A Minimal Architecture for Human Journeys to Mars - <AUTHOR> http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/space.2015.0018 <comment><USER2> To me it makes a lot more sense to start with a few decades of robotic mining and construction (and release publicly funded technology to the public domain so it can also benefit the 99.99999% of Earthlings who will never step foot on Mars). Get some infrastructure and fail-safes in place instead of sending people to almost certain death in a minimally viable mission, which would be a PR disaster.

<comment><USER3> > PR disaster

I keep saying it... There are billionaires alive today, who might actually chose to die on Mars. They could do it.

If James Cameron, Richard Branson, or Elon Musk decided they wanted to die on Mars, I think they could make it happen. And I don't think it would be a big departure from their personalities.

And I don't think it would be a PR disaster.

I think it would be inspiring as hell.

"All men die. Not all men truly live. Follow me to Mars. Colonize it. Make it a second home for humanity. Life is too precious to keep all of it in one basket."

<comment><USER4> They may want to die on Mars, but I doubt they want to spend a year or so of their life in a moving prison.

Billions do not buy you much in terms of comfort on the way to Mars.

Yes, it Will be hard for non-billionaires, too, but they will give up less, and have more to gain; they aren't famous yet.

<comment><USER3> "James Cameron becomes first solo explorer to reach the deepest point on Earth. This was his 73rd trip into the ocean in a submersible, including 33 dives to the Titanic."

He also worked as a truck driver for a while...

...and he'd probably bring VR along, and have multiple crews back on earth filming anything he wanted to see...

And I'm talking about them near the end of their lives... I could envision it happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I will accept halving of my salary if we can start making an effort towards Mars colonisation. But we all know that any extra money would be spent on building vanity structures here or earth and other forms of culture I don't appreciate.

We can send a robot mission to Mars or build another Olympic(tm)(r) stadium. I wish I was joking.

<comment><USER6> On that note, how come no government has entertained the idea of opening up tax money budget allocation, e.g. by letting citizens vote on where they want their money used? I understand that the average citizen has little or no idea of how to run a country, but still, surely decisions like whether to build a stadium or send people to Mars could be debated.

<comment><USER7> I recall at least one short story with that. (Eugene by Greg Egan) The main character previously worked in Social Security, who had to lay off everyone due to no one giving them money.

Anyway, you can directly donate to NASA. They just aren't allowed to promote it or somesuch.

[http://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/displayDir.cfm?Internal_ID=N_PD_...](http://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/displayDir.cfm?Internal_ID=N_PD_1210_001G_)

<comment><USER8> Has anyone done this before? Looking at this page it doesn't really list where to mail a check to or who to make that check out to.

<comment><USER5> [http://www.penny4nasa.org/donate/](http://www.penny4nasa.org/donate/) allows you to donate even through dogecoin.

<comment><USER7> None of that money goes to NASA.

<comment><USER5> Oops, you are absolutely right, I'm sorry. Serves me right for not even reading the faq.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You could launch most of this stuff with reusable Falcon 9 rockets or equivalents. You just have to divide the building blocks to about ten tons a piece. A large portion of mass is just propellants which is very easy to divide. Space assembly, docking, arm capture, berthing and in space refueling are all quite routine concepts nowadays. When you don't need the SLS, a lot of missions become a lot cheaper and also flexible.

Example: you have a reusable 10 ton vehicle and you need to send a 150 ton mass to orbit. You fly once per week for four months and it's there. After that the vehicle/capability can be used for something else. Think of it as renting a standard truck. It's cheap since there's a large supply because of a large market. Their utilization rate is relatively high, meaning when you use them, you only need yo pay a small portion of the investment and upkeep. You can rent many for long periods of time if you need to. On the other hand large custom moving equipment is expensive and not always even available. And they can stand idle for long periods of time.

<comment><USER10> A possibly irrelevant nostalgic detour, but I'm reminded of a thought experiment I contributed to once [1].. Called Mars 9 Tons at a Time. Basically use Zubrin's Mars Direct as the baseline plan, but do it without the Ares 5 he described or another HLV. Which has the effect that we would launch everything direct to Mars, no rendezvous or docking prior to the Martian surface. Primarily on the hypothesis that docking the parts together would add the cost of an assembly facility, and complicating the components enough to be dock- able together or heavily suboptimal to support simple assembly.

