On the Pleasures and Sorrows of Life Without Screens - <AUTHOR> http://www.calnewport.com/blog/2019/05/31/on-the-pleasures-and-sorrows-of-life-without-screens/ <comment><USER3> The article is quite optimistic about peoples' abilities to transform their newfound boredom into something creative, but as in the example with books, this digital minimalist "healthy" boredom also has its prerequisites to make it work.

By likening social media use to addiction, only the negative effects are highlighted. For example, the waiting line in the supermarket used to be full of aggression, it has become much calmer with phones, and some people might even revert to alcohol or other destructive habits when they feel uncomfortable with being alone. In some cases, distraction can even be beneficial, as playing Tetris reduces PTSD and flashbacks. [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tetris-shown- to-l...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tetris-shown-to-lessen- ptsd-and-flashbacks/?redirect=1)

Perhaps a better metaphor might be travelling: When I travel too often and move aroung all the time, there is a certain "up in the air" \- emptyness - <USER2> feels as if I don't ever arrive anywhere, and I spend far too much time in airports and in transit. When I travel less often, it is easier to enjoy the ride and the experience has a positive impact.

<comment><USER4> >the waiting line in the supermarket used to be full of aggression, it has become much calmer with phones,

What?

Grocery lines used to be people reading magazines/tabloids/tv guides or sending their kid to go get something they forgot, now it's people yacking loudly on their phone or playing candy crush waiting for the person in front of them to finish self checkout.

<comment><USER5> I can't remember the last time I heard someone "yacking loudly" at their phone in line at the supermarket. The Candy Crush part is accurate, but not very different from reading magazines.

Not sure what was the point both you and OP were trying to make.

<comment><USER4> I can't go to the grocery or my second gym without people shouting into their phones or their bluetooth, or worse, sometimes having a conversation with the other person on speaker (for that matter we have a few people that do that here in my office in the break room).

Perhaps it is a midwest thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I read _Digital Minimalism_ back in February, and did a cleanse in March per his recommendations. One thing I noticed... I normally keep track of books I've read. I jumped from reading two books a month to reading six. Was I seriously reading four books a month in bullshit screen scrolling and arguing with people who are wrong on the Internet? Apparently.

I still use the phone as distraction, but now I do it with the Kindle app. I keep my phone Kindle loaded with books I can read in short bursts without extended concentration (currently about to finish the financial planning book _I Will Teach You to Be Rich_ , by Ramit Sethi), and carry my regular Kindle around for books that require more engagement.

I already avoided video games; I've done so for years, because I recognized that I have an addiction problem. When it comes to videogames, I'm like an alcoholic that doesn't drink for fear of the consequences. What I didn't realize is how carefully crafted the addictions of Facebook and Twitter are, how they sucked me in worse than video games ever did.

I have a long ways to go to fully engage with the world again, but I'm getting better.

<comment><USER7> Wait, then why are you here?

<comment><USER6> I thought about that. What I decided was to distinguish between social media driven by deliberately addictive engagement in order to sell ads (Facebook, Twitter), and social media that doesn't depend on ad revenue and invites active engagement rather than passive scrolling (Hacker News, and a guitar forum I read regularly). I don't need to give up _all_ online interaction, just the ones that are actively and deliberately unhealthy.

<comment><USER7> I don't know man. This sounds like:

"I used to have an alcoholism problem. I used to drink wine, beer, hard liquer, you name it. But then I did a cleanse in March, and I stopped drinking hard liquer and wine. I only drink beer now. But that's ok, because I actually like the taste of beer!"

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it does. And if I felt that HN was intruding on my ability to do other things the way Facebook and Twitter do, I'd quit it, as well.

edit: Maybe a better analogy would be that HN can be chewing gum when I'm trying to quit smoking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Digital Minimalism was probably my least favorite Cal Newport book, not for the subject matter but because of the reliance on third party stories. I like to hear peoples' stories first hand.

Even though I ended up being a partially failed case for using this book, I still got value from it. I mostly did the thirty day digital detox but ended up going back almost to my old routine. The difference is that I have perhaps reduced wasted time on my devices by about 1/3\. I am more aware of how much time I am spending, while I am spending it reading Twitter, HN, or playing Chess or Go when I have short periods of non-busy time. I am considering removing Chess and Go apps from all my devices.

If you are going to read just one Cal Newport book, I recommend choosing Deep Work.

<comment><USER9> As I've noted here before[1], Newport is on a 3-book contract on more or less the same topic with minor tweaks. And is likely to subtly market them to the hilt at every opportunity.

Besides unsound fundamentals (relying too much "third party stories", and other issues noted elsewhere), he focuses too much on "quantity" and "productivity" than on _quality_ and _effectiveness_.

Sure, he _has_ something of value to say, but he should absolutely have compressed it into _one_ book, and avoid the filler content. But my (uncharitable?) conjecture is, as he values "productivity", he happily gives into the demand of publishers to have X number of pages in a book, to sell, lest it looks like a pamphlet.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19047303](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19047303)

<comment><USER10> Books for general audience are filled with light content. That's just the way things are nowadays. It is not going to change. Any self help, any book about basics of something is going to have massive amounts of filler. I remember listening to Shallows: What Internet Does to Our Brains, and just _suffering_ from being forced to listen to history about reading. How the monks or somebody read in the past, how valueable it was. I didn't care about any of that. I wanted to hear stories about people falling into deep depression because of too much internet. I wanted summaries of research into changes of the brain addicted to the internet. Instead what I got was history of papyrus, and what came after that, how novel it was, and how books became available for everybody, not just select few. How monks read aloud, and how there was one special monk who could read without speaking words. Terrible book.

I remember reading something about geniuses and high performance individuals, and of course examples were about sports. Because everybody understands sports and the book was for everybody. I wanted to read about workings of the minds of best mathematicians or professionals in intellectuals fields, like engineering, programming, businessman. As I was reading I felt physically ill, until I closed the book, yelled as loud as I can "BWHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH" and made a cup of coffee for myself. I realized that most of the books I wanted to read were fluff written for the publishers and editors. Not for me. I can get the idea from the title, description, table of contents, and maybe a few Amazon reviews.

I notice the same thing with technical books. Sections about history, long winded explanations of what is going to be taught paired with long conclusions. Recaps. I can't tell you how many times I've read history of Linux, and I can't remember anything about it: these mad diagrams of standards, what came from where, and how it was improved, extended and replaced by something else. I wanted to read a book on algorithms, a free one, it had very warm reception on HN[0], and guess what? It starts out with history of numbers. With detailed names of people who came up with ideas, of places, and even pictures. I hate these forms of introduction. But the book still seems to be good. I can recognize whether a book is "heavy" or "light". Heavy books often have exercises, they start fast, and go deep. Light books just can't get to the fucking point.

Heavy book: Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective Light book: Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: An Agile Primer

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18805624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18805624)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Funny how younger people don't even know how the true boredom looks like. They think they get bored on their phones. Only after they go on screen detox they realise how much more fucking boring the life is. Especially if you don't have an obsessive hobby and do not want to bother other people just because you personally are bored.

I feel bad for people older than me that never got adjusted to the smartphones when they have to wait staring blankly into space or trying to start up a monologue to random stangers because they can't stand how dull the inside of their head is. Before smartphones your only salvation was a book and it was limited tool also not for everyone.

Smartphone as entertainment devices are the greatest social invention so far.

<comment><USER12> Maybe I'm just too old for it, but what is this "being bored" thing you're talking about? I clearly recall staring blankly into space while solving problems in my mind, or even just feeling the surroundings, as some of the most interesting moments of my life. I don't recall ever getting bored, not once.

<comment><USER11> You are very lucky. I clearly recall intense boredom from pre-phone times. Every time I was forced to stay in some place and do nothing, like while waiting at the doctor's, using public transport, at school during some classes, at family dinner, at couples dinner, in church, even at the funeral, sometimes even in my own home.

There was a saying that intelligent people are never bored. Untrue. I have IQ over 150 and boredom brought me to tears more than once.

I'd read to kill it, i'd play solitaire with real cards, I'd play one player games with pen and paper.

Now when I'm older I can handle being bored much better. As I accumulated scars I can reminiscence on how effed my life is and daydream of pleasure. Buy I still prefer my phone wherever it's socially acceptable.

<comment><USER13> If you want people to take you seriously. Never cite your iq unless there is a very good reason. This is not one

<comment><USER11> I was providing data point disproving (dumb) claim I heard some people make. If I just said I'm intelligent and bored you could just think I'm not that intelligent. I thought it was better to tell you exactly how intelligent I am so you can decide for yourself if that's intelligent enough or not. IQ is just a number like height or age. I just stated it as it was measured by Mensa membership test.

