How to Raise Money (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://paulgraham.com/fr.html <comment><USER2> >To founders, the behavior of investors is often opaque — partly because their motivations are obscure, but partly because they deliberately mislead you.

YC itself is opaque. All their rejection emails are a simple "sorry, we can't tell you". I don't know if they are afraid of legal liabilities or the reasons are much more mundane : "It's been 2 years and your revenue is only $2k", "AI is overhyped", "Too small a market", "You look dodgy" etc.

>Don't raise money unless you want it and it wants you.

I wish I knew this before I went on a wild goose chase for angels.

The only two startup articles I read are either PG or indiehackers and I am impressed with how clear and lucid this dude is with his words.

<comment><USER3> No, this isn't a valid comparison. YC gives _an actual answer_. If you don't get in to a YC batch, you know you're not in. What's more, pretty much everyone finds out at the same time, on a well-defined schedule.

That's not at all what raising from VC firms is like. VCs rarely tell companies "no"; in fact, they say the opposite: "we'd love to fund you, let's keep moving down the path to us funding you, here are some next steps". They will do this indefinitely, and continue long after the decision not to fund you has been made.

That's what Paul Graham is talking about.

<comment><USER4> I see fundraising as having the same dynamics as dating or job hunting.

If someone wants to date you or hire you, they will make an effort. They will respond quickly. They make genuine counter-offers ("How about Monday instead?").

If they are lukewarm, they will string you along and eventually fade. They will never make counter-offers, just reject your offers and let you make the next one ("I can't on Tuesday").

If they are not interested, they won't reply in the first place.

When someone wants you it's obvious. And when they don't, it's obvious by omission.

It's sad that it took me so much time and heartache to work this out.

<comment><USER5> This is true up to a point.

But VCs keep stringing people along because they don't want to miss out at some point in the future if the business takes off.

That's different to dating or hiring (generally speaking).

<comment><USER4> I take it you've never experienced the sudden reappearance of someone after their first romantic choice fell through.

<comment><USER5> Sure. Hence the "generally speaking".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Definitely seems like really obvious advice that only really makes sense once you've been there and done it.

For a newb, it just sounds like quite a few things to remember, lots of expensive mistakes to make, although the saving grace is that investors are about money so even if you call them a rude word, I'm sure they'll come back if you're making enough money!

Does anyone have a fixed link for the Sequoia slide deck?

<comment><USER7> [http://web.archive.org/web/20130911042424/http://www.sequoia...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130911042424/http://www.sequoiacap.com/ideas)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> are there any crowd funded equity raise out there? whats the overall process like compared to traditional money raise?

because i feel like that is the best alternative to this 2013 article, it lets you bypass the whole problem of having to know an investor, mind you, is not necessarily a rewarding experience.

the fact is any one that has managed a small portfolio with or without wins is tough to tell apart from each other. when you have certain amount of money it buys you a comfortable cushion to fall back on despite your failures and still come across as successful, but in fact you are a horrible fucking money manager/investor who happened to get lucky in the 90s through ultimately being exposed to an environment where wealth and poverty divide is particularly wide in a massive city.

a crowd source equity fund raise, not much different from an ICO apart the added rigor (one ICO had some Russian dude in a drag posing as HR, switching gender and hair color for different roles filled by the same person, exit scammed with an anti-semetic pepe meme), equalizes the power balance between investor and innovator from what was a master-slave relationship to many masters-slave that is supposed to be more democratic yet fragility is questionable. ex. FUD, fake news causing run on bank vs one investor weathering it out because of #faith

im still not sure what the legality of crowd equity raising is in canada but this is what i decided to pursue now.

<comment><USER9> Convincing a lot of people to fund your project in a crowdsourcing campaign could be more difficult than convincing a few investors. This and crowdfunding for equity is much different that crowdfunding in the kickstarter sense because you would need to add a lot of paperwork and legal advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> this:

> Though it sounds slightly paradoxical, if you want to raise money, the best > thing you can do is get yourself to the point where you don't need to.

<comment><USER11> >the best thing you can do is get yourself to the point where you don't need to.

This is akin to being unable to get a credit card when you Really need the money. Viewing it in these terms, it actually makes a lot of sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This gives a really good insight into the investor mindset and explains why we're in such a massive bubble now.

It's as though investors don't think at all, they're just following each other and copying every move. That's the definition of dumb money.

<comment><USER8> i feel like we are witnessing it coming to an end. low interest rate fueled credit bubble we have been in since 9/11

now the music is stopping and there's not enough chairs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> >Before you can talk to investors, you have to be introduced to them.

But how can you get introduced to them when they won't talk to you?

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately if you are in the wrong location ie not in silicon valley or such you have very little chances of getting introduced.

My recommendation is to get into incubator or even "lift off" programs and then work your way up.

The current startup culture makes it impossible for us to find "Bill Gates" in Africa/Asia because they have no visibility, no voice and no money and not because they are less talented

<comment><USER5> I did an accelerator in Australia this year, and they have invested in at least one company in Nigeria, and multiple companies in Vietnam.

<comment><USER14> Do you mind naming the investor ?

<comment><USER5> H2.vc

I believe the next cohort is early next year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How does he get through this article without even mentioning putting on a good old-fashioned bake sale?

<comment><USER16> Close enough that it's not really a joke: [https://medium.com/@austincoleschafer/a-short-story-about- ho...](https://medium.com/@austincoleschafer/a-short-story-about-how-airbnb- funded-their-startup-with-cereal-boxes-ac6e62cf4c4c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> this is interesting but seriously need an update on this for the 2018 ICO world. Especially Oct 2018..

I'm working on a new social document collaboration platform:

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

and I'd like to raise funds for it but it's REALLY unclear if I should go ICO, pre-seed, etc.

</comment><comment><USER18> Seems an odd read in the post ICO world.

Why deal with any of that headache when you can just launch a landing page/white paper and ask for money from the public to fund your idea without giving up equity or control.

<comment><USER19> The fact that it's illegal seems like a good starting point.

<comment><USER18> That is not a fact.

There is a difference between regulated and illegal.

<comment><USER20> If you're doing a legal ICO it has almost no benefit over traditional fundraising, and some huge regularity drawbacks (not knowing who owns the shares).

<comment><USER18> >If you're doing a legal ICO it has almost no benefit over traditional fundraising,

The way I read that is there are benefits. Seems to me it's significantly more cost effective than a private offering and order of magnitude more cost effective than a traditional IPO.

>and some huge regularity drawbacks (not knowing who owns the shares).

Not knowing who owns the shares is in fact illegal.

<comment><USER21> Can you clarify this last statement? Surely it's a question of which geographic nation-state you plan on working in. Not all of us live or want to live in North America.

<comment><USER18> Whether you live in the US or not, the US dictates a lot of things. After 9/11 banking and finance changed radically, and that was global not limited to the US.

Before 9/11 many states allowed it (as did many countries)...now no States allow it and as far as I'm aware Panama was the last country to outlaw the practice.

But if you know of a jurisdiction let me know...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yes, lots of startups need external funding, say, venture funding.

But the US is awash, from border to border, in successful businesses, say, _Main Street_ businesses, that never got external funding. They were, say, _bootstrapped_.

Maybe if pick an information technology (IT) project carefully, then can bootstrap it or start it with just own checkbook and no external funding.

Really, an IT startup should need less money to start than a lot of Main Street businesses. E.g., can quickly need $100,000+ in spending to get to the first $1 of revenue in an auto body shop, auto repair shop, asphalt driveway paving company, dentist's office, pizza or Chinese carryout restaurant, etc. Heck, in my neighborhood, the guys mowing grass show up with $100,000+ in equipment.

In contrast, for, say, a Web site, can plug together a quite powerful server for less than $2000 and can get a lot of relevant software tools and infrastructure software for free or nearly so. Can run ads from ad networks. If people like the site and keep a $2000 server busy, then in a year can have more in pre-tax earnings than could get from a venture seed round.

<comment><USER23> Apple vs Orange. You are comparing startup to a small biz. These are not the same, a startup might look like a small biz in the beginning. That's it. It doesn't look like one for long. It has massive and fast growth that tends to crush it without enough cash

<comment><USER22> Famous, significant, exemplary counterexample -- the Canadian romantic matchmaking Web site Plenty of Fish, long just one guy, I suspect no equity funding, two old Dell servers, about $10 million a year in revenue, all just from Google ads, and later sold for $500+ million.

Another counterexample -- Drudge Report.

Main Point: A carefully conceived and planned sole, solo founder information technology startup, e.g., a Web site, can be cheaper to start than even a common Main Street business, e.g., a pizza carryout, even a grass mowing service. But if the site becomes popular, then quickly it will generate more cash per year than in a seed round. From there the site might continue to be a significant business, e.g., Plenty of Fish, Drudge Report, and likely some more, still without equity funding.

Conclusion: The Web is one heck of an opportunity for startups without equity funding.

There is a common assumption in your argument, that the startup must have a period of wildly rapid growth to take the opportunity or lose out. Sometimes this is true, but as in my counterexamples and, really, just common sense, it does not have to be true and isn't always true.

Part of this argument about rapid growth and need for equity funding is that once a startup shows promise, it will be copied by others, and only a startup that executes well with lots of equity funding can win. This situation need not always be true: Instead, some startups can have crucial, core, powerful, valuable, proprietary, protected technology, _secret sauce_ , locked up in a secure server farm, and difficult to duplicate or equal. That secret sauce can provide a powerful barrier to entry, "Buffett moat".

