function and > we must be sure that none of those functions is of interest any longer, > before releasing the associated memory. Second, BDD nodes are pointed from > the unique table and the computed table, as well as from other BDD nodes. > There are therefore multiple threads and one cannot arbitrarily free a node > without taking care of all the threads going through it [12].

> A solution to these two problems is garbage collection.

Similarly, [http://vlsi.colorado.edu/~fabio/CUDD/node3.html](http://vlsi.colorado.edu/~fabio/CUDD/node3.html) ("The CUDD package relies on garbage collection to reclaim the memory used by diagrams that are no longer in use. The scheme employed for garbage collection is based on keeping a reference count for each node."),

</comment><comment><USER11> not even sure where to start...

1\. plenty of garbage collectors do not pause all threads or wait for memory to be full.

2\. you CAN ask for gc anytime you want in java and in C# (you need not wait for it to happen)

3\. new and delete are still integral to C++ (check out any large codebase, like llvm)

<comment><USER12> 1\. Can you give an example of some of these systems?

2\. Designing your code in such a way that requires it to invoke the GC seems counter-productive. If your algorithm is producing a bunch garbage that is statically known, why not just release that memory explicitly? Invoking the GC is way more expensive than necessary here.

3\. New/delete will always be used in performance critical code but I think the point is that in general it's not a good practice.

<comment><USER11> 1\. [http://www.azulsystems.com/presentations/qcon- london-2011](http://www.azulsystems.com/presentations/qcon-london-2011)

2\. fair but irrelevant. the argument was that there is no way to make GC happen. It was wrong. I never objected to the (perhaps more interesting) argument that one should be able to manually delete objects

3\. then the parent should have said "in toy codebases, whose function is to look pretty, new and delete have no place" instead of a sweeping generalization that all uses of new and delete are archaic and wrong. That one generalization was an insult to every llvm & WebKit developer out there.

Disclaimer: i have no dog in this race - i prefer to work in C and think anyone who cannot free their own memory should maintain a safe 5 meter distance from any compiler. (this is my opinion only, of course)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _In modern C++, using new or delete in your code is wrong. It 's not done. Nobody writes code like that anymore in C++._

It's been quite a while since I wrote any significant C++ code, but this statement seems wrong. Is this really "state of the art" for C++?

<comment><USER14> Professional C++ coder here.

Seeing new and delete has _very_ heavy code smell and can be avoided 99% of the time.

<comment><USER15> What have you done to your language that the native syntax for creating and deleting objects is a code smell?!

<comment><USER16> Included an alternative to new/delete's form of allocation that covers a good range of its use cases and is less prone to screwup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As someone who's not interested in following every acronym and resource allocation strategy there is... is this even remotely useful? Lately I've gotten back into Java for Android, and after a very long time with Python, it's the first exposure in over a decade I've had to this argument...

...which, for some of us, _isn 't_ an argument, as we have basically no choice in the matter. But I'm still interested to know whether this is actually useful input or whether it's more holier-than-thou posturing.

To me, this is missing the forest for the trees. It's easy to argue about language implementation semantics when, in practice, it means almost nothing to anyone as we're stuck with the idiosyncrasies of the platforms we work on, _even when we choose the platform._

I guess it's good that someone is looking at these things, but I can't see the utility in it. Best case scenario, this becomes a paradigm shift in new languages (which doesn't help us or anyone else for years) or gets implemented in the next major revision of language X (which doesn't go mainstream for years).

<comment><USER18> I disagree. I believe even if you're stuck with a certain situation, it's important to know whether the status quo is actually a good thing and you should work to keep it or if it's unavoidable for the moment but generally bad and you should do your best to move away from it if you can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is totally on point. Ref-counting / RAII is the only sane way to do resource management. It's super lightweight and easy to understand.

The vast majority of resources are short-lived and don't create cycles. Our garbage collections "systems" should be designed for this case.

Cycles are a special case required for few data structures. They are not the norm and we shouldn't ship a huge heaping mess of a garbage collection system and make everything else slower to account for this rarely used special case.

Anyway people programming today shouldn't be thinking in terms of pointers and references. We should be thinking in terms of VALUES. Finite values have no cycles! The Haskell and C++ community have already embraced this, everyone else is still catching up.

Yet another reason why Java is a horrible language holding people back and the JVM is basically a hamster wheel keeping itself busy.

<comment><USER19> RAII is great, and should be used where appropriate. I'm not sure what it has to do with reference counting, though. Reference counting is just a particularly slow and unreliable form of garbage collection; I don't see why you would ever prefer it to a proper garbage collector.

