After the end of the startup era - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/22/ask-not-for-whom-the-deadpool-tolls/ <comment><USER4> I look at it from another end - I feel there is a sort of an app fatigue. Maybe it is jut me. I used to be excited about Uber-like things, note taking apps, DropBox, coupon sites, review sites. Installed some of them, used them, then kind of stopped. Someone at work would say "you should try this new thing, totally cool" and I'd be inclined to do it, but now would pass it probably.

Extrapolating scientifically from the sample of 1, it would seem that a small loss of excitement over trying new services and apps over the larger population would be enough to prevent the fabled hockey stick growth. No hockey sticks -> no unicorns -> less VC money for new startup -> articles about the death of startups -> comments on HN about articles about the death of startups

<comment><USER5> Mobile devices are very constrained. The OSes are locked down, the screens are small, high CPU apps are out, and input is slow and cumbersome.

After trying a lot of apps I have found that a smart phone has only a few functions:

1\. Talking and texting.

2\. Taking pictures and video.

3\. Maps and directions.

4\. Music, movies, ebooks.

5\. Brief interactions with services like Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Los Angeles metro, etc.

6\. Casual web browsing. (I want a bigger screen and a keyboard for anything in depth.)

7\. edit: Casual gaming.

Looking at how most other people use phones I don't think I am alone.

These devices are limited and I don't think it took us long to exhaust their potential. There just isn't much else a phone can do well (and that locked down vendor fiefdoms will allow).

The PC era on the other hand gave us a long, wide, and deep trench of innovation that is still not exhausted. PCs are more open, more extensible, and have a much wider IO path to the human in the chair. The breadth of what a PC can do is incredible.

(The main problem with PCs is antiquated, insecure, bloated operating systems. Fix that and I think you'd see even more innovation.)

Of course I have been a mobile skeptic since the iPhone. I just saw the next incarnation of the feature phone. Since it was still locked down by carriers and vendors and since its bandwidth to the user is poor I knew it would not deliver lasting innovation.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. I always cringe when I hear "build mobile first" that's just stupid, "flappy-bird" era is dead, agreed! - but there are so much more potential for full blown websites (or "webapps") that require PC/laptop and larger screen.

<comment><USER5> Mobile could be more innovative if it were more open and modular. Think of all the hundreds of things that would never have happened on the PC if they were as closed as phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >IoT devices [are] hard to prototype, generally low-margin, expensive to bring to market, and very expensive to scale. Just ask Fitbit. Or Jawbone. Or Juicero. Or HTC.

I feel like this is the public's idea of "iot," while I've learned after a year of working for an iot stack provider that the real "internet of things" explosion is found in places nobody looks except the procurement guys - <USER2> stadium lights, the refrigerators, the factory doors, etc. Small, single- minded decided sending one or two bytes of data, spread en masse through an industrial area.

<comment><USER8> _IoT devices [are] hard to prototype_

Here in Shenzhen, I would say no. They are cheap as chips. I have multiple friends doing consumer IoT devices (lots of BLE) with single-dimensional backgrounds (often software) who have been able to iterate through multiple prototypes and produce concepts within months. The chief problems for IoT products IMHO are marketing and replicability (low security for initial investment).

The fact that hardware is expensive to tackle in SV just means SV is badly positioned in this sector, not that it's inherently difficult or expensive. BTW, we just had the _Hacker Trip to China_ (by _Noisebridge_ founder Mitch Altman) roll through town here.

<comment><USER9> kind of off topic. but, how much markup is there compared to aliexpress? it seems prototyping using parts from there is pretty inexpensive. I heard about giant multi story marketplaces in Shenzhen, but I was curious if they were much cheaper or just a lot faster since everything you need is in one building.

<comment><USER8> There's more choice online but you have to pay shipping for everything. Quantities available, prices and discoverability are less attractive in the marketplaces but you can potentially save time and there are certain stores where you can get what amounts to nontrivial free in person implementation or product selection consulting. In general we buy online because we source so many things, but if you are starting out in electronics or just need some standard parts for cheap then the markets are pretty cool.

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

 _" We're already seeing this. Consider Y Combinator, by all accounts the gold standard of startup accelerators, famously harder to get into than Harvard. Then consider its alumni. Five years ago, in 2012, its three poster children were clearly poised to dominate their markets and become huge companies: AirBnB, Dropbox, and Stripe. And so it came to pass."_

 _" Fast forward to today, and Y Combinator's three poster children are… unchanged. In the last six years YC have funded more than twice as many startups as they did in their first six — but I challenge you to name any of their post-2011 alumni as well-positioned today as their Big Three were in 2012. The only one that might have qualified, for a time, was Instacart. But Amazon broke into that game with Amazon Fresh, and, especially, their purchase of Whole Foods."_

Look at the list of Ycombinator companies from the 2012 batch.[1] Where are they now?

[1] [http://yclist.com/](http://yclist.com/)

<comment><USER11> The journalist reveals his or her ignorance by not considering Gusto or Flexport to be well positioned, imo.

<comment><USER12> Plus the article could do with some basic fact checking.

"The web boom of 1997-2006 brought us Amazon, Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Airbnb"

Wikipedia AirBnB page: "Founded August 2008; 9 years ago"

<comment><USER11> Also iirc Amazon predates 1997. 1997 is its IPO date.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of what got me to this site many years ago. I was reading a lisp programming book that had a footnote that somehow got me to HN.

