The new dot com bubble is here: it's called online advertising - <AUTHOR> https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising/13230718600-5d15791f <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873)

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems like a dupe no?

<comment><USER4> Probably an A/B test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://outline.com/CquSKm](https://outline.com/CquSKm)

</comment><comment><USER6> Disable javascript to view whole page/website for free.

<comment><USER7> Hey, when you do this, can you see the member/expert contributions as well, or is it all the articles?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Since it is behind a paywall would you be so kind as to post the workaround so we can read it? Thanks.

<comment><USER9> How about an actual subscription as a "workaround"?

We all demand high quality journalism while not willing to make a contribution. Insane.

Same analogy as with software pirating (ah praise Erik Meijer for speaking up about this stupidity)

<comment><USER10> I think a fair middle ground is two or three free articles. I don't want to subscribe to three dozen different news sites.

<comment><USER7> You can get our best article every week by subscribing to our sneak peek email - [https://thecorrespondent.com/sneak- peek](https://thecorrespondent.com/sneak-peek). Of course, we'll keep suggesting you join as a member and given it's a pay-what-you-want payment model it's not a huge ask. You can also follow us on Twitter [https://twitter.com/The_Corres](https://twitter.com/The_Corres) and see everything we post there for free (which is, everything). What you do get as a paying member rather than just a viewer, is access to the conversations we have under the article which are sometimes really worth if. Under this article, for example, the journalist Jesse was joined by Garrett Johnson who was interviewed for the article and is a former Yahoo! economist and members got a chance to ask him questions based on the article and his experience at Yahoo!.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


10 Most Successful Web 2.0 Startups To Date  - <AUTHOR> http://www.rev2.org/2007/04/14/10-most-successful-web-20-startups-to-date/ <comment><USER2> In a way that list is depressing, or maybe it's just boring to a degree that is indistinguishable from depression.

</comment><comment><USER3> No skype on that list?

<comment><USER4> Yes, skype seemed very big when I was in europe. Not so much here in the US, but still huge. Then again, it's not quite web2.0

<comment><USER3> Not sure if they're strictly '2.0' but nobody can define that well anyway.

They did get aquired for $2.5 billion upfront + $1.4 billion performance based. If that doesnt count as being in the top 10 most successful then I dont know what is!

<comment><USER5> Hi there, This is Sid Yadav, the guy who made the list. I did consider Skype but ruled it out since it's more of an desktop app than a web app unlike the rest (doesn't have much of a web-based side to it). If I were to put Skype in there, then I guess I'd have to consider every single desktop app created since 2003!

Thanks

<comment><USER3> Perfectly understandable reasoning, writing top n lists is always tricky thanks to borderline cases. No last.fm either? :p</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Deep Learning in Combination with Crowd Computing for Photo Labeling in Browser - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/marsathome/mah-chrome <comment><USER2> Crowd computing / peer learning would be a great way for the community to compete with the tech giants. 10000 nvidia home gpu's might beat Googles TPUs.

<comment><USER3> IMHO, 10K or even 100K GPUs bottle necked by bandwidth/network speed might be hard to compete with giants. And there is a also problem of optimizing the ML/DL training to work in distributed architecture.

But this must happen for 1\. It's a research area that should be explored! 2\. 10K GPUs are still better than 1000 or 3000 in lab GPUs!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some great internet innovations of the past 10 years? - <AUTHOR> A long time ago the internet was a place where everything was possible and it allowed new radical innovations : marketplaces, search engines, blogs, social networks, Wikipedia ...I
I can't think of anything really creative in terms of products these past 10 years but I believe I am wrong and and older. And obviously there were more opportunities to come up with some thing really new at the beginning.
I'd be interested to know what are some innovation / new type of consumer products brought by the internet :
- in the past 10 years that are truly innovative
- since the the beginning of the internet and that have not ended up corrupt by bad actors and are still alive <comment><USER2> Sci-Hub of course

Smooth piracy of scientific articles.

It took a lot of work. Other people tried different ways but it has succeeded where others didn't and even cost some people their lives they thought is so important.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the modern internet is just TV anymore.

Early internet _was_ innovation. It was _almost_ as if you had to innovate merely to get on and use it.

Now it's a commercial resource, and the major effort will be extraction.

Dislosure: I'm also old. I almost spelled "internet" with a capital 'I'. Harumph.

</comment><comment><USER4> I noticed in my feed the other day that Monero is introducing javascript client side wallets. And its just one of those ideas I can't get out of my head. I love the idea of every web site visitor as "digital bank". That instantly accrues some wuffie just by participating.

And it opens up a huge range of "economic games" for all parties. Not just auctions, exchanges, casinos, and e-sports betting networks. But voting, stake holding, debt issuance, derivative products, commodity peer net grid computing. As well as a drop dead simple system for the allocation of public funds.

<comment><USER5> It's a fantastic idea, but it's also dead on arrival without first hand integration into Chrome. Brave is doing something similar with bats, but even that is limited. I think browser based mining is a huge deal, but Google has somehow managed to convince everyone that is malware instead of a legitimate threat to their business model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> * The current self driving tech requires internet to function. It may not be where we want it, but it has progressed far.

* Same with Drone technology.

* I think voice recognition/digital assistant has evolved quite far the last 10 years.

* P2P tech is exciting again thanks to blockchain progress and various civil unrest.

</comment><comment><USER7> Private tutoring platforms. Now that video calls are ubiquitous we can get a private tutor on short notice for a one to one class tailored to our needs and goals, choosing a teaching style in a pool of hundreds. It's especially big in language learning.

</comment><comment><USER8> Seconding smartphone and the many apps that run on it, but not one in particular. Ten years ago few people had their head glued to a phone.

Now, on any public transport (where I live) it's unusual to look up and see someone not looking at their phone.

For many, a smartphone (or, the apps on it, and I don't think the app matters so much, simply the compulsion) is the first thing to check when waking up,; many app makers simply in the business of making an app compulsive.

For many, a valuable conversation or thinking process is interrupted by an ping and 'very important' message for the constantly connected. But that's the norm for this many.

For many more, the smartphone comes before, or completely substitutes, the need for a 'traditional' computer in providing internet connectivity for many different internet use-cases across the globe: from staying in touch to banking to running a business to becoming a celebrity.

'Innovative' is also an interesting choice of word. As an amateur follower of business jargon, 'innovation' wasn't used much in business speak (it certainly existed, but in a different sense than that I observe today). In the 90s and 00s 'creativity' was the buzz-word, hand-in-hand with 'out of the box'. 'Creativity' as a term seems to have fallen off a cliff in usage a little more than 10 years ago, with 'innovation' filling the gap. But unlike creativity, 'innovation' is used to reflect thinking that is very much 'inside the box (or push the edge, but don't get out)' way. Usage of this term is slightly different from the classical dictionary definition. 'Innovation' (today) as a term seems to refers to bringing an idea that already exists to fruition, or combining several pre-existing ideas with some sprinkles on the top, or an incremental process touted as 'the next big thing' when it's what existed before but improved a little/new angle taken - not 'creativity' from the 90s certainly, the term 'innovation' representing a lower risk appetite over the past decade, and a preference of small and frequent change over the traditional one-step 'creative disruption'. Note this is my observed adoption/morphing of the term in business language over the past few years.

</comment><comment><USER2> Part of the problem is the 10 years. It takes ten years to innovate and prove it.

Starlink started in 2015 and probably will change how the internet works.

Lime started in 2017, this may work.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ok, another suggestion: The Noise Protocol Framework.

[https://github.com/noiseprotocol/noise_spec/commit/213237c43...](https://github.com/noiseprotocol/noise_spec/commit/213237c43add01dc7f1bd8dfc4fb7fcbc6917521)

[https://noiseprotocol.org/](https://noiseprotocol.org/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Twitch launched in 2011 and nowadays it seems _everything_ is a good idea for video streaming.

</comment><comment><USER11> Biggest internet thing of the past decade is the smartphone and anything related.

</comment><comment><USER9> Slack.

It is, IMHO, a great step forward for chat rooms. It is palatable to people who would never bother with running irssi inside of tmux.

<comment><USER12> I guess Pidgin or Hexchat don't exist, eh.

<comment><USER13> Invention != innovation. They're two different things. People in this thread are confusing the two rather painfully. The title of the thread refers to innovation.

Innovate: "make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products"

That's exactly what Slack did. Slack was innovative. It didn't invent chatting on the Internet.</comment></comment></comment>


Dealing With JVM Limitations in Apache Cassandra - <AUTHOR> http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/17940621304/dealing-with-jvm-limitations-in-apache-cassandra

<comment><USER2> _Cliff Click: Many concurrent algorithms are very easy to write with a GC and totally hard (to down right impossible) using explicit free._

Wrong, we did it.

<comment><USER3> Did what, exactly? The 'impossible' bit may be meant in more of a practical sense than theoretical, since obviously you can just implement your own garbage collector if it comes to that, but it's well-established in the lock- free algorithm literature that algorithms that assume garbage collection are less complicated than those that use some other SMR (scalable memory reclamation) scheme like hazard pointers, epochs, or Pass The Buck. My own experience porting ConcurrentSkipListMap from JDK6 to C supports this.