<comment><USER12> Classic RAII in C++ is a limited form of ref-counting (only one ref).

I have to disagree with your second statement, ref-counting is extremely fast. If you consider it a GC then it's the _fastest_ GC. It's also deterministic and does not pause.

<comment><USER20> > If you consider it a GC then it's the fastest GC. It's also deterministic > and does not pause.

No, it's not, not unless you use a lot of cleverness. "We find that an existing modern implementation of reference counting has an average 30% overhead compared to tracing…" (They did perform a lot of optimizations to get it up to speed with tracing garbage collection... however, these are far beyond what shared_ptr does.)

[http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~steveb/downloads/pdf/rc- ismm-2...](http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~steveb/downloads/pdf/rc- ismm-2012.pdf)

<comment><USER12> I'm a bit skeptical of the results of that paper without the seeing the source code and in what contexts they are performing the comparison. One can always find situations where one scheme is faster than the other but I'm not totally sure if micro benchmarks are representative of the real world. In long-lived servers, ref-counting can be preferable because it avoids random pauses. Maybe it's a latency vs throughput performance dichotomy. But yeah, thanks for posting that.

<comment><USER2> Reference counting doubles the number of memory access - you have to update the reference and the counter every time. That is a big performance hit. Reference counting may randomly halt your code, too, because you never know when you hit zero and the resource gets freed.

<comment><USER21> And you don't know how many resources will be freed when you drop the last pointer to that giant tree structure.

Of course, you could queue up and lazily delete the resources, but then you're back to nondeterministic behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When was this written? It seems to be at least half a decade out of date. Certainly nothing it espouses is actually new...

<comment><USER21> Indeed. The "garbage collection" described seems to have been state-of-the-art in the late '80's. And, of course, it's compared to features that weren't officially added to C++ until 2011.

Yes, garbage collection is inappropriate for things with finalizers---for resources other than memory. Other than that, I can't see anything useful here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Returning closures from functions without massive copying and/or massive headache seems to pretty well demand a GC.

</comment><comment><USER24> I skim read the article, but I think the author is absolutely right, _only_ for those Resource specific instances he pointed out that need to to have an explicit lifetime.

For everything else, there is garbage collection.

</comment><comment><USER25> Isn't it simply a form of garbage collection? Instead of garbage collecting all the unused objects at random moments, an object is garbage collected as soon as it goes out of scope.

The way I understand it, no garbage collection means you take care of cleaning after yourself, whereas garbage collectors do it for you. It sounds like what he calls resource acquisition.

<comment><USER26> No. I think cleaning up, manually or automatically, after objects go out of scope is not the same as garbage collecting. "Garbage" here implies objects that linger beyond their usage scope, from construction to destruction, and now have become garbage taking up memory that can only be reclaimed by an extraneous routine, ie the GC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I surely prefer RAII to any garbage collection. It doesn't mean it's completely wrong though and has no uses at all. It's just of limited usefulness that's why languages which overuse it claiming it's always needed (like Java) are too limiting. If anything, GC should be optional, not mandatory.

<comment><USER28> Well... if C and (early) C++ showed us anything, it's that programmers aren't very good at managing memory. (It's not just leaking memory. Accessing deleted memory is much worse.)

So, what are you going to do? Just say "Most programmers are lousy, deal with it"? Introduce garbage collection, which solves 90% of the problem (memory) with no programmer intervention, but does nothing whatsoever to help the other 10% of cases (files, sockets, mutexes, etc.)? Rely on RAII, which in turn relies on programmer education and discipline? Or do you have another alternative?

Optional GC could be interesting - maybe some kind of a switch that you set at compile time that says "this program uses GC" or "this program uses destructors". But then you're essentially talking about two similar, but different languages (like, say, Java and C++).

<comment><USER27> You are right, in case of C++ the language doesn't ensure safety because of RAII since one can always go back to manual new / delete and etc. But in newer languages this can be avoided.

Rust actually does that, and GC there is optional by the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Worth a mention: In Objective-C with ARC, the compiler treats every pointer to an Obj-C object as a std::shared_ptr or std::unique_ptr (static analysis is used to optimize out unnecessary reference counting), unless it's marked otherwise with keywords such as __weak, __unsafe_unretained, etc.

</comment><comment><USER30> GC is not 'wrong'. It's just an overused method of memory management. There are plenty of valid uses for GC where ref counting wouldn't make sense. Lua immediately comes to mind.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think the author's core issue is that in most cases GC aren't optional.

An optional opt-out would invite a wider range of developers.

</comment><comment><USER32> Sometimes GC is nice, sometimes it isn't. I like langs that give you options.