As a teenager I got enamoured by the idea of the future of the tech being driven by small fast-moving hacker friendly companies rather than big corp, as portrayed in PG's writings and this site.

I remember how I increasingly became disillusioned as I gradually realized that many (most?) startups were optimizing for the acquisition by the same big corp (investors gotta cash out, right?) instead of building long-term sustainable businesses.

This seems to have attracted the kind of personality that just wants to play the game, cash out and get rich.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. Working for a company that optimizes for cashing out loses luster _really_ quickly. As someone who's been on that hamster wheel for too long, have to say it'd definitely be more interesting to work for a company that builds for long-term sustainability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So the premise is that the startup era is ending:

> ...because we've all lived through back-to-back massive worldwide hardware > revolutions — the growth of the Internet, and the adoption of smartphones — > we erroneously think another one is around the corner, and once again, a few > kids in a garage can write a little software to take advantage of it. [...] > But there is no such revolution en route...

Then it says:

> It is widely accepted that the next wave of important technologies consists > of AI, drones, AR/VR, cryptocurrencies, self-driving cars, and the "Internet > of Things." These technologies are, collectively, hugely important and > consequential — but they are not remotely as accessible to startup > disruption as the web and smartphones were.

But a real counter to the premise is actually presented:

> (However, in fairness, software and services built atop newly emerging > hardware are likely an exception to the larger rule here; startups in those > niches have far better odds than most others.)

So once again, 'a few kides in a garage can write a little software to take advantage of it.' They start as niches, but we can't say what their potential is without discovery and development.

<comment><USER16> Well, the argument that 1995 through 2015 was a cycle completely different from whatever the next one will be, is not without merit.

I mean, it is easy to forget, but many, many things had to come together at one time in order for this to pop off like it did:

* high speed internet

* widespread consumer demand for high speed internet and services

* multi-core, low-power hardware that gave us smartphones and cheapish "device" pcs like tivo/roku/etc.

* widespread cellular and wifi networks

* miniturization and improvement of many types of sensors

* widespread data collection of all types

* massive investments and growth in consumer GPU devices, which underwrote the ML boom

and I'm probably missing some things, but you get the idea.

All of these things had to come together at the same time to give us the boom that we just went through, and it gave us rise to the likes of Google, Facebook, and so on.

This is very unlikely to repeat itself. Those who grew up in the late 90s, early 2000s may not really notice, but the difference between 1995 and 2010 is astronomical.

This is not to say that we're about to crash, or that there won't be another boom in short order, just that it will likely follow a very different pattern than the previous one. The period of 1995-2010/2015 was really a very unique confluence of events, historically speaking, and over what is really a very, very short time frame. Whereas the current boom is built around leveraging the smartphone and widespread internt access, the next will not be, as it will already be filled out by competitors.

<comment><USER17> It is likely entirely without merit.

Many thing had to come together from 1975 to 1995 to enable the things you're referencing. The list you made is not impressive versus the past, it's normal.

What happened from 1995 to 2015 that was more important than the Internet, transistor, microprocessor, router, DRAM or the GUI? Good luck resolving that debate.

Many thing had to to come together from 1955 to 1975 to....

I don't know how old you are and how familiar you might be with the prior half century plus in tech, but we could be here all day listing the incredible inventions and leaps forward in tech during each of those 20 year periods of time.

Nothing has changed fundamentally about what's occurring in tech. The process continues as before. Each new generation thinks what has happened during its era is particularly special or unique versus the past. We see the same generational bias in most everything, from music to politics.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I am old enough to remember, and I think you are reading more into my post than was there.

I am not claiming 1995-2015 was unique in the fundamental factors (we are all riding the exponential curve here), simply that the confluence of advances is unique to that time period, and gives you a unique distribution of companies/organizations/industries/etc. that is very different from other time periods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a trend that's been occurring over the past 50 years in all business sectors. The conglomeration of everything, from healthcare to food creates a oligopoly where only the big players have a seat at the table.

Tech was just immune from it because of its immaturity and infancy of the technology itself. Now that its a mature business its being subjected to the same pressures and issues of any established industry.

In some ways it's just tech "growing up".

</comment><comment><USER19> The evidence is likely in the data housed by Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and others in their market. Chart the statistical mean valuation of each cohort by year since graduation and see if that mean is changing. If Evans is correct, the mean should be declining for each successive cohort.

Alternatively, since the number of funded startups seems to be increasing, you may prefer to look at total valuation over time since graduation. Even if the mean is decreasing, the total number of 'successful' startups may be increasing and no 'end' is signaled.

I'm not convinced that 'there are no good startup ideas left in this technology era' because the big winners are all black swans. By definition, they defy conventional wisdom.

<comment><USER20> This reminds me of when Pando went to Demo Day and saw no interesting companies and a bunch of knock offs [https://pando.com/2013/03/26/y-combinator-demo- day-2013-stil...](https://pando.com/2013/03/26/y-combinator-demo- day-2013-still-looking-for-the-next-airbnb-or-dropbox/). They completely missed Zenefits, Teespring, and a few others.

I'm not convinced that the dominant YC companies looked obviously dominant at their early stages; they only seem dominant in retrospect.