But to avoid the costs of the Ares V, we wanted to do the entire thing using nothing but existing off-the-shelf available LVs to do the entire thing. If we'd gone the route of even a small custom LV, we would have the constant overhead of maintaining multiple launch pads that sat idle for 2 years at a time, just to launch something each launch window to Mars. Instead, our plan began with the Delta IV-H lobbing payloads trans-Mars. It has a payload of just over ~9T doing that. It could also fly three or four payloads per launch window, Vandenburg and the Cape, both at the start and the end of the window for a two week turnaround on each launch pad. Of course, suboptimal timing and suboptimal inclinations will cut into that 9T slightly. Further, we could make use of things like the Mitsubishi H-IIA [2], Atlas V 551 or Heavy (would need modest new development, or the 551 which is a bit weaker), Ariane V and maybe Proton (tho Proton is quite weak on high energy flights). Falcon 9 Heavy could eventually be added to that list (I think we were already talking about F9H in 2007...). That gets you maybe 6-9 payloads per launch window to Mars, of 6-9 tons depending on the launcher. That was our working budget for each payload.

We managed to account for just about everything to do with the surface base using nothing but those small payloads... Planned out a standard design for a small descent vehicle in I think 1500kg to 2500kg which could land most of the rest of the mass as payload. We could do Earthworks (or Marsworks... dirtmoving / digging) using using some small remote-controlled construction equipment of 2-3T each. [3] Food, water and other supplies could pretty easily fit in smallish pieces like that. Used solar panels in place of Mars Direct's nuke for political feasibility / scalability to small payload deliveries. Also talked a bit about assembling a shelter using either the landed capsules for rooms, or assembling rooms from parts (I don't remember which). A part I was a bit uneasy about that some others thought was trivial enough, was building a new launch vehicle from parts on the surface... We'd be using small modular segments to build stages, scaffolding to assemble everything together and connect the stages, and all of this would be done outdoors. I was kinda worried about getting sand between the staging components or in the engines.

The part we didn't manage to fit into the initial constraints of 9 ton payloads, all direct-to-Mars, was the actual crew transport there (we were fine-ish for the return). We stretched kinda far, pulled compromises nobody would really take, and got a 1-crew capsule to weigh in at 11T-12T. And that's with basically no redundancy! The entire thing would be a small can with a solar wing for power, life support for 6 months, and no way for the pilot to survive a launch failure from Earth. The capsule would fly straight to Mars, pilot would don a suit, depressurize the capsule and get in a MOOSE-alike [4] module and travel to the Martian surface in that. They would also be dependent on the entry trajectory for their life, as they'd have to walk to base on landing.

From there our plans started to look a bit more "traditional" with either an HLV snuck in there just for the crew (and not the base) or orbital assembly of an orbital ship. Say, something with plenty of life support of its own, just does Earth-Mars-Earth and gets the crew to and from the base. The ship itself would be a rather substantial project to build, but at least it could ignore landing much payload. And the ascent vehicle from Mars would only need to worry about orbit, not escape velocity.

[1][https://web.archive.org/web/20070810053610/http://uplink.spa...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070810053610/http://uplink.space.com/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=businesstech&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=0) Ok, so the thread Mars 9 Tons at a Time wasn't archived at all. But there it was, August 2007.

[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-IIA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-IIA)

[3] [http://www.cat.com/en_US/products/new/equipment/excavators/m...](http://www.cat.com/en_US/products/new/equipment/excavators/mini- excavators/18172626.html) For example, is a smallish piece of equipment which can take many different parts on the end of the arm, work very slowly as a bulldozer, and fit inside our payload budget. We'd need something mechanically different, but probably that size / style of machine, to work remotely in very low temperatures. Shortly after our that thread, one of the construction equipment companies produced concept art describing something like that on The Moon with actuators (I think) in place of the hydraulics. Some folks complained that they were just advertising their stuff on The Moon to look cool.

[4] [http://www.astronautix.com/craft/moose.htm](http://www.astronautix.com/craft/moose.htm) Not terribly confidence-inspiring.

<comment><USER9> Interesting!

If you want to avoid space assembly, you can always just refuel. Even that gets you far since in many cases propellants are a large proportion of spacecraft mass.

But why would you avoid docking?