Reference counting is usually not too bad from a complexity standpoint, but doesn't perform well for contended structures and has the cycle-collection problem, which may or may not matter depending on the algorithm.

I guess my point is: if you've solved this problem, the rest of us would love to hear how you did it :)

<comment><USER2> Our software is written in C++11 and we are highly asynchronous AND lockfree.

This was neither hard, nor impossible and surprisingly (<\-- irony) we have excellent performance with a very low memory footprint (in other words, all the problems discussed in the post don't exist for us).

We have a custom memory allocator for scalability. As for memory management we either don't copy it (zero-copy) or when we have to track the lifetime, we use reference counted memory (which does not have the problems you point out when correctly implemented and used).

We don't have (yet) a mapreduce-like feature, but this is coming.

Actually the most difficult part was the network layer.

We have a workable version with which you can play here: <http://www.wrpme.com/> Feel free to contact me in private if you have more questions.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the pointer, I look forward to playing around with wrpme. For context, my work on lock-free algorithms and data structures is in the context of processors with 128-1024 cores. I'm curious about your take on reference counting; my statement was not meant to be inflammatory, but was based on something I considered to be fundamental about reference counting. That is, refcounting a data structure requires, at minimum, an atomic increment and decrement for each element you traverse that must not be freed for your algorithm to be correct (you can elide the inc/dec in some cases if your algorithm can detect and recover from freed elements, but these elisions usually have tradeoffs in terms of the complexity of your algorithm or frequently having to restart your traversal).

Given that traversals require more or less one inc/dec per element, the ultimate efficiency of your algorithm is bounded by the throughput of atomic operations to a small number of memory locations (pretty low on x86 where they require cache-to-cache transfers, higher on something like a GPU where atomic functional units are colocated with the last-level cache), and by the amount of other work you're doing per element. For something like a linked list (or skip list) traversal, the inc/dec represents a 100-200% increase in the number of instructions per element, since the amount of other work is so low. In contrast, on a garbage collected system you can vary the collection frequency to achieve arbitrary amortized overhead.

So the overhead of ref counting is pretty variable, and depends on:

       * Whether you can elide refcounts in some cases
       * How much other work you're doing per element traversed
       * The contention distribution across the elements in your
         data structure (the first few elements of a linked
         list, for example, are highly contended because
         everybody starts there)
       * How many concurrent accessors you have
       * How often the accessors are hammering on the data
         structure (vs. doing other things in the program)
       * The throughput of atomic operations on your platform

To my mind, none of these have to do with 'correct' implementation or usage, they simply depend on the algorithm and the application. If your application consists of 1000 processors maintaining a sorted set of integers in a skip list, I don't see an easy way around making refcounting perform well. What am I missing?

<comment><USER2> You're correct about the reference counter, the trick is that the compiler can reduce the manipulations on the counter drastically with copy elision. C++ compilers are _very_ good at it. That's the easy part.

Now our implementation is a graph of small services (we call them nano- daemons) that slice a request into elementary tasks. nano-daemons communicate between them using messages that are copied around. This means a little memory overhead but absolutely no access contention. As you know C++ is very good at using the stack for that kind of allocation and the stack is FAST.

The actual content is only copied in the final phase into the network card's buffer. The reference counting is used to make sure the data is kept alive long enough, even if a parallel removal requested arrived meanwhile. The content isn't actually manipulated in parallel. An update implies the creation of a new buffer, reducing further the contention.

So in other words, if you have many parallel gets on the same data, you have, in theory, a little contention caused by the reference counter being incremented.

In practice, reference counting doesn't show up in profiling (so far). Actually most time is spent in the asynchronous callbacks waiting for I/O completion, something which we are very proud of! :)

We've benchmarked our software on a grid of 200 servers with 12 cores each and it does much better than other products, especially for entries larger than 8 kiB.

If you think about it, you realize that somehow, at some point, you will have a bottleneck, whatever design you choose.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Video: The Future Of Computing, Minority Report Style - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/2821182

<comment><USER2> Minority Report style computing has existed for a long time now. I was doing a research internship a few years ago and was talking to one of the professors about it - the Minority Report interface was based off real interfaces, not the other way around, and these interfaces were rejected as useful means of interacting with a computer because its much too tiring to wave your hands around like that for long periods of time. At least, this is what I was told.

Having said that, I'd love the three projector setup at the start of the video that mrphoebs linked. I also imagine this kind of thing would be awesome for entertainment (more awesome wiimote) and it _looks_ like it could be useful for some specific tasks too.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> another video <http://vimeo.com/2229299></comment>


Has YC ever funded a company with a Black founder? - <AUTHOR> I ask this question of out sheer curiosity.  Some people may ask "Why does it matter?" Well, it's a well known fact that there are a disproportionate amount of blacks in technology and it gets even worse when it comes to programming. I can imagine the numbers get even more grim when it comes to black programmers in startups.  I live in Metro Atlanta and have attended programming meetups, Big Nerd Ranch, attended meetings for companies wanting to join the ATDC (an incubator of sorts) and I'm often the ONLY black guy in the room.  Even with PYCON in town, there still aren't a whole lot of people that look like ME.  I applied to YC in 2007, WAAAAY before I was ready and was just wondering if anyone that looks like ME has EVER made it. <comment><USER2> I'm black as well. Went to Harvard and when I graduated I worked at the Kauffman Foundation. During that summer I pitched the idea to lawyers for deferred payment on corp formation and found a technical cofounder in August.

We wound up building a pretty miz alpha because I had no clue what I actually wanted to create to solve the problem I had in mind. Got very minimal traction, worked at a quant hedge fund to bootstrap. Learned to program (LAMP + JS) during the nights and weekends, launched a beta, got basic ("this could be interesting") level traction. Pitched angels, got funded, now working on an html5 based mobile website to capture the function our users find most interesting.

In general, I haven't experienced any discrimination or racial issues as yet. To be quite frank, the most helpful people have not been my color. This surprised me quite a bit because in the finance world where I interned all throughout school there's a strong "cultural networking" focus where you are connected with multiple career mentors, some of whom were "diversity" mentors.

With regard to my venture, I took the "open" approach and told everyone my idea in hopes of bouncing it around and making it better. In so doing, I met a lot of really interesting people of all colors who have served as advisors/friends/partners to this day. The startup community seems to be very much merit based and quantitative. If you have skills, traction, etc. you'll get looks but you wont get a handout for any reason unless you hustle for it.

(You should check out black web 2.0, <http://blackweb20.com> they have an interesting community of people in tech.)

<comment><USER3> Gah why doesn't that site let you post job openings?

I got some great advice from a Berkeley professor about increasing diversity in the workplace. I had issues giving preferential treatment to resumes that came in just because I thought diversity was important and he suggested I post job openings in places that are already heavily black/latino/etc.

I thought it was a great idea, but they aren't easy to find.

<comment><USER4> Hi Aloisius, we have a job board it's called Vocay.com, posting come up on the sidebar on Black Web 2.0 and we also try to post them as posts so that it gets distributed through our social graph. :)

-Angela Benton Founder, Black Web 2.0

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know how you feel. I was one of 2 black students in my graduating CS class at CMU. It has never been a source of pressure/anxiety for me, but I do understand how it may affect other black students to feel like you are on your own.

As far as investors go, I doubt that they have any aversion to supporting entrepreneurs of any background. This is one industry that I would presume is more of a meritocracy than society at large. As I said on my tumblr a while back (<http://bit.ly/g7jCAF>) investors can see the green inside all of us :-)

There are many discussions going on about women in technology startups. The greater question is not why there aren't more founders, but why there arent more minority/female students in academia. Most of your founders are going to be a subset of those in academia anyway, so why not look at the problem closer to the source?

<comment><USER6> "The greater question is not why there aren't more founders, but why there arent more minority/female students in academia"

[http://www.prb.org/Articles/2007/CrossoverinFemaleMaleColleg...](http://www.prb.org/Articles/2007/CrossoverinFemaleMaleCollegeEnrollmentRates.aspx)

[http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2009/section1/indicator11.as...](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2009/section1/indicator11.asp)

To wit: Females have dominated academia for a couple decades now.

Also, it should be pointed out that many founders are college dropouts or even high school dropouts, so I'd be interested in some sort of citation of evidence that one can assume most founders will be a subset of academia.

<comment><USER7> None of your data is broken out by major. That doesn't really help us, and you probably should refrain from going ad hominen immediately (troll, misinformed, are you serious etc) when your "facts" are far from conclusive.

I know in my college, in my two majors (mechanical engineer & computer science, 2007-2010) it was about 80/20 male/female in ME and 70/30 male/female in CS. The girls average was likely higher than the guys. I don't see how they are "dominating". You're numbers show there are more guys than girls in college - which was also true of my college which overall was 60/40 female/male. That doesn't mean there are more girls in majors related to startups like the ones we are talking about here (which I would highly doubt you can find numbers to say that).

