ActivityPub Could Be the Future - <AUTHOR> https://www.kyefox.com/2020/04/09/activitypub-could-be-the-future/ <comment><USER2> ActivityPub isn't the future.

Useful things that are built, brought to market, and meet user needs that may happen to use ActivityPub under the hood are the future.

Knowing what is useful for whom and how to bring it to market in a sustainable manner for the people it's intended for is a super critical element. One that's often overlooked.

Specs are like plumbing pipes. People care about sinks, showers, and stuff like that. The pipe fittings, materials, and sizes enable a lot. But, it's not what the end users tend to care about.

<comment><USER3> I wish more developers understood this very basic concept instead of introducing layers of unnecessary complexities in the specs and plumbing that don't necessarily improve a sink or shower " _for the better_ ".

If you're installing lots of sinks and showers, it's OK if you make the pipe fittings, materials, and plumbing a bit easier to work with. Coming up with dozen of all all new sets of pipe fittings, materials and plumbing designs every other week doesn't make installing sinks and showers easier.

Imagine walking into Home Depot and discovering there are about 100 'standard' styles of sinks, faucets, fixtures, pipes, fittings, etc. all with varying degrees of support from none to complete for interoperability. Not only that, every other month, 10 of each of those pieces are no longer manufactured or supported and 20 complete new designs are created with all the same cavets as before.

Meanwhile, you install these sinks daily and the customer really doesn't care _at all_ about how elegant the back pieces are from a mathematical or structural view, they just want a functioning sink that they can assume is easy to fix or replace parts on when it breaks. Not only that, they want to be able to call any plumber and have that done without the plumber spending 2 weeks just figuring out what the hell the previous plumber did before they figure out just how to fix it. At which point they decide its easier to just rip everything out, set it on fire, and pick the latest sets of pipes and fittings for no necessarily justifiable reason than it will cost more in time and effort to deal with the previous sink install than to start from scratch.

<comment><USER4> Just this Sunday I used an M5-sized drill bit from one manufacturer, in a drill from a second manufacturer, and the hole that I drilled was EXACTLY the right size for my M5-sized bolts from a third manufacturer.

After recently spending three whole days trying to make one part of Kubernetes talk to another part of Kubernetes (and eventually giving up), that brought me so much joy that I'm wondering if I should give up on software and get into carpentry full-time...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As an IndieWeb participant, I find the ActivityPub-verse confusing. Perhaps one of you can help me understand.

At Southern California Linux Expo, I joined a discussion session to learn more about ActivityPub and the Fediverse. What I took away is that the flagship apps supporting ActivityPub are designed to cater to people who want a single app for each type of social media interaction that they have. One app, e.g. Pixelfed, for posting/looking at photos like Instagram. One app, e.g. Mastodon, for posting/looking at text notes or articles like Twitter/blogging. When each of these apps implement ActivityPub, it becomes possible for people to communicate across apps. (Presumably there's one for music listening...)

I understand the drive toward cross-app communication, but I don't understand the "one app per use" way of thinking. Perhaps it's because I rarely use FB and have never used Twitter/Insta/Pinterest. To the extent that I want to broadcast my online social activity at all, I want to do all my posting with one UI, in one place (i.e. in one "app", my CMS) , and I don't care whether someone looks at my stuff by reading my website or subscribing to my feed. I think if someone just wants to see photos, or articles, or "tweets", or whatever, why build a separate app? Why not just filter the incoming content?

Running e.g. a Mastodon instance requires someone to administer the server. Once that's in place, a community can grow up on that server. This seems to mimic more traditional web forums. Is that part of the draw? A central meeting point for your community -- with ActivityPub letting you use your identity in that community while interacting with people from other communities?

<comment><USER6> To me this isn't too strange. Sure it's different but the alternative is our current system where each single social network implements its own video player when it grows big enough.

I'm still trying to understand ActivityPub / Fediverse completely, but once you manage to make several social apps use the same underlying protocol then the app just becomes an interface and the protocol runs the social network. And just like how a file system has various kinds of tools to interact with different kinds of files, it's not odd for a network of shared 'things' to have several tools to interact with different kind of things.

<comment><USER7> In _theory_ the app just becomes the interface and the protocol runs the network, but in _practice_ the implementations are hooked on the idea of being in control of the entire experience, and the _app_ runs the _protocol_. Also, ActivityPub seems to be more like a vocabulary—apps then use their own data models, extensions, restrictions, _& c._; some compatibly (e.g. Pleroma/Mastodon), some not. And from what I've seen, if I want to host several apps, each has to be on its own domain. Perhaps this is not a fundamental limitation (I don't know), but it does seem to be a _de facto_ limitations. I don't want to host Mastodon at x.chrismorgan.info and post as email@example.com, something else at y.chrismorgan.info and post as email@example.com, _& c._ I want to use one identity across all the apps, and be email@example.com for whichever app, which would then match my email address.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone explain, in simple terms, how interoperability and migration works with ActivityPub (or point to resources that do)?

If I create an account on a Mastodon instance, and want to move it to another instance, do I lose everything?

And how does integration among the various platforms currently out (e.g., Mastodon, Plume, Pixelfed, etc) actually work? Is there some tool to see feeds aggregated from all these implementations? Or does it work differently?

I ask these questions as someone used Mastodon for a bit, has explored a handful of ActivityPub implementations. It all sounds very cool to me, but I still don't quite "get it".

Personally I prefer the approach of Secure Scuttlebutt, but I realize their P2P workings are probably unrealistic and impractical for the vast majority of people.

<comment><USER9> > If I create an account on a Mastodon instance, and want to move it to > another instance, do I lose everything?

You can send a `Move` activity that will tell other instances that you moved, so people will (depending on their server) refollow you automatically. We (= people working on ActivityPub systems) are thinking about ways to create identities that don't belong to any one server, so you wouldn't lose your account even if your server went down.

> And how does integration among the various platforms currently out (e.g., > Mastodon, Plume, Pixelfed, etc) actually work? Is there some tool to see > feeds aggregated from all these implementations? Or does it work > differently?

In general, systems display what they can. Pixelfed, Mastodon and Plume mostly send `Note`s and `Article`s around, which are easy to display in any of their respective interfaces. Other types like `Video`s will usually be displayed as good as possible, with a link to the originating instance. Unknown activities are usually just thrown away by the receiving server.

<comment><USER5> > ...systems display what they can. Pixelfed, Mastodon and Plume mostly send > `Note`s and `Article`s around, which are easy to display in any of their > respective interfaces. Other types like `Video`s will usually be displayed > as good as possible...

(Not the person you replied to) Thanks, this was helpful. The fact that there's a common activity vocabulary helps me understand the usefulness of an ecosystem of ActivityPub apps which focus on different ways to write and view posts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looking at a _protocol_ such as ActivityPub is actually the wrong analysis and will mislead you with false hope. I'm not against decentralization but if we techies want to _raise the bar discussing_ realistic outcomes, we need to break out of the unproductive loop of focusing on technical protocols.

I'll copy&paste a previous comment here:

 _> We need a protocol, a specification for completely decentralised, carry- with-us social networks._

I know it seems logical that a "social network protocol" is the answer to replace Facebook but after studying the mechanics of social networks, I've concluded that focusing on technical protocols is incorrect.

My suggestion to programmers seriously thinking of new solutions in the social networking space: don't get sidetracked into thinking about the _protocol_ because if you do, your new social network will end up in the graveyard of previous failed projects like Diaspora. Instead, think about the _database of real names_.

Also, another previous comment on how focusing on _protocols_ is (inadvertently) analyzing the wrong drivers for success: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960)

Another comment explaining why the free protocol "Signal" didn't solve the funding dilemma: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20232499)

My previous comment on why _protocols_ like ActivityPub & Mastodon are not the answer for a general purpose social network adopted by the masses: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18727230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18727230)

<comment><USER11> In the words of Gucci Mane, "A man can get lost in the sauce, but the same man can be lost without the sauce."