As for why the giant companies at YC are still the dominant winners, it's because the winners just keep growing. We don't have a sense of scale; when Airbnb was a $500m company it was YC's poster child. Now Airbnb is worth many billion dollars, and of course it still is the poster child, while companies like LendUp are valued at $500m but are not even talked about.

It's not that because YC and startups are less successful, it's that some are so incredibly successful you stop paying attention to the successful ones.

If the measure is valuations coming out of YC, Airbnb raised at a $3m valuation. A lot of YC companies raised $3m at a $14m+ valuation, but that's more an indication of the market than of the likelihood of success of those companies.

<comment><USER21> I think this is partly due to the saturation of the consumer space, it's easier to understand the benefits of AirBnB vs Zenefits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's almost as bad as when we solved all of physics in 1917.

I'd write more, but I have to go to the chemist's to buy some westinghouse relays for my Bell systems electrified collating typewriter-telegraph.

<comment><USER23> Yes! Jeez, thank you. These articles are nothing but clickbait, but more insidious clickbait than the other stuff, because it's cloaked behind a faux point: It's not actually a thoughtful piece of writing, but it's trying to dress up like one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> To my way of thinking the pendulum is swinging away from funded startups to folks bootstrapping side projects.

So, on the "large" end you'll have the googles, facebooks, etc and on the "micro" end you'll see a bloom of people starting small projects like those shown on indihackers.

It's something I've been hoping for since 2011!

[http://justinvincent.com/page/1392/entreporn-the-fallacy- tha...](http://justinvincent.com/page/1392/entreporn-the-fallacy-that-wastes- your-life)

<comment><USER25> My short term goal right now is to sell/grow enough side projects to go full time with prototyping "micro businesses". I feel like a startup studio of 4-8 people could get some serious work done. It would also just be a great time exploring new ideas and green-field code all day every day. But hey, a young guy trapped in a megacorp-cube can dream, right?

<comment><USER24> Same here. Send me an email firstname.lastname@example.com let's chat.

<comment><USER25> This is why I love HN! Talk soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm not sure comparing the YC batches is convincing evidence. Off the top of my head, Coinbase (YC S12) is the 2017 analogue of a company that is "poised to dominate its industry", already valued at $1B+.

<comment><USER26> Another poised-to-dominate unicorn is Flexport (YC W14).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I agree with this premise. I knew it was over about 2 years ago when I noticed that about half of new startups were built to sell to other startups, or to serve the existing startup market in someway. That's a sign of saturation.

Another paradigm shift in media (like recorded sound, recorded video, radio, tv, computing, web, and mobile) is what's needed to produce another startup boom. It all comes down to media—�—the media is the message.

<comment><USER28> VR/AR fits that bill. It's just that no one has nailed the form factor and hardware yet so that it can reach mass adoption.

<comment><USER29> Or is it a chicken and egg problem? VR interests me, but I don't feel there is a killer app yet to make the plunge worth it.

<comment><USER30> Disregarding the new applications enabled by the medium, think of it as simply a new display form factor. Once the quality exceeds the best flat screens we can produce, having one unobtrusively attached to your eyes at all times becomes a no-brainer (from a cost-benefit perspective; obviously there are lifestyle-altering implications that each individual will have to embrace or reject on their own terms).

<comment><USER31> A poster above mentioned that they experienced VR some 30 years ago. I, myself, had a chance to work with it in the early 1990s. Truth be told, it was horrible. It was rudimentary and the graphics were very poor as it was computationally expensive. Exploration stopped and we reexamined the tech a decade later, with similar results.

I've long since postulated that I'd absolutely volunteer to 'jack in' to a neural method to control a computer - complete with my standard joke about being willing to even have a wifi antenna poking out of my skull.

I wonder, then, if we are going about this the wrong way. We are trying for ocular stimulation directly. If we could skip that and move to neurological stimulation directly, I'd expect VR and AR to finally reach the tipping point. There is, after all, a finite amount of miniaturization that's possible.

It is purely a hunch that tells me VR/AR are not destined for wide-scale 'normal people' adoption until it doesn't require external apparatus to utilize.

As it is, we already have people who don't even like wearing simple eyeglasses. However, if it didn't require such, then it may just be something we humans add to our bodies to augment it.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER30> I think the value of the technology hasn't reached a point where it exceeds the inconvenience of using it; namely the bulky headsets and expensive hardware. I agree that it won't be more than a niche technology in the near term future. I guess it all depends on how many more orders of magnitude we can expect to get out of miniaturization before we hit the wall. If it's possible to get a minimum of 4k per eye resolution and the graphics performance of a 2017 high end gaming GPU into a pair of wraparound sunglasses combined with a smartphone, I see it becoming the dominant display technology. The convenience of being able to summon any number of arbitrarily large displays at will is hard to deny, even if you completely disregard any value proposition involving AR and new forms of human computer interaction.

I'm sitting in bed with my laptop right now, and if I could choose between reading this on a pair of lightweight glasses or my laptop, I'm not sure what the laptop has to offer. The big issue is touch typing; no (macro) gesture- based virtual keyboard is ever going to be usable for professional workloads. I sometimes wonder if some kind of one- or two-handed finger-chording input could be as efficient as a qwerty keyboard. I would be willing to toss my decades of qwerty experience if I could eventually get something as fast without having to carry around a keyboard. I imagine something like this device from Children of Men: [https://youtu.be/sJO0n6kvPRU?t=2m4s](https://youtu.be/sJO0n6kvPRU?t=2m4s) (1024 "keys" should be plenty, so it's technically possible).