<comment><USER8> There are more types of startups than just web applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Courtland Allen, co-founder of Taskforce (YC W11)

And he is the technical guy of the pair.

<comment><USER10> Strange. This is an actual and useful answer to the question but for some reason it's placed halfway down the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a black programmer with about 5 years of professional experience, I've always asked myself the same question. Throughout all the job interviews, conferences and meetups I've been to I've met no more than 3 other black programmers. One is my dad while the other is a friend and his dad. I still haven't come up with an answer but I do have two theories:

Role Models: There is no black Bill Gates. Not everyone is a trailblazer and for the rest of us role models play a huge "role" when choosing a career path. This is especially true for the black community. It becomes much easier to convince yourself, and your parents, that your passion is a valid career choice if you can point to an existing success story.

Access to technology: When I was a kid growing up I was the only one of my friends whose family owned a computer thanks to my dad being a programmer. Kinda hard to develop a passion for programming without one of those. Before tech skills became a requirement for any decent job computers were seen as expensive and unnecessary so everyone else was told "we'll get you one when you get to high school / college."

However, as I apply these these theories to today, Obama is president and just about every kid, rich or poor, has daily access to a computer. I'm guessing in 5 years time, when the next generation begins their careers, the number of black programmers will increase drastically all on its own.

That said I do know a good number of black network engineers and sys admins so I'm completely lost as to why programming is the only IT profession with such a huge discrepancy. Any theories?

<comment><USER12> What about peer pressure? I'm not black, but I went to a public high school, fairly diverse, let's say 15%/20%/10%/55% black/asian/latino/white. My experience with black classmates was that in individual classes they were pretty typical in the mix of other students, reasonably friendly and participatory in class, etc. But then out in the hallways it was a whole different story. It just was not cool to be studious in any way. I saw black kids get made fun of by their peers just for carrying books. Kids who I was very friendly with in class would not even look at me in the commons, I'm presuming because associating with a white nerd would be social suicide.

<comment><USER11> Good point. For high school I switched to a private school with around the same demographics and since it was "college prep" all the black students understood that we were there to make something of ourselves. So I never experienced the anti-intellectual peer pressure in a school setting.

My friends from outside of school, however, STILL refer to me as "that corporate nigga". But since I know them from places like my neighborhood or sports teams where clics and social standings didn't exist there were no detrimental effects to being a nerd.

Anybody at any high school who is known as a programmer is going to be teased to some extent. What kept you from giving into the peer pressure?

<comment><USER12> Well I hung out with the stoners and freaks, which incidentally was one of the largest groups. I pretty much _did_ give in to the peer pressure, but I was fortunate that A) I had a computer at home and B) I came up right as the web was taking off, so I learned as I went, thereby neatly bypassing the need for academic credentials. I did eventually finish a CS degree, but it was irrelevant to my career path.

My story is more one of taking advantage of opportunities, rather than overcoming obstacles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _I'm often the ONLY black guy in the room_

It's probably my European naiveté talking here, but I seriously wonder if and why that matters to you. Most of us belong to some kind of "minority" in some fashion, sometimes it's visible from the outside, sometimes not. Are things in the USA really so bad that it matters what color your skin is? Isn't tech a business of ideas anyway?

<comment><USER14> It definitely matters in Europe, possibly moreso than in the USA, at least in the circles I've been in (I'm white myself, so this is mostly from observation and friends). In Denmark at least, there is a _lot_ of awkwardness around race, and it certainly isn't the case that non-white people generally feel comfortable in groups where they're the only non-white person (even worse if everyone else is not only white, but specifically of Scandinavian ethnic heritage, which emphasizes the not-like-me-ness even more). I'm not sure of the exact reasons, or how much is actual racism, but there is definitely a vague sense of weirdness/discomfort.

<comment><USER13> That's interesting. I'm from Germany myself, and I'm convinced it's the most unfriendly "western" country ever. There is certainly a lot of racism here, but it generally happens in socially and economically compromised regions with low unemployment, and then it's usually directed toward the Turks (because "they took our jooooooobs"). Not that there are many black people in Germany to begin with, but I worked with a lot of people from different ethnicities over the years and I always got the impression that we're all being treated equally (shitty).

<comment><USER15> That's a fairly typical German viewpoint. It's something that caught me a bit off guard when I moved to Germany 9 years ago.

Germans have a real aversion to noticing their own racism, no doubt that's a product of cultural baggage, but racism is pretty rampant in Germany and permeates all levels of society.

A few of questions to suss things out a bit: What would you or your friends parents think if you announced your engagement to a Turkish girl / guy? If in most of society racism isn't problematic, what do you think the chances of an ethnically Turkish chancellor being elected are? Why are people whose _grandparents_ immigrated to Germany still commonly referred to as foreigners?

<comment><USER13> > _What would you or your friends parents think if you announced your > engagement to a Turkish girl / guy?_

I have been in a relationship with a Turkish girl for eight years, dude. Everyone was OK with it. Not once did anyone say anything about it. You know what? It was just fine.

> _That's a fairly typical German viewpoint_

Did you just assert that I'm a "fairly typical" German racist? If you knew me at all you wouldn't accuse me of painting Germany in an overly positive light. I hate it here.

<comment><USER15> Sorry, no, my intent was not at all to paint you as being racist. What I meant as "typically German" is that most Germans, even those who are not particularly racist themselves, have something of a blind-spot for noticing the depth of racism within German society.

And sure, there are families where race is a non-issue. I could list examples as well of where I've seen things go the other way, but that's side-stepping my point: surely you'd agree that in many, many families it would be an issue?

<comment><USER13> > _even those who are not particularly racist themselves, have something of a > blind-spot for noticing the depth of racism within German society._

In this context it's worth pointing out that my grandpa was a Nazi, and even worse, as is one of my cousins to this day - in an otherwise lefty-liberal family. So if I want to see racism, I don't have to look very hard. But even the Nazi cousin behaved normally toward my girl friend at the time, I guess his hatred is geared more toward anonymous concepts and not actual people. When I asked him flat-out, he spouted some nonsense about how my girl friend is somehow not part of "The Turkish Problem" at all.

> _surely you'd agree that in many, many families it would be an issue?_

I'm not even remotely qualified to answer this in a meaningful way, especially after the feedback I got here today. All I can say is that, being from Germany, I know a lot of people who elevated being mean and destructive into an artform. Some of them are fascists, some of them are bad in other ways. What I can attest to is the general social climate here, it's just as bad as the actual climate.

<comment><USER16> Well, I was born in Russia and moved to Germany 20 years ago with my family, I was 11 then. Today I consider myself as German, so far the background. What is really true, even if you speak native German and identify yourself with the people and the country, for most Germans, you are not German. I do not mean it in the negative way, I think it is just the way it is, if you have not a German name or look "Russian". But I do not have/ had any problems with it. Moreover I realized, that although people know you are originally not from Germany, you are valued on your skills (at school, job, sport, etc) and not by you ethnical background. And those people from Russia/Turkey or whatever who claim they are discriminated e.g while looking for a job I just can repeat, no, you just did not tried hard enough. In Russia there is a saying: You are greeted by your look, but bid goodbyed for your skills. I think in Germany this is a very reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Black people only make up 13% of the population. [1] Most people forget this fact when judging race in a population.

1) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States)

<comment><USER14> I don't think that particular statistic by itself explains much of it; YC has funded over 200 founders, so if indeed the relevant population were 13% Black, that would imply an expectation of around 25 Black founders. I don't think anyone's asking why there aren't 50% Black founders, by why there aren't closer to 13%. (There may well be good explanations, but they have to be something other than the 13% total population number.)

<comment><USER18> Yeah, demographics and statistics are tough and mostly useless in this situation. For example, the DOE found that roughly 40% of people have merely a basic or "below basic" level of literacy, yet I doubt that's true of the YC alumni..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It would help to know how many black founders apply in the first place.

<comment><USER20> I think the question is not about racism during the funding process, but how much of a minority black people are in this situations.

<comment><USER19> Yes, and that's what the answer to my question will illustrate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Michael Seibel CEO of Justin.tv comes to mind.

<comment><USER22> Pretty sure Seibel joined after it got funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> A Co Founder of Addmired Inc. (YC W08) is black. So at least one.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's all about access. YC can only fund the best applications it gets. Those often come from, I'm guessing, people whose creative sides have been nurtured while _also_ getting some kind of constructive exposure to programming. Just like anything else, the socio-economically disadvantaged often don't get the access or education they need to wield or understand the power of programming. I do think that is changing, as evinced by the programs and organizations that have sprouted up to address the issue. But it's a slog.

</comment><comment><USER25> I really don't think YC cares about ethnicity. I also don't quite get the point of this post.

<comment><USER26> I don't see the question or the discussion so far as meeting the standard for "An interesting new phenomena." It looks like something that would be better served over on Quora than on HN. It's a reasonable question, but just as many subjects--explicitly including politics--are of interest to HN's readerships but still not HN-worthy, it doesn't appear to meet the standards in the FAQ for the front page.