It's natural that here on hacker news we spend most of our time discussing protocols and implementation details. No, protocols alone are not a solution but they are important. What's the point of just re-inventing centralized social networks over and over again? That being said, in order for any of these protocols to reach the masses the protocol itself needs to be invisible to casual users. If the marketing for your new social network is "It runs on this cool decentralized protocol!" you will never reach a non-technical audience.

The end product needs to be as good and as easy to use as centralized equivalents even if that means making some compromises.

<comment><USER12> The point is to iterate, innovate, and compete. Name one major social media site today that was based on a "new protocol"? Answer: None. They all started as slight twists to an existing site. It's kind of strange to me that the word "central" has such a bad rap when it really just describes an efficient means of organization, which naturally lends to other efficiencies.

<comment><USER13> "Efficient" perhaps, but also typically controlled by a single entity that often ends up using its power in ways that don't benefit its users. It's not really about the technology, it's about the power dynamic that technology leads to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Webmention and Microformats2 are the present and the future. They extend blogs with social features. Your blog is your profile. The blogs you follow are your feed. You can send and receive replies, likes, etc. from your own blog with Webmention. Blogs are already a decentralized social network. Webmention and Microformats2 extend what we already have.

Check out [https://IndieWeb.org](https://IndieWeb.org) to learn more.

<comment><USER6> While I can see the appeal, this seems rather blogger centric. And the problem with basing a standard of interaction on that is the 1% rule: 90% of people only read, 9% interact with content and the remaining 1% actually produces new content.

Practically it seems more likely that the final method will be decided upon by the 99% of people following blogs, not the 1% making them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > I have noticed a tendency for people supporting older, similar protocols to > wonder why ActivityPub got so popular while their own stagnated

How do ya'll feel about ActivityPub on a technical level? I read the ActivityPub, ActivityStreams, and JSON-LD specs a couple years back, and came away feeling like it was a bit much. Wouldn't JSON RSS with some sort of web push notifications get us 80% of the way there? Are there simpler alternatives already in the wild? Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER16> My impression, and I've only skimmed through things at the technical level, is that ActivityPub isn't far from where RSS and various web push notifications might have naturally converged if things hadn't jumped tracks to walled gardens for several years in the middle there.

Some of that feeling is because my introduction to RDF was itself buried in dealing with the real world complexity of 90s and early 2000s RSS feeds. JSON- LD is no worse than early RDF, and in some ways better, clearer, easier to understand. Especially it feels easier to understand why it is useful to the ActivityPub standard, versus as complicated as RDF was it was sometimes hard to understand the impetus to bolting it on top of RSS, if for no other reason than that ActivityPub was built more directly around JSON-LD as opposed to RDF really was bolted on into the middle of the RSS soup (and its dozens of mostly compatible versions) and it was very confusing what/where/how RDF applied anywhere to RSS.

Some of the other parts of ActivityPub similarly seem smarter, simply better versions of now lapsed and/or only half-forgotten "standards" like PingBack/TalkBack or even the original goals of the (real) original OpenID efforts.

JSON Feed, the most widely accepted RSS in JSON standard, has so far managed to intentionally avoid depending on JSON-LD so far, but it's also tried to intentionally be a minimalist subset of RSS and all of the RDF in RSS stuff has been out of scope. Presumably should any of that be relevant again, JSON- LD would be the natural successor. (Similar too, that JSON Feed so far has left notifications support out of scope, but if it did expect to move in that direction they would be remiss to entirely avoid looking at what ActivityPub has already standardized.)

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the breakdown

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In support of ActivityPub, what are some good intro/tutorial resources?

Any recommendation for a cloud provider to host a Mastdon server? DigitalOcean vs. AWS?

<comment><USER18> I wouldn't go with AWS or anything that advanced for just running a Mastodon server.

I personally like Vultr for VPS's, DigitalOcean is okay too.

If you want managed Mastodon hosting, I can vouch for [https://masto.host/](https://masto.host/) \- it's really good, have rarely had issues, and if ever I did, the support is amazing.

<comment><USER19> Unless you're trying to get AWS experience with a side project you'll actually use, in which case it's worth looking into -- people have gone whole hog and set things up to use a managed DB and everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There was a link on HN yesterday about how Emacs was a great success for 'malleable software' because despite being less flexible than some other programmable systems, it came with a built-in application that was usable out- of-the-box (i.e., a text editor).

HTTP won big because it had the web -- Mosaic and Netscape. Spreadsheets won big after VisiCalc showed the way.

Where's the app for ActivityPub? I'm not sure I've ever seen "killer protocol, then killer app". It's always "killer app, then extract killer protocol". You need a carrot.

<comment><USER19> Mastodon, FWIW

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If the network of decentralized social websites grows large enough, then it can overtake Twitter and even Facebook. Just as the World Wide Web won over AOL in the early days.

The network effect is powerful.

<comment><USER22> The problem is and always will be the friction associated with discovery. If I want to add my friends, colleagues or family on Facebook they have most likely already been suggested to me. One click. I didn't even have to ask for their handle.

How can we create a more powerful network effect through a decentralised network without some centralised directory?

<comment><USER23> I posted some thoughts on this in my Show HN thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22844481](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22844481)

I'll quote it here

> My long term thoughts on aggregators for fediverses:

I think aggregation/curation sites (like pixelfed.club) can be a decentralized complement to the fediverse. The fediverse generates the content. Aggregators, can curate the content for specific topics and help new users discover content. Anyone can start a fediverse instance, and anyone can start a aggregation/curation instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can one easily hook up ActivityPub to WordPress, etc?

I've wanted a Twitter/Facebook/Instagram replacement platform with syndication to ActivityPub.

<comment><USER22> It's not perfect but this plugin is an incomplete implementation: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It will not work because there is no way for anyone to profit from it. That's the sad but inescapable reality of the internet today.

The only way grassroot movements can succeed is through engaging in mass collaborative corruption. Thankfully, cryptocurrencies have proven the effectiveness of this concept. You just need to invent a financial instrument which has no value initially but which can grow in value as it becomes more popular - This gives your financial instrument 'potential value' \- This potential value allows your financial instrument to be used to 'bribe' journalists to hype up your product and convert its 'potential value' into 'actualized value'.

It is a bit like a pyramid scheme, but everything these days is a pyramid scheme. The only way to compete within the gigantic pyramid scheme that is our financial system is through other even more elaborate pyramid schemes.

More concretely, the reason this is necessary is because corporations are constantly 'bribing' journalists by holding ad revenue over their heads and restricting the kinds of things that they are allowed to write about; so it's essential for grassroot projects to have a mechanism in place which can counteract such market forces which intentionally limit the visibility of new 'unproven' products.

<comment><USER26> There's some truth in this, but you extrapolate too far. 1) UX is a bigger problem than the lack of financial incentives in the system though the two are related somewhat 2) There are audiences in these ecosystems, and I think monetization will find it's way in appropriately somehow. It's not impossible, by my estimation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If ActivityPub gains adoption, it will end up like email, where there are a few large central providers that 99% of the users use.

A crypto based protocol will be the only way to achieve true censorship resistance and decentralization.

<comment><USER19> It seems relevant that it's decently easy with Mastodon 3.0 to move from one server to another, and the UX Just Works. Hard to imagine gmail doing the same. If I'm mad at Google there are a lot of factors stopping me from migrating my email because they own my identity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Serious question: in what way does AP provide more privacy than Facebook?

<comment><USER29> There's nothing stopping an implementation from encrypting and locking things down, but so far every popular AP platform is focused on public content.

<comment><USER28> Ok. But note that "locking things down" might be not that simple, as you'd need _good_ privacy controls. We all know that Facebook's privacy controls are/were lacking in many respects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am not even sure ActivityPub is the past, let alone the future. I agree with the philosophy behind it, but people are always going to be more willing to go it alone on this type of thing.

</comment><comment><USER31> Been hearing this for a while. The future sure comes slow?

It's a great protocol and system but not a great product/brand.

</comment><comment><USER32> ActivityPub is as decentralized as email and RSS feeds.