And I don't care much about people taking me seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Whatever you want to call it, I'm all for _digital minimalism_ these days.

I find modern computing to be filled with stress and anxiety. Computers, at one time, used to sit idle until used. Using a computer was to use a tool to help you get some task done that was previously menial and boring. These days as soon as I sit down at a computer I start getting messages, advertisements, pleas, bargains, warnings, requests... it seems like it never ends. I sit down to get some work done and an hour later I've finally managed to get enough of the messages down and distractions over with that I've nearly forgotten what it was I intended to do in the first place.

And this experience has been following me in my pocket for more than a decade. Since 2008 or so it has been getting louder, more obnoxious, and demanding. Offers for new phones and data plans when I'm trying to bathe my kids vibrate in my pocket waiting to be heard. Advertisements tailored to my interests and desires follow me everywhere. Messages from people trying to contact me whenever the whim comes to them. There is little room for silence in my days anymore.

I have a dream inspired by the folks behind [http://screenl.es/](http://screenl.es/) \-- a version of computing where there screens are not the primary interface for computing. One that is diverse, invisible, and intentional. I'd like a version of computing that is controlled by me and bends around my needs and not the needs of product designers, advertisers, and whims of others.

Until I can realize that dream or someone else gets it done I think I'm going to continue my trend of cutting out as much technology from my life as possible. I need more silence, solitude, and intentional, meaningful interactions. I don't want a deluge of social opinion on every happening in the world aimed right at my brain.

</comment><comment><USER15> How about the pleasures of life without other people's music and TV, which adults and children play aloud with no headphones in NYC, on a subway and in a forced, enclosed space?

Should we thank the geniuses who designed phones with amplified speakers and no headphone jack (some people are too poor/cheap for Bluetooth I suspect)? Or do we thank Facecrook and Instascam for out-loud videos cranked up at a higher volume on Android?

Or a breakdown of norms due to being a permissive, some call freer society?

Whatever it is, it's a quality of life detriment for those of us in dense areas, and a personal pet peeve.

<comment><USER16> People playing their music loudly in public spaces isn't new.

What's new is that it's coming out of a tiny phone rather than a 12 D-cell powered boom box.

<comment> Funes- >What's new is that it's coming out of a tiny phone rather than a 12 D-cell powered boom box.

And that makes _all_ the difference. You cannot possibly compare the number of times you would be bothered by a boom box in the 90s in public transport, for example, and how frequent it is now to be bothered by other people's phones on the exact same circumstances. Let's get real.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am a good dancer, well only Lindy and East coast swing. Not much weight for me to lose. I have a black belt in Kenpo. But I am also a systems administrator, enjoy my Switch, and generally spend at least a few hours looking at a screen each day, more than 12 hours on a work day. So I fail to see the correlation...

Seems like less about tech minimalism being the key and more, learning how to have self control. I am not knocking that, I believe that if you do not have the self control to manage a habit than you should remove that habit if it is a detriment. Nonetheless, the article, IMHO, is off the mark.

<comment><USER18> I think the value of his work is in helping folk become aware of how much time they waste. You sound like you have a good grip on that already, so probably aren't the target audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting topic but is this not just an advert for this guys book?

<comment><USER20> Is there information in the article that you find useful or interesting? Or that someone else might? If so, then what does it matter that he wrote a book on the same topic and mentions it? Would it have been better if he'd written exactly the same article but not mentioned the book?

<comment><USER19> Fair point, I just worry about the prevalence of "stealth" advertising. For me at least, the article seems to boil down mostly to "Look what my lifestyle book did for this person". But if others are getting value from it then who am I to judge :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you want to distract yourself while not doing anything you will find a way to do it. Before smart phones there were computers and video games. Before that there was television. Before that there was printed fiction of many sorts, most of it of no personal or social value at all.

It is good to strive to do worthwhile things. The worthless things you do to fill your time are not preventing you from doing anything else. You do what you do...

<comment><USER22> Good point. I would say that modern day distractions have an extra oomph however. I've never developed an addiction to books, crossword puzzles, or television whereas I've come to the point where I can't have a healthy relationship with video games.

<comment><USER23> I think video games went from "fun for a while, but eventually you wanna stop and go ride bikes" to "wait, what do you mean it's Monday morning?" at or a little after the 16-bit console era. There were always people who could just play Super Mario 3 all day or that one guy who did nothing but play Doom for six months or whatever, but most kids (and certainly most adults) would knock it off after a while. It wasn't a widespread issue, even among the small segment of the population that played games, even if _some_ did have problems even then.

There was the occasional eat-your-life-for-weeks-on-end game but they tended to be confined to genres like 4x and RPGs (Ultima series, say) and you didn't see multiple high-quality works of that sort every single year. The other big exception was probably MUDs and other games where social, online multiplayer was a major component.

I think a combo of 1) refining and focusing games to drive "engagement", 2) games just getting better over time, in a lot of ways, 3) multiplayer and social elements becoming more common, and 4) digital distribution putting unlimited novelty at one's fingertips, has made the whole artform kinda scary, unless you stick strictly to shortish, tight single-player games. Or local multiplayer, I guess, since it's hard to binge that until 3AM on a regular basis, for obvious reasons. Leveling concepts, lengthy turn-based games, randomness of rewards, and online/social components are all especially dangerous.

Actually point 4 goes for most things, now. It's kinda _too_ fast & easy to get... well, almost everything. I think there's a reason an unfettered will and easy gratification aren't usually things depicted as _improving_ characters in fiction, for example, and often do the opposite.

<comment><USER22> I think your analysis is spot on. Regarding that last part, I would add another disturbing argument. Some things are definitely easier to get, but the things that matter the most such as strong relationships or a sense of being useful and valued in a community are arguably harder to come by. Modern games and porn mimic having access to these needs and draw people in but fail to provide real satisfaction so the individual ends up like a moth on the lightbulb that burns it. You are under the illusion that your life is going well while at the same time you can sense that it isn't.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Fix Capitalism - <AUTHOR> http://hbr.org/2011/01/the-big-idea-creating-shared-value/ar/1

<comment><USER3> The reason the article is of note is that one of the authors is Michal E. Porter, author of books on strategy that was seized upon to drive much of the "Greed is Good" Wall Street culture since the 80s. He is a Harvard Business School professor who just authored an article that I would characterize as essentially advocating Socialism.

<comment><USER4> Having read what I think is the most famous of those books (_Competitive Strategy_), I'm wondering what aspect of Porter's writing you think catalyzes "greed is good".

The normal ding on Porter seems to be that he's no longer relevant.

<comment><USER3> You make another interesting point about his relevancy, since as I read the article, it really felt it was more like coattail riding by a consultant, moving from advocating a CSR framework to a "the new new thing is" CSV framework, upon which to advise corporate clients and create some kind of relevancy. The Social Enterprise "thing" is big at Harvard Business School and Kennedy School and in reading the article, it is sprinkled with more anecdotes rather than new intellectual models or frameworks on anything new.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Capitalism does not need to be fixed. We need to ACTUALLY have capitalism.

The above article seems to claim that we can fix capitalism by adding socialism to capitalism.

socialism != capitalism

They are mutually exclusive for the most part.

First it is important to note that we do not live in a pure capitalist system. I would estimate it as 25% capitalism, 25% socialism, and 50% kleptocracy (special interests / corruption).

To blame capitalism for all the problems is akin to taking an Olympic gold metalist, tying him up in iron chains, throwing him in a pool and then blaming swimming as the cause of drowning.

Capitalism is by far the most efficient system for increasing the wealth of an ENTIRE society. History has shown that societies prosper in direct proportion to how much they embrace capitalism.

We are currently moving from capitalism towards socialism and kleptocracy (think klepto as in stealing).

The common complaints against capitalism are not actually complaints against capitalism; they are usually against corporatism (regulation that favors corporations) or kleptocracy. Why do corporations have tax breaks employees can't take even though their situations are similar?

Bank bailouts were not a failure of capitalism. Capitalism would say that no company can get money for free. All money must be traded from other individuals wishing to purchase from you. The fact that the banks knew they were most likely to be bailed out created a moral hazard that encouraged them to take risks. "Privitized gains, socialized losses". Under pure capitalism a bank would not take such foolish action because they would know they would have a high probability of going out of business.