For my startup, I am a sole, solo founder. I've done all the work, have the software apparently running as intended, and am rushing to go live on the Internet.

From the timings of my software and some Mary Meeker data on ad revenue, the one server I plugged together, for less than $2000, if users like the site well enough to keep the server busy, should generate top line revenue and, essentially the same, pre-tax earnings of about $250,000 a month. I don't need the equity funding now, and with $250,000 a month in revenue, I will not need and would not accept equity funding.

My Web site is intended to be of high interest to essentially everyone in the world with a standard Web browser.

If my site gets to $250,000 a month in revenue, then that will be a significant _sample_ of what users like from which we could make a projection to rapid growth to about $10 million a month, all just from my spare bedrooms and present Internet bandwidth. With such revenue per server dollar, the costs of the servers, etc. are next to trivial.

Thus, from pleasing a large fraction of everyone on the Internet, we could reasonably extrapolate the potential of my startup to a company worth $T+.

We have to keep in mind: Successful information technology startups are unusual things, each one essentially a unique business. So, we have to expect, at least not reject, some unique aspects.

Moreover, we have to see that the most successful startups were quite different from anything that went before. So being new and different, even radically different, are not sufficient for success but are nearly necessary -- again, we must not reject things just because they are new, different, unique.

Some products and services have such coveted utility that customers, users are really eager. My startup is so intended. Uh, my startup is squeaky clean, fully "safe for work", actually, say, _culturally uplifting_ , an aid to better lives, families, communities, countries, and civilization, nothing to be ashamed of.

While my startup is a Web site, really what's important about it is just some original applied math I derived. The math is difficult to duplicate or equal because it is clever and original and exploits some advanced pure math prerequisites. Users will just get the utility and not be aware of the math.

But it is the math that is the crucial core _secret sauce_ , difficult to duplicate or equal. In comparison, except for the crucial core, the software is next to trivial. So the site is not really a computer software development effort but an applied math effort.

There are not many people who know the math prerequisites and can do good original applied math, and the people that can nearly never want to do such applied math, want nothing to do with software, and are not in the information technology startup community.

There is a way to have a good idea about the promise of my work -- based on the utility for all the people on the Internet with just a standard Web browser: While Silicon Valley does not use such means of startup evaluation, several very important parts of our civilization do, do so routinely and quite successfully, with batting average far, far above that of Sand Hill Road.

So some parts of our society can look at a serious problem, see clearly that the problem is important and the first good or much better defensible solution will be very valuable, and evaluate proposed solutions with high reliability. Such parts include some internal industrial R&D, Ph.D. committees, editors of the better STEM field peer reviewed journals of original research, NSF, NIH, ONR, DARPA, USAF Cambridge, NASA, major engineering firms, etc.

My work would easily pass such filtering. So, I'm confident.

In strong contrast, Sand Hill Road wants to see a minimum viable product with traction significant and growing rapidly; all the project evaluation techniques of Ph.D. committees, NSF, ... are ignored and set aside with severe determination.

Sand Hill Road is not interested in anything from original STEM field research, maybe is forbidden by their limited partners to consider such research, and is not practiced in evaluating such research.

But I hold a good Ph.D. in pure and applied math from one of the world's best research universities. All my career, many times, I've successfully applied math, sometimes original, to practical problems.

So, I have a solid basis on which to be optimistic. Sand Hill Road can't understand that.

Sand Hill Road wants nothing to do with me before my business is so good I will want nothing to do with them.

Yes, my startup is unique, and that's nearly necessary for major success.

It would be short sighted to reject what I'm saying merely because it is unique or even different.

On crushing it, that's not part of my intentions or planning. The $1T+ is.

I've seen a lot in computing, e.g., in an AI, _artificial intelligence_ , project at IBM's Yorktown Heights Watson lab, for US national security, saving FedEx twice, teaching ugrad computer science at Georgetown University and graduate computer science at Ohio State University, and I've seen much more in pure and applied math.

Net, at this point, my considered option is (1) academic computer science has run out of promising research directions they have the qualifications to pursue and (2) Sand Hill Road style computing is essentially dead and all but buried. Routine software will continue, much as routine sheet steel stamping has continued, but for now the glory days are over. In particular, for AI, etc., I see 99 44/100% hype and nearly all the rest water or mostly quite old applied math. We just had an AI spring of hope then a summer of hype and are now in a fall of failure and soon again in an AI winter. E.g., to me self- driving cars in current traffic on current roads is obviously an absurdity and a lot of hype, a bubble about to burst.

Computing remains a major opportunity, but nearly none of the software development community, academic computer science, or Sand Hill Road know how to make use of the opportunity.

For exploiting the amazing cycles, bytes, bandwidth, infrastructure software, etc. some new directions are needed.

IMHO the most promising such new direction is engineering based on very carefully done theorems and proofs of pure/applied math.

The number of people in the world ready, willing, able, and eager to do this could have a convention in a $20 a night motel room.

So the situation is bad, but the flip side is a grand opportunity. E.g., the processor I bought is an AMD FX-8350, 64 bit addressing, 8 cores, 4.0 GHz standard clock speed, now available quantity one, retail for $100-. ECC, error correcting coding, main memory is available for $10-/GB. The situation on hard disks, solid state disks, and Internet bandwidth is maybe even more amazing. So, the need and the opportunity is to make good use of such products.

First step: To heck with Kernighan and Ritchie, Stroustrup, and even with Knuth. Instead get a copy of W. Rudin, _Principles of Mathematical Analysis, Third Edition_ , dig in, and work nearly all the exercises.

E.g., again, once again, over again, yet again, one more time, US national security is going deep long ball, if you prefer, swinging for the fences, into challenging pure and applied math with the new Space Force. For the role of math there, trust me!

No, don't trust me: Instead watch the start of the movie about John Nash where the flat statement is that "mathematics won WWII". Exercise: Discuss with arguments pro and con. Don't forget that Commander Rochefort's work and advice to Admiral Nimitz is what sank four Japanese carriers at Midway and turned the tide of battle in WWII in the Pacific. Uh, the Japanese brought 6 carriers to Pearl Harbor. Soon they lost one at Coral Sea -- also due to Rochefort. Then they lost 4 more at Midway. So early in the war, they were already running short of aircraft carriers. And don't forget much of the reason Rommel lost in North Africa was because most of his supplies went to the bottom of the Mediterranean due, right to code breaking. And note the importance of the cavity magnetron from Maxwell's equations in winning the Battle of Britain. And there was much more, e.g., from A. Turing. Then we have to count The Bomb, e.g., the critical mass calculations.

If you regard these views as new or different, then just remember you first learned them here.

<comment><USER24> Can you please name a few example problems that could be solved with maths?

Whenever I found a way to apply research-level mathematics to a business problem, the solution always was too difficult to sell. Sometimes I can solve my own problem, e.g. options pricing models known from financial mathematics can tell you the minimum to accept in a salary negotiation.

<comment><USER22> (1) GPS internals are awash in math.

(2) Solid mechanics modeling, e.g., for jet engine turbine blades -- lots of math.

(3) Molecular spectroscopy: Some group theory and group representations can write down the possible spectral lines. That's long been the key to identifying molecules.

(4) My post mentioned Maxwell's equations for the design of the WWII radar that helped England win the Battle of Britain.

(5) A good, general purpose curve fitting technique is least squares spline fitting -- there's some math in there.

(6) Which pharmaceutical salesman goes to which physicians and leaves what samples to maximize revenue? Can be formulated as min-cost, capacitated network flows via the network simplex algorithm with a modification of W. Cunningham.

(7) Given a special scenario of global nuclear war limited to sea, estimate how long the US SSBN fleet would last.

(8) Given current revenue and planned capacity, project revenue growth -- solution saved FedEx.

(9) Given some ocean wave data, find the power spectrum, with confidence intervals, and generate sample paths with that power spectrum.

(10) At FedEx, which airplane goes to what cities in what order to carry all the freight, meet engineering, FAA, and safety constraints, arrive in specified time windows, and minimize costs.

(11) For an airplane, how to climb, cruise, and descend to arrive on time and minimize costs. Basically deterministic optimal control.

(12) Blue positions SSBNs and targets missiles in Red areas; Red attacks the Blue SSBNs; the remaining SSBNs fire. How best to position the SSBNs and target the missiles?

(13) A missile is chasing an airplane. What flight path should the airplane follow to evade the missile and what flight path should the missile follow to hit the airplane? A problem in differential games.

(14) A resource allocation problem in marketing resulted in a 0-1 integer linear program with 600,000 variables and 40,000 constraints. How to get a feasible solution optimal or nearly so? Solution involved non-linear duality theory and yielded a feasible solution bounding showed was within 0.025% of optimality in 900 seconds on a 90 MHz computer.

(15) My current startup.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What I Learned After Banning Screens from My Home for a Month - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/what-i-learned-after-banning-screens-from-my-home-for-a-month <comment><USER2> I really like the Penny Arcade take on "screen time":

[https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/30/](https://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2014/06/30/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Lots of flies</comment>


To make money online, don't write about weight loss; write about physics - <AUTHOR> http://greyenlightenment.com/to-make-money-online-dont-write-about-weight-loss-write-about-physics/ <comment><USER2> I hope this article could share some data.

because the other day, I read an article about a guy who didn't write a single word and made lots of money via amazon self-publishing.

all he did was researching the hottest on amazon, and hired someone to write book on that topic.

the topic was about some kind of healthy diet.</comment>


What are the biggest engineering mistakes that a tech company has made? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Knight Capital lost $440 million dollars due to a bug and went out of business.