Even Apollo had it as a critical part of the mission. Twice! (The CSM turned around and docked to the lunar module after translunar injection.)

<comment><USER10> Well, the avoidance of docking was primarily because this was a thought experiment, not quite optimizing for a global optima. We wanted to see if a Mars mission could be mounted within those tight constraints, and set about with those constraints as unwavering. Why avoiding docking was one of them, was a requirement from Mars Direct. (Flipping through A Case For Mars for a minute wasn't enough to find the reasoning...) If you wanted to do a mission with minimal assembly but with docking... I'm not sure you could get a ship with a dry mass of <25T to launch to LEO. Say, with a sizeable upper stage for orbit insertion, habitat module and life support storage space (even with the food / water / fuel all brought up later). Even a fairly large Bigelow module, electrical equipment and pressurized space for food is going to be more than a Delta IV-H can take to LEO... And then an empty upper stage big enough needs a lot of volume. Maybe two flights for assembly, and then launch supplies up?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Barring some compelling geopolitical phenomenon, there is not likely to be another 'Kennedy moment,' and the NASA budget is unlikely to see a dramatic increase"

and

"Furthermore, although not considered here, international contributions could offset some of the cost"

oh Americans, there is a wider world out there across the border you know...

<comment><USER12> And miss the chance to put our flag first on Mars? I think not.

<comment><USER13> I dunno…

I think space exploration _is_ a great chance for human solidarity.

Funding, control, bureaucracy and such can still be challenging, but I think the scientists and engineers themselves would generally be on board. The public also, I think/hope.

Planting an earth flag instead of a national one kinda makes simple sense that I think will appeal to people. You land in a new land, you claim it for your land. Land on a new planet, claim it for your planet.

<comment><USER14> Did you see all the little american flags come out when New Horizons reached Pluto. I found that a little disappointing. As deliberate as unnecessary. Almost looked tit-for-tat following the EU cheer at Rosetta.

<comment><USER13> No, but I'm not american so the media doesn't play that angle so much here. But, I'm not looking to berate anyone for flags. Nationalism/group thinking is part of how we work. If American flags are being used to explore the universe and take steps for mankind, I'm not mad at them. I also don't think americans are the worst at this, for all the flak they get.

On the other hand, I'm totally behind anyone who wants to internationalize it. Like I said, I'm pretty optimistic that if it starts people will dig it.

I would be proud to see an earth flag flying on new worlds, especially if they have wind. I think other people would be too.

[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bA- pR_9s6Ng/VVeBWoDKeHI/AAAAAAAAAc...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-bA- pR_9s6Ng/VVeBWoDKeHI/AAAAAAAAAcc/wv7sIdbwW80/s1600/United%2BTerra%2BFlag%2BHoisted.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is great sci-fi novel Voyage from Stephen Baxter which describes such minimal mission. It is alternative history where NASA landed on Mars in 1980-ties.

</comment><comment><USER16> Six SLSs for a crew of 4 to spend 24 days on the surface. At first glance, this is a _wildly_ inefficient mission architecture.

<comment><USER17> I have to imagine that if this could be done more efficiently, that plan would be in this proposal.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, you'd like to imagine that, but unfortunately it isn't the case. Here's a perfectly credible and very well-studied architecture for a Mars mission with 1/3rd the upmass and ~540 days on the surface. If your objective is time on the surface to inhabit and study Mars, then this would give a 64x better return on your investment:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct)

So why propose something much more expensive with much less return? Because scientists have learned that the NASA projects which get funded and stay funded aren't the projects which are most cost-efficient; they're the projects which spread the money around to as many NASA centers (and, more importantly, states which correspond to the senior members of the Senate Appropriations committee) as possible. That's pretty obviously the guiding light for this architecture; its innovation is that it proposes to do so within _existing_ budgets rather than radically expanded budgets. But that doesn't make it minimal or cheap by any measure.

<comment><USER18> Because nobody is building any of the components for Mars Direct. However many of the components for these missions either exist already or are currently in active development. To do Mars Direct now you'd have to factor in the cost of scrapping everything that's currently in the works and developing Mars Direct from scratch.

I appreciate your POV, Mars Direct is a compelling plan, but it's weakness is that none of its components except the launcher are any use for anything else except another Mars Direct mission. Anyway it's a bit unfair to thrash these guys for wanting to work within what is already actually happening.