Regarding direct brain-computer interfaces, I just don't see the technological barriers going away any time soon. You'd either need some type of non-invasive technology that could wirelessly stimulate the optic nerves (aside from light, obviously), which I'm not sure exists even in theory, or such sophisticated nano-machinery that it would be effectively invisible, like a neural lace. I don't see either of these things happening for decades at least (I would love to be proven wrong though!).

I don't know if the form factor that will finally trigger mass adoption will resemble currently available headsets. The breakthrough might be retinal laser projection or light field displays. I just think that if nothing else, the ability to move our current workloads to a portable virtual display is such an obvious improvement I can't imagine it not happening as soon as the technology is good enough. Of course the same can be said for BCI but that doesn't even work in the lab yet.

<comment><USER31> I would absolutely love AR. It'd be fascinating to look at a bridge or building and see who designed it, when it was built, how it was constructed, who died while building it, the floor plan, utilization rates, etc... Ideally, this would be done while not actually driving.

As for the direct methods, I think we may get there someday. We already enable paralyzed people to interact, albeit on a minimal scale, with a computer using nothing but their mind. There is even a DIY movement that has enabled this, again on a minimal scale, for hackers at home.

No timeline, no estimates, but I think we may get there.

My thinking is that miniaturizing is a limited endeavor. We're very unlikely to ever have things like AR by means of contact lenses. So, we're looking at something people will wear.

It is my own personal view that I see no great benefit in consuming print media by means of VR. For that, I have a tablet and a few ebook readers around the house. I am not sure that I (expressing only my own thoughts) see any great benefit in that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The era of startups began to end in the 1970s:

"Where are all the startups? U.S. entrepreneurship near 40-year low"

[http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups- nea...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-near-40-year- low/index.html)

In recent weeks, this issue has been discussed several times on Hacker News. I recall someone recently wrote a comment and said, "We should distinguish between new businesses, like a pizza shop, and real startups, that might become big companies." But why exclude a little pizza shop that might become the next PizzaHut or Dominos or Little Caesars? During the real startup era, in the mid 20th century, there were hundreds of successful pizza startups that turned into big companies. If we say "We won't count small pizza places because they can not possibly become big companies that get listed on Wall Street" then we are simply assuming our conclusions. If we exclude all of the categories which were once hot, and which should be hot right now, and only focus on the handful of sectors that still have some life in them, then we can end up believing that the era of startups is still happening right now, but we are blinding ourselves to reality.

When the economy is healthy, small businesses, with the right leadership, can make the jump to the big time. It is from the frothy, primordial soup of little mom and pop shops that new giants emerge. Two examples off the top of my head: both McDonalds and Barnes & Noble were small family businesses, for decades, before new management took over and found a way to turn them into giants.

Focusing on the tech sector, and acting as if it is the only sector that matters, allows us to ignore the sclerosis that has crept over the USA economy since the end of the post-war boom, back in 1973. We should take a step back and look at the long-term trend. The economy has been increasingly sick for 40 years now.

We should ask ourselves, where does this trend end? How large do the monopolies grow? Will there ever be an era when the USA returns to creating new businesses at a rate that would have been normal for most of the 20th century?

</comment><comment><USER15> Even ignoring "AI, drones, AR/VR, cryptocurrencies, self-driving cars, and IoT" from the article, there are still two big areas still in its infancy:

1\. Rich web apps - We know Gmail, Gdocs, Salesforce, etc are/have taken over from desktop apps. I'm continuously discovering more, e.g. Figma. Basically anything that was a single-user desktop app can be made into a realtime collaborative networked one.

2\. Mobile business apps - Yes we have mobile versions of business web apps but these are typically as useful as responsive web apps which drop critical features needing to resort to a poor [x] request desktop app experience. What is needed is to create apps which make full use of what works on mobile. Speech input, gestures, what have you. Just as PCs took over from centralized computers, and web from OSes, future computing will be more mobile and ubiquitous. Current apps are translations of desktop/web ideas. We have a long way to go to making great mobile ones. The many significant discoveries and inventions along the way will come from both large and smaller contributors.

<comment><USER33> >single-user desktop app can be made into a realtime collaborative networked one

Dear God, Why?

I would rather have MORE single desktop, single license products which I can buy once and then forget about having to upgrade every year, and buy yet another license for. (B2B)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> There definitely is a change in Silicon Valley from before. I don't think it is a lack of things to be created by any means. The difference I see is that before the thing to do was create startup. Now everyone wants to go work for Google, Apple, Facebook or another large company. And why not, you can get a huge salary there without the risk and hard work of a startup. With so many more of the smart people are going to big companies rather than trying to make something on there own, I definitely expect less innovation here in the US, for now at least.

On the positive side, there are some things a big company can do that a small company can't. This may contribute to why so many people are going to work at big companies, and we may see some good results.

<comment><USER30> The weirdos and hackers are still doing the same stuff they've always done. What you are seeing is the influx of people who would have gone into law or finance identifying tech as having the biggest payoff for the least amount of effort. The Silicon Valley of before was a small fraction of its current size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This sounds suspiciously like the mid 1990's when everyone was bemoaning how the big software companies had basically ended the at home software startup shop. Then the web struck and all these big companies had to get nimble enough to complete with the scrappy little web shops. This basically happened again the mid 2000s with smartphone development.