Discussions of minority participation in technology and entrepreneurship goes on ad nauseaum elsewhere. If it is to come up here out of the blue, we ought to have some interesting angle to YCombinator funding. For example, if we know that YCombinator funds double the proportion of the rest of the industry, that would be interesting and new.

If we have no evidence of anything interesting or new, the question hardly seems like Hacker _News_. If it's a simple question, an email to Paul Graham would probably obtain a simple answer.

<comment><USER27> "An interesting new phenomenon" is used an exception to the rule that politics (and so forth) shouldn't be posted. In the paragraph right before that quote, we find:

 _Anything that good hackers would find interesting. [...] anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity._

I was at PyCon as well, and observed the exact same anecdote that the OP describes. At my company's booth, the only minorities I can think of who talked to us were more than likely visiting from Europe, Asia, or South America. Therefore, I'm curious, and I'm interested to see the response; not from accusing Y Combinator of racism, as some seem to suggest, but merely to get some data on minority penetration into our field.

There is no "standard" for the front page. We're all smart people, and we can be trusted to make judgments.

<comment><USER28> I was all set to vote this up until I got to the last paragraph.

It seems that a lot of people have the idea that HN is a democracy, run by the will of the people. Nothing could be further from the truth. pg and the editors have the last word on everything. It's not immediately obvious, because pg doesn't go around saying "I banned this guy because he was a jerk." That's polite of him, but the truth is, quite a few people get banned for being jerks, every day. And quite a few submissions get killed for being off- topic.

Having said that, I agree with you that this is a good submission, and I'm a little dismayed that raganwald is arguing against it. When I saw the subject line, and that it had over 100 comments, I figured it was going to be ugly. I was delightfully surprised to find myself honestly learning something from almost every comment I've read here. I haven't upvoted this much stuff in months. Pretty well restored my faith in humanity, it did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Good Question. It would be interesting to hear about the experiences minority programmers have had in the startup scene (in our out of YC).

<comment><USER30> As a British Asian (that means Indian-subcontinent Asian for you Americans :) - I'd say race is a total non-issue in the startup community in the UK.

(Off the top of my head of the YC companies I believe Heyzap, Auctomatic, SnapTalent, and Rapportive all had British-Asian co-founders)

<comment><USER31> American society has a very different relationship with Indian-subcontinent- Asians and African-Americans.

<comment><USER30> oh definitely, but I think nocko was broadening the question to ask about other ethnic groups as well.

<comment><USER31> That's a fair point, but people of Asian (subcontinent included) descent are pretty damn ubiquitous in the industry, and I don't think anybody worries that they're being discriminated against.

I feel like something more relevant to the OP would be including Latinos, or talking about how rich the parents of programmers are.

<comment><USER30> I don't think anyone's saying blacks are being discriminated against either, rather asking the question what are the factors driving the change.

British Asians on a whole tend to come from lesser educated poorer backgrounds than average, do less well in school, etc. That they're well represented in the developer and startup community despite that makes an interesting data point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can't speak to YC's experience, but I attended a historically black college/university (referred to as HBCUs) and knew a number of top-notch African-American CS students/hackers while I was there.

At one point, out of 7 or 8 undergrads in a research group I was with, more than half had completed PhDs and I think the rest of us (I was the lone white student in the group) had picked up MS degrees.

A number of the higher-quality students from this institution were heavily recruited by big corps with eyes on increasing minority hires and diversity rates.

What I mostly know is that successful CS students from this institution had their choice of top-notch careers or academic research opportunities. As a school (and my general region), not much emphasis was placed on entrepreneurship. Maybe both facts come into play with startup culture today.

</comment><comment><USER33> As a black person why do you think this is?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not many black programming role models. Sad to say but many black youth still see sports and entertainment and the only way to achieve a high level of success in America. My primary goal in life is to try to change that perception by becoming a successful programmer.

<comment><USER34> I'm not sure about this... do you really believe that programmers need role models for success?

We have people that we idolize but its not because of _common-place programming ability_ or merely their job but because of what they've achieved ----Bill Gates with Microsoft, Linus Torvalds with Linux, etc.

Programmers seem to usually be self-described 'geeks' and thus like programming for its own sake.

<comment><USER2> Don't need specifically black role models but it would help. Just proof positive that being a programmer can be interesting and lucrative. Coming from a social anthropology background and having experienced it in grade school myself, there is an issue of "talking and acting white." Programming falls directly under that umbrella unfortunately.

Is it complete BS, absolutely. But at the core of it, we're talking about people delineating groups based on sameness and otherness which is a practice as old as there have been social structures.

It helps kids to identify with a mentor whose shoes they can envision being in directly. More important than "looking like" though is feeling a sense of kinship that comes from similar background. I'm a firm believer that we should focus on the level of privilege not color. There are all types of people coming from a disadvantaged background that need help, how do we make programming/startups attainable and "sexy?" Silicon Valley's got that down but NYC is still a "banking city"

<comment><USER34> > Don't need specifically black role models but it would help.

That is exactly what the OP is asking for.

To tell about my experience, I did not grow up with "black programming" models. Even to date, I can't think of a single black man over 50 who is a programmer that I know personally or professionally.

I got into programming for the same reasons I assume many other HNers did: computer were readily available for my use, and I enjoyed the logic exercise. Once I found something I was good it, it was irrelevant if other people thought it was 'cool'.

Luckily though, I grew up black in a black nation so accusations of being 'white' was the furthest thing from most peoples minds. You weren't 'white', you were just 'uncool'. I think that's a significant difference because one is an attack on your identity, and the other merely on your social credentials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If you watch the slide show: <http://ycombinator.com/> long enough, a black guy will show(< 3 mins in).

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm 27 and I've only met one black programmer. That is rather strange.

</comment><comment><USER37> It's possible that very few black people seem to care enough to give it a shot. Being black has never stopped me from trying anything. So long as I know that I can pull it off. At the very least there may be a slight prejudice simple because of the scarcity of motivated black individuals. In the end, if one can show what one's got, I do not see why that person should get a fair chance. That's my 2 cents on the matter.

</comment><comment><USER38> Not really on topic, but I'm in Atlanta too at the moment and when I went to the game developers meetup about 5 of the 20 people who showed up were black & other game development events I've been to in Georgia Tech had a few black people in them too (less than their proportion of the population, but still a good 1/4-1/5 the attendants).

Don't know what that might say about the games industry, if at all, just putting it out there.

</comment><comment><USER39> Kalimah Priforce (Qykno | Career Matchmaking 4 Kids)

There have been several discussions about this topic, including my own: "Startup America Should Look Like America" <http://bit.ly/fuqcBB>.

There are groups that are forming to address the need for diversity in the tech world.

The "Black Founders" Kickoff Launch Event is on Thursday, March 24th, 2011 at www.meetup.com/BlackFounders/events/16882191/ The Plancast event details are here: <http://plancast.com/p/4cq2>

We've recently launched four "Building While Brown" groups on facebook: Bay Area: <http://on.fb.me/hyJJhM>, NYC <http://on.fb.me/fF2lXW>, DC|VA <http://on.fb.me/gf4beu> and the RTP <http://on.fb.me/dZCrnj>

</comment><comment><USER4> I think this is a good question, I'd like to piggyback on it and ask of the people who have applied did they apply as a team or as a single co-founders? Were they technical? etc.

I only ask these questions because I think they are important. I applied to YC and just had a conversation w/ someone who applied also however at the time of application we were both single founders.

I consider myself technical but I'm sure not as technical as many of you since I've only dealt in front-end web development. YC does have super specific criteria for applying, they are looking for a certain type of founder (or team of co-founders) so it would be helpful to this discussion to know.

I think it also depends on the idea/start-up submitted. Part of the review process does seem like they are looking at the entrepreneur but it also seems like they are looking at the entrepreneur (or team) and their ability to execute on the idea.

Just my thoughts...

</comment><comment><USER40> <http://oonwoye.com/2010/04/05/black-founders/>

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm in Atlanta, black, a programmer and and I casually take notice and see that most of the faces that surround me aren't those that look like me. I tend to wonder the same questions at times. It's a question of is the game we play skewed towards a certain outcome. If it is how do we play?

</comment><comment><USER42> It really doesn't bother me at all because it makes sense why the low numbers exists in the first place. Basically the black community doesn't lend itself to hacking in general. When I hang with my friends I switch from geeky to a more hip hop style, they are simply not interested in what i am into and talk more about sport/entertainment topics. The few black friends I have that are in tech only do it for work. To have a Hacker/YC mind you usually have to fully immerse yourself into hacking, eg.. hacking at home,IRC etc.. So I believe the disproportion just reflects the type of people who simply interested. Believe me if you have the next million dollar idea in your hands then your set. The only color that really matters in this tech entrepreneurial space is green.

</comment><comment><USER43> It'd be interesting to see. African Americans and Latinos* make up about %28 of the US population, but are very under represented in startups. East Asians, South Asians, Arabs and Jews are over represented in tech based on over all population. What's more, most of the black programmers i've worked with at startups were born in Africa or the Caribbean.

I suspect that YC would be wise to try and recruit diversity, having different perspectives, backgrounds and world views among founders at the the dinners and other places, would probably make all the startups stronger.