Unfortunately nothing in such protocols prevents the gmail problem.</comment>


How Google can still become the greatest company ever? - <AUTHOR> http://microreviews.org/how-google-can-still-become-the-greatest-company-ever/ <comment><USER2> Dupe a dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2913709> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2914021>

Although the others linked through Reddit and Digg redirects.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, what is the current "greatest company ever"? What defines it?</comment>


How much extra for nice? - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/09/how-much-extra.html

<comment><USER2> _I think there's a huge gap between what people are willing to pay for nice (a lot) and what it would cost businesses to deliver it (almost nothing)._

Godin is crazy if he thinks it costs business "almost nothing" to deliver nice. Keeping customer-facing employees behaving in a noticeably "nice" manner is not cheap at all, or easy to manage.

<comment><USER3> You can have a smaller 'premium team', who you select from your existing team for competence and niceness. You then make it part of the job ("have a nice day") using existing procedures.

Interestingly, this would also have the effect of making it almost guaranteed you'll get someone surly if you don't pay the premium.

As a customer, I don't think I like the idea. But I think it could be made to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For me, it sounds like an excuse for buying expensive services. Oh, I'm not a snob, I don't buy social capital... I enjoy nice people.</comment>


Vitamin D deficiency as a predictor of poor prognosis in patients with Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40618-020-01370-x <comment><AUTHOR> Eighty one percent of patients had hypovitaminosis D. Based on vitamin D levels, the population was stratified into four groups: no hypovitaminosis D, insufficiency, moderate deficiency, and severe deficiency. No differences regarding demographic and clinical characteristics were found. A survival analysis highlighted that, after 10 days of hospitalization, severe vitamin D deficiency patients had a 50% mortality probability, while those with vitamin D ≥ 10 ng/mL had a 5% mortality risk (p = 0.019). High prevalence of hypovitaminosis D was found in COVID-19 patients with acute respiratory failure, treated in a RICU. Patients with severe vitamin D deficiency had a significantly higher mortality risk. Severe vitamin D deficiency may be a marker of poor prognosis in these patients, suggesting that adjunctive treatment might improve disease outcomes.</comment>


HadCRUT3: Complete land surface temperature record (except Poland) now available - <AUTHOR> http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/climate-monitoring/land-and-atmosphere/surface-station-records

<comment><USER2> I took a look at the delta between it and the previous release: [http://blog.jgc.org/2011/07/comparison-of- january-2010-and-j...](http://blog.jgc.org/2011/07/comparison-of- january-2010-and-july.html)</comment>


Who should pay for college? - <AUTHOR> http://colabopad.blogspot.com/2010/09/who-should-pay-for-college.html

<comment><USER2> I was sure until the end of this essay that the author was going to argue for governments to pay for or heavily subsidise a post-secondary education (as in fact they do in much of the developed world); all the arguments about an "educated population" seem to point in that direction.

So I was surprised that the conclusion was instead that employers should pay for the college education that they are benefitting from. Surprise: they already are. They pay your salary, from which you pay your college loans. It does mean that your take-home (post-loan-payment) pay is lower, but that's because you're still just a journeyman. Any arrangement where the employer pays more than a base salary means that inexperienced fresh-outs will be _more_ expensive and thus even _less_ desirable than now.

</comment><comment><USER3> This whole notion that beneficiaries should pay is garbage. The logical end of this is a totalitarian dictator that shoves stuff down your throat. The person who should pay is the person doing the buying, acting on their own free will.

As per college, totally agree this is over valued. There are far more efficient ways to learn. The whole system has turned into a tremendously expensive signaling device to future employers that you're willing to commit to something.

Of course there's also a long list of phenomenally successful engineers and businessmen who did fine without it: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Thomas Edison to name just a few.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm old. I live in a country that until fairly recently universally funded tertiary education. (What Americans call college, most other places call university, but we can all accept it as tertiary education, I believe.)

I was 28 when I started my degree, but it was "state funded", both university fees and a maintenance allowance were paid. I had a mortgage and a car, so I had to work during the summer to make ends meet, but without the mortgage it would have been decent subsistence living. Regular students survived, many did part time work improve their lot.

This was a great and workable system. It pretty much leveled the playing field and allowed anyone who wanted to go to university to do so, if they satisfied the requirements of the university.

I maintain that it is a fundamental right that anyone who so desires, and who meets the requirements of the university, should be state-funded through their first degree (not failed years, of course).

It is hugely beneficial to everyone in a nation state to have the most educated workforce it can afford and support.

You cannot over-educate a nation.</comment>


Google won't be able to resist listening in on your conversations - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/google-wont-be-able-to-resist-listening-in-on-your-conversations-3341fd3d987b <comment><USER2> I have trumpeted this many times but selfhosted solutions like cloudron, sandstorm, arkos are the way to go. We want iot devices to send data to our personal servers and not to big brother companies for analysis and mining.

That said, in my experience, people willingly give their data to Google and Facebook. I assumed people were not cognisant but this is not the case. Most people are very conscious of their decision and argue that their data is safer with Google and it's a good trade off. This seems like a PR issue and hard to fix even if selfhosted solutions reach maturity.

Do others share my thoughts? Would love to hear from privacy enthusiasts as to how we can promote better architectures for the web.

<comment><USER3> Let me be the devil's advocate for a moment:

Why is it a problem if Google knows more about you? Doesn't it just mean that you will be served content more relevant to you?

<comment><USER4> I guess it depends how valuable that service is.

Right now, I can't imagine that being served content "more relevant to me" is so valuable as to warrant a corporation systematically recording my doings. My current reaction is: I'm perfectly capable of finding relevant stuff on my own, thank you very much.

But I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My Google Home gave me an ad for the beauty and the beast today

[https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/5zq60f/my_google_ho...](https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/5zq60f/my_google_home_gave_me_an_ad_for_the_beauty_and/?st=j0cq7kyq&sh=6d8f1529)

Video: [https://twitter.com/brysonmeunier/status/842358950536318976](https://twitter.com/brysonmeunier/status/842358950536318976)

<comment><USER6> That's why I avoid Google religiously: you are the product, even when you pay them money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone remember Patrick Norton on The ScreenSavers on TechTV in the 00s complaining about websites keeping access logs? Heck we even complained about cookies back then. The sick thing about the privacy trap is that they slow- cook you to the point where _not_ snooping on users becomes something akin to a business risk.

<comment><USER8> I believe it already is a business risk because competitors would still keep doing this to their advantage even if you stop it. It's like smuggling -- once your competitor finds a way of smuggling goods safely, not doing it becomes a business risk, especially if margins are low.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps it's just my selective biases, but I feel like I am reading about more notable people in the tech industry speaking out in favor of privacy over the past couple months than even when the Snowden revelations happened in 2013.

Could this possibly be a tipping point for adtech as a revenue model? (Although I've been reading about it for almost a year now [1], [2], [3]) I'd like to hope so, and am also curious: how invasive can companies be before consumers start to push back?

[1] [http://digiday.com/marketing/copyranter-ad-tech-bubble- explo...](http://digiday.com/marketing/copyranter-ad-tech-bubble-explode/) [2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/41zyoo/why_i_bel...](https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/41zyoo/why_i_believe_there_is_a_social_media_adtech/) [3] [https://kalkis-research.com/google-end-of-the-online- adverti...](https://kalkis-research.com/google-end-of-the-online-advertising- bubble)

</comment><comment><USER10> "This isn't an ad; the beauty in the Assistant is that it invites our partners to be our guest and share their tales."

It just boggles my mind that anyone could read nonsense like this and not immediately say "I want nothing to do with that". This is evil corporatist greed along the lines of Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, or Halliburton. Alphabet needs to start getting called out forcefully, especially by their own employees and other tech leaders, whenever they pull this crap.

<comment><USER11> Assuming they haven't developed a deep neural net to generate PR-speak, I really want to understand the human(s) who wrote that. How do these people operate? I would assume they know they're spouting pure bullshit, know that everyone knows that, and simply don't care, but I'm not in that business.