I'm not sure if the machine learning revolution will favor the guy at home with a GTX 1080, but until we go for a decade or more without any big hardware/software companies starting up then I will believe it.

OTOH, I suspect that the US as lost the competitive advantage to china in this regard. The "IOT" revolution probably isn't going to start in the US since all the little board dev shops are in china where you can actually purchase all the little parts you need without having to wait 6 weeks for a part or pay 10x in shipping.

<comment><USER36> Similarly, there is a big growth in the small scrappy startup space around cryptocurrency and associated blockchain technologies.

Not to start a conversation over ponzi schemes, scams, and vaporware, but its impossible to ignore the millions of dollars of investment moving around on a monthly basis in this space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Having lived through three "deaths" of silicon valley so far I will reserve judgement until the price of housing goes down to the national median

</comment><comment><USER38> NYC-based angel investor Jerry Neumann calls this the "deployment age" and has a very nice, and somewhat prescient, write-up about it:

[http://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment- age.html](http://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-age.html)

<comment><USER39> He's just quoting Carlotta Perez. But he doesn't get it quite right, we're in the installation phase for some technologies and the deployment phase for others.

<comment><USER40> Thanks for mentioning Carlotta Perez. I found a fairly recent (Aug 2017) article by her and cohorts that discusses these "installation" and "deployment" phases. It's a more optimistic article, so I created a separate post:

Are We on the Verge of a New Golden Age? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15531574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15531574)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> > Big businesses and executives, rather than startups and entrepreneurs, will > own the next decade; today's graduates are much more likely to work for Mark > Zuckerberg than follow in his footsteps

This is a tautology and reflective of the mindset that produces articles like this one. There is only one Zuckerberg. Unicorns are by definition rare, and disrupting entrenched business interests is rare _because they are entrenched._ That's what it means.

<comment><USER42> Yeah this is another example of how SV exists in a bubble and can't see the broader world. Today's graduates are more likely to work for Zuckerberg than to follow him, as were yesterday's, as were the day before's and so on.

It only seems like everyone is a founder because that's how it was in SV. It only seems like every stopped creating startups because that's how it is in SV. But like everything else in the world, trends start at the coasts and work their way inward, to the point where SV tech growth may be stagnating or declining, but Midwest startups are booming. And if the Midwest is firing up, African startups are virtually exploding.

Big businesses have always owned every decade of capitalism, and that's not going to change. Economies of scale is too hard to turn away from. But startups aren't dying, they're just taking on less sexy, harder problems that don't impact SV. So of course SV thinks entrepreneurship is dying.

<comment><USER31> I see other 'startups' that I think are missed by the SV folks. They aren't tech, but may use tech in their startup. I see quite a few of them.

They are people starting their own business. A friend borrowed some money to start a business where he drives a remote control vehicle down pipes to examine them from the inside. The space didn't have much 'local' competition and he was able to spot that, take advantage of it, and now has a dozen employees, has repaid the money, and is seeking to expand his operations. A similar experience was loaning my sibling some money so he could start a plumbing company - except it is more niche and not residential. They use some tech but they aren't tech companies.

It seems to me that the SV pundits see the tech startups while not seeing the guy who does vehicle power washing on-site, the interior decorator that uses 3D modeling and VR, or the folks who opened a diner where they have automated the food ordering process.

<comment><USER25> It seems like you have a lot of entrepreneurial energy and inspiration in your personal network. SV pundits don't care about those people creating lifestyle businesses, they just want "megascale" and big fancy exits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think there is a constant shift towards different kind of startups, as one field saturates and big players emerge. Currently the shift has been from "easy" towards "harder". in the early 2010s there was a shift from viral consumer services and apps towards b2b services and Uber-style marketplaces, which both are arguably harder to make than most consumer apps, and now there is a shift towards hard tech startups, which, again are harder to build.

But startups were more about hard tech in 80s, early 90s. It will take a while that new big consumer tech platforms emerge, but when it happens, then again there will be shift towards viral consumer services.

</comment><comment><USER10> One killer for startups is the weakening of patents. After _eBay vs. MercExchange_ , easy post-grant re-examination, and _Seagate_ [1], the worst- case penalty for infringing a patent is only paying the royalties that would have been paid if a license had been negotiated. So there's no incentive left for big companies to buy technology; they can just steal it.

This is new. All those things changed in the last 15 years. The result is that VCs have gone for market share, not technology. (Or they've gone for pharma, where patents still work.) Until about 2000, Silicon Valley VCs wanted startups to show that they had a strong intellectual property position. That all changed in the first dot-com boom, when it started being about buying market share.

This hurts innovation. Why work on a hard problem?

[1] [http://www.fulcrum.com/punitive_damages_are_now/](http://www.fulcrum.com/punitive_damages_are_now/)

</comment><comment><USER44> Meh, articles like this are neither new nor interesting. Journalists have been writing articles like this for decades. At some point, one of the journalists who writes these articles will be right, but I doubt this one will be. It's the same with how the US dollar will get replaced as the reserve currency. Maybe some time in the future, but definitely not now and not in 10 years.

There will always be cycles, but it's so easy to be a naysayer, just write a medium post. People have been calling for the collapse of Silicon Valley since the dotcom crash, and at some point they'll be right, but they've been wrong so far.