Latinos or Hispanics are an ethnic group, not racial, there are white, black, native american, and asian latinos.

<comment><USER44> > I suspect that YC would be wise to try and recruit diversity

Why?

Are you assuming that different races might have different strengths (on average)? If so, that assumption implies that, again on average, a purely merit based system will result in less diversity than the general population.

To the extent that race correlates with culture and culture has an effect on strengths, the same applies.

So, remind me why diversity is important?

<comment><USER44> Note that said "less diversity" is in each role, because different roles require different strengths. Whether or not a given organization ends up less diverse depends on the roles in said organization.

However, I'm still looking for an answer to my question - why should YC care about diversity?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> How many apply? The population norm is irrelevant.

That said, how to correct this? E.g. Stanford University has no quota and doesn't yield on admission standards, but does a good job actively recruiting qualified minority students. Does YC recruit at all?

</comment><comment><USER46> It doesn't address your question directly. But I find it a good opportunity to show you a visualization I've made for San Francisco Elementary school assignment by ethnicity. Clearly the city is not distributed evenly.

<http://tungwaiyip.info/2011/2011_SFUSD_ethnicity.html>

</comment><comment><USER47> Here in France, we have many African people from our former colonies studying here, and many staying too, so I guess we are used to it. Speaking about skin color, there are more "brown" people than "black" people, because Magreb is more represented than sub-saharian countries.

</comment><comment><USER48> The population percentages of race have absolutely no correlation to the percentages of startup founders accepted by YC or that would potentially be accepted by YC. With YC only funding 200 or so startups, that sample is too low to quantify any conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER49> Others have answered the question and there are a few. However, if Paul Graham is looking to inflate the stats ala Campbell's Law... I'm actually a white African-American. ;)

</comment><comment><USER50> black male founder probably...black female founder probably not

<comment><USER51> and why not?

<comment><USER50> because there are very few women in tech, and that number goes down even further if you just consider those that are black.

<comment><USER51> As a black woman .... I have to agree

<comment><USER52> Hey tersiag I'm putting together a blog post on your experience thus far. Would love to get your insight. Hit me <http://thegeoffreyhull.com>

<comment><USER51> Sure I would love to. keep in mind that I'm a black woman from African and not America, but I'm sure my insights are universal...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> More interesting to me: how many have been rejected? If anyone were curious about possible racism in funding (AND I'M NOT SAYING THERE IS AT ALL) that would be the metric i'd begin with.

</comment><comment><USER54> Confession: When I read something online that I know was written by a black person, I am significantly more critical of grammar and usage. I sometimes read sentences twice simply because I expect errors.

I consider myself to be a good person and I don't actively discriminate against people based on things like race, but I simply can't help this reflex. Sad, huh?

</comment><comment><USER55> I am curious as well.

</comment><comment><USER56> _was just wondering if anyone that looks like ME has EVER made it_

Assuming that there might be something "unattractive" about being black -- a big assumption but one I'm willing to play along with for purposes of this thread -- how about fat people? Old people? People who don't live in cities? People who didn't go to an ivory league college? Conservatives? People who have physical defects?

On a few occasions, it's been stated that basically you need to look "cute", "serious", or various other quasi-bullshit phrases. It's a logical follow-up question to start asking about exactly which attributes people find attractive.

But I'm not sure what difference it makes. If your startup depends on YC, they probably don't want you. It's like the old thing about only asking for a loan when you don't need the money.

While you can count up various attributes and report on them, that's a long way from a causal relationship. Maybe no black people applied. Maybe there were only 2 black people that applied, but they were both joke applications. There's simply no useful information you can gather from a count. At least not that I can see. Perhaps you can develop a suspicion that the odds are stacked against you, but if you're looking for reasons to think the odds are stacked against you, hell, just go look at the stats for startups in general. No need to add anything else in there.

I guess I just don't understand your point. It doesn't seem very productive, no matter what the answer is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just looking for some inspiration. It's that simple. I don't think 'THE MAN' is trying to hold me down. If I had that mentality I would have never made it this far.

<comment><USER56> I must be an idiot, because I still don't understand it.

So I'm an old fat ugly-looking guy. According to you, I should be looking for other folks like me who made it? This will somehow be inspirational?

And what good, exactly, does finding another person who _looks_ like me going to accomplish? What the hell difference does it make?

Have you ever visited or not visited a web site because of the way the person who created it looks? Ever purchased or not purchased an app because of the religion or heritage of the developer?

YC, if they have any sense in their heads, should care about traction, scalability, and success potential. None of that is based on attributes like this. If it is, I've never heard of it. (And it makes no sense)

Now perhaps you can make a case that things like this play a role with finding investors, but AFAIK YC has made it clear -that not every entrant has to have a beauty pageant investor track.

Here's a question I could get behind: Let's say I want to find funding. What sorts of things that I can control -- looks, haircut, attitude, etc -- make the biggest superficial difference to investors?

I'd like to hear a lot more about that. Wonder if anybody has any data?

<comment><USER57> I thought his question was perfectly legitimate and interesting. I look for people like me who've succeeded for inspiration and ideas.

The black experience in the United States is likely quite different than the white one. Ever watched a Tyler Perry movie? His films have grossed over $400 Million and go _largely_ unseen by whites. It's because the black experience in the USA is so different. The people who live it, identify with it.

I'm sure it really was a fair question based on interest. Not any sort of accusation.

<comment><USER56> Yes, it's a fair question, as I tried to explain. Hell I upvoted your reply.

My point was that the answer to the question has no usefulness that I can determine. You can either explain it or not, but please don't assign emotions and attitudes to me that I am not having.

There are a lot of people with various experiences that share some commonality. Ever attend a Jewish wedding? Spend some time in a mosque? Been to Mardi Gras? Had perogies? Unless you are saying that the "black experience" is somehow different from the "Puerto Rican experience" or the "Eastern European experience" then all of these issues are on the table and should be treated equally.

I don't think you're saying that, so please stop picking on me. I was simply saying that the question had no value that I could determine. These things might (unfairly) be success criteria for a cocktail party, but never a startup. I'd love to be proven wrong. How many ways can I say "Stop looking to people outside yourself and to attributes you can't control and instead go make something happen?" before it sinks in? And what's so controversial about saying that?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is there a blog about startups and new technology from Asia? - <AUTHOR>

i am especially curious on what is done in Japan, China, South korea or Taiwan. is there an equivalent to techcrunch or RW/W [...put your favorite tech blog here], or is innovation all in the US? <comment><USER2> I know of one from India - watblog.com</comment>


Show HN: Learn foreign languages by playing games - <AUTHOR> http://language-monster.com <comment><USER2> Nice idea but the left-click when I target a word don't work (Chrome, Windows 8.1). Plane with up arrow is okay . Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> @apixline Thanks a lot again, the issue is fixed (along with the buttons in the top-left corner not working on windows).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> cute idea, but a few issues I had:

1\. No instructions. I couldn't figure out what to do for a while.

2\. No sound? Learning to hear a foreign language is much more important than learning to read it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for your comment!

1\. There actually are instructions (button in the top left corner, shown during the game). I guess it should be more visible to be useful :) 2\. Great idea, I'll certainly think about it!

<comment><USER4> Love the idea! However, the info button in the top left corner wasn't working for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! A bit weird, should be working. Will look into that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tanks Are Mighty Fine Things (1946) - <AUTHOR> http://imperialclub.com/Yr/1945/46Tanks/ <comment><USER2> One of the interesting things I've heard the Soviets did [1] was operational research: The lifespan of a tank on the Eastern front was less than 6 months, and once in combat was less than 14 hours. Less than 1000 miles driven.

Knowing they didn't _need_ a tank that lasted more than 1000 miles let them lower the number of parts and man-hours for each tank, allowing them to get them off the production line that much faster.

You can imagine what an advantage it was that the Allies produced four times as many tanks as the Axis powers.

[1] [https://youtu.be/N6xLMUifbxQ?t=2295](https://youtu.be/N6xLMUifbxQ?t=2295)

<comment><USER3> I've been to the tank museum in Munster (not to be confused with Münster if you ever decide to go!). Looking up close, comparing the American and German WWII tanks to the Russian ones is absolutely night and day.

The alignment of the panels and the welding on a Tiger tank looks (to an untrained eye) pretty much as good as you could make a mass produced vehicle back then. A T34 by contrast has haphazard misalignments connected by welding that looks like mine did when I was learning in high school.

So you can see with your own eyes that they essentially put the bare minimum of quality in to them.

This is a very interesting talk on the manufacturing efficiency of the US, Russia and Germany in WW2, which drills down into the details of how the factories were organized and the difference in man hours spent on each (which I'll spoil the bottom line of here: US 10k, SU 35-50k, DE 300k).