Monopolies are often created by government policy, not by free markets. For instance, why do lots of communities only have 1 ISP even though there are competitors that would love to do business there? It is because the city grants a license to that one company for a long period of time. DNS registration was granted a monopoly by the government. Why can't we have other DNS authorities? Surely the vast majority of people on here can still make a profit and charge cheaper for domain names. Why does GoDaddy have to pay a fee to another company that doesn't actually provide any real value?

In capitalism, if I was able to invest at 30% each year I could open my own bank and give out 10% in interest to all my depositors. Instead we are stuck with abusive banks.

The only semi-rational (emphasis on semi) argument that I have heard against capitalism is that those with capital have a higher chance of getting more capital and that this would lead to a concentration of power. It may in fact do this, but the moment the power is abused, others with capital will combine their resources to take the place of the exploitative company, or there will be revolts and people will boycott that company.

The system is set up so that businesses are fettered with regulations such as minimum wage and hiring ethnically diverse people (as opposed to the most qualified). Under global capitalism, the companies in countries that do not have those laws will drive the US companies out of business. Businesses that can will be forced to move to those countries if they wish to survive. It is no shock to me that unemployment is on the rise.

<comment><USER6> I agree with many of your points. However, note that Professor Porter does not technically propose socialism. Socialism would imply seizing private property, such as part of a company's assets, for the alleged purpose of using them to further the "public good" or satisfy "social needs", something a company would not do by itself. Note that prof. Porter does not even advocate increasing government regulation to channel more resources into social purposes. Actually, he does not even say that companies must of should take losses in order to help societal needs. His argument is that businessmen should look for opportunities in markets he chooses to call socially useful. In essence, he urges managers to make decisions that would make proper business sense anyways. Therefore, I can only speculate as to why he formulates the empty concept of "shared value." It is possible that he wants to create another framework to fill business schools' curricula (they have to teach something that sounds scientific) or to reassure himself that he is still relevant by taking a safe undefined middle-ground between "big business" and "society." I can only guess.

The sad thing, however, is that the major premise of his philosophy will prove more damaging to capitalism (which he so passionately professes to defend) than most socialist ideas would. That premise is the notion that capitalism, or whatever remains from it in the mixed world economy of today, is fundamentally broken. That even those businessmen who thrive (or survive) by their own ability and productive effort are fundamentally guilty of looking after their own interest. They are guilty by popular opinion and have to find a way to exonerate themselves.

I urge all HN readers who have read the article carefully and understand that there is something wrong about it, to also read Ayn Rand's "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" ([http://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Ideal-Ayn- Rand/dp/045114795...](http://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Ideal-Ayn- Rand/dp/0451147952/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1294615803&sr=8-1)) and judge for themselves dispassionately. Just because I happened to be reading the book today, I quote a couple of paragraphs, with which I agree:

"I [Ayn Rand] want to stress that our [objectivists'] primary interest is not politics or economics as such, but "man's nature and man's relationship to existence" - and that we advocate capitalism because it is the only system geared to the life of a rational being. In this respect, there is fundamental difference between our approach and that of capitalism's classical defenders and modern apologists. With very few exceptions, they are responsible - <USER2> default - for capitalism's destruction. The default consisted of their inability to fight the battle where it had to be fought: on moral- philosophical grounds."

"There are the businessmen who spend fortunes on ideological ads, allegedly in defense of capitalism, which assure the public that all but a tiny fraction of an industry's income goes to labor (wages), to government (taxes), etc., with these shares represented as big chunks in full-color process, and, lost among them, an apologetic little sliver is marked "2 1/2 percent" and labelled "profits."

"There is the display of charts and models, in a hallway of the New York Stock Exchange, presenting the achievements of free enterprise and captioned: "The People's Capitalism."

"Since none of these attempts can succeed in disguising the nature of capitalism nor in degrading it to the level of an altruistic stockyard, their sole result is to convince the public that capitalism hides some evil secret which imbues its alleged defenders with such an aura of abject guilt and hypocrisy. But, in fact, the secret they are struggling to hide is capitalism's essence and greatest virtue: that it is a system based on the recognition of individual rights - on man's rights to exist (and to work) for his own sake - not for the altruistic view of man as a sacrificial animal. Thus it is capitalism's virtue that the public is urged - by such defenders - to regard as evil, and it is altruism that all their efforts help to reinforce and reaffirm as the standard of the good."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Single-page view: [http://hbr.org/2011/01/the-big-idea-creating-shared- value/ar...](http://hbr.org/2011/01/the-big-idea-creating-shared-value/ar/pr)

</comment><comment><USER8> Since when is capitalism is broken? Seems like during great recessions everyone wants Keynesian systems and when things are going great we want a classical economy.

<comment><USER9> Capitalism's always been the least broken system. Over time, we've added laws to make it even less broken. Anti-trust, for example, relatively uncontroversial. As is the FCC's role in regulating frequency allocation, I think pretty much everyone agrees that a pure-free-market free-for-all with "biggest transmitter wins" wouldn't make a lot of sense.

Right now, IMO at least, the issue is that every time we have a recession, it takes longer and longer for "average folks" to be able to get work again. Last time, it wasn't until right before the bottom fell out again. This time, the jobs might never come back.

What do those people do now? That's what needs fixing in the current version of capitalism, IMO.

<comment><USER10> In a lot of ways, the "fixing" is the problem. Capitalism relies on a consistent set of rules. All the messing around means that businesses will not take risks. Check the history on 1929 and now. There are some serious parallels from recovery to hiring based on actions taken by government.

<comment><USER11> Inadvertently, you are correct. Capitalism thrives on a consistent set of rules, which can then be analyzed and legally subverted for greater profit.

<comment><USER10> You know, a huge percentage of the business owners follow the rules. They probably would follow more if the rules didn't require an expert (account or lawyer) to get right. Capitalism isn't Wall Street, it is the entire system. Look up your history and see that "Inadvertently" never enters into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article espouses a topic popular in most business schools today: they want to quantify (or simply pay lip service to) the idea of social responsibility. You will see all sorts of attention paid to this in most MBA programs today.

The idea isn't a new one and can trace its roots back to Marx and probably beyond. Marx argued that the workers should own the means of production [1]. That's simply a different take on creating "shared value".

But this article, as you'd expect from Harvard, is high on naive ideals. For example:

 _Not all profit is equal..._

The premise is that corporations have a social responsibility. I view this as being like the idea of keeping tigers as house pets. You can change the _purpose_ of a tiger to be a domesticated animal but at some point that tiger is going to snap your neck because, hey, that's what tigers do.

Of course tigers aren't inherently _bad_. The point is that tigers are really not suited for the purpose you have in mind.

Trying to colour corporations with morality is I think much the same. Capitalism works because corporations are amoral entities that simply respond to their environment. Add warm water to dry yeast and it grows. Add salt and it dies.

You control the actions of corporations not by making them _feel_ something. You control them by treating them as yeast and adding warm water, salt or whatever is required.

To put it another way: you control corporations by controlling their _environment_.

Unless you're a pure capitalist you will recognize that there is some place for government intervention and regulation, not only for the good of the people but for the good of the corporations themselves.

Antitrust for example came about because companies were _too_ successful. You can get an algae bloom in a river. The algae will eventually die out but only after killing virtually everything in the river and then starving.

In England the road system was nationalized (many years ago). In the US, the railroads were.

The difficulty lies in deciding exactly how much intervention is required.

Our current woes I think boil down to one thing: there is a mismatch between the interests of people and corporations and the interests of the politicians who decide what the intervention is. Corporations and people have to deal with consequences for a very long time. Politicians are often only concerned about what happens between now and the next election.

Of the things broken with the current system at the top would be (IMHO) the financial system. By this I primarily mean the Federal Reserve, the IMF and the World Bank.

The IMF and the Federal Reserve now have a role where they are basically welfare for investment bankers. You have seen crisis after crisis in recent years that largely stem from financial institutions having almost no aversion to risk. Why? Because we've trained them that way. If they ever get in any serious trouble, don't worry, we'll bail you out!

Likewise the IMF/World Bank continue to throw money at developing nations because, basically, they can never lose that money. A country can't declare bankruptcy like a person or corporation can.

Initiatives like HIPC [2] are misguided. The country already can't pay. All you're doing is paying bank the organizations that never should've lent them money to begin with.

It should also be noted that some of these loans end up funding war, revolution and even genocide as well as funding the personal fortune of corrupt dictators.

Back to capitalism: capitalism has been the engine that in less than 200 years has turned us from a largely agrarian existence to computers and putting man on the Moon, while increasing the standard of living of _billions_ of people to levels unprecedented in human history.