Currently, I don't see any companies that are particularly interesting, but I'm confident there's some young kid out there that will create something great that will capture everyone's attention in the next couple of years, and then a new land-grab will occur all over again. It always has happened, and will always continue to happen.

</comment><comment><USER45> Why would this be the end of the startup era? That era has been going on for decades it's just taken different forms. It's maybe the end of the overvalued photo sharing mobile app company era (it can't come soon enough).

Even "old" startups like Palantir that claim valuations at $20 billion are privately being revalued down significantly [1].

We're simply moving into a different era and the very public, very flash, direct to consumer startup market appears to be well beyond saturated. The money will go back to where it's always gone, quieter B2B type companies that build boring technology that solves less glamorous, but more important, problems.

1 - [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-17/palantir-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-17/palantir- will-struggle-to-hold-on-to-20-billion-valuation-report-says)

</comment><comment><USER46> This isn't to say that you can't still build a successful startup, but it is saying that you probably won't build the next Uber/Airbnb. The difference is a few zeros but you'd still be wealthy either way.

</comment><comment><USER47> >"Big businesses and executives, rather than startups and entrepreneurs, will own the next decade; today's graduates are much more likely to work for Mark Zuckerberg than follow in his footsteps."

I disagree with this. I think the bloom is off the rose for these companies(FB, Google, Amazon et al)in terms of an image as a "cool place" to work. I they will increasingly be viewed for what they essentially are - <USER3> other big corporations. Big corporations that only have their own best interests at heart.

This nearly reads like a propaganda piece intended to discourage people from doing their own thing.

</comment><comment><USER48> If the smartphone boom was "2007-2016" it's premature to claim nothing is next. It's too soon to say "there is no such revolution en route", when we had one practically yesterday!

</comment><comment><USER49> This article is using false assumptions about AI to back up its narrative.

"AI doesn't just require top-tier talent; that talent is all but useless without mountains of the right kind of data. And who has essentially all of the best data? That's right: the abovementioned Big Five, plus their Chinese counterparts Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu."

Making the next quantum leaps in AI is not a question of data advantages.

1) We have just seen the world's best Go-playing AI trained completely from self-play, without access to any labeled data nor hand-engineering, trained on a few machines. This happened at Google, but could have easily been done by a small startup.

[https://thenextweb.com/artificial- intelligence/2017/10/20/go...](https://thenextweb.com/artificial- intelligence/2017/10/20/googles-deepmind-achieves-machine-learning- breakthroughs-at-a-terrifying-pace/)

2) Even the pioneers of deep learning are now strongly pushing back on the methodology that lots of labeled data is required to solve AI problems.

Geoffrey Hinton: "I don't think it's how the brain works. We clearly don't need all the labeled data."

[https://www.axios.com/ai-pioneer-advocates-starting- over-248...](https://www.axios.com/ai-pioneer-advocates-starting- over-2485537027.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twsocialshare&utm_campaign=organic)

In a nutshell, the biggest challenge of pushing AI forward is tackling unsupervised learning, not having "better data".

<comment><USER50> 1) That's false. AlphaGo did not just train by self-play. It trained on millions of pre-played games, and the bot also uses hand-engineered features for their MCTS hybrid (best) model. Refer to their paper for details.

2) Read the article that you are referencing please. What you are implying is not the thesis of that article nor is it what Geoffrey Hinton is saying.

What Hinton is saying is, we should throw out deep learning. What he is saying is that the current approaches to AI are fundamentally broken and aren't going to result in artificial general intelligence.

Backpropagation is not just used in supervised learning, it is also used in unsupervised learning. I happen to agree with Hinton, in that there is too much hype around the current state and successes of AI, which has mainly been in "narrow AI".

AI is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days. But there is a big difference between technology that automates the tedious tasks of daily life, and artificial general intelligence.

In the world of deep learning, data is king.

<comment><USER49> Sorry, but you are incorrect on both accounts.

1) AlphaGo Zero was indeed trained in the way I mention.

2) As directly quoted from the article, Hinton believes that a better way of learning doesn't require all that labeled data. If such a method is invented, as is required to push AI forward, big corporations would not have a data advantage, which is my original point.

<comment><USER50> AlphaGo, trained using supervised learning using games from KGS:

[https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind- media/alphago/AlphaG...](https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind- media/alphago/AlphaGoNaturePaper.pdf)

AlphaGo scratch: [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24270.epdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24270.epdf)

I was specifically talking about AlphaGo, not AlphaGo scratch. Also, if you read the paper about AlphaGo scratch, the key innovation driving the self- learning is the use of MCTS as a policy improver, which couldn't have feasibly been done without AlphaGo and the supervised learning.

And I think Hinton is saying that we need fundamental breakthroughs for AI, and I don't think he is in favor of "traditional" modern neural network architectures. Anything that requires SGD, he doesn't like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> No one wants to be called the next Yahoo, so even a whiff of competition means the startup gets acquired. This considering FAANG companies have so much cash on their books, not to mention ease at which credit can be had.

</comment><comment><USER52> This doesn't feel particularly true in the enterprise space. There still is the constraint on IPO exits due to (unclear what exactly -- that's another topic), but I don't see companies like HPE, IBM, Dell, etc. getting _more_ innovative, nimble, or effective.