We've all heard stories about how Russian tanks in certain cases were driven out of factories partially completed straight in to combat, but up until I watched it I hadn't heard of Tiger tanks being rejected by the Wehrmacht because they didn't latest gear stick design. I highly recommend it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6xLMUifbxQ&ab_channel=TheNa...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6xLMUifbxQ&ab_channel=TheNationalWWIIMuseum)

<comment><USER4> The T34's were designed this way on purpose. They purposely skipped on making things perfect so long as they were functional. The guns worked. The engines worked. The transmissions worked. This is what they needed, nothing more. See the CIA document regarding this tank: [https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia- rdp81-0...](https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia- rdp81-01044r000100070001-4)

The German tanks, on the other hand, were designed and built meticulously...at least in the early days of the war. The downside is they were expensive to build and maintain...and they were not reliable.

For instance, the M4 was designed to be simple and easy to maintain, and required 3 times less the amount of man and materiel than the German tanks required. The engine and transmission in an M4 could be replaced by two men in four hours. For all the fear the larger German tanks (Tiger 1 and II, Panther) caused, the reality is, they did not construct very many because they were expensive. At any one time, half of them were broken and needing time consuming repair.

<comment><USER5> The German tanks were put together by highly skilled craftsmen. Often, the parts were hand machined or finished for each tank. This meant that the tanks did not have interchangeable parts, and were difficult/impossible to fix in the field. Being unable to fix equipment in the field was a general problem for the German army, as a very large proportion of their trucks and other equipment was captured from other countries, and they had no spares.

Once the Soviets moved their factories beyond the Ural mountains, the Germans, who lacked heavy bombers, had no way to knock out the factories. They stood no chance against the Soviet T34s and tank destroyers at that point.

If you're interested in digging deeper into this kind of history, take a look at "The Second World Wars" by Victor Davis Hanson.

<comment><USER6> Fascinating. In Britain it's long been recognised that our frequently innovative design engineering is often let down by poor production engineering. Many exmples can be cited: most F1 cars are UK built, but we no longer have an mass market car producer. Everything built by Jaguar and Land Rover! Spitfires took four times as many man hours to build as ME109s. The Rolls Royce Merlin was the best aero engine available to the Allies early in the war, but was effectively hand built. When Packard started building Merlins for the P51 they had to retro fit the production engineering tolerances to the design [2]. So I'm surprised to learn that tank production engineering was so poor. I wonder which models were most affected? Panzer III or IV? King Tiger?

[1] Stephen Bungay - The Most Dangerous enemy. [2] [https://www.tested.com/art/makers/492418-packard-merlin- how-...](https://www.tested.com/art/makers/492418-packard-merlin-how-detroit- mass-produced-britains-hand-built-powerhouse/)

<comment><USER3> I only learned this while studying German, but King Tiger is actually a poor translation.

The German nickname for the tank was Königstiger, which is the German name for a Bengal tiger, but if translated literally it would instead be Royal Tiger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The association may not be remembered now, but Imperial was a Chrysler brand from times past. Here's another booklet I love from the site: [http://www.imperialclub.com/Repair/Lit/Master/003/cover.htm](http://www.imperialclub.com/Repair/Lit/Master/003/cover.htm)

and previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15397926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15397926)

Re: Tanks - there are so many things that are obvious in hindsight, but its amazing how effective US production was.

<comment><USER8> I think it was Max Hastings in one of his books on WW2 who makes the point that there is no point having tanks that are six times as good as your opponents if your opponent has ten times as many tanks as you do!

<comment><USER9> The tank crews would probably disagree; Allied tank crews sustained terrible casualties during the invasion of Europe.

And it did little good for morale to know that a German tank would knock out yours and probably kill your crew in the time it would take to fire tree rounds. (Twice to find the correct angle and the third to score a hit).

Strategically, this worked out nicely in WWII due to massive manpower advantage and the Germans' severe weakening on the Eastern front, but the poor performance of Allied tanks was still a serious strategic blunder.

<comment><USER10> The M4 tank is an underrated tank. It does have one major flaw: its main gun is undersized--but the tank crews themselves were saying "we don't want a bigger gun" when the tank was being designed, and no one realized the mistake until late 1944. It also excels in other areas, most notably reliability and survivability (it's incredibly easy to exit the tank in a jiffy if it's on fire, especially compared to German tanks). German tanks notably had a deficiency in reliability--they may look powerful on paper, but if a tank is spending half its time awaiting repairs, it's not contributing to your actual war effort.

<comment><USER11> It wasn't a mistake. US tank doctrine was to use specialised tank destroyers against Tigers; the Shermans were there to support the main army. And a few Shermans had the more powerful 76mm guns which were better against Tigers. But the 75mm guns were fine against the vast majority of targets they were likely to encounter. Tigers were incredibly rare.

The Brits did put a 17 pounder gun on the Sherman to create the Firefly, which was much more powerful, but also too large for the small turret of the Sherman, making it a cramped, uncomfortable and impractical tank. The basic Sherman was fine. Arguably the best tank of the war.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 1946 - "Tanks Are Mighty Fine Things"

1955 - First Anti Tank Guided Missiles developed

2019 - "ATGMs Are Mighty Fine Things"

</comment><comment><USER13> I knew that the authors name as my late grandfather was fond of saying 'rang a bell'. This guy started in newspapers at 17 and ended up editing the Saturday Evening Post.

The Post at the time was the largest selling and most influential magazine in America. They actually sold the magazine like a newspaper complete with paperboys. My father was one of those delivery boys in Detroit during the depression.

[https://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/16/archives/i-wesley-w- stout...](https://www.nytimes.com/1971/11/16/archives/i-wesley-w-stout-is- dead-at-82-i-edited-saturday-evening-postj.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> War is stupid.

<comment><USER15> Written on a device, invented for war, send by a device ment for a war, transfered by a device, engineered for economic competition (a war in all but name forced to peace by a governments monopolizing force), read while eating food that was taken away from other critter who would prefered to have eaten it.

Stupid processes can give rise to usefull things and create intelligent incentives.

The people dieing in wars, are lost to us forever though. Thinking about all the russian mathematicians, jewish pianists, german painters and american poets who died in the war, oftenn without ever noticing there talent, one can come to the conclusion that war makes stupid.</comment></comment>


Advanced CSS expandable button - <AUTHOR> http://dreamcss.blogspot.com/2009/04/advanced-css-expandable-button.html <comment><USER2> Interesting, but why the JS-hidden (i.e. cloaked from search engines) link to a web hosting provider in the demo page?

I found it by testing how the button degrades when you disable CSS or JS or both.

<comment><USER3> By the look of the source, it's from an analytics snippet, and the image has failed to load. Probably the fault of the provider, rather than any "sneaky" attempt on behalf of the webmaster.

Unrelated - I didn't realise you were on here (recognise you from Cre8asite forums) :)</comment></comment>


How a Trump Administration Could Terrorize Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/how-a-trump-administration-could-terrorize-silicon-valley <comment><USER2> Haven't there been enough click-baity, hyperbolic articles about Trump on HN?

Amazon deserves to get broken up. Jeff Bezos is abusing Amazon's position as a monopoly. Sellers regularly get banned without any reason given (and support is an automated response). Workers are subjected to deplorable conditions, long hours, and easily fired.</comment>


Announcing: One Month Stripe Payments - <AUTHOR> https://onemonth.com/announcing-stripe-payments

<comment><USER2> As a note of criticism, that video did not add to your post (it seems more like an ad for Stripe than an explanation video for your integration with Stripe), and the "humor" nearly made me close the tab.</comment>


Flu Widespread, Leading a Range of Winter's Ills - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/health/flu-widespread-leading-a-range-of-winters-ills.html?hpw

<comment><AUTHOR> The Google Graph showing the severity based on people searching for symptom advise is particularly alarming:

<http://www.google.org/flutrends/us/#US></comment>


Imagine... (a slew of startup ideas in the spirit of PG's "being good") - <AUTHOR> http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/008207.html

<comment><USER2> Imagine... people doing what they want and making decisions that are best for themselves.</comment>


US10144532B2 – Craft using an inertial mass reduction device - <AUTHOR> https://patents.google.com/patent/US10144532B2/en <comment><USER2> There's two distinct possibilities...

1\. A lot of physics is about to be rewritten. Travel to other planets and stars is within our grasp. The entire world is about to change. We'll all remember this day for the rest of our lives.

2\. The Navy has been paying a very convincing snake oil salesman to make patents for impossible devices.

<comment><USER3> This is more than travel to other planets. This is travel to other times, maybe even other dimensions or universes.

<comment><USER4> Which leads one to think explanation #2 is most likely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Smells a lot like the EmDrive. That didn't pan out so well under increased scrutiny!

This isn't the first time a physics-violating patent has been granted - anybody else remember the Orbo?

[https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2011110951A3/en?oq=WO201...](https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2011110951A3/en?oq=WO2011110951)

<comment><USER6> How do you know emdrive did not pan out? It's shown that the used configuration was wrong by the German institute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Being a patent lawyer, I had to dig a little deeper because there is a record behind every patent.

As you some of you already know, the patent office does not freely give patents for impossible devices. No perpetual motion machines, no magic invisibility cloaks, nothing that an ordinary person in the relevant art could not build after reading the patent. This is a doctrine called "enablement"—the patent, plus what is already known in the art, must be enough to enable one to build a working device without undue experimentation. This is the quid pro quo of the patent system: to get ownership of the invention for 20 years, you must tell everyone enough about it to build it themselves.