So when I read something like this, I think it's just the latest fad from Ivory Tower MBA academics who seek to justify their existence in a world that is largely coming to the conclusion that the MBA itself is a destructive fad.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production#Marxist_ana...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production#Marxist_analysis_of_ownership_of_MoP_within_capitalism)

[2]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavily_Indebted_Poor_Countries></comment>


If you add an OS to Chrome, it's an OS - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/09/dzuiba_google_chrome_redux/

<comment><USER2> > a pre-adolescent in-the-brain-out-the-mouth reporting style.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

His writing style plays for cheap laughs by insulting people, but that can only go so far. After a while, don't people grow up and get tired of that kind of thing? "Mike Arrington is a doody-head! Hah hah! Poop!"

Were one to look at his actual point, one might also go back 30 years and wonder if those silly upstarts at Microsoft with their "pee sees" have a chance against serious mainframes, with the millions of lines of code already written for them.

<comment><USER3> _Were one to look at his actual point, one might also go back 30 years and wonder if those silly upstarts at Microsoft with their "pee sees" have a chance against serious mainframes, with the millions of lines of code already written for them._

That comparison would only make sense if mainframes and PCs cost essentially the same, used the same hardware platform, and the mainframe could run all the software as the PC (but not the other way around).

<comment><USER2> It's not an exact comparison. What I'm pointing out is that disruptive innovations are often like this:

> In terms of functionality, web apps have been a regression from their > desktop counterparts.

They're not _better_ \- at least not initially. They're _good enough_.

Will web apps follow that path and displace desktop apps? Maybe, maybe not, but it's not as ridiculous a concept as the rant makes it out to be.

<comment><USER4> His point is not only that web apps are inferior. His point is that web apps are _not_ good enough. Case in point:

 _TechCrunch goes on to report: "Don't worry about those desktop apps you think you need. Office? Meh. You've got Zoho and Google Apps. You won't miss Office."

Ah, yes. Corporate IT workers everywhere have to port decades of esoteric business logic codified into Excel macros to Google Spreadsheets, but the real problem is, what are they going to do after lunch? Have you ever tried to use Google Docs for any serious task? In the words of a true hacker, it's like trying to build a bookcase out of mashed potatoes. The Microsoft Office institution will not easily be overthrown by a bunch of jokers writing JavaScript._

Web apps may be disruptive, but that doesn't make them more useful or more likely to take off.

<comment><USER2> Maybe he's right, maybe he's not, but calling people who think differently a bunch of morons isn't what makes his case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It doesn't seem like a lot of people have connected the parts together yet.

Google Gears, Native Client and Chrome are all parts to making the web MORE than what it already is. Think about it. At the moment we are constrained to HTML, CSS and JavaScript. With the technologies being put together by Google you can easily have downloadable native applications that run through Chrome.

I'm doubting that Google is just going to make another net kiosk distribution. Making an operating system for themselves is how they are going to really get their web technology out in the open.

<comment><USER6> So basically what you are saying is that google plan to "embrace and extend" the web?

While this may be a step which is required to bring the web as a platform forwards, I'm not sure I like the sound of that either.

<comment><USER7> Sounds fine to me. They aren't locking you into anything. All their technologies are open and free, it's just that no other companies can offer Google's quality and breadth.

<comment><USER8> That's not really true. Google's range of products is tiny compared to Microsoft's, and while Microsoft's quality is variable (partly due to their wide range) it's not the case that they're universally bad.

Microsoft rely on their closed source, Google rely on physically owning the servers their services rely on. Will you be able to run your own set of Google services on your own kit, or on a third-party VM host and retain the full functionality of Chrome OS? I doubt that somehow.

<comment><USER2> If it's anything like Android, it _will_ be open enough (well, completely open, actually) that you can hack it to make it do what you want. You could hack it to work with Yahoo or Microsoft, or DedaSys, for that matter.

<comment><USER8> Well, OK, I have an old Mac SE/30 at home. It's a fine machine for basic word processing etc. I'm running Word 5.1 on it, how old is that? Yet despite it being closed source, Microsoft, utterly unsupported, yadda yadda, it works fine. In 20 years, will I be able to have my own completely independent Google Docs running on a Unix that doesn't exist yet, in a datacentre operated by a company that doesn't exist yet, and have all my old docs still there?

Basically, I don't think this has been very thought through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I enjoyed this article a lot. It's nice to see that there are others avoiding the Google koolaid.

I DO want to see local apps accessible via the browser though. That has a lot of potential to be cool.

edit: local apps as in hosted locally, whether on the same computer or on the home network somewhere. Basically, where your data is your data and no one else's :)

<comment><USER10> Why on earth would you want your applications running locally to show in the browser, that's just another layer in between slowing things down and offering no extra level of service ?

'Applications' running on your local machine that are web centric can be reached via the localhost url, everything else knows how to talk to the display engine already (and at a much higher clip than a browser would be able to offer).

<comment><USER9> Because I want people to be used to accessing their own stuff (media in particular) via their browser for when home media servers inevitably become a big deal and people use a youtube-like (or HTML 5 Video tag)-like interface to access their stuff.

There are absolutely limitations to using the browser as an interface to apps, but you gain in that "Remote Desktop" becomes trivial to implement and that you can have one expensive server and a bunch of thin-clients all over your house.

It's just the way I think it's headed, and I think that's pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Proof that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't punch him in the dick without being brought up on assault and battery charges._

This phrase, alone, makes me wanna buy a Real News Paper subscribtion. I never read such profanity reading the Washington Post.

Why perform inexpensive literary contortions, and dive face first into pie just to make me laugh, Ted Dziuba?

</comment><comment><USER6> This had me laughing:

 _The canonical example of failure in tech journalism is TechCrunch, a blog that once declared Google's MapReduce to be a system that "reduced the links found on the web into a map that search algorithms could run over." Yes, this will do nicely._

While you could say that The register obviously would have an "agenda" to discredit other competing sites, I honestly find The register, despite the snarky style, much more informative and useful than TechCrunch.

<comment><USER12> TC have been publishing good articles, mediocre articles and quite bad articles. But calling them failure is laughable, I think it's a result of envy combined with fear. TC is their serious competitor, and they know it. If for nothing else, they are usually able to break stories sooner than others. IMHO, Register should better find a ways to improve themselves, their work is not that impressive either.

<comment><USER13> It's not The Register that has an obsession with TechCrunch, but this particular writer.

<comment><USER14> Dziuba doesn't have an obsession with TechCrunch, but with snark in general. Once upon a time he wrote balanced articles criticizing things he didn't like. Then he realized that the more negative he was, the more hits he received, and like many weak-minded tech writers before him, he sold out for the sake of a minor celebrity status.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dziuba's a clever writer to be sure, but to me, part of being a 'professional' journalist is that you refrain from the ad hominem. Hurling clever insults is easy there are a million writers who can do it but to create a piece of informative, interesting, relevant content, not so much. Calling out Michael Arrington like that...was kind of unprofessional. But I do like Dziuba's writing and also of course Verity Stob.

</comment><comment><USER16> I was agreeing up with him to this point.

 _"Keep whackin' away on that Pareto Principle and let us all know how it turns out. In the meantime, I'm going to go play a few rounds of Counterstrike on my Windows-based PC"_

That's one way to kill your own argument about technical knowledge superiority. Counterstrike? seriously? Windows can be forgiven... but counterstrike?

<comment><USER6> How does a preference in games (or, more likely, choosing a game absolutely everyone would know about for a sarcastic remark) in any way relate to technical knowledge?

<comment><USER16> Look, I agree it was a sarcastic remark - but if you're going to take any sort of high ground (which is why I used the technical superiority comment, even though it was probably a poor choice of words) to sum up your argument, at least use something that doesn't have connotations of overzealous teens whose primary goal in life is to tell each other to F off.

It demeans his argument from a scathing piece (which I mostly agree with) to a blatant rant...

<comment><USER6> I take it you have not seen this Halo commercial then :)

<http://www.break.com/index/best-halo-3-trailer.html></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Sketch.sh - Interactive OCaml and ReasonML Sketchbook - <AUTHOR> https://sketch.sh <comment><USER2> This is already such a useful part of the Reason/OCaml ecosystem in its current state, and has even more potential longer term. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER3> Both beautiful and super powerful tool, keep up the awesome work!

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a brilliant tool that fully shows the potential that Reason/OCaml provide as a platform.