<comment><USER16> In other words, they're stuck in the Sunk Costs fallacy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs)

<comment><USER18> I don't think you properly understand what the falacy is. The falacy is to factor in a sunk cost that has no future value in future decisions. For this proposal to be subject to that falacy, you'd have to show that the products of the current development programs have no future value.

<comment><USER16> I'm afraid I have to turn around and say that it is you who does not have a proper understanding of the sunk costs fallacy. The future value of the sunk costs is not important -- in fact, thinking that it is important is the very definition of the fallacy. Rather, the future value of _all_ costs is what is important, whether those costs are sunk or not.

To illustrate, here's a simplified example. We can buy one of two Mars missions: Mars Mission A, which costs $100, of which we have already paid a $10 non-refundable deposit, and Mars Mission B, which costs $30, but we have not yet spent anything on it.

The $10 we have already spent absolutely _does_ have future value -- $10 worth of future value, if we pursue Mars Mission A. Its future value is, however, irrelevant, because Mars Mission A has $90 worth of future costs, compared to $30 of future costs for Mars Mission B. The Sunk Costs Fallacy is to believe that the $10 continues to have any relevance in such a scenario. In truth, the future costs are the only costs which matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> These sound very similar to Kerbal Space Program mission plans (which I guess speaks highly of it as a simulator). I'm tempted to try to fly it all ingame.

Has docking with (unpiloted) prepositioned stages been demonstrated in real life? Is it reliable enough to use when crew lives depend on it?

<comment> T-A It was perfected (for some value of "perfect") in the 60s, during the Gemini program: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agena_target_vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agena_target_vehicle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd like to see more on how it's proposed to protect the travellers and the long-stay Mars migrants from radiation. The dosage numbers I've seen do not seem encouraging. Isn't this a major, possibly fatal stumbling block to extensive space exploration?

<comment><USER21> 10.3 m of water + a strong magnetic field gives you approximately the same protection as the earth's atmosphere. Sadly, that getting that much mass in orbit would be extremely expensive, but a shield provides a long shadow of safe area. Though, in the long term such a shield could be reused indefinably.

On Mars the easy option is to live in a cave.

And, considering the other risks involved I think many would trade a significant increased risk of cancer in their lifetimes for the journey.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The crazy thing about all the Mars missions I have read about is they optimising for the cheapest component - the humans. Until we have a problems finding volunteers then this is very suboptimal.

<comment><USER23> There might be a long queue of people willing to volunteer but 99.9999% of them would be incapable of doing the job so the mission would fail. Most would give up before they leave Earth. A lot would break down and make errors during the travel. Of the remaining few, most wouldn't be able to do useful science at the other end. If you want the mission to be more successful than "Yay, we got a human corpse to crash on Mars!" then you need to optimise for attracting people who can actually successfully execute the mission operations. _That_ isn't so cheap.

<comment><USER22> Sure 99.9% of all humans might not make the grade, but out of 7 billion people I think we can find more than a handful who would.

In the end it does not matter as you optimise to the level you need to attract the candidates required to do the job. Anything else is just over engineering.

Edit. I don't think we would have a major problem attracting Apollo-level candidates even if the chance of success was less than 50%.

<comment><USER24> Or once we have real AI it could run the mission and the humans would be more like passengers who could spend most of the trip in some kind of suspended animation.

<comment><USER22> You don't even need real AI to do this. Years ago I worked out a way to get humans to mars for under 1 billion per person by using off the shelf components and existing infrastructure by not optimising for humans. I should write it up as it is at least entertaining (most people I told were equal part horrified/impressed).

<comment><USER24> Please share your write up if you get a chance.

I was being a bit playful with 2001: A Space Odyssey

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ya know what would be fun? building a huge space-ship. I feel like people over-think it sometimes. buildtheenterprise.org

</comment><comment><USER26> There should [pdf] flag or something in hacker news.

<comment><USER27> There's a suggestions thread. I'm not sure how often that gets read by the mods. Or you could email them - they seem pretty receptive. Having some tag for PDF / Video / Audio would be good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Am I the only one seeing a Unicode issue in the title?

<comment><USER29> It is U+FFFC, the OBJECT REPLACEMENT CHARACTER. The Unicode spec says it is "used as placeholder in text for an otherwise unspecified object".