[http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/09/technology/knight- expensive-...](http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/09/technology/knight-expensive- computer-bug/) [https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2013/34-70694.pdf?page=...](https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2013/34-70694.pdf?page=5)

</comment><comment><USER3> Putting a service's status indicator on the service.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd best most would fall into "not handing insane user inputs". Remember the recent S3 outage? [http://www.recode.net/2017/3/2/14792636/amazon-aws- internet-...](http://www.recode.net/2017/3/2/14792636/amazon-aws-internet- outage-cause-human-error-incorrect-command)

</comment><comment><USER2> Mark Zuckerberg: Our Biggest Mistake Was Betting Too Much On HTML5 (for mobile) [https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our- bigges...](https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest- mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Just about any co that partnered with some big tech co. to try to boost their product sales. Especially when the tech co. is trying to win favor for their #2 (or lower) industry product.

</comment><comment><USER6> Does product mistakes count?

Google : Social & Chat applications.

Google+, Hangouts, Allo, Duo

Other than core products, Google made lot of mistakes(both engineering & non- technical) in all the products.

</comment><comment><USER7> Google was a great example of what it means to focus on what you're good at. Trying to be something you're not and have no business doing will result in embarrassment and failure, as seen with Google Plus. Facebook is good at social networking. Google is good at search and development.

Google actually helped me to understand this important point: You and I will never ever create another Facebook. Sure, we can create smaller community-like platforms, but there is no reason for us to believe that we can be greater and better than Facebook. And we don't have to be. There is no sense in pretending. There's not even a sense in trying. Therefore, find smaller projects to work on, and specialize in them. There are a great many things that Facebook cannot and should not do. There are a many great things that you and I cannot and should not do. But then, there are also a great many things that we can do!

Before this, I used to get upset and it probably prevented me from even wanting to start projects or come up with ideas. I was always thinking big: "How do I create something like the next Facebook." Once I set this mindset aside and focused on the smaller picture of just developing useful apps, and getting them out into the world, it made things better.

I had finally realized I was completely focused on the wrong thing. There are many things that Facebook is not good at and there are things Facebook is good at. There are many things Facebook cannot do simply because they are not in the business to do it. There are things that Facebook also implemented into their platform that just doesn't get as much use or attention as it should. Those little flaws in the system are the things the "little developers" can take over and specialize in.

I created [https://mypost.io](https://mypost.io) which is an easy-to-use platform that lets you put up a webpage on the Internet in seconds. I posted it on Hacker News ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10552168](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10552168)) and it got absolutely no attention at all. And other than telling Twitter and a few Facebook friends about it, it has had no advertising or media attention. Yet somehow, the entire world is using it. By "the entire world", I mean people from around the world. Not thousands of people, but a few hundred at least. I've seen people from Russia, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and Japan using it. How did it get around the world within a year? To date, there have been over 2,500 posts created. Might not sound like a lot, but I'm not Facebook and I didn't spend any money advertising it. I could have spent more money and time advertising it, but it was just a fun platform that helped me understand what people like and whether my applications were useful or not. I mean, I really just created it for myself, as I do all my web apps. I simply share it with others and if they enjoy using it and find a use for it as well, than that is a success to me.

Lesson learned: Stop developing apps for other people. Develop them for yourself and make it user-friendly in the process. If you find it useful, it is more than likely that others will find it useful as well. Either keep it free or figure out how to monetize it and make a little money for your efforts. That is what I am in the process of testing and learning now: How much will people pay for something they find useful?

</comment><comment><USER8> having non-technical founders making technical decisions.

</comment><comment><USER9> Twitter: Limiting self-expression to 140 characters.

</comment><comment><USER10> Netscape rewriting its code base.

<comment><USER11> Why ? any source from founders ?

<comment><USER10> [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you- should-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never- do-part-i/)

<comment><USER12> Good as new. Who knew, that this is as good as dead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Windows Registry</comment>


Peter Molyneux's staff work 36 hours non-stop - <AUTHOR> http://ilovecrunch.co.uk/?p=230 <comment><USER2> Jeebus, what a way to turn a molehill into a mountain. @22cans:

In fact @pmolyneux BEGGED the team to go home but they wouldn't have any of it :) <https://twitter.com/22Cans/status/268387590368030721>

22 Cans is a tiny startup and they were expecting 10,000 concurrent users tops -- they're at 2 million and counting now, and they have to capitalize on that momentum and not piss off their obviously fanatical players. So they pulled an all-nighter to build and migrate from a single server to a clustered architecture, and hell yeah, if I was in that position I'd do that too.

Seriously, is there another option? If you think the answer is "clock out at 5:01 PM and go home", you shouldn't be in a startup. Obviously pulling 36 hour shifts on a regular basis is not sustainable, but this is _precisely_ the type of situation where it's warranted.

<comment><USER3> The question is why did they assume 10k concurrent users, or plan for that to be the cap handled under the current architecture? Any competent project manager should have said "let's pretend we're massively successful... how will it work then?" and have some contingency plan in place so that they're not trying "experimental" fixes.

The flaw here isn't the heroic efforts, it's that heroic efforts were needed. In the days of cloud based architectures, it's a lot easier to be ready for massive horizontal scaling than it used to be, so much so that being unready is malpractice.

<comment><USER4> Assuming massive success is a stupid move. The majority of the time you are not that successful. The ground is littered by projects that spent vast sums of money (and more importantly time) designing for load they never needed to handle before release.

In about a month my company will be releasing an online game. We think we will get about 15-20k concurrent users in the first few days, but we will be testing the realm for as high as 50k concurrent users using load testing bots.

What will happen if we suddenly get 100k or 200k concurrent users? Even throwing more hardware at the problem might not solve it immediately if there is some new bottleneck we haven't found before.

Testing the realm for more than 50k concurrents and then spending engineering effort required to make it work will consume time and effort that we can't afford to spend. All for an outcome that is unlikely to occur.

<comment><USER3> Assuming massive success is stupid, but testing for it seems prudent. Given how easy it is to spin up EC2 instances generate bot-load, even just to see what'll happen or to find the collapse point, seems so straightforward as to be routine. And as the commenter below observes, the Curiosity interaction model requires high server load for all interaction.

<comment><USER5> The problem with your theory is that there are lies, damned lies, and load tests.

Any sensible app is going to have caching layers. A simple load test is going to just be a really good exercise of the caching layers. By contrast a complex load test with lots of calls to do really random stuff is going to stress you out in entirely unreasonable ways. And finding a realistic balance of traffic is difficult unless you've simply sampled real traffic - which you can't do until after you've generated some.

<comment><USER6> This!

I cant agree with this more, unless you approach me with an experiment that would put most science to shame I do not value your use of Jmeter/Tsung/Siege/Rando-Python-Script. If you test plan does not have pauses in it, and you are not engineering a nuclear reactor I probably wont even start the conversation.

.... At $DAYJOB, when we were putting together a new search engine we spent some time upfront putting in a lot of tooling to worry about and test performance every step of the way. Some of this tooling was built around jmeter and focused on generating realistic test plans (which we could derive from the already operational existing search engine). It was a neat infrastructure it tracked everything by commit, captured all manner of metrics and used huge datasets, mined from the logs, built out with markov models. Everything we reported into an install of the software that runs <http://speed.pypy.org>, we thought we had it conquered.

Yet it was so flawed! Data would get stale, models would break, caches invalidated datasets and much much more.

It was funny at the same time I wrote a tool that we now know as darklaunch, this tool is stupid simple, it captures incoming traffic to the production system with pcap, and then (after a little mussing with it) sends it through to a always on test cluster. Yet its this tool that produces all the load, has all the weird user behavior, never gets out of sync and can run load, soak, endurance and impact tests.

Guess which one we use to test out new software, or new features, or to tune a garbage collector in as close to production as possible ?

I have not started Jmeter now in over a year, its been no great loss; sure we have microbenchmarks where they matter but for everything else you often hear the words "darklaunch it"

Now for sure we have the luxury of having real traffic to use and abuse, but if you don't have real traffic then realise you are using a scrying device anyhow and I will bet you good money your assumptions are wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Industry bullshit artist approaching has-been status... super high-concept game design without any actual game... his nephew as producer... five staff total working on a massively parallel realtime cross-platform title with novel mechanics...

What could _possibly_ go wrong? popcorn.gif

<comment><USER8> Peter Molyneux in a nutshell : <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q>

But aside from the hate 22cans is doing some impressive stuff

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> To "just work harder", in this case 36 hours, is the easy decision to make when something goes wrong. It smells deliciously of heroics, bravado and top performer mentality. Most importantly, the soul drenching, exhausting late hours, gives the illusion that "we are doing all that is humanly possible to resolve the problem". How tough are we, right?

But as the author points out, heaps of literature clearly show that "crunching", like it's affectionately called in the games industry, is contra- productive. One guy working 8 hours, going home for a good sleep, and coming back to work an additional 8 hours will vastly outperform the developer- turned-zombie that's been at it for 24 hours straight.

At that point, short term memory is gone, stupid mistakes (blunders even) are rampant. Fixing simple issues takes extraordinary amounts of time, because the ability to focus is all but lost. You effectively have tunnel vision and your reactions and logical skills are reduced to that of a drunk.

This is not anecdotal - there are an immense amounts of studies done on the subject. But time and again, the knowledge gets discarded because it's just easier to "work through the night" at a frantic pace, rather than take the necessary step back, let people rest and do the work in an orderly and planned manner. By burning the candle in both ends, at least no one can challenge your commitment to solving the problem.