Good job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So it's like Jupytr Notebooks for OCaml and ReasonML, nice!</comment>


Moore's law for Solar Energy? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/opinion/krugman-here-comes-solar-energy.html?ref=global-home

<comment><USER2> Clayton Christensen had a much more interesting take on solar power at the Business of Software conference: it won't compete with fossil fuels in the US anytime soon (except as a recipient of huge amounts of government largess), because for the most part our energy infrastructure works really, really well. It's ubiquitous, cheap, and mostly doesn't kill you. In much of the world, energy is 0 for 3! This makes e.g. small solar cells just good enough to run a cell phone charging station into revolutionary, disruptive devices in parts of Africa, because they're not competing against a well-developed multi-billion dollar infrastructure, they're competing against "no electricity at all." If they're expensive and fail to work in poor weather and available only spottily and... _who cares_ , some electricity still beats no electricity.

His thesis was that if solar ever becomes a big thing in the US it will be because it grew like wildfire on the global periphery until the tech gets mature enough to start peeling off bits around the edges of US consumption (and then implied it might go further than that, using the same disruption mechanic).

<comment><USER3> I think that's over thinking it. If solar panels get cheap enough, companies will find a way to make it reliable. It's not terribly difficult (or expensive, comparatively) to store energy when size and weight are not a concern. You can use huge tanks of molten salt, for example. But in the short term, you could just hook a bunch of panels up alongside a normal natural gas plant. Just spin the gas up when it's cloudy or at night. The nice thing is that in a lot of places where it's hot and sunny often, electricity use tracks sunlight due to air conditioning. Natural gas already supplements coal plants all over the country. It would be no different.

<comment><USER4> > It's not terribly difficult (or expensive, comparatively) to store energy > when size and weight are not a concern. You can use huge tanks of molten > salt, for example.

Yet, PG&E pumps water uphill at night so it can get more hydro during the day. Maybe they made a big mistake, but I'd like to see some actual numbers.

PG&E isn't perfect, but they're not obviously incompetent either, so ....

To put it another way, if you're correct, you're ignoring gobs of money.

> The nice thing is that in a lot of places where it's hot and sunny often, > electricity use tracks sunlight due to air conditioning.

Most places don't have air conditioning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's good news, but no matter how cheap it is, solar only works when the sun shines. The real impediment to a solar/wind economy is energy storage, which is still very expensive and hard to scale.

A good post that runs the numbers and conveys the scale of the problem is here: [http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized- bat...](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/)

And another that takes a close look at wind is here: <http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/10/29/gws-sg-es/>

We can definitely use solar for about 20% of our energy, with fossil or nuclear plants backing it up. But until we fix the storage problem, the only route to a post-carbon economy is nuclear.

<comment><USER6> That post was written by someone with a vary superficial understanding of these issues. For example Hydro power already provides a lot of 'grid storage' and is totally missing from his analysis. Also, photovoltaics are far less impacted by clouds than you might assume with partially cloudy days offering similar power levels to sunny days. And even on days where it rains constantly you get some power and often see an increase in wind power output.

Smart grids enable many applications like large scale cooling to shift of demand without building new storage infrastructure on the supply side. Not to mention simply shifting maintenance cycles can shift a lot of 'supply' to different parts of the year without building any infrastructure at all.

Add it all up and Wind + Solar meet total energy demands and have near ideal capacity factors with ~2-4 new hours of total grid energy storage. VS. the 6 days which he assumes.

PS: [http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/it-looks-like- ti...](http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/it-looks-like-time-to- build-an-atlantic-seaboard-wind-grid.ars)

<comment><USER5> There's a limit to how far you can expand hydro. There aren't that many more places to build dams. You can expand a little more by putting reservoirs at higher elevations specifically for storage, but that's expensive.

Even at 4 hours of storage, the scale we need is a bit mind-boggling.

Your link is really interesting though. That's the kind of analysis we need. I see too many articles that just talk about rated capacity with no consideration of actual output or reliability.

My second link does similar analysis for Australia, and there it doesn't work out so well. The wind drops low over wide areas for days at a time.

In any case I have nothing against renewables, as long as they don't use up too much land...offshore wind is perfect. But I think we should be building GenIII and better nuclear reactors, too.

<comment><USER6> Hydro is already used for peaking power, at most we would retrofit things it increase peak power output where it's reasonable to do so.

Building 4 hours of storage is a rather extreme step that's also extremely unlikely. California already has a 40c/kwh cost differential between peak summer demand and the middle of winter, but nobody is building massive grid energy storage to smooth that out. Even over the course of a single day you could make 10c/kwh just from grid storage but nobody is building it. Rather we add peaking power plants because base load power + storage costs more than peaking power plants and that's likely to continue to be the case even in a world dominated by solar + wind power plants.

<comment><USER7> If you use hydro for peaking, you increase the impact of hydro on the environment.

A hydro plant running at baseload has a river downstream that is like... a river. Water levels vary with something close to the natural rhythm.

A hydro plant used for peaking will have no water flow for hours, and then heavy water flow. That puts extreme stress on organisms living downstream.

<comment><USER6> Rivers don't have constant flows so it's more natural to have variable output than constant output. And dam's never have zero output, it's more a question of 30-80% and back down.

[http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700006602/USGS-Gains- from...](http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700006602/USGS-Gains-from-Grand- Canyon-flooding-short-lived.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Krugman's article is not very interesting (at least not by HN standards). It's clear he has his biases.

But the HN comments here contain some pretty cool links, which is why I upvoted it.

I worked in the renewables space for a little bit and my conclusion was that far too many companies were making political bets, not technological or business bets. Specifically, a lot of business models depended on an extension of Kyoto to the US, which did not happen and is unlikely to happen any time soon. Without that the business models were interesting,but not compelling.

Personally, I do believe renewables can replace a significant fraction of fossil fuels, but they have to do it based on cost, not political correctness. I'm not saying that as a normative statement, but as an observation of American politics. There was a brief window of time when carbon could be priced the way environmentalists wanted it to, but that's not going to happen again any time soon.

</comment><comment><USER9> Krugman, as is his custom, criticizes his political enemies without even knowing their position.

From the article: _Let's face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives._

If they are "actively hostile" to alternatives, why did they pass a law subsidizing alternatives?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005>

Also, why are we submitting inflammatory and dishonest pundits to HN, rather than a source that might skip the politics and cover some actual science?

</comment><comment><USER10> Moore's Law is actually quite ubiquitous. In _The Innovator's Dilemma_ a large number of examples are given of similar trends that lasted for decades, including such things as the volume that a hydraulic scoop could scoop, to the distance that a steam ship could travel without refueling, to the capacity of batteries.

It is therefore no surprise that solar power would show a similar trend.

<comment><USER11> > Moore's Law is actually quite ubiquitous.

Well, s-curves (sigmoid curves) certainly are common, but Moore's law - so far - is not a sigmoid AFAIK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This SciAm article has actual numbers / charts - worth looking at: [http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest- blog/2011/03/16/sm...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest- blog/2011/03/16/smaller-cheaper-faster-does-moores-law-apply-to-solar-cells/)

</comment><comment><USER13> _We know that it produces toxic (and radioactive) wastewater that contaminates drinking water_

Yes, some of the runoff is almost five times as radioactive as a banana. I don't mean to say that we shouldn't be concerned about the chemical sin fraking fluids, clearly those are things we should worry about. But raising the specter of radiation here just seems like fear mongering.

<comment><USER14> Water evaporates, concentrating contaminates. Its much more important to have water safe to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "At what cost?" That's the first question anyone should ask about solar (or any other type of energy). Even though prices have fallen, solar is still, by far, the most expensive source of on-grid electricity generation--5 time more expensive than natural gas for example. [http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2009/05/12/leveliz...](http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2009/05/12/levelized- cost-of-new-generating-technologies/)

<comment><USER16> You provide a link from 2009 (!) which states that the "levelized" capital cost of nuclear is higher than that of solar PV. Fail and fail. Current solar PV prices are much lower than they were expected to be in 2009 -- that's part of why Solyndra went bust. And if nuclear is cheaper, why does no one build it? Answer: it's not, as soon as you include the costs of waste disposal and disaster insurance, both of which are effectively infinite because no one has a solution. See [http://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/NCW- SolarRe...](http://www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/NCW- SolarReport_final1.pdf) among many others.

<comment><USER16> More details: [http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/11/07/362705/krugman- sola...](http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/11/07/362705/krugman-solar-power/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Solar is going to be a disruptive technology in the future. Something I'm pretty excited about.