It might just be that in the consumer space there are some exceptionally good companies, where that hasn't really happened in enterprise, or it could be a function of the technologies and markets. Amazon (AWS) and Google to some extent compete in enterprise as well, but they're not as dominant relatively.

</comment><comment><USER53> Ironically, you have a giant media house (AOL), one of whose important revenue streams is selling hopes of the startup world ("Startups, start here". [1]) through their Disrupt conferences, writing something like this.

My personal opinion - as long as there is a market demand and as long as you're a business fulfilling that demand, startup or not, whether the tech is accessible or not, it's all that matters.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/event-info/disrupt- berlin-2017/](https://techcrunch.com/event-info/disrupt-berlin-2017/)

<comment><USER54> Of course market demand and other factors matter but the point of this article is that large tech companies are now a barrier on the way of small startups to their success. We all see that now, most startups fail and even if some of them gain some traction, they are being bought by big guys. And one of the main causes of that is the outdated nature of large corporations. Nowadays, one of the main platforms to promote your company is Google. However, google advertising is good for those who pay more. Thus, companies with more cash have a privilege over smaller companies even if the second ones do their job better. And that's only one example with one large corporation. To conclude, big guys, which were praised by the whole tech community all the time are now a barrier on our road to progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Weird that an article on the end of startups doesn't mention the likely next big area for startups: Genetics.

<comment><USER56> Genetics research is slow. It could be 10 , 20 or 50 years away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Most industries tend to consolidate over time with a few big players. For technology it's particularly true given the winner takes all phenomenon. Unless there is a fundamental new technology / hardware platform, there's little chance small startups can go into existing ones.

However, I am more interested in seeing technology disrupting old heavy industries. Please go outside the silicon valley and there are plenty of those.

</comment><comment><USER58> I try to be patient with Techcrunch, but seriously, phrases like this make me see red:

> The market capitalization of Bitcoin vastly exceeds that of any Bitcoin- > based startup. The same is true for Ethereum.

The market cap of the US dollar exceeds that of any financial institution. What's the fucking point?

<comment><USER59> The point is that the success of bitcoin does not mean a huge windfall to bitcoin based startups. Reread the paragraph.

<comment><USER60> I suppose it depends on how broadly you define startup. Surely some drug dealers, online casinos, etc, are doing well. I believe Silkroad did $1B+ in sales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I remember the beginning of the startup era. When Bill Gate and Steve Jobs started their companies in 1976, rhere were very few venture capital firms and the stepped procedure of investment you see today. A company had to borrow from more conventional banks and/or grow their own capital from revenues. A big help was when President Carter lowered capital gains tax in 1977. That stimulated investment firms.

</comment><comment><USER62> Startups have also seemed to have morphed from ventures started by founders, to vehicles for investors to make long plays for monopoly control of a market, like Uber and Netflix. I am not sure of the laws regarding dumping and artificially low prices, but when startups operate at a loss for years and gobble up the entire market, that looks like what they're doing.

</comment><comment><USER63> Clickbait.

ML won't require mass amounts of data forever. One-shot learning will get solved.

<comment><USER21> > One-shot learning will get solved.

This is nonsense. I would challenge you to show any few-shot learning work that isn't basically some form of transfer learning in disguise.

Few-shot learning is super useful if you're in a position where you don't have much data, but will never compete with huge stacks of data.

<comment><USER42> The nice thing with digital models is they can get data from everywhere and continue to improve slowly over time. It's the lean startup applied to ML: there's nothing wrong with launching with a one-shot ML product to test a hypothesis, and as time goes on keep adding to it. That's the core concept there: start with a working but basic model and continue to extrapolate from that as time goes on.

"I would challenge you to show proof of X" in ML is an empty challenge when the technology is in its infancy. You might as well say "I challenge you to stream HD video over the internet" in 1989. Theoretically possible but technically impossible for the time. We proved it possible as tech improved, though.

The problem with cynicism is it costs nothing but still makes you look like an expert.

<comment><USER21> > That's the core concept there: start with a working but basic model and > continue to extrapolate from that as time goes on.

This has literally nothing to do with few-shot learning though. You can always make a crappy model with a small amount of data and then improve it as you get more. And my point is that if you have a competitor with several orders of magnitude more data, their models are almost certainly still going to be better than yours.

Few-shot learning will probably be able to improve the baseline of what you can do on certain tasks, but you're not magically going to learn a sufficiently accurate cancer diagnosis algorithm from 5 radiology images.

The best case for few-shot learning is that you go from "worse than the alternatives" to "good enough for some people to get value", which will probably happen a few times, but is going to be a minor phenomenon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I call bullshit on this. The problem is centralization, but that hasn't prevented startups. It just caused them to be bought by large companies like Faceook (YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram are some examples)

I write about this extensively here: [https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/centralization- and-o...](https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/centralization-and-open- source/)

Decentralization of trust, power, energy generation, and much more is on the way. This will lead to a lot more startup activity.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus...](https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration/up- next)

</comment><comment><USER65> Well, back to good old small business it is.

<comment><USER66> That's right. The small business SAAS biz in niches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Not every startup needs to become the next Amazon or the next Uber. Startups will still be around, some will still be successful, but yeah, maybe they won't turn into mastodonte that easily.