This patent almost suffered the fate of non-enablement at the patent office. What led to its issuance is the interesting part because patent examiner tried and tried to reject this patent as not "enabling" the invention. Yet it issued anyways.

I cannot link directly to the patent prosecution documents, but the files are public and you can find them at the USPTO database[0] by searching for the patent's application number 15/141,270.

The patent was filed in April 2016. The first action by the USPTO was in November 2017 with the usual delay and it rejected all claims as not enabling the invention. Simply put the examiner said: "You're claiming a perpetual motion machine, good-bye."

The patent examiner and the applicant held an interview in January 2018, which is an ordinary event to try to convince the examiner is wrong. The examiner pointed out "that he still felt there were enablement issues." The applicant disagreed. No agreement was reached.

A few days later, the applicant filed his formal response to the rejection. He attached a published article under his authorship in AIAA Space Forum[1]. He also cited other publications on how to "generate extremely high EM flux intensities." Basically, he's saying I'm peer-reviewed here is some other peer-reviewed articles, and it being peer-reviewed that's all you need to know.

But most interestingly, he attached a letter from Dr. James Sheehy, Chief Technical Officer of the Naval Systems Air Command, indicating that the amount of magnetic field and electricity described as being required by the patent "can be created, and thus the invention is enabled." Dr. James Sheehy is a real dude, with that real title and corresponding resume.[2]

Dr. Sheehy's letter is fascinating. It asserts that the applicant is currently one year into a project to demonstrate the feasibility of high EM field-energy and flux and has begun experimenting with associated propulsion systems. Dr. Sheehy says he believes the research shows the invention will be a reality. Then he says (seriously, he says) "China is already investing significantly in this area and I would prefer we hold the patent opposed to paying forever more to use this revolutionary technology."

The examiner at the patent office (who is typically kind of knowledgeable in the field) nevertheless called B.S. Peer-reviewed, shmear-reviewed. He rejected the application again finally in March 2018. He pointed out "for a high energy electromagnetic field to polarize a quantum vacuum as claimed it would take 10^9 teslas and 10^18 V/m." He said "these levels are not feasible with current technology so how would someone of ordinary skill be able to know how to create this craft? The largest magnetic field ever created is 10^3 teslas and a neutron star is 10^ teslas so how are you using a microwave emitter that produces a magnetic field that is three orders of magnitude greater than a neutron star?" And so on... Basically, the examiner said this is bullshit.

As is often done in this situation, the applicant filed an appeal from the patent examiner's rejection. This is usually a procedure that is next addressed by a board of patent judges, with more briefing, typically oral argument, and takes months to years. But the appeal was never picked up after it was lodged, and it is unclear why. Two months after the appeal was filed, on October 31, 2018, the examiner (for no reason apparent in the file) allowed the patent to issue without comment and on the same day the government paid the fees it owed. The patent was issued in due course.

Whether or not the named inventor was a crank, and whether or not the invention was equally frivolous, this was a patent prosecuted by a Navy attorney, vouched for by the Navy CTO, and pushed through under atypical circumstances, in a public forum.

What's even more intriguing is that, if the Navy wanted, it could obtain the patent under a secrecy order that would keep it from the public's eyes until it was declassified.

Knowing all this, now ask yourself why this impossible sounding patent issued in a public forum with high-level brass support under tax payer dollars.

[0] [https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair](https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair)

[1] [https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10.2514/6.2017-5343](https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10.2514/6.2017-5343)

[2] [https://www.linkedin.com/in/james- sheehy-28437a8/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-sheehy-28437a8/)

<comment><USER8> Excellent writeup, big thanks.

From the file wrapper (parent post reference [0]), the examiner's main point in the rejection was apparently that the generation of E-fields of 10^18 V/m and B-fields of 10^9 Tesla, as needed for the device, are impossible.

The 2018-10-31 Notice of Allowance states that the application was allowed for the reasons in the 2018-08-21 Appeal brief.

The first part of the appeal brief (in response to the 112a rejection) more or less states that the peer reviewed papers are sufficient to overcome the rejection by proving that electromagnetic flux values of 10^33 Watts/m^2 are possible, which are equivalent to the required E-field and B-field values.

The second part of the appeal brief (in response to the 112b rejection) gives a little more context on the situation with a quote from the AIA 2017-5343 paper (parent post reference [1]):

"It is a well-known facet of quantum field theory that everything can be described in quantum mechanical terms. The complex interactions between a physical system and its surroundings (environment), disrupt the quantum mechanical nature of a system and render it classical under ordinary observation. This process is known as decoherence. However, it is argued that we can retard (delay) decoherence (and possibly even suppress it – namely decouple a physical system from the environment) by accelerated spin and/or accelerated vibration of electrically charged matter under rapid acceleration transients. This may be the very condition to achieve a state of macroscopic quantum coherence, the idea being that we never let the system achieve thermodynamic equilibrium, by constantly delaying the onset of relaxation to equilibrium (hence the production of maximal entropy is delayed). The system may 'violently' react by generating 'anomalous' emergent phenomena, such as, but not limited to, inertial mass reduction."

The idea of "macroscopic quantum coherence" is fascinating. This could be the next major technological race outside of computing.

[0] [https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair](https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair) (search for application number 15/141,270, then click on "Image File Wrapper" tab, then click to select all and download PDF) (includes several other peer reviewed references to support the patent)

[1] [https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10.2514/6.2017-5343](https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10.2514/6.2017-5343)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This dude has some crazy patents, including for room temperature superconductors.

A few comments in previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19229584](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19229584)

</comment><comment><USER10> From the description:

> Matter is confined energy, bound within fields, frozen in a quantum of time.

> Polarization of the local vacuum is analogous to manipulation/modification > of the local space tie topological lattice energy density.

> If we can engineer the structure of the local quantum vacuum state, we can > engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level

If _real_ physics sounded that cool, it would convince me I took the wrong major in college. :)

<comment><USER11> I'm pretty sure that last quote is direct from the Alpha Centauri datalinks... Prokhor Zakharov, maybe?

"Time dilates as the speed of light approaches. To the extent that light consists of particles, it is in its own way, timeless. Through simple perturbations of the temporal manifold, we can refract or repel photons most efficiently."

<comment><USER12> Those were the days!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> More details here: [https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/02/if-these-us-navy- paten...](https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/02/if-these-us-navy-patents-are- made-then-we-are-in-a-star-trek-technology-world.html)

I was about to dismiss as speculative woo woo (there is plenty of "may" passive language in the patent), until I noticed the assignee is the US Navy. Taxpayers are funding this.

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't read a _ton_ into this. He also has a patent on a room-temperature superconductor.

In one of his autobiographies, Richard Feynman talks about ending up with some bizarre patents on nuclear-powered aircraft. In brief, the patent office at Los Alamos went around and solicited patent ideas, though he tells it better here: [https://youtu.be/rc9gwPB78lk](https://youtu.be/rc9gwPB78lk)

<comment><USER15> The nuclear powered jet engine technically did work both the Russians and the US worked on it and had what you can call a functional prototype; however irradiating the sky wasn't a good idea after all, it required a normal engine to take off and with the development of aerial refueling and much more efficient jet engines the loitering time you get form superheating air using a nuclear reactor instead of burning fuel just bring enough of an advantage to make up for the cost, complexity and the risk.

That said at least for the US the nuclear jet was developed into the liquid metal cooled reactors that became the first submarine nuclear reactors to be deployed [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium- cooled_fast_reactor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium- cooled_fast_reactor)

The US navy stopped using sodium reactors once the small pressurized water reactors have been developed.

<comment><USER14> If you listen to the story I posted above, it's pretty clear that Feynman's patent was issued _well_ before that--he basically rambled off a list of nuclear <things> to the patent officer, who then ran with it.

<comment><USER15> The US army (Air Force didn't exist then) started the Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft program in May of 1946, Feynman was 28 at the time however he did work on the Manhattan Project and using nuclear propulsion for submarines, aircraft and surface vessels heck even trains were things that people at Los Alamos and other labs were actively working on since the late 30's.

So it wasn't that much of a crazy thing to work on, heck while looking back at it I'm sure Feynman was in jest but I'm not sure it was the case when he was in his mid 20's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well that's going to shorten travel time to Mars! Now we just need a gravitational mass reduction device so we don't need so much fuel for take off and landing!

<comment><USER17> Done! The device in the patent claims to be a gravitational mass reduction device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am going to wait for CERN's research on measuring the gravitational interaction coefficient of antimatter to be published before I even try to understand this.

</comment><comment><USER19> I predict that this patent is legally irrelevant, because it will expire (20 years) before there are any (working) implementations.

</comment><comment><USER20> Any vessel that burns fuel reduces it's total mass.

</comment><comment><USER21> Still can't reverse entropy though.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is emdrive hoax.

Navy got took.