<comment><USER12> I assume they just breathe their own exhaust and so that statement was heartfelt. You can imagine that especially non-technical people can believe that "advertising is annoying and intrusive but we have deep learning and so much knowledge of the user that the users will be delighted when we add to their experience. We'll just keep out the annoying stuff."

And really are we any different? Any YC entrepreneur should know how to cold call, and the only way to bring yourself to do it is to believe in your heart that the person you're calling really _will_ be happier with the information you provide, delighted that you called, so you aren't interrupting them at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Onion called this one years ago: [http://bit.ly/1JXicmI](http://bit.ly/1JXicmI)

</comment><comment><USER14> "Resist" might not be the operative term here. Advertising is the whole purpose for developing these devices and placing them in people's homes.

Edit: And though it's obvious I'll say it: at Google advertising means data gathering.

</comment><comment><USER15> uhhh... who here has yet to adopt a radical fuck-all-ads-always-and-forever-i- dont-care-if-you-go-out-of-business attitude? if you're not already blocking all ads wherever you possibly can, you can expect zero privacy and a lot of invasive advertisements and surveillance. and it'll annoy you.

seriously, fuck em. if they go broke, they'll ask you to pay for their service. that might be what needs to happen to restore privacy: throw money at them so that they don't need to sell you out.

<comment><USER16> I use uBlock origin on all my browsers. are you doing anything extra (e.g. blocking at an /etc/hosts level?) or am I covered?

<comment><USER11> IIUC uBlock just deals with JavaScript. Google and others fall back to old- school pixel tracking when their JS fails, so I put some of the worst offenders in /etc/hosts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm trying to move away from Google, but I'm struggling to find anything close to the quality of Inbox. It's pretty much perfect. And it gets a lot of its greatness by reading my email and organizing my information and events for me. Is there anything non-cloud-based that I could use that even comes close to this?

<comment><USER18> really? i used inbox since the closed beta as well, but recently (january) switched to another mail provider and can't say i really miss it.

its kinda nice, but it was pretty easy to replace it with some static mail routing rules (and the added benefit of a wildcard email address, making $email@example.com possible, consequently making these rules even easier).

<comment><USER17> I planned a short vacation earlier this month which involved flights, 2 different hotels, and a rental car. Inbox automatically gave me an itinerary with a timeline of each thing in order with all relevant info (flight times, flight number, hotel addresses, rental car company and confirmation number, etc) on one screen I could look at on my phone. It added my trip (and hotel stays) to my calendar on the correct dates so I could plan better. And it did all this without me asking it to do anything. Literally all I did was make reservations for things. It figured out where I was going, and that the flights, hotels, and rental car were all part of the same trip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm sure they will find a way to introduce the ads, as well as a premium subscription option that removes them.

<comment><USER20> Like youtube red? Note that this only stops ads from being displayed. They still mine your youtube data for re-use in other services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> That Verge article has 2 different statements, the first sounds like this was for sure an AD though they try like hell to make it sound like it's not an ad...

"This isn't an ad; the beauty in the Assistant is that it invites our partners to be our guest and share their tales."

But then the second sounds like no, it wasn't so much an ad as something an algorithm dug up.

"What's circulating online was a part of our My Day feature, where after providing helpful information about your day, we sometimes call out timely content."

Giving them the benefit of the doubt here, those 2 statements seem to describe things that can be different. One "came from a partner" the other was just "timely content".

<comment><USER22> They're really both the same - and there's a LOT of annoying FUD regarding this.

It's triggered by the phrase "Good Morning" or other phrases that launch into the "what is going on today" prompt.

* The weather is currently blahblahblah * Your commute will be x minutes * Beauty and the Beast came out in theaters today * [the rest of your news]

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Straight out of M.T. Anderson's _Feed_. Have you read it? Read it! (Or listen to it, there's a really great audio book of it)

</comment><comment><USER24> Watching the Edward Snowden is pretty eye opening about this kind of stuff. I was going to buy an Alexa devise, but thankfully watched the movie first and now I know I won't...

</comment><comment><USER25> I decided I cared less about this considering that I (and many others) already have a Google listening device with me more often than I'm in my kitchen: an Android phone.

<comment><USER26> Is there any evidence of Google actually doing this on a widespread basis? The Home is specifically designed to be an always-on microphone. My phone isn't.

<comment><USER27> I'm not sure if it's on by default, but the "OK Google" feature presumably requires an always-listening microphone on your phone.

<comment><USER28> The difference in the quality of the microphones make it quiet impractical in phone, but very easy in a google home device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is really missing the point, because if I objected to Google mining my private conversations to advertise to me I wouldn't use Gmail.

The problem with ads on Google Home this week is serious, but it isn't related to "Google spying on me" at all. It's to do with the fact that reading out ads in my home is super creepy, despite — in fact, because of — the fact that the ads aren't targeted to me.

<comment><USER30> > because if I objected to Google mining my private conversations to advertise > to me I wouldn't use Gmail.

This incorrect and short-sighted. The private conversations that you have are with someone else, who might have not opted into Google mining their conversation.

In that sense your conversation partners' only option to "opt-out" of using gmail is to stop conversing with you, which I find to be a perverse choice.

<comment><USER31> I guess it should be noted, though, that the choice being perverse doesn't mean the outcome is obvious. I, for one, generally will just refrain from contacting you if the only contact info I have is a gmail address, if it's not exceptionally important for me.

<comment><USER32> Its worth pointing out that this doesn't help you much. I have 3-4 email addresses, from @gmail to @myuniversity to @mywebsite. I send and receive all of my mail from a Inbox though.

<comment><USER31> Yeah, I am aware that I might be misplacing my trust and share things with people who end up sharing it with third parties, violating my trust ... your point being?

<comment><USER32> Well I didn't really have a point to be made, just a general informational statement.

However, claiming that I'm violating your trust if you send me an email is a bit of a strong statement, don't you think.

<comment><USER31> > However, claiming that I'm violating your trust if you send me an email is a > bit of a strong statement, don't you think.

I am not sure what your argument is? If I am sending you an email, you cannot possibly violate my trust by sharing it with other people?

<comment><USER32> You said

>I might be misplacing my trust and share things with people who end up sharing it with third parties, violating my trust

I take that as

"If I send an email to someone and they share it with third parties, they are violating my trust...Google/gmail is one such third party."

<comment><USER31> Well, google is one third party that I would count as a violation of my trust --obviously, that does not necessarily apply to every possible third party, if that is what you are getting at? Nor would it necessarily apply to google, if the specific content was meant to be shared with google, or whatever.

My point is: Yes, it is obvious that other people can violate my trust by sharing information with third parties, and I might not even know, as that doesn't even require email or computers. People could be sending copies of snail mail letters I send them to some company offering them 10 cents per piece or something ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's like buying a cat at a Monsanto pet store and complain afterwards it glows in the dark.</comment>


Ask HN: Did your YC (or other incubator) startup fail? What are you doing now? - <AUTHOR>

What year did it fail, how long after the program did things end and what are you doing these days? <comment><USER2> Here's my (long long) story: [http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut- newstilt-down...](http://blog.paulbiggar.com/archive/why-we-shut-newstilt- down/)

Am now doing [https://circleci.com](https://circleci.com), so it has a happy ending.

<comment><USER3> Hey Paul, I'm the founder of Beacon [http://www.beaconreader.com](http://www.beaconreader.com) \- would be interested to hear your thoughts (if you have any) on the space now. Can I send you an email?

<comment><USER4> Not the guy you're asking but I have something to tell you.

I've never heard of Beacon, so I went to your site. The site does not immediately and clearly tell me what Beacon does. That sucks.

No, I don't want to watch a video to find out.

Only at this point do I know what it does:

"When you fund a writer on Beacon, you also get access to every story from every other writer. New writers are added each month so your subscription becomes more valuable over time."

Weird that I "also" get access, as you didn't actually tell me that you get access to a particular writer if and only if you fund them.

It seems like your product is niche journalism. What you are apparently currently triyng to sell is "Pay a journalist." That is not a product and it is not a value to anyone except the journalist.