[http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFFF0.pdf](http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFFF0.pdf)

The weird thing is that this is the second time I've seen it today, and I don't think I've ever seen it before...</comment></comment>


Chip and Pin is Broken (Credit Card Security Issue) - <AUTHOR> http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2010/02/11/chip-and-pin-is-broken/

<comment><USER2> How many more victim cardholders will be blamed for fraud now just because the allegedly infallible computer system says "PIN verified"?

As noted by Frank Stajano, it is amazing the comment by "the UK Cards Association (02:06 in the video clip) that the method will never present a real threat to our customers's cards because… drum roll… it requires possession of a customer's card.

A bit like going from "it would be very hard for a thief to steal your card AND at the same time figure out your PIN in 3 tries or less" to "it would be very hard for a thief to steal your card"."

</comment><comment><USER3> From cryptome.org:

"To: ukcrypto[at]chiark.greenend.org.uk Subject: New paper, and a Newsnight story tonight - Chip and PIN is Broken Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:12:27 +0000 From: Ross Anderson <Ross.Anderson[at]cl.cam.ac.uk>

There should be a 9-minute film on Newsnight tonight showing some research by Steven Murdoch, Saar Drimer, Mike Bond and me. We demonstrate a middleperson attack on EMV. This explains how stolen chip and pin cards can be used by criminals without knowledge of the pin.

The flaw is that when you put a card into a terminal, a negotiation takes place about how the cardholder should be authenticated: using a pin, using a signature or not at all. This particular subprotocol is not authenticated, so you can trick the card into thinking it's doing a chip-and-signature transaction while the terminal thinks it's chip-and-pin. The upshot is that you can buy stuff using a stolen card and a pin of 0000 (or anything you want). We did so, on camera, using various journalists' cards. The transactions went through fine and the receipts say "Verified by PIN".

Our technical paper "Chip and PIN is Broken" has been accepted for the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, the top conference in computer security. It can be found at

[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/projects/banking/n...](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/projects/banking/nopin/oakland10chipbroken.pdf)

while the FAQ is at

[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/projects/banking/n...](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/projects/banking/nopin/)

and the press release at

[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/projects/banking/n...](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/projects/banking/nopin/press- release.html) "</comment>


How I Validated My Startup Idea Without Spending A Cent And You Can Too - <AUTHOR> http://techu.com.au/2014/03/validated-startup-idea-without-spending-cent/

<comment><USER2> A great way to validate _certain_ ideas, namely "things people would search for on the internet and click on adverts for". If you had an idea for a product that, say, gave developers a better way to do debugging like Mozilla's new "rr" tool, I don't think this approach would validate it at all (based on an assumption that developers are unlikely to click internet ads for debugging tools).

There isn't a one-size-fits-all approach to idea validation. You need to pick the technique that best suits the product.</comment>


Great Hackers (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://paulgraham.com/gh.html <comment><USER2> Please add (2004) to the title.

Nobody understand and articulates what hackers want better than PG, and its great that he benefits from this via YC.

In a way this is similar to Joel Spolskys view of the world of optimising for programmer hapiness and enjoying business success as a side effect.

The genuinely optimal setup for me in terms of work quality and volume would be unrecognizable the average corporate job. For instance, choosing my own working hours and tools would improve my output by 25%.

<comment><USER3> _For instance, choosing my own working hours and tools would improve my output by 25%._

I'd be surprised if it weren't _250_ percent. Corporate environments optimize for responsiveness, not productivity.

People talk about programmers being "overpaid", but I think we're underpaid, at least at the top end, and I think we suffer for it in more ways than the obvious one. We work under conditions where we produce at 10% of what is possible. That's because a good engineer's _potential_ ABV (abstract business value) is well into the millions per year, so if we perform at 10 cents on the dollar, we still make a profit for our employers. If our salaries went up 3x, there'd be fewer of us, but we'd probably have a lot more autonomy and better working conditions, because it just wouldn't be economically feasible to put us in noisy offices, give us crappy tools, and have 90 percent of our time get eaten up by maintenance, meetings, bureaucracy, and distraction.

<comment><USER4> Most businesses are incapable of getting millions of dollars of value from a programmer because of the work that they assign them to do. As Paul points out, the biggest potential variation is in deciding what to work on.