</comment><comment><USER18> One fantastic presentation given at HomeCamp 4 last month was by Moxia. Their angle on this is retrofitting homes to use DC sockets rather than AC (via USB ports and convertible DC cables, so you don't have to carry the brick around with you). They install batteries, an AC/DC transforming battery charger (charging overnight, using off-peak, cheap electricity) and solar panels (presumably wind turbines and other generators can be used too). All with clever management and monitoring integration. The point of this (besides the convenience of having DC sources for everything, and LED lighting) is shifting your power consumption off-peak, and to an extent, offgrid.

</comment><comment><USER7> Moore's law is the wrong analogy.

Computer chips become better every year because they get smaller, use less materials.

We could make solar cells thinner, but we can't appreciably reduce the area that they take up. The solar cells need some backing material, brackets to hold them, infrastructure to move the electricity away, security mechanisms so that people can't steal them, and other forms of material that can't be rapidly dematerialized.

<comment><USER19> Moore's law is all about improvements in the fab process which drives down not only design rules but also defect rates to mean that putting more devices on a single wafer is more cost effective.

As you reduce the process costs then there is no reason that the cost of solar panels doesn't approach coated window glass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was not concerned with fraking until I read:

"the heavy trucking required for fracking inflicts major damage on roads"

</comment><comment><USER21> It's interesting that he started the discussion with a reminder of externalities, pointing out that the negative externalities from fracking were not properly internalized.

I'm surprised he didn't mention the FITs in Europe, and the cheap loans in China. Was he making a singular point of the United States, or did he overlook places where solar is relatively advantaged relative to fossil fuels?

</comment><comment><USER22> When solar becomes cheaper than the alternatives, the propaganda machine can only slow the adoption, not stop it. The entities that consume large quantities of electricity are mostly unaffected by IQ lowering media transmissions.

<comment><USER23> You don't really need to reach for "propaganda" as an explanation as to why people have not been in a big rush to buy more expensive (both up front and ongoing) and less reliable electricity, and when and if that ever changes it won't be "despite the mighty power of progaganda", it'll be because it's cheaper and better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24>
      Moore's Law — in which the price of computing power
      falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months

I stopped reading right there.</comment>


Kernel module for advanced rickrolling replaces open() call - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fpletz/kernelroll <comment><USER2> SECURITY WARNING: do not use this module! Scroll down for more information in the discussion. This module disables a major part of kernel memory protection and trusts user provided file names to be valid. This makes it possible for an UNPRIVILEGED USER to do bad things.

These problems are, of course, fixable someone may fix it.

Bonus points for whoever fixes the problems and submits a pull request. All the info you need is in this discussion thread.

(edit: I can already see some pull requests on this)

<comment><USER3> I never had security in mind when developing this. I just did it for fun and to prove it was possible after I had the idea. It was never intended to go that popular.

I will incorporate all fixes and address all issues raised in the next few days.

<comment><USER2> You should never ever admit that you didn't think of security when writing code, especially in the kernel space :)

I think that instead of the strlen pull request you accepted, you should use getname/strncpy_from_user like the open() syscall does instead of strlen+memcpy.

Also, while you're here, could you explain what is the purpose of disabling memory write protection? Is it to allow writing to the syscall table? You seem to enable writing in the page table for the syscall table before writing, but never disable it. Could it be that you forgot to flush the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) after updating the pagetable and the change you did does not take effect soon enough? I don't know how you flush TLB's in Linux but the Intel manuals tell you to do so after updating the page table.

It's fun to see that there were so many people interested in this, although it's not much more than a joke. I guess part of the interest stems from the fact that it's a small kernel module with so little code that it's easy to grok.

<comment><USER4> > You should never ever admit that you didn't think of security when writing > code

For a joke weekend project that you never intended anyone to see / use seriously? Sorry, no. I would never waste time making something secure that I did for funzies that I'll likely never touch again. If I happen to come across or realize a security issue as I'm writing it I _might_ make a comment there in the source or in the README. Otherwise, that's time spent I could have been making my real projects better and more secure.

<comment><USER2> Did you notice the smiley at the end of that line? I intended that to mean that I'm not really serious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great, for the fun of course, but also and mainly because it is a simple example of a working kernel module, which is not something one can see very often.

<comment><USER6> What are you talking about? The linux sources are full of simple examples of working kernel modules.

<comment><USER7> But those are all things like parallel port drivers. _This_ is for an Internet meme!!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> p = (char *)(path + strlen(path) - 4);

This is a very bad idea as path is user-supplied and has to be treated as malicious. An attacker can omit the string-terminator...

<comment><USER8> BTW: write_cr0(read_cr0() | 0x10000)

is a absolute no-go. It's a nice and funny kernel module but it dooms the kernel's security.

<comment><USER9> If we could take CR0 et al manipulations away from module authors, we'd do it long ago. Sigh...

<comment><USER7> This is why I avoid out-of-tree modules. At least someone had to glance over the in-tree module before I run it on my machine. When you download random kernel modules from the Internet, they're probably from people too lazy to have their code properly reviewed. And if they're too lazy to have their code reviewed, they probably don't feel too bad about disabling all page write protection, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll be saving this for April 1, 2012 :)

</comment><comment><USER11> See, I'd do this sort of thing for any image by opening up my wifi and waiting for people to connect. Then just ensure I serve rickroll pics/videos/flash videos/sound whenever appropriate content is requested.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why not just write a FUSE module?

<comment><USER13> Maybe because the author prefers to play with kernel. Other option is create a wrapper library and enforce it's usage with LD_PRELOAD.

<comment><USER8> Using LD_PRELOAD you cannot hook a syscall like open().

<comment><USER14> Doesn't pretty much everything call into libc to open() things rather than invoke the syscall directly?

<comment><USER2> No. Assembly code invokes kernel syscalls by invoking an interrupt or using a syscall opcode. No libc or function calls involved, so LD_PRELOAD can't hook in.

You might even have several libc's in your system. You might have a uClibc + Busybox based initrd and a full glibc based root system.

Btw. how does LD_PRELOAD act together static binaries?

<comment><USER14> I know apps _can_ invoke kernel syscalls directly, and I'm sure you could name a handful of apps that do this all time. But are you really doing that in your mp3 player?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> may I suggest the use of a random rick-roll probability?

</comment><comment><USER16> Brilliant.</comment>


Selling your company doesn't make you happy - <AUTHOR> http://ryancarson.com/post/24480936689/selling-your-company-doesnt-make-you-happy <comment><USER3> I've tried writing this comment multiple times and I'm struggling to find a way to explain it well. We sold our company[1] and part of the sale terms were we would be retained as the "managers" of the products (websites) and I always approached the sale as: "We take their money, they use their experience and assets to increase the value of the products and we continue to manage the product" and in theory that's what happened, unfortunately I made one big mistake: I didn't at any point realise how much control (freedom) mattered.

The company that acquired us is fine and I have no problems with them in any way and I enjoy my job, but it's just so different to how it was before. I guess a good real world comparison is renting vs. owning, if you own your home you can paint the walls, install a new floor or turn an entire wall into a television. When you're renting you're limited to very insignificant and inconsequential things, you can move around your sofas, have red plates instead of blue and get a new desk, but what sort of control is that? It's all cosmetic.

If I ever sell a company again I will absolutely make sure that the sale is the end of my involvement. If I wake up in the morning and have control I can think "today I'm going to make my company so fucking awesome, yeah!" because the sky is the limit, but as an employee it's just "oh, today I'm going to work... my goals are x and I can't change that" and when the former was previously possible and is no longer an option it's very depressing. I guess depressing is a dramatic word, but that's how it feels. Maybe stifling would be better, or trapped.

[1] I say company but the company was just for the sake of legalities, we didn't have an office or any formal structure, we just ran a couple of websites.

(I've been thinking about this for a while now and this blog post reminded me how I felt, sorry if the comment is too off-topic)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great comment. I felt this acutely in the sale of Carsonified. I had no real control in the production, marketing or execution of the events after the sale. Thankfully the company that bought us did a good job and everything went fine.

You're absolutely right though - everyone who's selling a company should think very hard about what their involvement is going to be post-sale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It depends on your circumstances, and specifically whether (a) running the company is what you most want to spend your time on and (b) whether you want liquidity and diversification.

I didn't want to spend my life running Viaweb, and I did want liquidity and diversification, so selling it made me very happy.

<comment><USER5> "running the company" is much much different than "running your own company".