While it may sound counter-intuitive to go to bed while the house is on fire, it is, at least if 40 years of research is to be believed, actually the only correct thing to do in a software development crisis. Note this doesn't mean "stick 100% to 8 hours and always go home at 17.01", but it does mean if you are still there at 23.00 you are much better off going home, getting sleep and resuming work when well rested.

The games industry seem to be especially vulnerable to this problem. It might be due to the general inexperience level caused by games development being a young mans game, or it might be due to a failure to understand that games, while glorified in the industry, is "just" software, and therefore also subject to all the established rules of software development.

In any case, I agree with the author that Molyneux should know better than to tweet from the rooftops how many hours everybody is working, but I guess he is not thinking entirely straight after 36 hours of work.

<comment><USER10> It depends on whether or not a fix is perceived to be further away than what you can accomplish in that one night.

Being down for yet another business day when you don't have to be ('house on fire') is usually not an option.

There is also a class of problems (chasing subtle bugs) that you're much better equipped to tackle when you come in fresh in the morning or when you're actually not looking directly for them, the flip side is there are those that it takes forever to get the mental model set up that maps the circumstances of the bug with enough resolution that you have a chance of cracking them that it pays off to just sit there until it's done, even if that means staying up well past your bed time.

The rule seems to be 'go home if you can no longer positively contribute towards solving the problem', not just 'go home'.

<comment><USER9> That's a reasoning that is prevalent and very often catch project managers and developers alike: It is "not an option" going home, because of whatever crisis is occurring. Because if we aren't working through the night, we are not committed, and we are certainly not doing the most we can to resolve the crisis.

The outcome is almost always stereotypical: Early in the morning, the fire is doused, and all is good. Until suddenly three more fires spring up out of nowhere, previously undetected due to fatigue and tunnel vision on the one particular issue that got it all started.

Slow and careful consideration of the problem, the potential fixes and especially the side consequences of implementing those fixes, gets thrown out the window after 24 (or even 12) hours of coding.

I agree in theory that the best solution would be if you could somehow tell when you are no longer positively contributing, and only then going home. But it is exceedingly hard, if not impossible, for an individual to accurately determine when he is no longer positively contributing towards solving the problem (i.e. Creating more problems that is being fixed). The outcome is you have people valiantly soldiering on, in the false belief that they are actually contributing, but with actual, measurable setbacks being incurred due to fatigue.

<comment><USER10> Some things just can't wait. If you have never worked in an industry where there are no commitments to outsiders then that's all fine and good but production (banks, networking, airlines, critical infrastructure such as electricity plants, water pumping, hospitals and a very large number of other services that society relies on) problems take precedence over a lot of otherwise completely valid concerns.

If that is a recurring theme then there is definitely a deeper problem but on occasion things go wrong and 'going home' really isn't an option.

Count your blessings if you are not stress resistant and are working in a line of business where these things don't matter.

Production problems have a habit of not announcing their arrival dates, and some of those can be surprisingly hard to track down to their root cause.

Working until the problem is fixed in those situations has nothing to do with 'showing commitment' it has everything to do with being committed.

There is a right time for knowing when to call it quits and there is a right time for pushing on until the lights are back on.

You simply can't categorically state that it is wrong to push on, it depends on what is on the line and the capabilities of the people involved.

<comment><USER9> In the case you mentioned, with a clear perception of a problem being fixable within a nights work, I of course agree, that's the time to keep on working.

But I think we will probably disagree on the right time to call it quits.

In my book, that is when the situation is more diffuse, like the hard-to-find bug on a real-time enterprise system with many integrations, and your team is fatigued, having spent 20 hours already trying to fix it, with no clear outlook on when it will be done.

If you keep on at this point, you run the very real risk of turning a manageable bonfire in the kitchen into a wildfire that takes down the whole neighborhood. I.e. direct contra-productivity in the form of unintended side consequences and breakages introduced by bleary-eyed programmers. Such issues can often end up putting the system down for even longer than it otherwise would be.

In a standard, non-live development situation, the effect will be less immediate, like slipped schedules and high defect counts, sometimes turning into the classical "deathmarch" project where there is a constant feeling of one step forward, two steps back.

The risk and impact of course varies a lot from situation to situation, so just to be clear I am not categorically stating anything here: Calculated risks can be okay, and everything has exceptions, especially when it is a production / sysops crisis versus a development deadline crisis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Unless you're battle-hardened and able to endure multiple 36-hour runs in a single week, which few of us can withstand before something completely _snaps_ , this is probably the worst possible idea.

You do a big push like this as a last resort, not as standard practice.

It reminds me of an anecdote about Icelanders and how they do their off-road driving: You keep your vehicle in two wheel drive. If you get stuck you can always use the four wheel drive to get back out. If you're always in four wheel drive, when you're stuck you're really stuck.

<comment><USER12> _Nowww you knowww_

But seriously. Interesting point about Icelander off-road driving style. It makes sense for terrain that could stick you while in four wheel drive, but it's never occurred to me to drive like that. Ex: Chicago snow storm about 2 years ago, I just drove super-careful but many people had to abandon their cars on the side of the road.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For all of you crapping on Peter and his team:

What if the employees were founders with equal shares of the company, and they launched a product and it fell over? Would you blame them for pulling an all- nighter to scale it up in the face of unexpected traffic? Should they give up at 10pm? Midnight? 5AM?

If they're not equal partners, should they immediately give up? What if they own 10%? 1%?

What if they don't have much on their resumes and are excited to make this a successful project, instead of a laughingstock that fell over in the face of scaling challenges? What if they care about each other and want to make this a success for their friends and coworkers?

What's the function into which you plug all these variables and decide when to go home?

It's not black-and-white, pun intended, and if you think it is you're being obtuse. I hope they feel happy and like they accomplished a lot in the face of long odds, and you should too.

<comment><USER14> I'd rather have a colleague come in to work _drunk_ than pull an all-nighter to work on core functionality.

 _Yes_ , we really need to get this thing improved as soon as possible, but having effectively brain-damaged people introduce bugs all night _and_ then be utterly useless the next day is not helping. Take your financial lumps and get over it instead of burning out everyone and ruining the codebase.

These kind of masochistic hero stories perpetuate the destructive belief that every hour your face is planted in front of the monitor is equally productive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I did a 36 hour push once. I did it because there was really no other way to achieve the deadline, since there was about three days worth of bug squashing to reach a deadline and I only had two days left.

I am proud that I managed to pull it off, however I tell it as a tale of caution not as a tale of inspiration.

The work I did was objectively atrocious, by the 24 hour mark the simplest operation took me 5-10 minutes. My short term memory was completely gone by then and I had to rely on writing down each step of an operation as simple as refactoring a block of code into its own function, just to be able to pull it of in a "reasonable time frame".

Thus I would call bullshit on anyone claiming that his team made "huge improvements" and that after such a push some piece of software "started behaving like it should".

Unless that means that they introduced a plethora of bugs that they would be busy fixing for months from now.

<comment><USER16> The experience of going for an all-nighter is akin to watching a full season of 24 in one go, only you're the protagonist. It's memorable, and yes, especially if you manage to pull it off.

I tell it as a tale of inspiration: do it, _once_.

Whether it's good or bad for business/health/morale is a whole other story. Hint: it's not good.

<comment><USER17> One of the best things about going to university is you can get all of that stuff out of the way without hurting anyone else.

<comment><USER18> Well, until you graduate and continue your old habits...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When we launched Zite, I (along with several other engineers), were awake for about the same amount of time keeping the servers alive.

Sometimes a heroic emergency effort is required. As long as it is (extraordinarily) rare, it's not in itself sign of a dysfunctional organization.

<comment><USER20> > _heroic emergency effort_

Completely agree that it'something required sometimes. But it's nothing heroic, it is a (temporary I hope) dysfunctionment, and shouldn't be put in midly positive light.

Planning failed (not assuming you might have 2m users is sensible, but it's still a failure in it's way), and shit hit the fans. It's the kind of failure you might wish you had, but next time you should think hard about a way to deal with this kind of situation with minimal emegency, and no need for 'heroes'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's all our own fault.

We glorify the noodle-eating couch-sleeping code-generating-machine hacker and let the corporations profit by exchanging our health and personal lives for stupid hacker-perks which costs the companies nothing.

Woohoo! come hack for us, we give you a fancy chair and large monitors to stare at and even food! what else do you want out of your life?

We need to see that we are being taken advantage of.

We have raised expectations so high, that you can't land a decent job unless you have dedicated your evenings to patching bugs in open source projects for free.

What do you think that says to an employer? Sorry to break it to you but it roughly goes like this, "The poor bastard has no life. When he goes home, he does the same crap _for fun_. He'll be more than happy if I pay him 2 peanuts"

Have you asked yourself why other professionals don't have "open source" like we do?

If programmers are expected to work _for fun_ to develop your email client, web browser, server softwares etc... it is only fair if lawyers were also expected to _contribute_ to cases for free.

I'm too damn tired of this crap. We have put ourselves into an infinite loop of competition that only hurts ourselves and brings profit to the corporatoins. The guy next to you has to sacrifice his life because he needs to compete with you to stay relevant and you do for the same reason and so on...

We are smarter than this. We deserver better than this. We need to bring this to a stop.

<comment><USER22> In other professional fields (like with lawyers), doing work for free is called "pro bono". I would think that if you're being interviewed for lawyer position they would ask you how much pro bono work you've done.