An alternative sales pitch would be: "We're building a grassroots journalism network. For $5 a month, you can sponsor a writer whose work interests you to get access to their work, and as a bonus, we'll give you access to the entire network."

It's realize highly presumptious of me to say all this. I would expect that you already know it. Plus, maybe your model for generating new subscribers does not include "they go to the website never having heard of what it is before." So, sorry if I'm wasting your time.

<comment><USER5> I hate the term "sucks" when applied to someone's serious work.

<comment><USER6> I see where you're coming from, sometimes Honest Feedback can be a bit harsh. But Honest Feedback is the Best Feedback. I've learned to turn negative feedback into constructive criticism. You can't take it personally, these are things that may potentially help your business (assuming you can identify and solve whatever problem is raised). I'm an optimist at heart, but when it comes to feedback, I always tend to focus more on the negative feedback. In terms of fine tuning my product, I think there is more to learn from the negative feedback (not to imply that positive feedback is not valuable). I don't consider my job well done until there is no negative feedback (rare), or I do everything I can to minimize the negative feedback. It has become an effective strategy that allows me to learn from potential customers and fine tune the product (customer feedback loop).

<comment><USER5> It is possible to give "Honest Feedback" with out saying something "sucks."

<comment><USER6> I'm not going to disagree, but I think it's important to note that Honest Feedback is unfiltered. So if they think it "sucks" then they should be able to say that it "sucks" and this shouldn't reflect badly on them. If anything, the person receiving the feedback should be thanking them for investing the time to even provide feedback (instead of bouncing and moving along, never to be seen again).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Other incubator. 2004-2007. We had a good product, but didn't focus enough and instead pivoted twice to arguably worse products. The company barely scraped by until last year, when it was sold to a well-known market player. We founders were so diluted by then that we only got a minor amount. Was a great journey but won't be repeating it until I find a product I believe 100% in. You have to be in it to win it. Working as a consultant now and one thing I can say for sure is that running a startup gives you one hell of a headstart competence-wise.

<comment><USER8> When you say consulting, what do you mean?

To me, consulting is 'providing outside expertise and advice, to teach a client what to do and how'. For instance, you might have a sales consultant teach you how to build a better sales pipeline. A software consultant would show you how to commission outsource work, or design a service architecture, but not actually implement them.

I get the feeling that on HN it means something else?

Often, people here transition very easily into consulting, and treat it as a worst case fallback job, which is crazy because I figured the kind of consulting mentioned above is engaging, well paid, really hard to get started in, and a business in itself.

<comment><USER9> I think a lot of people use it interchangeably with "contracting". i.e. working as an expert temporary employee on a specific product/problem usually at a higher wage than the "permanent" employees.

<comment><USER10> As an ex-consultant/contractor, you're exactly right - it's often confusing because different companies call it different things. I've done both types (consulting on the high level goals, and actually implementing things) and I've rarely seen a company that draws much of a distinction, oftentimes the first leads into the second anyways, usually at the same rate.

Terminology, meh...these days I just say I was a hired gun, because some people think there's an actual distinction between consultant and contractor, but I was never clear on what it was, even though I was doing it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Other incubator. It failed in early 2012, a little over a year after it was founded and probably 6 months too late. I'm now working at one of the other startups from my batch, and things are going great.

It was really tough to pull the plug, but it was really obvious it was time to do so. We were out of money in the bank and weren't making enough revenue to stay aloat

<comment><USER12> Looking back, what would you say were the problems?

Were they more about the product, or how you approached the process of building a business?

Just curious about your experiences. It can possibly be both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> 2010\. I went into a 2-day startup crashcourse with a rough idea that I didn't even plan on telling anyone (so rough it was) and went out with a prototype done by a google-employed engineer (I wasn't a programmer at the time) and a couple of investors ready to back me up. In the following months, I (me personally, not the situation neither anyone else is to blame) failed miserably and went through a very rough psychologic breakdown.

<comment><USER14> You might be interested to read about what is called the "upper limit problem". There's a book called The Big Leap which discusses it in an accessible and helpful way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My co-founder and I ran into a lot of logistical issues when building out a Bitcoin remittance platform. One of the biggest blocking issues was dealing with regulatory compliance and preventing people from committing fraud on the service. Turns out that these headaches are extremely common across all Bitcoin companies, so we 100% switched to [http://blockscore.com/](http://blockscore.com/) which drastically simplifies compliance and anti-fraud.

</comment><comment><USER16> I failed in 2005 (wasn't an incubator, more like an angel thing). We started in 2001 and had some moderate success, but in the end the business wasn't scalable, and the concept was horribly flawed at a point in time where most of our customers had financial difficulties. The business/myself was acqui-hired, luckily, otherwise I'd just have gone under with all the personal debt I had (unwisely) accrued.

Now I'm kicking around some ideas.

Actually, after nReduce failed I thought I might try a second take on the idea of a community-based incubator.

Check it out: [http://launchway.net/posts/blog](http://launchway.net/posts/blog)

<comment><USER17> What happened to nReduce? It seemed to be a good idea, and had some traction for a while.

<comment><USER16> That's what I thought, but then they shut down suddenly. To be fair hadn't checked in on them for a while, apparently things haven't been great for some time. But I still think this is a concept worth pursuing, so I'm trying to see if I can iterate on the work they did in that space. We'll see!

Anyway, I'd appreciate any feedback from HNers on the project, it's very new (went live as a rudimentary version last night).

<comment><USER17> I signed up

<comment><USER16> Thanks :) Let me know if you run into difficulties. Today I'll be working on site features, and after that I'll go and advertise as much as I can!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I got a cease and deasist letter :)

Now doing a new startup. Launched on November, so help us grow: [http://www.allthecooks.com/download](http://www.allthecooks.com/download)

<comment><USER19> A cease and desist letter is pretty meaningless in and of itself. Care to expand on the story?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yes it failed (other incubator). Maybe 7 or 8 months after. I started working at a another startup where I knew one of the cofounders. It was definitely the right choice.

Sometimes ideas just take a while to take off and will be ultimately successful. Sometimes ideas are just bad, and you need to kill them and move on. Sunk costs can be a bitch, but you're not getting that time back, so make the most of the future.

</comment><comment><USER21> UsableHQ ... other accelerator 2011, failed 2013. Look back through my HN comments for (parts of) things I learnt during the story.

Now doing Pitcher.io :)

<comment><USER22> I noticed pitcher.io uses hash fragments do you guys plan on going to pushstate? Have you noticed any issues with google indexing the hash URLs?

<comment><USER21> I'd love to go that way, but I've never managed to get backbone.js pushstate to work. And yes, I have noticed that Google doesn't like hash URLs. It's annoying.

But, that said, Google search traffic isn't a likely source of users, so I've not spent much time figuring out a solution yet. There are much bigger problems to solve before that. Like how to stop posting on HN when I should be working. :)

<comment><USER23> I've visited Pitcher.io. I think the messaging on the site is kind of complex, maybe you should focus on one value proposition and communicate that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Kind of curious what happened with the team from Diaspora. I thought they pivoted to a website where users posted pictures and could place text on them.

<comment><USER25> From: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy)

 _On the evening of 12 November 2011, Zhitomirskiy was found dead in his San Francisco home by police responding to calls about a suspected suicide._

 _Zhitomirskiy's mother, Inna Zhitomirskiy, did not comment on reports of his history of mental illness, but she did say on his participation in Diaspora, "I strongly believe that if Ilya did not start this project and stayed in school, he would be well and alive today."_

<comment><USER26> Darn, that's really sad. Diaspora is a really cool concept, though I'm kind of soured on social networking after years of Facebook. Perhaps I'll give it a shot soon since this guy literally gave his life for the project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Other incubator. 2012-2013. Came in with B2B enterprise software (invalidated that), and came out with a consumer subcom startup. Bootstrapped that to 6 figures in 12 months. Growth plateaued, but it's a going concern (~$7200 MRR). I spend about 5 hrs a month on it now.