After I sold I had to stay for 3 months for transition. That was brutal. I couldn't have been unhappier and felt that those three months would have been super valuable to get a head start on the next thing (which took about 5 years..)

If I did it again I would make sure that the consulting time was on an "as needed basis" and not 9 to 5 or any fixed period.

One interesting thing though happened. After the consulting was over I went on a ski trip. I was called during the trip because they had some system problems. Solving those problems I really enjoyed doing and I continued to do that free of charge for the next year or two. My payback was simply hearing the appreciation (this was back in dial into system by 2400 baud modem days.)

<comment><USER4> Yes, it's rarely pleasant working for an acquirer. We tell founders who are thinking of selling to factor that pain into the price.

<comment><USER6> When do you tell them that? Before or after you've invested?

<comment><USER7> "Founders who are thinking of selling" is a clue that it's after YC has invested. But obviously it's no big secret since he's posting it on a public forum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While I agree with the sentiment, the freedom provided by an exit (or alternately just a very profitable company) is certainly something that can make someone happy.

It isn't the 0's in the bank account, it's what they provide. It means you can work on bigger projects with more funding requirements. It means you don't ever have to worry about how the mortgage is getting paid next month, because you don't have one. It means you don't have to worry about how to get health care to take care or your aging parents, or how you are going to get your kids through college.

These are some of the biggest problems in life, and all of them go away with a big exit. Then you can spend your time focusing on the things that make you happy, which is probably for many of us building another company. The point is that it removes some stress and some worries, and that is a very good thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed - the extra cash makes some basic problems go away. Once those hurdles are removed though, you realize they weren't hurdles at all - they were just part of being alive.

<comment><USER5> "extra cash makes some basic problems go away"

"basic problems" are an important thing to make go away.

Let me put that a different way from my personal experience.

Some things that money can buy can make you happy obviously. Of course if you feel like crap that day for any reason the fact that you have those things that money can buy won't change that.

Having money means importantly being able to avoid things that make you unhappy. Small living quarters. Bad food. No air conditioning. A car that breaks down.

Added: To name only a few things which vary in importance depending on the individual.

<comment><USER9> For people who don't really know anyone who's poor, it's hard to see that it's not all about iPads or even good cheese and air conditioning and square footage.

Broken teeth you can't afford to get treated. Family members with psychiatric disorders no one can afford to help (or, the available medicines cause side effects that make life completely miserable). Busted plumbing and busted roof you can't fix properly. Aging parent without necessary full time care, but you still have to have a job. Both you and your spouse having to work to support your kids, who you have to put in cheap daycare which they hate just so you can go to work. Living in a trashy, high-crime neighborhood. Having to drive four hours to get to a place which will give you birth control at an affordable price. Getting treated like dirt by a scumbag boss at a job you can't leave, for years. Getting turned down for interview after interview because of the heuristic that you must be bad at what you do if nobody else hired you. Fighting and stressing over money to the point of divorce, when just a little money could have smoothed it over. Actually worrying about how you are going to live when you cannot afford the place you are living. Having the scorn and disregard of most of society until the day you die.

Yes, there are alternate solutions and little consolations and some possible ways out, if you are in a developed country, if you are smart, if you are hard to discourage, if you are lucky.

But when a normal middle class income so easily makes these problems into implausible memories, it can be pretty insulting to hear smug sayings like "money doesn't buy happiness" from people who have decent secure income.

So to be a nice empathic middle-class person, don't say those things in public unless you are prepared to go full Buddhist (and put your money where your mouth is).

<comment><USER10> How about: "money does not buy happiness, but it can mitigate a whole lot of the misery associated with lack of money".

For an analogy - it's no more fun swimming in a 500 foot deep lake, than a 50 foot deep lake, but a 3 foot deep lake with rocks and waves is painful and dangerous and no fun.

The baseline of money that eliminates misery ( == "buys happiness") is that which takes a person from "really poor" to "modestly middle class".

<comment><USER5> I like that example. I use a similar analogy to that frequently. If you are in a room with a ceiling that is even a few inches over your head you don't have to stoop at all. It doesn't necessarily benefit you if the ceiling is 3 inches over your head or 10 inches or 10 feet (with respect to walking that is - <USER2> some room for up and down etc.) On the other hand things become tremendously difficult if the ceiling is even an 1/8 of an inch lower than it needs to be. In that case you have to stoop and you can't walk normally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I built and sold a company last year. It was relatively small, but being able to go from an idea to acquisition in less than a year was incredibly validating to me, and that definitely made me happy.

Also, having extra cash in the bank means I have to worry less about how I'm going to pay rent this month, giving me more time to think about and do things that do make me happy, like spending time with family and friends, and making things.

Money can't buy you happiness, but it definitely doesn't hurt.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're a normal human being, you're likely to notice over time that the things that you think will make you happy, when they finally happen, don't. It's just something people are really bad at predicting.

If you're a normal human being, probably the only thing which actually makes you happy at the end of the day is helping somebody else selflessly-- best is if they don't even know it was you.

We're weird animals.

</comment><comment><USER13> Selling for a good profit gives you the flexibility to do other things that you want to do, especially things that require capital, like starting a small team of devs and designers to work on another startup or creating a private space transport company.

So many artists around me would just love it if they could have even a marginal exit as to be artists all the time. However, most (as in, 99.9%) have to take a full-time job to make ends meet.

My point is not to say it's disingenuous to state that selling a company doesn't make a person happy. But I think one cannot underestimate how those finances helped to further happiness and even continued success.

</comment><comment><USER14> There's another, very salient reason for selling your company. But only if you are a serial entreprenuer:

An exit validates your ability to build to sell and may move you ahead of the pack when a potential angel or VC calculates your probability for a successful exit, especially compared to others who are "unproven."

</comment><comment><USER15> Related (from 2007 but still relevant!): [http://www.erica.biz/2007/hitting- the-jackpot-doesnt-mean-in...](http://www.erica.biz/2007/hitting-the-jackpot- doesnt-mean-instantly-becoming-happy/)

This does seem to be a consensus amongst successful entrepreneurs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great post - thanks for sharing

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Paul Graham seems pretty happy doing Y Combinator, and what I've learned of him from the internet makes me think he's better off there than running the same company he started 'back in the day', both personally and in terms of what he's giving back to the world.

</comment><comment><USER17> If you haven't already met your financial goals, then selling your company should help, and that should make you happy.

If you have met your financial goals, then the only reason to sell is if you aren't enjoying what you're doing or want to move on to other things. In which case selling gives you the freedom to do that.

It sounds like the author got a big pile of money and it didn't make him as happy as he thought it would. No surprise there, it's pretty well known that money doesn't buy happiness _.

_ Beyond about 75K/yr or so [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2019628,00....](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2019628,00.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> 'The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence' is what my father always says.

He is a man who spent much of his youth traveling the world trying to 'find himself'. He ended up moving back to the same town he was born in.

<comment><USER19> "The grass is always greener where you water it" is my preferred version.

<comment><USER20> "The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance. The wise grows it under his feet." -James Oppenheim

(I stole this quote from the chapter titles of _The Philosopher Kings_ , a documentary which I saw on a plane last week:

<http://www.philosopherkingsmovie.com/about/about-the-film/>

I liked it.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Awesome post. Whether or not you'd like to sell a company for millions isn't the point - the point is that buckets of money won't make you happy, and it's really not what drives most successful entrepreneurs. Good entrepreneurs look at the money primarily as a scorecard and validation of their efforts and ideas. Is the money great? Sure. Does it buy some comforts and remove some stresses. Absolutely. But never mistake it for what really creates passion and happiness.

It's funny how as we grow we always move our bar and expectations. I remember when I first started my company, I thought "If only I had X orders and $X in revenue per month! I'd be set!"

Well, now I do have $X revenue. And I don't feel any different, just like he discusses. I simply have created a new "if I only" in my mind that drives me forward.

I think the trick is to continually be pushing forward toward growth and improvement while realizing that if you can't be happy with what you have, you likely won't be able to after a large, multi-million dollar exit.

Easier said than done, right?

<comment><USER22> So the odds are that you will fail soon or later with the last objective you won't be able to reach. How would that feel ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> All due respect Ryan, but were those life changing dollar amounts for the acquisitions? I seem to remember DropSend being sold on your blog, and Carsonified was a consulting company or something from what I can remember? Not to take anything away from your accomplishments and I 100% agree that money will never make you happy, but if you had gotten say $500 million from your acquisitions would the story be any different?