So I disagree that doing this stuff for free is inherently bad, but I fully agree with the sentiments of the rest of your post. Particularly this: "come hack for us, we give you a fancy chair and large monitors to stare at and even food! what else do you want out of your life?"

An old manager of mine was once on the phone to a recruitment agency trying to hire some developers complaining that they hadn't made progress, at one point he screamed, "it's software development, it's not fucking rocket science!" He did that in a room full of developers.

For some reason many non-technical people get to become managers of technical people and have that kind of opinion. This then leads to the, "well if it doesn't work you can stay here all night until it does" mentality.

<comment><USER23> To be very honest. Software development is NOT rocket science. Writing corporate CRUD code is not that difficult...

Writing a new 3D game engine is off course more daunting but still not rocket science.

<comment><USER24> One difference software engineering has with aerospace engineering is that the people building the rocket get all the time they need. Since it's rocket science it's pretty much a given that if it's rushed or a PM or CEO puts the pressure on (with people working triple shifts for instance) then things just literally blow up.

In software the coders rarely have the option or will power to push back against unreasonable deadlines and fantasy launch dates. This is especially common in corporate cultures where a chain of command makes those calls and large scale plans are built around dates pulled out of the air. At best the coders are given lose-lose choices: miss the date or ship a broken product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The danger of incurring so much sleep debt so quickly is that you will start paying compound interest on it immediately - in terms of ability to avoid accidents, struggling with mental coherence, handling relations with loved ones, out-of-it attitude, and dealing with unexpected situations gracefully.

</comment><comment><USER26> I like Mr Molyneux's imagination, but I have to say that I enjoy his deliverables significantly less. Whether intentionally hyped or not he has become, in my mind, quite the bullshitter. Seeing this I'm not surprised by the disconnect between his vision and products.

I'd advise anyone against purchasing something from his group without having a very generous return policy.

<comment><USER27> I read here (see below link) they are soliciting user donations in order to speed up the bug fixing of the server code... so presumably to help pay the overtime of the coders. First time I've heard that a game user has been asked to pay to fix bugs in their game. I congratulate Molyneux on his chutzpah.

"The popularity of the app has now forced Molyneux to ask for donations so that they can help improve the experience, but we're not too certain how well this plea will be received." \-- [http://www.phonesreview.co.uk/2012/11/13/curiosity-app- game-...](http://www.phonesreview.co.uk/2012/11/13/curiosity-app-game- by-22-cans-peter-molyneux-social-cube/)

<comment><USER2> Srsly? The Curiosity app is free. The donate button isn't even in the app itself, but on the developer's web page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> My advice is for Peter to have a read of "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" by DeMarco & Lister.

<comment><USER28> My advice to _anyone_ in our field is to read this book. Even if you yourself are not manager, and never have managed any team, it will at least make it easier to spot some common pitfalls and be aware of the consequences before it's too late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> You're making a lot of assumptions here based on a tweet. Also calling these employees "idiots" is pretty irresponsible in itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Frankly I just copy-pasted the title from the post. And it looks like it's been 'corrected' now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> as one of two 'server coders' that scaled Draw Something from 0 to 35 million DAU, a 36 hour day sounds nice.

<comment><USER31> What was your motivation?

<comment><USER30> quite simply, to see just how far we could take it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The author of these tweets should read a book about literacy. He could learn something worthy of cerlibretion.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm a big proponent of working (i.e. laboring) as little as you possibly can in order to leave as much room as possible for convivial activities and personal growth. But I think it is disingenuous in this case to paint Molyneux as a slave driver.

They were ill-prepared for the launch and stuck together to scoop the water out of the boat. It's probably a bad idea to do it for 36-hours straight, but it's understandable. I would certainly stick my teeth in there till the storm's passed. Especially in a company this small, where the line between collegiality and friendship are probably quite blurred.

I'm much more interested in what the RSI is a result of. That shit needs to be taken care of.

</comment><comment><USER34> Does anyone know to what kind of books or reference is the author talking about when talking about the "15 years of free literature on how to run large- scale online projects"

I've seen in the comments that damian2000 (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4781706>) has suggested "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" by DeMarco & Lister.

any other suggestions?

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm a gamer and this is very subjective of course but Peter Molyneux hasn't actually done any good games. Overrated junk ~ and it's not his works, it is the engineers, designers, illustrators, sound engineers and actors who've done the game. He just makes enough noise to get attention and praise.

<comment><USER36> His early games were interesting, fun, and original, pretty much all the Bullfrog catalog. I'm also not sure you can get away with saying it's not his work when he's the lead designer and executive producer on those titles. Yes, he didn't do it alone, but those roles stamp a considerable amount of personality onto the product.

Lionhead produced nothing but crap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> ... and to think all they needed to do was hire one real programmer in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER38> No one should be pressured into this type of work, and it's important to always maintain that.

However, if you haven't worked a 48hr+ stretch in a young startup, check your pace and/or commitment. It may be fine, just think about it.

</comment><comment><USER39> Anyone else find Curiosity intriguing not for the game (which is arguably about vanity), but for the technical brain-trust that operating such a service creates? Here's hoping they all write books...

</comment><comment><USER40> On what planet does this make sense? Here on Earth, this is generally considered "unwise."

</comment><comment><USER41> We hope none of those people are driving when they finally go home.

</comment><comment><USER42> Judging from the reviews for Curiosity in the Google Play store, it was not time well-spent. (I would provide my own comments on the game, but it insists on crashing before I can do anything with it.)

If it is a joke...Mr. Molyneux would have better spent the time on fixing his abysmally bug-ridden game.</comment>


Why Bitcoin Could Split into Three in November - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-21/why-bitcoin-could-split-into-three-in-november-quicktake-q-a <comment><USER2> I wonder if this will make it crash to $8,000?</comment>


HP to cut 25-30k jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34265094 <comment><USER2> My father is a field-service engineer for HP in Midwest (based out of Minneapolis, but he has calls all over from Fargo, ND to Mpls, MN to Madison, WI). He is _the_ go-to for their biggest, most senior, most mission-critical clients. He put together UMN's Alpha setup, is the only guy that USPS will call for help, MNSCU, Best Buy, UHG... basically, anyone with an HP setup (server or printer) that's a Fortune 1000 (and some of the smaller guys too) — he's their man.

He's feeling the heat.

He's made it through the absorption of Compaq, and when Compaq absorbed Digital. He's won a ton of awards with each company he's been at, frequently getting high marks for his professionalism, timeliness, availability, willingness to mentor the new guys, stuff like that. He also brought in more than $4MM in revenue for HP in one fiscal year, even though sales wasn't his job (I think it came out to 28 different contracts?) The next highest was $600k. It's been like that for 25 years.

Needless to say, he's pretty damn good at his job.

He's late 50s, but in amazing health. My mother, however, is in her 50s, and is in absolutely terrible health.

They cannot afford to lose healthcare coverage. My mom wouldn't make it, and my father would probably lose his mind. They just refinanced their 220k mortgage and put new siding on their suburban house, added new gutters, got the roof redone, stuff like that.

Please, don't make this about how shitty of an investment that might have been. That's beside the point.

He makes a good living — he filed $98k last year, but that's a _ton_ of overtime.

All he's known is hardware for the last 30 years. He's not a sysadmin and will never be. He's not some low-level nerd. He's the product of an unnotable tech school and he's worked his ass off to keep things afloat. I don't have the best relationship with him at all, but he's a human and I picked up my people skills (if you can call them that) from him.

Who would hire him at this age, with this kind of experience?

<comment><USER3> Your dad needs to think about the next best 5 guys, and how to pick them up for cheap when the layoffs happen. At his age striking out on his own will seem absolutely terrifying.

Work on him for a few months. He must have built up some serious contacts over the years. His pitch is straightforward. HP can't actually support their products anymore, they don't have the staff. He knows the hardware inside and out. Sell support contracts. Snipe the best after the layoffs.

You don't look for a job when you need one. this rumor is going to terrify customers. Since he has good personal relationships with those fortune 1000, he needs to monetize that. He must have some idea of what HP charges for his time. He can send the new guys, and come in to rescue at the end.

I know this sounds crazy. Think really hard about it though. There isn't anyplace that will hire him at 100k. He needs to set up his own shop. Think of it this way, 0.05 < P(new_biz_fail) < 0.1. What is the chance of him getting a good new job in 6 months? i'd guess less than 10%. With your mom, he needs to bring in serious cash. He's in a position to do that. If he picks good helpers, it won't consume his life, anymore than the current job. He really only needs 1 contract, and can build from there.

It sounds super scary. Hell, it is super scary. If he needs stability for the next 15 years or so, this is a really good way to do it. Really, in his position, as good as he is, it's less scary than going and looking for work.

<comment><USER2> This sounds like a great idea, but I don't know if he's such an entrepreneur or risk-taker. Some people are, some people aren't. It's a natural thing.

I'm not sure of the papers he's signed (non-competes...), or the contracts that HP has with their customers (there must be some), but... he could definitely "get the band together" and pull off such a feat. Again, I think this goes back to the contracts he had.

He's one of 4 remaining from the "blue days" (time with Digital); I think they'd be able to pull it off if they did go this route. They're all pretty awesome.

<comment><USER4> _> He's one of 4 remaining from the "blue days" (time with Digital); I think they'd be able to pull it off if they did go this route. They're all pretty awesome._

From personal experience, I want to add some long-term expectations about commanding premium consulting rates -- especially as it relates to vendor- proprietary knowledge.