My main squeeze is [http://featurekicker.com](http://featurekicker.com) \-- software that helps teams "make something people want."

With FeatureKicker, you can quickly add a button representing a new feature on a website. When a user clicks on the experimental button, our tech opens a modal window and gets user input on the new feature.

You can also get feedback on existing features of their website, so they can improve their product.

Any and all feedback is welcome...

</comment><comment><USER28> Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. -Ron Conway

Most of the answer will be bounce backs from a failed startup to a surviving/successful one.

<comment><USER29> Depending on one's financial situation, it's pretty reasonable to do consulting or something in between, especially if the founders are older or otherwise have higher income potential. (Going from $250/hr or $250k+/yr consulting to $0-3k/mo startup wages kind of sucks if you don't get an exit...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> We failed early 2013. I was the founding engineer, but ended up doing Product Management at [http://frankandoak.com](http://frankandoak.com) after.

Engineering -> Business oriented role was the easiest thing I could think of.

</comment><comment><USER31> We ended up helping retailers integrate iBeacon functionality into their existing app and supply them with with BLE hardware at [http://www.beaconmaker.com](http://www.beaconmaker.com)

</comment><comment><USER22> [http://omnipapr.com](http://omnipapr.com) Not a startup yet just really a side project. You can have a look at the interface with the test account. user:test pass:win

</comment><comment><USER32> This seems to be going really good. Do we have any site or something that lists sort of failed startups in one place?

</comment><comment><USER33> 2011 , kept the product up and running at my own expense for the next year, joined a big corp starting of 2013.

</comment><comment><USER34> Very interesting topic. I wish it would go on and not vanish in nothingness..</comment>


Learning how to think - <AUTHOR> http://dcurt.is/startups-ruin-you <comment><USER3> Why does the fucking kudos dot auto-kudo on mouseover!?

Dustin seems like a smart guy, and the article makes sense and everything, but then my mouse casually tracks across that dot and it starts-a-throbbing, and I'm like "oh crap oh crap, what is this? do i want it?, omigod, I don't know, oh no, move fast before something happens!" and then I don't remember what the number was before and I'm not sure if I kudo'd or not, and my heart is racing, and I've lost a few hours off my lifespan...

And this is all before I realize it's a fucking counter on a webpage, and it doesn't matter whether I increment it or not.

I hate you auto-kudo, I hate you so much.

<comment><USER4> So it's clever and quirky. Yeah, it's not a scientific poll. I used to get pretty annoyed with that because your gut reaction is, "hey! I didn't know that would happen! I didn't give your consent to count my vote!". But really, when you take a step back, you realize that internet karma means absolutely, positively, _nothing_.

It's really all meaningless Internet points. The auto-voting karma button reminds me of that, and I now appreciate the digital "up yours!" every once in a while ;)

<comment><USER5> I think we're trained to feel anxious about it because of services like Facebook where clicking an upvote button not only delivers a point but puts your name behind it and potentially broadcasts that to your friends and followers.

<comment><USER6> Nah. Humans have been susceptible to meaningless points since the dawn of time.

<comment><USER5> I'm not addressing proclivity, only the anxiety expressed by the OP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of "the designer's curse." I often find myself getting pissed when something is designed poorly. It used to be poorly designed software and websites, but now it's anything.

Like, for example, when I buy something, pull the sticker off, and it leaves a thick residue that won't come off. Or, when I'm in a car without any indication of which side the gas tank is on.

My significant other makes fun of me for this. "Who thought doing THIS was a good idea? Do they buy their own f*ing products?" I'll say. Meanwhile, he has a non-founder view of life, "Meh, it's like that because it's like that."

He's clearly more zen than I am.

<comment><USER8> I don't recall being in a car w no indication of which side the gas tank was on. Usually a little arrow indicates it next to the gauge.

<comment><USER7> Yes, that's what I'm referring to.

I use a service called Car2Go quite often which rents Smart cars exclusively. For some reason they decided not to include the little arrow.

[http://0.tqn.com/d/cars/1/0/6/9/1/ag_08fortwo_speedo.jpg](http://0.tqn.com/d/cars/1/0/6/9/1/ag_08fortwo_speedo.jpg)

<comment><USER9> Not that it's your fault they didn't include the arrow, but when you rent a car, you want to walk completely around it anyway before driving away. Otherwise they may try to stick you with pre-existing damage that wasn't noticed the last time the car was turned in.

(I've heard it's a good idea to shoot a video of the walkaround with your phone, but that seems OTT.)

<comment><USER10> I have never rented a car where the rental person didn't do this with me. Nobody is going to remember what side the gas tank is on though a week later when you fill it up.

<comment><USER11> I've never rented a car where the rental person was even near the car when I walked it. And I rent cars every few days...maybe the lack of personal attention is an airport thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The implications of this have always fascinated me. It's hard to go back to being a worker when you've spent time as a boss, but we also know that 75% of venture-backed startups fail.

What happens to the failures? Can they go back to work and fall back in line? Or are we going to have "Professional Founders" or "Business Engineers" down the line that have a decade or two of experience starting and running companies, none of which survived past infancy.

It's hard to imagine in the very positive atmosphere that most young entrepreneurs live in. What are you supposed to do when you want to keep building companies, but they just keep failing? Are you prepared to say "I can't do this very well" and move on? Where will you go?

I personally don't think startups are the tech equivalent of starting a band or going Hollywood, but I can understand why some would employ the analogy.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm sorry but this vision of a "thinker" who is always imagining the future so he can "out-innovate" his competition is a little ridiculous. PG's point is a psychological one: many of the founders he encounters are lack the self esteem to thrive when they have control.

The startups that win do so only very rarely because a visionary founder innovatively guessed the future trajectory of culture. In my opinion being good at running a company mostly requires the usual mix of soft skills plus a strong, unconflicted motive to succeed.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. It's all too easy, in hindsight, to claim that a happenstance was because of some great vision of "Privacy is a relic of the past" but more often than not, serendipity wins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can personally relate to the part about no going back to just being a worker bee once you've tasted blood.

For me I did my "startup" at a pretty early age (I didn't call it a startup then - it was just me building software and selling it online) and it has forever changed my perception of the workplace. I've tried slotting back in to some regular jobs since then and it hasn't really worked out all that well - <USER2> get anxious, frustrated with the slow pace, second guess too many decisions, wonder why everyone around me doesn't have that same passion/enthusiasm, etc.

Short of doing another startup, I've found contracting to be a good middle ground for me (for the time being).

<comment><USER16> > I get anxious, frustrated with the slow pace, second guess too many > decisions, wonder why everyone around me doesn't have that same > passion/enthusiasm, etc.

Same here, and the frustration is compounded when you get slogans like "take ownership" thrown at you, but then find out you're not allowed to own the project, just the problems.

<comment><USER17> I think a lot of things like "take ownership" are working ideas lost in translation, applied by people that don't properly understand how to apply them.

For example, it works well where employees are given the responsibility to take ownership of things. Some guy who runs a business that runs well on that premise writes a blog post about, or an article that's printed on page 23 of Inc. Magazine. Some middle manager reads that article and thinks "yeah, that could help me get to this quarters target" and tries to implement it in a company that isn't structured that way. Since he doesn't want to restructure, he simply tells his employees "yeah, you should take ownership now, that's an order", and the inevitable happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As someone who worked at startups, started my own, and had a great time and good outcome, I'm considering going back into a large company for some time just to see what it's like.

I think this article is true in the sense that startups cause you to lose any sense of being satisfied as a mindless "worker bee", but I'm not willing to rule out the idea that in some larger companies non-"worker bee" types who are driven individuals who want to make a dent can actually get a lot done with the resources of a large organization at their disposal. If you're in a good position mentally and financially, you have the luxury to just walk if the place is a dysfunctional mess or isn't letting you accomplish your larger goals quickly enough.