<comment><USER24> Going into the billions must be a completely different story - it's _world- changing_ money, not just life. The things he talks about still don't change, but you have the power to achieve much greater goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I might be late to this thread here but my question is: how do you go about selling your company for low 7 figures? I'm not asking how to make it worth that, my question is assuming that's a reasonable price for someone to buy your company for.

Do you mark it as for sale? Are they mostly private offers? Go through a broker?

Basically, I'm interested in how to actively put up for sale a company that is too big for something like flippa.com for instance

</comment><comment><USER26> "Its true money can't buy you happiness. But it can buy you a big fucking yacht to pull up along side it."

-Diamond David Lee Roth

</comment><comment><USER27> Going through "getting out" right now - essentially selling my chunk, but not sure what I like better: the uncertainty of a young startup or the stress of haggling with partners what my share should be worth.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think people have come to undervalue proprietorship. In other times and places, it was/is a good thing just to have steady work as (say) an innkeeper. If we consider this as just an income stream, it's not much to strive for. If we want to be pointy-haired bosses, it seems pathetic. But a self-sustaining way of life offering some fulfillment is valuable, and not everyone can have a self-sustaining way of life where they order around lots of other people.

</comment><comment><USER28> Selling OpenAir was a very positive experience. It gave me three things. A tremendous sense of accomplishment, financial security and most importantly the freedom to go back to the most exciting and difficult part of business, building startups from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER29> Ryan, I would like to take your advice, but only for my second hypothetical company. I need the zeroes, even if they come with regrets. I can use some of the zeroes to start company 2, at which point I will start following your advice.

</comment><comment><USER30> Again with these titles. speak for yourself.

<comment><USER31> Exactly. I'm sure the instagram guys are crying their eyes out right now, and wiping their tears with hundreds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Coming up to the end of several years of vesting after an acquisition. The acquiring company has been absolutely awesome and fun to work for, but its nothing like being in complete control of your destiny as a startup founder. You have a boss, you have smaller aspirations, its impossible to have as large an impact, and you have to push through lots of people to try new or risky things. The best you can hope for is a non-dysfunctional and creative organization, and I've been extremely lucky to have joined one. But I still miss the wild west of the scrappy startup phase, there really is nothing like it. PG's post about humans in their native habitat is spot on. You remember very quickly what it's like to be a caged animal when you are acquired.

That said, I think the author of this post is glossing over a major point.

When you're doing a startup in your 20s with essentially zero net worth, you're taking a massive risk. If you get sick, if your family members get sick, if you end up busting up your car, if your landlord throws you out, and so on, could all be complete disasters. Of course, you (generally) know this going into it but the reality is most young first time founders are dancing on the edge of disaster, on all fronts. (As I was) I know you're _supposed_ to be financially secure before you start a company, but in practice this means 6-9 months of living expenses, and you still are one or, if you're very lucky, two disasters away from total ruin. If you want to be successful, you almost _have_ to jump in when it feels dangerous to do so, because if you keep delaying for safety you'll never make the jump as your standard of living rises to meet your salary and so on.

Now, after an acquisition and the admittedly grueling process of going through a payout schedule, I am of the mindset that finally getting to a solid payout is going to be a life changing event for me. No, not because I will buy fancy cars or go on lavish vacations. In fact, I expect my standard of living to _decline_ as the low-risk returns I expect to earn on my payout in the markets will result in a virtual "pay cut" for the time being as I prepare for the next adventure.

But what it _will_ mean is I can have another thrilling startup experience (for all the reasons most people do it) without all of the truly scary, risky, life-endangering consequences. Sure, the startup can still fail and I can waste my time. Sure, I will still need to think frugally. But if disaster strikes, I (or my loved ones) won't end up bankrupt, on the streets, or dead. Also, until I jump back into the game again with a solid team and idea, I will be free to experiment and pursue where ever my curiosity leads me in finding that idea without the pressure cooker of "maybe I should start doing consulting again soon to pay the bills."

I haven't gotten quite to the finish line yet, but I have to imagine it will be a very liberating feeling, as long as I have a clear perspective on what exactly money can and cannot do for me, and how I should take advantage of the opportunity of having a few million in the bank. For me, its about freedom from having someone control my life, and removing the ambient risks life has without financial security, not about material things or indulgences. I'm so happy to live in a country where having one lucky break of an exit of a few million dollars can bring about this type of freedom if acted upon wisely.

</comment><comment><USER33> Some people don't know how to retire.

Some people don't want to.

</comment><comment><USER34> This article is out of touch with what it's like to not yet be a financially independent, respected, and successful entrepreneur.

Making a few million dollars, one path to which is selling a company, solves a huge number of problems. You stop worrying about making rent, take a year off and start something new without worrying about a paycheck, return to school to change careers without risk, have children and afford a babysitter, build the company you want to even if you don't have confidence it will succeed, hire a maid, have a lawyer do your taxes, have price insensitive vacations, wear fancy hats and expensive suites and deign to tell people how little difference money made in your life, ... shall I go on?</comment>


Outsourcing Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2010/02/10/outsourcing-life-unconventional-advice-for-when-youre-financially-secure/

<comment><USER2> > _"To allow others, whose passion is cooking, cleaning, or assisting in > various ways to help me — while I supported them by giving them income to do > what they loved."_

If you really want to think about your maid, cook, chauffeur, etc this way, sure... For the majority I'm pretty sure cleaning, cooking, and driving all day wouldn't be top of their to-do list if they had the means.

Don't get me wrong, I outsource plenty of things in my life, but I think it's incredibly out of touch and pretentious to think that you're doing someone a favor, and that your maid is _really fucking passionate_ about cleaning. IMHO when you start spouting things like this, you probably lost touch with reality.

Like mattm commented, there's a line between outsourcing the menial things and outsourcing things that give your life purpose. I wouldn't mind outsourcing my laundry, but outsourcing my Facebook profile may just defeat the purpose of using Facebook.

<comment><USER3> You think people can't take pride in taking a mess and making it look good? Or you think that only writing software is a noble enough work to take pride in, whereas those other occupations are all inferior?

It's true the many people in manual jobs do them out of need, not love. I can also find you a lot of software engineers who _hate_ their jobs. And I can find a maid who loves what she does - it's easy to see when one goes above and beyond what was requested to make things _neat_ and _accurate_.

<comment><AUTHOR> I love working on a production line. The only reason I moved out of it was money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I upvoted this article even though I don't agree with "outsourcing life." I would rather learn and do things myself rather than pay someone else to do it for me. Take cooking, for example. The author doesn't like to cook but if she invested in cooking classes for 6 months, I bet she would start developing an interest in it and then she would have that skill for the rest of her life.

If you pay someone to do work for you (and you don't know how to do it yourself), you will have to keep paying them forever.

It will also cause you to become a one-dimensional person.

She does have a million dollar windfall, but a million isn't really enough to last the rest of her life since she is only in her 20s.

<comment><USER5> It is clear that she is not just sitting around on the couch watching soap operas with the time she frees up via outsourcing. She's hustling and making money (and presumably having fun). She can always learn to cook later if it strikes her fancy.

The idea of outsourcing your life makes a lot of sense if you spend a lot of time on petty outsourceable tasks and are a driven sort of person who can use every extra minute.

A lot of us don't fit that profile, and outsourcing more of our lives would just mean more time spent sitting on the couch or parked in front of the computer. I'm probably better off mowing my own lawn and only watching five episodes of Breaking Bad this week instead of six.

<comment><USER4> I understand the reasoning and she at least gives the impression that she is busy with other things. However I've also learned that some people just like to talk about how "busy" they are to make themselves feel more important.

Some of my best ideas or solutions to problems come to me when I'm doing "petty, outsourceable" work like washing the dishes or making dinner.

<comment><USER6> Interestingly enough, I found that the ideas come either way--whether you're outsourcing or not. So, if you want to outsource things, don't worry that the ideas will stop coming. They just show up when you're taking a shower, driving, or doing any number of other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I upvoted it because Erica had the best web hosting company I ever worked with and I miss her running her service.

<comment><USER6> Thanks! ;)

<comment><USER7> oh hi there :) I am going to have to drop you an email now

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> as an amateur psychologist, she probably is so immersed in one face of her life (running a business) that when she got depressed by the lack of another (having friends) she focused back on her safe harbor (running a business) to compensate for it. Just saying.

<comment><USER6> I've been having fun discovering myself as an extrovert, actually, and doing more things like public speaking. But thanks for playing. ;) (I am the author of this post)

<comment><USER8> Denial. First stage of self discovery.

:D</comment></comment></comment>