I used to work for an enterprise software firm and was on their "crisis firefighting team". I'd travel to customer sites at less than 24 hours notice and fix their worst problems. These were the problems that were escalated to the CEO.

When I left the company and struck out on my own as a freelance "subject matter expert", I was able to command $300k a year for a few years. My background and rate was easy to sell: I was trained directly by the people who wrote the software.

The thing is that I always knew I was living on borrowed time because that high income was based on my previous association of being in the "inner circle" of how the software works. I had to diversify my skills away from that software because with each year that passed by, I became more of an "outsider" just like everyone else.

To relate to your dad's situation ... yes he's very good at what he does, but _some_ of that value may also be his inside feed of information from HP. After he's separated from HP, as each new generation of server & printer hardware is released, his "aura" of HP knowledge can become outdated and less relevant value for customers. In other words, he needs to charge whatever premium rate he can, save as much as he can, all with an eye towards diversifying his income. Diversity could mean new tech skills such as learning AWS architecture or buying real estate to get income from rental properties.

<comment><USER5> For people who work with legacy technologies, it can actually be the reverse situation. Yeah, your knowledge of The Latest Hipster Web Framework becomes less valuable year on year, but the situation is a little different for senior personnel running Fortune 50-level ops on legacy technologies. They aren't exactly churning OpenVMS systems architects out of coding boot camps. It's a lot the same situation as COBOL programmers are in - they're not something you need a million of, the work may not be 100% stable, but when you do need them they're fixing mission-critical systems that have millions/billions of dollars of business riding on them and the rates are astronomical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> HP's new business model for the last 2 years :

* cut costs (mostly by disabling essential business functions)

* buy back stock using proceeds

The result:

[https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=Linear&chdeh=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=1442377918603&chddm=78200&chddi=86400&chls=CandleStick&q=NYSE:HPQ&ntsp=0&ei=sPD4VcvfAoiI0AT2xIkY)

The person in Charge : Meg Whitman. In 2008, she was cited by The New York Times as among the women most likely to become the first female President of the United States.

Because what "worked" for HP, we should apply to all of the US.

Also see:

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-24/why-hewlett- packard...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-24/why-hewlett-packard- firing-58000)

<comment><USER7> Doing the math on this, they apparently believe that each one of those people is costing the company $108k per year, net. Given that HP's revenue per employee is ~$350k, I find those numbers simply unbelievable.

And let's suppose for a second that HP is somehow right. How did they just notice that 10% of their employees are doing something totally worthless? On top of the 55,000 employees that they laid off in 2012? I don't understand how this isn't an admission of total management incompetence.

There's also the classic MBA mistake of seeing employees as expenses rather than assets. HP has been investing in these people for years. What a waste to just fire them all. And this is surely damaging another valuable asset, organizational morale. That they couldn't figure out a single valuable thing to do with those assets is just sad.

<comment><USER8> _And let 's suppose for a second that HP is somehow right. How did they just notice that 10% of their employees are doing something totally worthless?_

The keyword to search for in the economic literature is "labor hoarding". In short, companies tend to (by default) keep employees until well after they are no longer useful. Then some sort of a shock causes the company to shed the deadwood all at once.

This is management incompetence, but it's exceedingly common. If you ever see a company (e.g. Netflix) which sheds employees regularly, that's a very good sign.

<comment><USER9> Could you argue that in a broader sense this exact same thing happens not just on the company level, but on the level of entire economies? I recall reading a few articles on how recessions/depressions often have a way of shaking up industries to align (or rather, catch up) with new innovations/developments.

<comment><USER10> It's like a spring/mass dragging across a rough surface: it stays behind until the tension gets too much, and then skips forward. You can find this effect in a lot of places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The sad part is that it's Carly Fiorina's fault for turning HP into the mess it was. And now she touts that as the reason why she should be president. It's a sick joke that she thinks gutting one of Silicon Valley's preeminent companies makes her worthy of being president.

HP was the first company to pioneer Silicon Valley culture, ie. The HP Way. It was only after Fiorina's tenure that HP turned into a shadow of its former self. They were one of the first to aggressively lay people off in the US and hire in India, and under her, they lost "The HP Way".

Every CEO since Fiorina has been a complete joke. Now Whitman is coming in to finish the job.

<comment><USER12> What precisely did Carly Fiorina do weong, and what precisely should she have done instead?

<comment><USER13> I think she kind of kill the HP Way read [http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/2002/2002_04_10....](http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/2002/2002_04_10.hpway10.html)

<comment><USER14> Thanks, that article was very helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What do you all think a company like HP should do when they (finally) realize that they're overstaffed by a big number like 20%, 30% or 50%?

One thing I realized working for a huge company and comparing that with my time at their much smaller competitor was that organizations in huge companies become hyperspecialized. This is great during the good times, because everyone is able to squeeze out that last 5% of performance (or whatever other metric they're optimizing for), and this combined effort allows them to keep their lead over the competitor.

But it's terrible during bad times because of the overstaffing. And firing people just makes things worse because the company loses important parts of its organizational memory. Because of the hyperspecialization, no single person/organization knows how to do all the things that need to be done to get the product out the door. And if you fire 10% of your workforce, you're going to forget 10% of the stuff you needed to know to build your products. In fact, you probably lose much more than 10% because people who are actually good see the writing on the wall and leave, taking a disproportional amount of the organizational knowhow with them.

I feel like these companies get caught in a death spiral. They can't do things the old way because they don't know how to any more, and they can't do it the way their competitors are doing it either because they never knew how to do that! So they just flounder along for many years slowly becoming less and less relevant. They solution is to luck into a completely different business model that somehow ends up working a la IBM in the 90s. But how realistic is that?

<comment><USER16> > What do you all think a company like HP should do when they (finally) > realize that they're overstaffed by a big number like 20%, 30% or 50%?

Fire the person(s) responsible for letting things get that bad.

<comment><USER17> That's a punishment, not a solution. Then what?

<comment><USER18> Barring any extreme creativity, they should fire those people. It doesn't excuse the incompetence which led to that position though. Working at HP is not a seasonal job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My first job, when I finished college in 1992, was at HP.

They hesitated to offer me a job, because they said that when HP offers someone a position, they're basically offering them a job for life.

Sure, you can snicker at that comment, since almost no company would (or can, or should) make such a claim nowadays. But people told me that before I got there, in the mid-1980s, there were big problems at the company. Rather than have any layoffs, they reduced everyone's salary by 10%, and told people to only work 9 of every 10 business days. This included everyone, starting with the top managers.

I'm not sure if that was the right thing to do for the company. And I doubt many companies would do that today. And if they're talking about shedding 30k people, then HP is planning some drastic changes.

But it's sad for me to remember the HP that I worked for at the time, in which there was a strong sense of community, and of "we're all in this together" \-- and to think of the people who joined when such an ethos existed, and who will be laid off now.

I'm not sure if there's a real alternative, and I'm a capitalist at heart... but it's still sad to see so many people laid off because it's now in style to break companies apart.

<comment><USER20> I just think it's the wrong way to look at things. It's better to cut 30,000 to save the company, than to keep everyone hired and wait for every employee to be out of work.

<comment><USER19> Maybe. And I fully admit that given those two choices, it's better to save the company and lay of 30k people.

But I do have to wonder how the company grew to be _so_ bloated and large. Perhaps it was unfair for HP to hire them to begin with.

I fully recognize that at the end of a day, an unprofitable company doesn't do anyone any good. It's just sad for me to think that the only way to make the company profitable is to lay off such a huge number of employees.

I also know how big-company layoffs often work; they often don't take someone's quality of work into consideration, but rather the project or division in which they worked. Thus, I'm sure some great people will be looking for jobs, through no fault of their own.

<comment><USER21> A lot goes back to the EDS acquisition, which seemed doomed almost from the start. A poorly planned acquisition + longstanding internal issues will almost inevitably get you to this kind of outcome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> HP has become terrible. My girlfriend does some IT procurement from time to time at her job, and that also involves having to buy stuff from HP (nothing big, just the usual).

She told me that HP's procurement interface for external entities (or whatever its official name is) is absolutely terrible. It blocks randomly, it's very slow, it takes a lot to fill in all the info, and when you finally give up and call some human from HP you're being told to go back using the interface. It's like they just don't want to take their clients' money.

<comment><USER23> This.

Two weeks to get two hard disks on an enterprise agreement. Bought the damn things off Misco and had them there the next morning.

Decided to buy supermicro from now on.

Plus Broadcom NICs in 2015. Kill me now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> HP Enterprise are aiming to be operating out of a suburban Palo Alto garage by the end of next year.

<comment><USER25> Bangalore garage.

<comment><USER26> No: Bangladeshi Garage with a dirt floor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > The tech company has struggled over the last decade to keep up with changing > demands as customers move away from desktop computers.

Maybe, but laptop or desktop, HP has been always synonymous with crappy quality and design - among the worst I have ever seen. I just can't wait for them to stop making PCs so that we can get at least half-decent laptops from other manufacturers.

<comment><USER28> I have an HP11C calculator I bought in 1989 I still use. It cost almost $100 back then. The first HP printer I bought was a DeskJet 550c. Made a beautiful whooshing and humming noises. Kept it for more than 10 years. When they discovered a tendency for premature wear on the pickup rollers, HP sent me a maintenance kit: one day it just showed up with instructions. I had a zd7000 laptop in the early oughts. It was pretty badass for it's day. Lasted until my boy closed the top with a pen on the keyboard and cracked the screen.

HP was a different company that made good stuff.