<comment><USER3> Right, and this is my fundamental issue with the software industry. If we were paid 2 or 3 times as much, we'd be assigned to do higher-impact work. The reason 90% of software engineers are assigned to bullshit is that our compensation is so _low_ that it can make economic sense to put us on the sort of low-impact stuff that companies never have the sense to drop in favor of more ambitious, more interesting projects.

Since the 1960s, we've been approaching (but waveringly, with backward motion from 1973 to 2008) what some call the "Singularity", but it's actually a more prosaic shift: a movement from the late industrial era (3-6%/year economic growth) to a technological one where 10%/year (or better) growth is not out of the question. The first sign of it is what I call the _convexity switch_. The input-output curve of a worker used to be concave, with the A-players producing 120, your B's producing 110, your C's at 100, your D's at 60 and your F's (slackers) at 0. Intimidation-based management and closed allocation (which are performance-middling, bringing down the best and up the worst) made sense in a time where one slacker cancelled out 2-5 A players (relative to the C standard). But we're moving into a different era where that curve is convex: your A's produce 1000, B's produce 250, C's produce 50, and the D's and F's produce virtually nothing. The traditional, mediocrity-oriented management model used by MBA programs, McKinsey, and typical software management doesn't work anymore, and no one (except, perhaps, the leaders of Valve and Github) has any clue what to do.

The issue for us is the expectancy-variance trade-off. The effect of "lean" management post-1975 was to make individual managers (and workers) more accountable for local performance, the result being that no one was paying attention to global, company-wide concerns. Everyone started becoming a lot more careerist, job tenures decreased, et cetera. People optimized for local performance and especially for low variance, because underperformance is punished more severely (firing) than high performance is rewarded (usually, small bonuses, if the high performance is noticed at all). Bosses no longer worked for "the company" or were rewarded for abstract contributions that make the whole firm a better place, but instead were measured by _their_ bosses, and on a tight timeframe. It became more about "individual accountability" and less about actual value creation. The results favor low-variance work. In a concave world, this actually works very well, because low variance is observed at the top of the output curve. This means the work is reliable and meets expectations, and the interchangeable parts fit together well with no surprises. But in a convex world, the top of the output curve is more _highly_ variable, so the result of low-variance management strategies is abysmally low bulk output. It doesn't _look_ abysmally low-- software engineers are still contributing $200-400k per year of business value-- but it's terrible in comparison to what would be possible if the allowance for variance were higher.

<comment><USER5> Are there even that many high-leverage problems available though?

<comment><USER6> At most places I've worked, if my assigned work contributed $x to the bottom line, the side problems I chose to work on contributed $10x-$20x. There are so many high-leverage problems out there that it's frankly ridiculous.

<comment><USER7> It sounds like your real contribution isn't solving high-leverage problems, it's identifying high-leverage problems. This is a rare skill, no matter how obvious they seem to you.

<comment><USER3> Implement open allocation and it becomes not-so-rare.

<comment><USER5> Isn't that how Valve does it? I seem to recall some articles here about that...

<comment><USER6> Valve, Github, and Gore & Associates all use open allocation or something very similar. Gore & Associates is particularly interesting because they are a large company and have basically proven that this model can work at scale (~9000 employees).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A very refreshing reading to which I fully agree and recognize my self as a hacker now such in a shit job for years. I don't know if I can recover from that since I'm getting 50. I'd love to try working on interesting and challenging problems again.

At 15 I built my own computer, at 17 implemented a disassembler for 6502 processor with pokes, and at 19 the symbolic assembler still with pokes. These where saved with tape recorders at the time. At that time I bought a book containing the raw disassembled listing of the ORIC Atmos Basic 'OS'. I spent my free time finding out what each function did and documented it, as fun. It felt like what decoding ADN and genes might feel today I guess. Pure hacking. etc.

The reason I "failed" is the lack of entrepreneurial culture in my family and educational context, or meeting a lucky opportunity. There was no Internet at the time which would facilitate meeting other hackers.

My advise based on my experience, is if you feel like matching the hacker description of Paul Graham in this essay, go run to find and join other hackers, ASAP !!! Start with open source projects for instance which didn't existed in my time.

If you don't do that you'll suffocate and get crunched under the pressure of "mediocracy". It's a concept I had plenty of time to develop based on the analysis of my working context. Maybe one day I'll write an essay about it.