</comment><comment><USER33> > Don't believe me? Then don't skim-read.

My hero.

<comment><USER34> Yup, some people think they can teach others as soon as their first C++ program compiles without errors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why is your nickname in green color?

<comment><USER3> Very fresh (16h old at the time I wrote this comment).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What's the catch?

<comment><USER37> You can run out of space on the stack, which has a smaller size than the heap, where new'd objects are placed. This can easily happen with large objects that own other large objects and it is difficult to debug without knowledge of the implementation of all of the child objects.

<comment><USER38> That's too strong of a critique. You can have just a handle on the stack, with the data on the heap. When the destructor of the handle is executed, it deallocates the data on the heap. This is what almost all resource holding library or user-defined types do in C++.

<comment><USER37> Sure, but at that point, it's not RAII all the way down. RAII is a great wrapper around new and delete, but I saw people talking about how they rarely use new and delete anymore.

Edit: Actually, reading about auto_ptr<> and friends I see what you're getting at. The codebase I worked on some years ago didn't use those so I'm not totally familiar with that idiom for wrapping heap allocation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> GC was developed because too many programmers were morons, not the other way.

<comment><USER39> That's a pretty moronic way of looking at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> 1-</comment>


Walt Disney Creative Org Chart - <AUTHOR> http://www.atissuejournal.com/2009/08/walt-disney's-creative-organization-chart/

<comment><USER2> It says 'This Chart Designates Operations And Not Authorities' at the bottom, so I'd think it's not really their org chart but more of a 'movie process' chart.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is it just me or is there a face in the org chart?

I think this is a great, creative way to present this information. Management is on the right, production is on the left, and the chart identifies processes and direction, instead of business groups and job functions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why is there "morgue" under management????

<comment><USER5> It must be the Walt Disney archives. Or the cryogenic facility...

<comment><USER6> Yah - the morgue is the archives. This is what newspapers call it too.</comment></comment></comment>


Do I need work auth if I just receive equity in a startup? - btc-hacker (I am a f-1 visa international student) You are allowed to work without CPT or OPT work auth if you are not being paid (i.e volunteering). If I receive equity (unvested) and still work for no money, do I need to get work authorization? <comment><AUTHOR> IIRC, the law is phrased in terms of "compensation". For example:

> To be considered a volunteer, the work performed by the individual must meet > the following criteria:

> * No expectation of compensation

...

> * Work at a for-profit entity is considered employment and must be for pay. > The only exception is made for training programs where the trainee > functions, to some degree, like an employee, but is under close supervision > and provides no significant measurable work for the employer. The trainee > must not take the place of a paid employee. For example, students who are > considered student interns may engage in unpaid internships at for-profit > organizations.

See [https://internationalcenter.umich.edu/students/employment- vo...](https://internationalcenter.umich.edu/students/employment-volunteer)</comment>


Pebble cuts $50 off both Original and Steel - <AUTHOR> https://getpebble.com

<comment><USER2> I might pull the trigger now. I was thinking about waiting for the Apple Watch, but I think it will take a while to work out the kinks there. This has a bunch of apps and great battery life, plus I need something right now to control/check my massive iPhone 6+ when it's not convenient to pull out, or when running.</comment>


Simple psychological intervention boosts school performance of ethnic minority students - <AUTHOR> http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2009/04/simple-psychological-intervention.html

<comment><USER2> "Stereotype threat", the proposed mechanism for this "intervention" functioning, is not reliably reproducible in experimentation.

Also, _come on_ \-- a ten minute lesson repeated three times adds half a grade level two years later? What kind of fairy dust were you sprinkling during that lesson? I'd like some -- you can probably cure cancer by sprinkling it on someone eating a carrot and stop the Israel/Palestine if you sprinkle it on a Palestinian and Israeli forced to watch The Odd Couple.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are correct of course that the usual questions about any published research result apply.

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

Maybe this result will not be replicated, as many first results are not. But the question presented by this paper is not so much what the mechanism of the problem is, but whether or not the intervention is helpful to the learners. The place of first publication being Science,

<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/324/5925/400>

the most selective journal of all, is a good sign, and it certainly looks to me like this issue is worthy of further investigation, especially as it is consistent with other recent findings in positive psychology and possibly generalizable to how hackers running start-ups can maintain their relentless resourcefulness.</comment></comment>


Types of Languages - <AUTHOR> http://jorgetown.blogspot.com/2007/12/dimensions-of-type-checking.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Further Analysis

[http://jorgetown.blogspot.com/2007/12/types-and- programming-...](http://jorgetown.blogspot.com/2007/12/types-and-programming- languages.html)</comment>