<comment><USER29> I have an HP11C too, and a LaserJet 5L printer. Both are over 15 years old, in regular use, and work fine. The printer has had two roller replacements, though.

That's HP's problem. Great gear, got the job done, didn't have an addictive replacement revenue model like Apple. People ran HP minicomputers for decades because they Just Worked.

<comment><USER30> Ink?

<comment><USER29> Toner, which is cheaper than ink.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> norea-armozel In an unrelated industry, Beechcraft (Hawker-Beech I believe it's called now) has a similar blow out. Too many managers and not enough actual workers making product. And to make it even worse, outsourcing integral parts of the aircraft to Mexico: fuel bladders, electrical components, and etc (and sadly they refused to properly train the Mexican workers in any of it). What are they doing now under Textron? Quietly returning those outsourced jobs to Arkansas instead of Salina (Kansas), focusing on making actual aircraft, and scuttling middle management and other other useless cruft from the company. Too bad no one with a similar attitude can just swoop in and buy out HP like how Beechcraft was bought out by Textron.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow this is a pretty huge cut. However, I won't lie/sugar coat it -- I think of HP as one of the most stereotypically bad big companies (where you can go in get a job, and almost never get fired, despite not doing very much work), so this is probably a great move for them. I can't imagine it really takes 300,000 people to do what HP does.

I'm sure there are departments that do cutting edge hardware/software work at HP, and I just haven't seen them yet

<comment><USER32> After they bought VoodooPC they turned that org into their Envy line which put out industry-leading PC's for a minute. Now it just makes low-end Mac knock- offs :(

<comment><USER33> Industry leading premium heaters/friers, maybe :-D Those early Envys were hot as hell and the processor was right under the palm rest. Quite an idiotic design...

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Altay- The most shocking part of this story is that HP still employs 300,000+ people...

<comment><USER34> IBM has a smaller turnover and employs even more....

<comment><USER35> IBM blacklists anyone who ever quits. Its emotional blackmail - "You'll never work in this industry again!" They're experts at giving the impression of career growth while underpaying.

<comment><USER36> [Citation Needed] - I've seen people who have worked at IBM multiple times, and certainly nobody has ever said that to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Meg Whitman's 2014 compensation was 19.6 million, which is exactly 200 times your Dad's salary.

</comment><comment><USER38> "the need for any future corporate restructuring."

Ever.

Always funny when CEO talk about the future and think about the next quarter.

</comment><comment><USER39> Is HP one of the companies banging the drum of a tech job talent shortage? Because this is a pretty powerful message of just the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER13> Also this is why US should get better immigration policy and allow incoming people rather than outsourcing. My cousin was just hired in hp in India for he get about US$ 5000 per year or Rs 20000 per month(He is very happy as he was getting Rs,9000 with a indian company). whereas in US even for small company that job would be atleast $25000? so no way to compete for USA guys. Just ensure companies create healthy competition for people in the country.

<comment><USER40> You're being totally unrealistic. The salaries are higher because the cost of living is higher. They don't go down because of "competition". Nor should companies rule a country, most just act in their own self interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's sad that HP+Compaq turned into this zombie company

<comment><USER42> HP/Compaq had the trained staff to do what apple and google have done. But management has been busy busy cutting their way to profitability. Cutting staff to make next years numbers look good is opiate of the MBA.

<comment><USER43> The trained staff probably needed some direction to be an Apple or Google. Or at least motivation. They probably played second fiddle to the sales people.

Seemed like leadership was missing. Fiorina and Whitman never seemed interested in tech. They just liked being the boss of something big. Boss of California, boss of US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm really sorry for all those people. Nothing worse than losing your job. I hope they at least get a good severance. It's a pretty mis-run company that is now having a lot of human collateral damage. Really sad.

<comment><USER45> Many things worse than losing your job. Health issues, incarceration, serious problems with your kids, and betraying an old friend by luring him to Cloud City and turning him over to Boba Fett all come to mind...

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> You know layoffs are coming up when your boss starts announcing things like dress codes in R&D due to "customer complaints". Severance packages are way more expensive than people leaving on their own.

<comment><USER47> The executives completely renounced the whole dress code thing though. It was some middle manager who though it would be a great idea for his unit and got slammed after it hit public media.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Although this may seem bad for many of these workers, I know of a lot of other tech companies that will be chomping at the bit to pick up many of these talented affected workers, though it may require a relocation in some cases.

As for HPE moving to these "low cost centers" for their talent, this is actually something I've seen happening where many larger companies are moving to smaller and mid-sized cities farther inland or down south in the U.S., places with adequate amenities to support their infrastructure and a decent workforce, but also within striking distance of large metros. The overhead and salaries in the DC beltway and Silicon Valley, for example, can be as much as 30-50% higher than locations just a couple hours drive away from them. So such a move to lower cost of living areas makes sense from a business perspective if you're running a services company in the IT industry and especially if you're serving cost-conscious government clients which HP has been doing in a big way lately.

</comment><comment><USER49> Is it the result of spending $10.3bn buying Autonomy and $1.2bn buying Palm?

</comment><comment><USER50> Heh, it used to be a joke that HP was basically an ink company. Seems to become more true every day.

<comment><USER51> It's really sad. When I graduated from college HP was where you really wanted to work. They had all kinds of cool high tech test equipment and parts. And they had a policy of never laying off people - during industry downturns they'd hang on to everybody and tough it out until the economy recovered.

For whatever reason they spun off the high tech bits (as Agilent) and became a PC/printer company. I'll never understand that decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> To me it's kinda obvious that any "major event" i.e. merger, large acquisition, split, extremely bad quarter etc. in a big company is an excuse to let people go. IMO the only way to survive these "events" in a big company is to make sure you are indispensable (which is not a reflection of how smart you are) or be politically astute. Despite this there are no guarantees, you just have to keep your eyes and ears open to the on goings of your company.

</comment><comment><USER53> Automation was supposed to make us all work less, not get everyone fired from decent, safe jobs.

<comment><USER54> Between virtualization, 16-core CPU's, and "the cloud", businesses have been replacing servers at a 1:10 ratio. Good for businesses that buy servers, bad for companies that sell servers like Dell and HP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> So in February HP announced it would fire 58,000 just so the company could spend even more billions on stock buybacks. Since then, buyback activity has gone down a bit and so they clearly needed to spend even more on buybacks.

But where get the money? Cutting 30k jobs is a start:

[https://imgur.com/3MdRKqv](https://imgur.com/3MdRKqv)

</comment><comment><USER56> No problem, the new "technology" in the Silicon Valley is AirBnB and Facebook. Let China do the hard stuff.

<comment><USER57> Yeah, because running Facebook isn't hard at all. Maybe you should clue them in how they don't actually need all these positions at all [https://www.facebook.com/careers/teams/infrastructure](https://www.facebook.com/careers/teams/infrastructure)

<comment><USER58> "Never mistake activity for achievement." \- John Wooden

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I work for a big company that uses HP software. It's horrible. If HP is anything like the company I work, HP is full of people getting free money for showing up and doing nothing.

My thing is, if you know you are getting free money you have to expect it to end at some point. Have a contingency plan.

</comment><comment><USER60> I know a guy who works for HP. He has been wanting to take redundancy for a while but has been turned down. The way he tells it, a lot of the guys he works with leave high priority tickets without looking them up, leave early, start late, surf the web all day, and generally don't work as you might expect. The manager in this situation doesn't seem to do anything about it, and this has been going on for years. I'm not surprised HP are in the predicament they are in, as they've totally mismanaged their business and assets over the past few years - and that business with Autonomy? Wow. Hopefully my friend will be getting his redundancy with this announcement.

</comment><comment> norea-armozel I do hope the Board of Directors sells off the Machine assets to a company that could actually pull it off (that's not Intel) like Microsoft or even, hell, Apple. The idea of moving processing to a memory-centered architecture just seems very interesting and possibly useful in non-trivial situations. And for that idea to die horribly with a company ill equipped just bothers me.

If they're hurting enough to layoff tens of thousands people, surely they can sell off the technology to settle some of their debts and live. Just an idea.

<comment><USER61> Assuming you mean the non-memristor version of the machine?

Microsoft are not a hardware company by any stretch. There are a few hardware engineers in small areas (Xbox, handsets, Surface), but almost none in server. Apple mostly make consumer facing equipment, again, no enterprise/server heritage.

If not HP, then who has a true system development background?

Well, not sure why you say not Intel. They are one of the few that actually does systems development.

IBM makes the most sense. They've distances themselves from x86, and still maintain a system development mindset, including heavy investment in big data processing. They have the OS development skills.

After IBM, there are a few maybe's:

Google would be a realistic company too, as they have shown system engineering skills, end to end, including a lot of OS development work.

Facebook - continue to do full system engineering in areas they believe are differentiators. I could see them doing something similar for analytics crunching.

Outsiders: Oracle could be viable. There must be a few Sun guys left there that do system development, and they need to show they are still relevant in big data, but they don't spend much in R&D.

Cisco - continue to do full system engineering, but would likely break this by making it too network centric. No real OS development heritage.

Broadcom - continue to expand their areas. This would be a huge step for them in systems integration, but not big at all in terms of silicon and interconnects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> HP should have done something meaningful in the profitable consumer electronics space with Palm, rather than gutting it. That was an opportunity for some market growth squandered, where else is their growth going to come from? I have lots of sympathy for those losing their jobs, but none whatsoever for the senior management team or board.