<comment><USER23> This is not EmDrive, just because there is a resonant microwave cavity does not make it the same thing. I suggest reading the patent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thunderf00t will have field day with this</comment>


Virtual Keyboards on iPhone and Android - <AUTHOR> http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/08/07/virtual-keyboards-on-iphone-and-android/

<comment><AUTHOR> A few months old, but interesting nonetheless.</comment>


360 Video Library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/thiagopnts/video-360 <comment><USER2> I saw this 360 feature on Facebook and I loved it. Thanks for the library!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is definitely going to be useful when virtual reality gains traction

</comment><comment><USER4> Great job!</comment>


Ask HN: Why do startups get acquired for a cost way more than the revenue made? - <AUTHOR> Why do big companies want to buy the startup companies with prices way more than the revenues made (even if they were multiplied by many years)?<p>Is there any specific example where the startup's technology affecting the buyer companies significantly? <comment><USER2> Big companies are using startups as proxy innovation labs. So instead of figuring out themselves what users are doing, they let startups. Then they buy the startups. Much easier to buy an audience and all the possibilities associated with a new brand than try to make it all work in-house.

Combine that with raw talent acquisition, and a lot of startups begin to look like highly-rewarded spec R&D work for big companies. Picking up that kind of talent, audience, and potential? It's easily worth it to BigCorp, even if there's no income at all.

(I hope the tone sounds okay on that. There's nothing wrong with gaining a million users and flipping your company to Google -- assuming that's what you want to do, of course)

Of course, there's a ton of startups that don't fit that model. But many do -- at least many in the valley.

<comment><USER3> That's something strange from my point of view.

I mean, imagine some big company opening a BigCompanyName-Seed division, where they do something like Y combinator is doing, but instead of giving a small amount of money for 6% they get 50% of the company for a bigger investment (at least in perspective, so if future investments are needed, there is no dilution up to a given sum).

But in the process of course the company doing this stuff should be smart enough to don't force any strict rule like technology to use, type of authentication, domain name, and so forth. Must be a startup with its own life. Just they can select things that are interesting in general, or are interesting for the general goals of the big company.

I'm not sure why this model could not work.

<comment><USER4> Yahoo!! tried this with Brickhouse. They opened a pseudo-startup innovation lab in SF. I don't know all the details, but iirc, it was 30-100 people for 1-2 years.

This failed utterly.

Why? Once a company is beyond a certain size, employees maximize their expected value by spending time seeking internal resources. Budget, headcount, etc. If the lab is still part of the parent company, these games are still played.

You also have companies like Hulu, that exist at the pleasure of their "investors." This might work a little better, but Hulu can't act fully in self-interest.

Perhaps the best thing I can think of is a spinoff with initial funding, control of its own board, and an irrevocable IP grant. This would potentially be a huge head start. But then what happens if a competitor acquires your spinoff (for the IP grant) right away?

I guess all this seems more fraught with risk than the simple buy a random startup model.

<comment><USER3> Yes I think the startup branch should be a separated company, with a clear separation of management and so forth. Just the mother company has some specific rights that can use after a given amount of time a given startup was created and under specific terms. So that in the end it's really a lab without the weight of the big company, but the big company can avoid paying a lot of money, especially if the final aim is often to hire.

<comment><USER5> From an entrepreneur's perspective, being in bed with one corporation to this extent significantly reduces your options and flexibility. Sounds more like you'd be an employee in a skunk-works than a real entrepreneur in this type of setup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1\. Brand and scale.

If a company buys a startup with a promising product that they can quickly sell to a large portion of their customers, they're willing to give up a portion of that future revenue. It may not be at all tied to past performance.

2\. Talent

Facebook payed a premium for FriendFeed because they wanted their team to work on the Facebook platform. This team has developed more than $50 million in new value for Facebook.

3\. To keep a competitor from having the advantage.

Google paid $1.5 billion for YouTube. They've lost money on owning it, but in the process kept their biggest competitors from controlling an asset that drives an enormous portion of all video traffic on the web. You'll see companies buy up companies they're not really interested in just to keep someone else from having them. Powerset was bought for $100 million by Microsoft because if they had developed some interesting or successful search technology, they couldn't chance letting Google have it.

<comment><USER5> The above are spot on.

However, acquisitions are not always so rational. The other reason is hype. If you're in the hot area of today (cloud, location-based whatever, social gaming, photo sharing) and a corporation is hearing a lot about this, even if they don't know what it's all about, their desire to be part of this "thing that will be big" can motivate them and cause them to pay more than it may be worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The most general answer is "talent acquisition" (you should do a web search on that, also a HN search will be very helpful). In short, the proposed value of the company is based on the value of the engineering team.

<comment><USER3> If that is common, it is very very bad. It means startups are not doing real innovation mostly. What is even worse is that once this starts to be established way of business, startups will be more and more group of good hackers producing a good product but perhaps not outstanding, waiting for some big acquisition.

In the long term this can completely killed innovation.

What was very good with the model of creating a startup to create things that really users want, in order to earn money, is that people tend to give money to a company only when the product they do is really something worthwhile.

This was what happened to the big startups in 70s and 80s. This drives innovation.

<comment><USER7> It is common, in fact, painfully common. As for whether or not it is "bad" that depends on who you are. If you need a bunch of innovative engineers and you are the current darling of the technical world (i.e. great people applying to your company), then your only solution is to buy out companies who have proven innovative engineering acumen.

If you are Microsoft, or even Google for that matter, talent acquisitions might be your best avenue for getting great people working for you.

There were some posts to HN about the estimated value of an engineer during an acquisition. I believe one of the folks from PowerSet or FareCast (both acquired by Microsoft) was talking about it in a blog post. The effect on valuation was roughly 1 million USD per engineer at the startup.

hmmm... my meatware memory is failing and I can't find a link, but I'm pretty sure it was PowerSet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Generally its because people who run/operate companies are terrible at allocating capital. Operating a business and effectively allocating capital are two very different skills, but smart operators seem to believe their intelligence carries over to capital allocation.

The fact is that most companies destroy shareholder value when they buy other companies. A recent example is the whole yahoo/delicious debacle but anyone reading this can think of a handful of other equally terrible examples off the top of their head. A far more difficult exercise would be to name the acquisitions that actually added long-term value. For example, Apple is generally great at only buying companies that add real value. They are an exception.

The fact that operators are terrible at capital allocation is great for founders and VCs. Its terrible for shareholders of the acquiring company!

</comment><comment><USER9> One reason could be user acquisition. It can cost a lot of money to acquire new users or reach a specific target market. So sometimes it makes sense to buy a company who reaches that audience, regardless of their revenue. Then you can roll that business into your existing product.

Other times it's worth a premium if you want to get into a particular business and have nothing or are playing catchup.

</comment><comment><USER10> My first hypothesis is that it's a question of comparative opportunity cost, rather than absolute cost.

When a company gets very large, it usually struggles to keep innovating under inertia. Trying to build in completely new directions becomes both necessary and difficult. Buying a startup is often cheap compared to trying to fork an existing team to build new things. Furthermore, the startup's business model is already partially proven by time of acquisition - so they are buying some certainty compared to assigning a team to generate new ideas.

Another hypothesis is that with the resources of a large company behind it, the startup may grow very fast. Adobe seems to be good at this. Other companies don't seem as good at managing post-acquisition.

I have never been in or acquired by a large company, however, so what I say should come with a grain of salt.

</comment><comment><USER11> There's a variety of reasons why you'll see M&A prices that are several multiples of a startups revenue. In financial terms, its a long term investment just like any other. Figuring in the net present value of money, the selling price must consider the asset's future value. Everything such as good will, userbase, and talent that comes along with the startup are simply indicators that the asset's value will grow with time.

</comment><comment><USER12> Because in a really bizarre way we're investing in the utility of a company rather than the money it makes.

</comment><comment><USER13> I suppose its because the same code serving millions instead of thousands might be worth 1000x as much.

If you invented a process that turns lead into gold, how much has been converted so far really doesn't affect how much the patent is worth.

</comment><comment><USER14> I believe that is most businesses, not just startups.</comment>


Skout: a devastating privacy vulnerability - <AUTHOR> http://corte.si/posts/security/skout/index.html

<comment><USER2> I can't quite decide whether hiding the stupid with SSL would be a good thing or not. If done properly (incl. pinned cert(s)), it would mostly hide the stupid, which would help protect users - but also make it less likely that users would ever know just how bad the app is.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do they not use SSL? Every mobile app should use SSL to communicate with their API. Apple should look into making this a developer guideline (i.e. reject apps that break it).

<comment><USER4> That's a problem generally, but not the fundamental problem here.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sadly, I suspect this is a case of developer neglect and laziness. I'd imagine what has happened here is the developer has serialised the entirety of a User model, rather than carefully only exposing properties required by the client.

Hopefully this will act as a cautionary tale for anyone designing an API.

<comment><USER5> Certainly they're serializing the entire user, and I'm guessing they just figured, "let the client sort it out." In other words, a lack of backend chops that would establish proximity and age (per examples in the blog post) based on the request and the user requesting the data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> | Skout immediately suspended the service for teenagers and went through a security re-vamp

Guess that wasn't such a great re-vamp.</comment>