<comment><USER9> I can relate to this perspective. My parents encouraged me to try a number of things when I was young. They encouraged me to read a lot, to get outside, to challenge myself. But every time I started to get really good at something, they encouraged me to back off, often in very subtle ways. I think they were afraid of real success, or afraid of a big failure on my part. It took a long time to recognize this, and a long time to fully break away from this.

My father was a software engineer from the 70's-90's, and he passed away last year. It was really sad to go through his computer, and see the project which he'd been working on in his retirement, knowing it would never see the light of day. He never learned the "release early, release often" concept.

The positive side of this is the new motivation I have to make sure I finish projects. I do not want to watch my technical skills go to waste. This is especially important to me, because my day job is teaching, not programming. So all of my programming consists of side projects, the easiest things to leave unfinished. It also inspires me to not fear my son's failures, in fact I want to teach him that you have to fail in order to succeed significantly.

Some of my heroes in life are the programmers who have remained relevant throughout their entire lives. It's interesting growing older. I am just as impressed by technology as I was when I was a kid, but I am much more focused on what we do with that technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The mere prospect of being interrupted is enough to prevent > hackers from > working on hard problems. If you want to get > real work done in an office > with cubicles, you have two options: > work at home, or come in early or > late or on a weekend, when > no one else is there.

> They get new technology by buying the startups that created it > \-- where > presumably the hackers did have somewhere quiet to work.

It's funny -- all the startups I know have embraced open floor plans, and the culture of coming in late and on the weekends. My sample size is pretty small, though (n=2); what are your offices like?

<comment><USER11> Open office plans seem to be considered "hip" these days. The fact that it's cheaper probably also makes it easier for the founders to ignore the lessons from Peopleware.

<comment><USER3> Open office plans are "hip" because they show that you're in access to the anti-anxiety drugs you need in order to survive one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thank you olalonde for posting this. It comes at a perfect time for me as I am in the process of evaluating my own career and this article hits the nail on the head in so many ways. I work for a non-technical CEO at a small startup and perhaps I am not a great hacker (as Paul says, 'I don't know'), but I do know that the non-tech CEO - hacker relationship is one fraught with peril regardless of how good "friends" the two people are outside of work.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wish people/mods would add dates to PG's articles - I can never tell whether it's a new one or just something from the archives. Still interesting though.

</comment><comment><USER14> Okay... 2004 and now it's 8 years later. I'm curious to know what PG thinks of great hackers after 500 startups and plenty of exposure to would be hackers. Surely his thoughts have matured?

Paul Graham, care to oblige us?

</comment><comment><USER15> While the article is excellent, it is wrong on one point. Edison didn't invent anything at all; Tesla is responsible for most inventions credited to Edison today. The world could definitely do with as little Edisons as possible, what the world really needs are more Teslas.

<comment><USER16> While I appreciate Tesla as much as the next person, the statement that he's responsible for "most" of Edison's inventions is wholeheartedly not true.

Edison is still seen as being largely responsible for things like the phonograph and kinetoscope, the pre-cursors to modern music and television, as well as hundreds of other inventions in other areas that Tesla never touched.

<comment><USER17> Yes; Edison invented some toys. Tesla invented the modern industrial power complex, almost wholly from his own head. You almost have to think he was a time traveler or alien or something, to get thousands of details exactly right to propel a civilization into the electric age.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> >Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages.

Not realy just that the good hackers you mention decided Python fitted better to their specific needs.

</comment><comment><USER19> Dude,

That was one of the greatest things I have ever read.

<comment><USER20> <http://paulgraham.com/articles.html>

You are welcome, dude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> benjaminwootton agree with your opinion what do you think for new start-up?</comment>


Mini ITX 16-core Linux workstation board - <AUTHOR> https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/honeycomb-workstation/ <comment><AUTHOR> I discovered this by reading about devices whose support has been mainlined in the up-coming Linux 5.6 kernel.

It doesn't feature any in-built graphics but the producer recommends AMD's RX series of discrete graphics cards. Unfortunately those will take up the only PCIe expansion slot so unfortunately extra devices (I was hoping to add an SDR) will have to be hosted over USB.</comment>


Samsung's bug bounty program will pay rewards of up to $200,000 – The Verge - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16265926/samsung-bug-bounty-program-rewards <comment><USER2> remove the facebook app from all your phones.

Where is my 200k?</comment>