<comment><USER63> _but none whatsoever for the senior management team or board._

Who happen to keep their jobs no matter what happens to the company.

<comment><USER62> Yeah they're keeping their jobs, but all they are doing is managing decline, nothing to take any pride in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> They were dead that very day when they brought that consulting scam company (I forgot its name) because it was clear signal of internal corruption and disconnection from so-called reality. Now it all unwinds.

</comment><comment><USER65> This is so sad - And HP has an Ad Targeted on the page. Quite a bad targeting decision. [http://imgur.com/GegYER0](http://imgur.com/GegYER0)

</comment><comment><USER66> It's much easier to buy companies (revenue) than to produce it yourself. This is their strategy. Buy companies to get revenue up, then cut costs via layoffs where there's overlap.

</comment><comment><USER67> I guess the shortage of tech labor is over. :)

</comment><comment><USER13> Most of US big companies are like that if they have more than 200000 people you seriously can cut 30000 jobs any time.

<comment><USER68> I only wish they cut from the pool of useless middle managers (god knows there's an overabundance of them in HPE, and their number seems to increase every day), and not from among people who do actual productive work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> When I first read the HN title, I thought it was that HP was going to cut somewhere between 25 and 30,000 jobs.

</comment><comment><USER70> Is this another classic HP re-org?

</comment><comment><USER71> It's Carly Fiorina's legacy! And Meg Whitman carries her torch.

</comment><comment><USER72> This is a good thing for the survival of the company. I worked at HP and let me tell you, from what I saw, HP was the most bloated company I have ever seen. The horrible work ethic by the full time employees wasn't the exception but more the rule. I saw jsut about every employee take half day lunch breaks, and they'd hire contractors to do their work. I found it so disgusting that I exited the company. The full time employees I saw did NOTHING all day. They were basically all 25 year career employees that sat around doing NO actual work and they could get away with it because their manager and their managers manager was doing the same thing. HP is a horribly run company. Just about everyone there at least in the division I worked at was dead weight just showing up to collect a huge paycheck.

</comment><comment><USER28> Yesterday I picked up a rental car. I wanted Cheri listed as a driver. I emailed the photo I took of her driver license before I left the house to the person at the counter. All using my phone. I didn't need a scanner or a printer or ink.

I take documents with me using my phone. The printer business ain't like it was.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps you missed this in the article, but these layoffs are in the Enterprise division. The printer business is separate.

<comment><USER28> HP is trying to save its printer business because in the short term that will be better for senior management's options than changing the the company's course. Wall Street will bump the price and HP management will claim success and see their bonuses rise. That's much more attractive than changing course.

If the printer business was flush, HP could afford to bet on a diversity of services and products. They would be in the business of making money rather than saving it. 25k redundant staff doesn't speak to a track record of sound management decision making of the sort that would inspire confidence in this decision being a great one. Layoffs aren't innovation.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Problem finding places to engage with your TG? - <AUTHOR> Have you faced problems in finding places to connect and promote your startup to the right audience? How did you solved this? <comment><USER2> My experience with any kind of marketing (ex. putting up posters to promote a concert, calling B2B prospects, etc.) is that it is a lot more work than many people think. Having realistic expectations and applying elbow grease can go a long way.

For the area I am in, I find myself agreeing with this guy more and more

[http://www.mkbergman.com/969/of-flagpoles-and- fishes/](http://www.mkbergman.com/969/of-flagpoles-and-fishes/)

</comment><comment><USER3> TG?

<comment><USER4> Target Group / Target Audience

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I usually google up for relevant websites or forums to post my startup or submit my startup to directories.</comment>


MindsDB: Machine Learning in One Line of Code - <AUTHOR> https://www.mindsdb.com/ <comment><USER2> The website has to of those stupid chat bubbles overlapping each other...

I didn't see any lines of code, is this another no code solution?</comment>


Ask HN: CoffeeScript or TypeScript? - <AUTHOR>

In my company we are starting a front end project and there is lot of discussion to use a superset language. We have lot arguments between CoffeeScript and TypeScript. it seems TypeScript has more advantage with ES6 standards and typical coding style. But few are very much worried about its Microsoft roots and also found no one using it as much as coffeescript is in use. <comment><USER2> While I personally haven't used TypeScript, I can say this - worry not, about its roots. The whole code's open sourced on Codeplex, and Microsoft's commitments to open source are growing. Plus, it was personally overseen by Anders Heiljsberg - the guy's a freaking genius when it comes to language design. The only thing I have against TypeScript is the syntax - personally, I prefer CoffeeScript, due to its Ruby-esque syntax, but that's just me. So if TypeScript's being favored by peeps at your company, go for it!

<comment><USER2> And about its usage being lower than that of CoffeeScript - I'm afraid I can't say much about that, but again - it just hasn't caught on yet. My startup was one of the first to use Docker in production when it first came out a year ago, and now, Docker's the biggest thing ever. So yeah..

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> JavaScript</comment>


Collection about Rich Hickey's Works - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tallesl/Rich-Hickey-fanclub/blob/master/README.md <comment><AUTHOR> Just attended ClojureD in Berlin today. Never saw so many Clojure people in one place.

Woah moment: Question to the audience was "who is using Clojure at work?" almost all hands went up immediately. Couldn't believe my eyes.

Great talks from thoughtful to inspiring, super nice speakers, organizers, sponsors and audience. Reminded me of the openness & enthusiasm of the Ruby community many years ago.

Many talks had references to talks or concepts by Rich Hickey (& the sources he points to). The atmosphere was a melange of academic research & insight combined with hacker/maker spirit. The joy of building cool stuff.

If you are dabbling in Clojure or are just intrigued by it (e.g. through talks you've seen or things you've read):

See if you can make it to one of the Clojure conferences (big or micro) or whether there is a local group nearby (meetups, Clojure Bridge, …).

People will be enthusiastic to meet you. Newbies more than welcome.

There is also a slack ([https://clojurians.slack.com](https://clojurians.slack.com)), a discord ([https://discordapp.com/invite/v9QMy9D](https://discordapp.com/invite/v9QMy9D)), a forum ([https://clojureverse.org/](https://clojureverse.org/)) and a subreddit ([https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure](https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure)) where you can drop by.

</comment><comment><USER2> Woo hoo</comment>


The Music Industry's New Extortion Scheme - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/27/the-music-industrys-new-extortion-scheme/

<comment><USER2> <http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html>

_All sorts of development can be funded with a Software Tax_

Kids today never know who they are criticizing.

<comment><USER3> Read further: "But if the computer buyer makes a donation to software development himself, he can take a credit against the tax. He can donate to the project of his own choosing".

I think there would be _much_ less offense taken to this "tax" if we could pay the $5 to the artist of our choosing and get the same benefits.

<comment><USER4> So the buyer donates to his friend, and his friend donates to him, and effectively no one ends up paying the computer tax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really hate the music labels. Here's hoping online publishing (thefeelgood.com, amiestreet.com) puts them out of business before they can do too much damage to the legal institutions of this country.

<comment><USER6> I'll throw in a good word here for AmieStreet.com. I've been on there for about 3 months and I'm loving it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> __________ industry revenues will be a set size, regardless of the quality or type of _______ they release. Incentives to innovate will evaporate._

Yes. Fill in the blank - public education, health care, etc.

<comment><USER8> To be fair, 99% of the time I'm not looking for innovation in my hospital stay.

<comment><USER7> If the blood-letting is still working for you, then, by all means, stick with it.

<comment><USER8> There's a difference between being stagnant and being a guinea pig though.

<comment><USER7> As there is between a serious concern and a straw man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it's obvious that the music industry is headed towards an "all you can eat" model to generate the bulk of revenue related to its recorded properties. Either this (doubtful) or a premium on your MP3 player (likely), or something else. What will be interesting is how this changes the way music gets marketed.

I actually don't see anything changing. Labels will simply push all their artists into 360 deals where the labels get money for not only their record sales but also everything else, touring, merchandise, etc. The incentive is still going to be there to promote acts that classically "sell" even if "sell" no longer includes record sales.

</comment><comment><USER10> When a whole industry starts suing their customers on a regular basis you know they are in serious trouble.

There are so many alternative ways of making money, and I'm frankly amazed that the music industry hasn't even managed to implement one single money- making scheme. Apple clearly shows that it is possible - so they really have no excuse.

They should stop sobbing and get out there and compete in a market that is always changing and often brutal. That's what the rest of us have to do.

<comment><USER11> As the banking industry has shown us, what's good for the industry in the long term is often not what's good for the individuals in charge in the short term....

So I can't entirely say I'm surprised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Spain has already a music tax. They just assume that every DVD-R, CD-R, Hard Drive, iPod, etc. will be used to store "pirated" music so they charged them accordingly.

<comment><USER13> And, since there has been payment, people are then allowed to "pirate" music?

<comment><USER12> Yes. If you don't make money from it AND it is from personal use, it is _technically_ legal.

In practice, however, restaurants, salons for private weedings and even individuals who throw parties in their houses are being sued (or charged with a fee) for using copyrighted music in a non-personal or profit-making way. It's totally insane.

The tax is collected not by the goverment but instead by an increasingly- powerful-lobby who "represent the artists" (called SGAE) so the situation it's only getting worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If the music industry as we know it is dying, what's going to replace it?

Music tax - definitely bad idea. Buying CDs/albums - apparently, that is 'dying'.

So, then, how are artists going to get payed in such a way that both artists and consumers are happy? They won't work for free, after all. I've been think about this, but to no avail - nothing really comes to mind.</comment>