I think there's a certain point where you do need to step into the pool of ideas again: startup culture is pretty insular and at the end of the day if you are always working with a small team of like-minded people you are likely to not make the connections necessary to produce real innovation. Startups are certainly challenging in many ways. But there's a certain type of challenge you get when given a specific task by a mentor in a large company that seems impossible at first that really levels-up your skills. I've found that a lot of the type of learning in startups I've had has been rising to challenges that materialize out of the need to ensure the survivability of the product and business. These challenges are of a completely different flavor than those crafted by older and wiser mentors who have an interest in passing on their skills and throw you curve balls intentionally to make progress towards a larger goal while pushing the limits of your technical skill.

<comment><USER19> > mindless worker bee

A little bit respect could be nice

<comment><USER18> I was using the words used by the article, not my own. i'll put quotes around it (since I generally disagree with this analogy anyway)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands >>> it's knowing how to think. Most people don't know how to strategize. Most people don't know how to take what they see in the world and use it to invent something new.

I learned how to think critically in college. I had a few exceptional professors I gravitated towards and they really pushed me to learn this on my own. Through a few very involved research papers, I learned some of the key tenets of doing this.

I kept waiting for that grain of knowledge he was about to bestow on his readers on what exactly critical thinking is - but it never came.

Just in case you needed it. . .

[http://ctb.ku.edu/en/tablecontents/sub_section_main_1120.asp...](http://ctb.ku.edu/en/tablecontents/sub_section_main_1120.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER20> "...for yourself.' would be a great subtitle to this article.

Of those who do survive 18 years of public education and still mentally check- in on a daily basis, many they aren't capable of creating something outside of what they are given. That's the most troubling aspect of what he (and PG) are discussing.

These people can understand and execute complex instructions, but can't come up with their own instruction manual that actually fits their situation. Lots of successful people could be 100x more successful if they would stop trying to figure our how to make 200-page management fads work in their situation. Instead, if they would look at that situation, and engage their own brain and gut instinct to come up with solutions, they would be so much more efficient and effective.

If "so-so said to do it," or "I read it in a book," is your TOP reason for doing something--to me that's a 99% accurate sign that's its not the most effective thing you could be doing right now. Engage your brain.

</comment><comment><USER21> I find the part about Facebook ominous:

> There is an insanely huge difference between, "We're making a site for > connecting to your friends" and, "Privacy is a relic of the past, so we're > going to push people to open up their lives and share, connecting them > together."

This is "learning how to think"? If so, then I'm afraid the NSA, Google, and Facebook are far ahead of those of us who just want to connect privately with friends. I would say that Facebook has learned how to think about ways to exploit the human impulse to connect. Hopefully there is a business opportunity in platforms for private connections as well. It may take years for public awareness of privacy issues to reach that level, but I hope someday people will look back at Facebook as a relic of the past when personal privacy was exploited for corporate gain.

</comment><comment><USER22> In most of the world, and in most of the United States, your thoughts are owned by your employer. If you want to eat, have a roof over your head, raise a family, you almost always sign away the rights to your thoughts.

The exception is California. And that's why Silicon Valley is in Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER23> Amen! For the last few years I've bleated about this to any one who will listen. A few years ago I moved from academia to industry and I was shocked by how restrictive the employment contracts are (I'm in the UK). I reckon it's also a major contributor to wages being so much lower over here. How can we change it though? I'd love it if we could get legislation introduced similar to that in California. What practical steps could we take?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder whether this article by Dustin is the same one referenced in this tweet: [https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/373243436331069440](https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/373243436331069440)

<comment><USER5> I find it ironic that he feels he's subverting HN when HN has become absolutely fixated on divisive opinions and exploring all subtrees of viewpoints to completion. Polarizing articles give everyone an outlet here.

<comment><USER25> LOL, true. Pedantic haters gonna hate pedantically.

Also:

[http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2205-there-is-an-inverse- rela...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2205-there-is-an-inverse-relationship- between-level-of-anonymity-and-quality-of-conversation)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Reminds me a lot of the PhD-student experience; for years you sit in courses in a relatively strict environment to finally get your BSc (or your MSc or whatever), and you start your PhD - and suddenly you're on your own, you have to plan your own time, outline your own research, you have to make sure that your program stays on track, deliver results on time etc.

Not many people can handle this sudden shift which is why a PhD is not something for everyone.

<comment><USER27> Yes, exactly. I think PhDs are actually an undertapped pool for startup founders. There are major overlaps in the skill set, IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Related is the concept of "agency":

• [http://lesswrong.com/lw/id2/to_what_degree_do_you_model_peop...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/id2/to_what_degree_do_you_model_people_as_agents/)

• [http://lesswrong.com/lw/5i8/the_power_of_agency/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/5i8/the_power_of_agency/)

</comment><comment><USER29> This post articulates a problem that is an order of magnitude worse in East Asia. We are working in Cambodia and Laos (we gave up on Thailand, they're a basket case) to encourage tech startups and develop talent that can think on their own in the workplace.

People here are not just willing to learn but enthusiastic. But they are like Paul Graham's baby birds, they don't even know what to learn or how to begin.

The Chinese education model is based on the idea that a student is an open vessel that the teacher pours their wisdom into. More often than not, that pouring consists of little more than route memorization of lists and facts. Computer education is little more than teaching how to operate GUI applications without any understanding of what they are doing.

Save a document? I asked my staff last year why you save documents and what happened when you clicked on "save" (no one had heard of C-c). No one had a clue. Digging deeper I found that half of them didn't have a clear idea what a file or file system was. And these were people who had graduated from technical schools! This wasn't the case even five years ago before Android and the iPhone became ubiquitous.

And that is part of the problem, mobile devices are little more than consumer electronics rather than general purpose computers. Everything is abstracted away from the user so there is less chance for people to learn how things work.

Last night my partner who is on a business trip in Tokyo, asked me to check his girlfriend's android phone because he hadn't been able to get through to her on Viber for a couple of days. When I checked her phone, it turned out that she had tried to install a new game, did a factory reset to free up memory, installed the game and then wondered why she had no email, facebook or viber on the phone...

When I get new staff, the most difficult thing to teach them is that if they have completed a task that had been given to them, that they have to hand in the work and ask for a new task. But it gets even worse. Many times, if they run into a problem in the task they just give up and don't tell anyone. When you ask them what happened, they give you a blank look and say something like, I couldn't open the file. So instead of asking someone for help they spent the next three hours on facebook until a manager noticed. Very frustrating.

The problem is that they have never been allowed to take responsibility for trying to solve a problem on their own. Traditional management and education systems here reward blind, literal obedience which is coupled with an abject fear of failure.

It's not enough to teach people how to think for themselves. They must have the freedom to fail, and be given the responsibility that goes along with it. We have our work cut out for us....

<comment><USER30> I'm currently living in Chiang Mai and curious what made you give up Thailand?

<comment><USER29> I lived in Thailand for 16 years. We had a successful 3D animation studio in Osaka that had lot's of business but our expenses were so high that we weren't making a profit. We thought that moving to Thailand would save us money, and we wouldn't have to live in a damp shoebox smelling of stale cigarettes (actually I loved Japan, but it's just too damn expensive).

At that time (in the 90's) it was still a pain in the ass to get a work visa and run your own business, but it could be done with a bit of money paid in the right places.

But as the years passed by, the government kept changing immigration rules almost every other month. The amount of paperwork needed to renew visas increased dramatically. You have to have a map showing where you live. You have to show photos of you working in your office, photos of you and all of your staff outside your office. We had an application turned down one time because I wasn't wearing the same color shirt as the staff in the photo.

Then they came down hard and changed ownership laws so that foreigners can't own 51% of a Thai company and closed the common loophole of using proxy shareholders.

Meanwhile we had been having a terrible time with Thai staff. Cambodian and Laos workers don't know how to learn but they try very hard to learn, and put real effort into learning english (which we need in order to deal with our customers around Asia). We are primarily a Unix and Linux shop (back then we were using SGI workstations for animation, modeling and rendering). But we had a difficult time finding staff who could even be bothered to learn different systems.

So it finally got to the point where we closed up shop, and I continued to live in Thailand, but ran my business out of Hong Kong (where I lived for 10 years before Osaka).

But in the end, the cost of living in Thailand had grown so high, and immigration had become such a pain in the ass that I finally gave up even living there.

We've now consolidated all of our business and are headquartered in Phnom Penh and it's been, all in all a very good experience. In thailand, expats spend 15-20% of all conversations talking about visas (even if you have a work/marriage/retirement visa). In the past year in Cambodia I don't think the subject has come up more than a couple of times).

I love Thailand in many ways, but the governments xenophobia, and the tendency for girls there to treat you as an ATM card with no pin number just wore me down.

<comment><USER31> Since you don't have any contact details in your profile.. I play a lot in Unity3D these days and am Phnom Penh-based (well returning from a break on Wednesday). If you wanna grab coffee one fine day and chat about "digital biz in SEA", then just holler!

<comment><USER29> Email sent. If anyone is interested in what we're doing in Cambodia, (which is relevant to helping people to think on their own) please check out our web site [http://chenla.la/studyhall.html](http://chenla.la/studyhall.html) and our longer term vision [http://chenla.la/plancddr.html](http://chenla.la/plancddr.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think this is an important point, however it can be applied to many more roles than just founding a startup.

When an engineer (of any type) can consider the how and why they are building, they learn to question some of the tasks they have been assigned, potentially resulting in a more efficient execution.

If a programmer is told to build a search function into a website, and he builds that, great.

If a programmer is told to build this, and he considers why, and realizes that certain things on the website aren't as clear as they could be, and decides to not only build a search function but also suggests certain usability and discoverability improvements to the website, then much better results will be had.

</comment><comment><USER33> About pg's observation that founders don't realize how independent they can be:

It may be a selection bias: Probably a founder wants to participate in the YC program partly because they want advices, feedback and maybe just psychological 'confirmation' (social confirmation) more than people with the same talent/knowledge who do not apply to YC.

I do not say that it is bad. Overconfidence in one's capabilities can be also dangerous. And needing social confirmation is a very natural thing. I just say that there is probably a small selection bias in play here.

</comment><comment><USER34> This post has an interesting url: [http://dcurt.is/startups-ruin- you](http://dcurt.is/startups-ruin-you)

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if the distinction between working for a startup and founding one should be emphasized more clearly when such an article pops up?

</comment><comment><USER36> This guy acts like he knows exactly why Facebook succeeded and MySpace failed. And sure, it all seems so predictable in retrospect. But nobody could have predicted the rise of Facebook.

Furthermore, attributing the rise to one cause (Facebook is about sharing) is simplistic and naive. Early Facebook wasn't too different from MySpace. Could have just been luck.

</comment><comment><USER37> > _discovering (...) that you have wings and can fly. And once you discover > it, there is no going back. It's addictive and powerful. It ruins your > ability to be a worker bee, because you've tasted blood... (etc.)_

And then:

> _You should follow me on twitter_

Isn't the whole point, to not _follow_ but rather, lead?

</comment><comment><USER38> I have a questions that is irrelevant to the article per se, but rather the design of the web page. Is blog organized by a CMS or the design is entirely of Dustin's creation (I'm pretty sure I've seen it before?) I'm specially interested in the blog design, I like it.

</comment><comment><USER39> (English student here)

The title should be "Startups ruins you" because it can be rewritten as "it ruins you", or I'm missing something here?

Thanks!

<comment><USER40> Do you know what my name means? Also, as others have pointed out, the particular anaphor you'd use here is "they" which is (generally) plural.

Edit: sidenote, this is why linguists dislike many people in the humanities who blindly follow "rules" and end up writing badly as a result because they make hypercorrections all over the place.

<comment><USER41> > _Do you know what my name means?_

Well, I do. In simple terms, a word refering to another one in the same sentense/text (e.g. "My Xbox arrived and it was great" \-- it being an anaphor for the Xbox).

It's a shortened version of the greek word "anaphora", which means "reference" / relation etc. It comes from the words ana (which roughly means "again" or "anew") and phora (pherein) which means "carries" (connotes, etc).

In the example case, "it" "carries again" the banana (in the sense that it refers to it again from another place).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think the most profound thought I had from reading that article was "Animal Farm"

<comment><USER43> Care to elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> this evening's hagiography

</comment><comment><USER45> lol

<comment><USER45> tldr: we are special snowflakes

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> > Privacy is a relic of the past, so we're going to push people to open up > their lives and share, connecting them together.

Privacy is not a relic of the past, but a lot more that you intend to be private is and/or could be made public.

Information is like an infectious agent. Even if you want to keep it to yourself, if you are around others, it will likely spread, though you can control it to some extent. Even when you think it is eradicated, it may still be lurking, like smallpox and polio, to come back with force later. If you live in a cave in a large forest alone, the chance of it spreading is much lower. If you live close to others in a village, there is still a chance of infection. Few really want to live totally alone, so infection is almost impossible to avoid. But, no one can stop you from moving to the forest, or at least wearing a surgical mask.

<comment><USER47> _Information is like an infectious agent. Even if you want to keep it to yourself, if you are around others, it will likely spread_

digital gossip.</comment></comment>


Leanpub starts charging $99 to create a book - <AUTHOR> https://leanpub.com/blog/2016/10/leanpub-and-pricing <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote a book [1] using Leanpub, and their Dropbox-to-PDF workflow helped me seeing what the final result would look like while writing Markdown files.

I was a little frustrated with the loss of control over formatting, but Leanpub was still worth to keep using. I wouldn't have used it if I had to pay $99 upfront to create a book, even if backed by a 45-days money back guarantee: I would have been comfortable with something in the order of $5-$10, non-refundable.

I'm investigating alternative toolchains for creating ebooks, for the moment Softcover looks like the best candidate.

[1]: [https://www.hostingforappdevelopers.com/](https://www.hostingforappdevelopers.com/)</comment>


How I Made $2000 Writing An eBook - <AUTHOR> http://tjholowaychuk.com/post/524961369/how-i-made-2000-writing-an-ebook

<comment><USER2> _The eBook it self probably took around 3-4 hours to write_

holy cow, i don't think i could type 60 pages of coherent markup in 3-4 hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> He's a pretty prolific guy... if you're into Javascript, his Github repo has lots of great stuff: <http://github.com/visionmedia>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How did you market it?

<comment><USER4> Probably by creating posts like this one on sites like HN

<comment><USER5> Then again, advertising that you spent four minutes per page writing the thing isn't really marketing.

<comment><USER4> True, and I bet most of those pages were code samples

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 4 minutes per page? As someone who has written two books, I call BS.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ignoring the spammer's attempt to spam and trying to bring some ideas in this conversation, If you're really interested to write anything useful, you should get in contact with Geoffrey Grosenbach from peepcode(<http://peepcode.com/questions#are-you-hiring>). They often publish third part ebooks, if your book is accepted and sold about 1k copies they claim that you'll receive US$3,000. peepcode's eBooks and Screencasts are memorable for it's simplicity and pragmatism.

<comment><USER8> I went and read their Author Guide. This line stuck out:

>Our goal is to sell at least 1,000 copies of your book (a reasonable target after a few months of sales). If this happens, you'll receive about US$3,000. The first $2,000 of this will come when your book is published, and the remainder will be paid quarterly in January, April, July, and October.

There is something about that which really bugs me, mainly it's the word 'if'.

<comment><USER9> My startup (FiFoBooks.com) offers another possibility: authors retain all the rights to their work, have full editorial control, set their own prices, and also keep the majority of the sales proceeds, with no "ifs".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My hotshot affiliate marketing client in Dallas made $150,000 on his eBook over a period of 2 years' sales. I don't usually approach my affiliate marketing clients and press them for details -- that's kind of why they like me I'm thinking. But I sure am curious what the topic was about. My guess was that it was about affiliate marketing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know if there is some sort of contribution-friendly eBook store with high amounts of visitors? In a way like the App Store, just for eBooks (of course with less visitors)?

</comment><comment><USER12> what a shit ass blog post.

</comment><comment><USER13> How I Made -$2000- $2000CAD Writing An eBook</comment>