</comment><comment><USER68> I think this was a very sober presentation of things, however it seems that it underestimates our inability to tell how the future will pan out, especially when we're moving on an exponential function of technological progress and creativity. Sure, the Internet window is closed and so is the mobile apps window but no one saw either of them coming - likewise, I can't tell yet what the next really big thing will be or when (unfortunately) but I wouldn't mourn garage entrepreneurship just yet.

</comment><comment><USER69> The world does not need more Mark Zuckerbergs, it needs millions of small and mid-size businesses working on the build out of low carbon energy sources. Converting the world electricity supply to run off renewable sources will require tens of trillions of dollars of investment over a period of decades. It's not a small opportunity, but unlike the app economy, it's not a winner take all market. This is mostly a good thing, although we won't see many overnight billionaires from it.

<comment><USER70> I agree the future is built on small businesses. But to have the most impact on the environment we could all just stop eating so much meat.

<comment><USER71> Why would we do that when are bodies are specifically evolved for eating both vegetables and meat?

I, for one at least, consider along the millions of years that evolution tried a version of _homo sapiens_ that couldn't eat meat, and it was selected against...why would we now attempt to overturn the apparent wisdom of that selection?

<comment><USER72> Quoting from the collective wisdom of HN here:

      Because it doesn't scale.

<comment><USER73> Oh crap, you summed up my long-ass comment in 4 words!

"I've been disrupted by a leaner competitor!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I don't think it's the end of the startup era at all. It might be the end of startup hype ending on itself, with valuations not tight to reality and companies without business.

</comment><comment><USER75> I get what he's saying. The internet used to be peaceful grassy plains. Now it is loud bustling New York with bigger fish that are out to get you. This doesn't mean you can't disrupt everything, but now you have to outrun this new establishment that reinvests all its money into eating you more efficiently. Companies like Facebook already have giant audiences, and copying your product can be done virtually overnight.

</comment><comment><USER76> > today's new technologies are complicated, expensive, and favor organizations > that have huge amounts of scale and capital already.

That is not a fact of life or act of nature, but to a great degree it is a choice. Decades ago, engineers built many technologies that were conceptually simple, elegant, open, free-as-in-liberty, and hackable - not by accident, but to empower hackers and end-users. Those efforts created the environment, platforms and tools that the startups thrived on. What are today's engineers building for the next generation?

For example, I recently had to learn in-depth how computers boot these days - down in the weeds with ME, TPM, UEFI, SEDs, PXEs, GPT, and more:

First, the complexity of that small step to starting your computer is beyond an individual's comprehension; just one spec was 2,500 pages; many technologies' roles overlap and it's not clear why there is redundancy or how they integrate with each other. Perhaps there is someone who specializes in this narrow field as a full-time job and actually grasps it all, or maybe if I had a year to dedicate to it - but I can't imagine some new teenage hacker mastering it.

Second, much of it is proprietary or at least not free. TPM and ME, for example, are ultimately outside the user's control.

Compare that to the former system of POST - BIOS - MBR - boot loader. I'm not saying change is bad and that we couldn't have improved on it, but clearly nobody thought about making it hackable or empowering end-users.

I'll go a little further and say it reflects - I can't support a causal connection - a broader loss of interest in the 'American Dream', equality of opportunity (or at least an abundance of it for all), and empowering the little guy and underdog. The U.S. also cuts back education and other programs that give opportunity to less advantaged citizens, often with the idea that the powerful should not be hindered by taxes or government. Polls show interest in democracy is slipping, with the US government saying it's not worth promoting abroad (the White House and State Dept both explicitly said it) - democracy is political empowerment of the little guy; everyone gets a vote and is equal. Some political groups even explicitly argue that their group should dominate the others. I'm not starting a political debate; I'm just pointing out that it's a much different outlook.

</comment><comment><USER77> We don't need more humongous private firms like Google/Facebook/Apple. If they were to be replaced by other firms, they will only be even bigger and more powerful. Pretty sure most would say no to that.

What we need is more tech savvy populace that know how to put up their own website (facebook replacement) and apps to share photos (instagram) with family and friends.

</comment><comment><USER78> The point has been proven: there're some business models that can be jump start with VC, and generate tons of cash flow. It will never go away.

What's happening is that the world is learning no to invest hundreds of millions in a "bro app". VCs learning = less investment in absurd enterprises = less total number of startups

</comment><comment><USER79> The cryptocurrency space has brought multiple unicorns - they just mostly don't come from silicon valley and don't follow the typical VC funding model.

Bitcoin Ethereum Ripple Bitcoincash Litecoin Dash NEM NEO Monero Iota

<comment><USER80> I admit I don't know too much about cryptocurrencies but how are those unicorns? Aren't those all currencies and not companies?

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Current startups are jokes. Not really many of them have techs, let alone a working business model. All they have is websites/apps, nothing more.

</comment><comment><USER82> This article fails to take into account blockchain startups (esp for mobile) and the trend toward decentralization.

</comment><comment><USER83> The champion of the dying cause is a trope going back (at least) to Greek poet Pindar. It usually treats the titans of the near past as god-like and looks at the future as one of inevitable decline. It ends with _Get Off My Lawn_.

I've already lost a few bets on the future. I didn't see Uber/Lyft although I thoroughly hated taxis. What do I know?

</comment><comment><USER84> Interesting article, but if the big five really dominate all resources in SF/SV, maybe other cities will become the next Silicon Valley.

</comment><comment><USER85> robo machine startup end u

</comment><comment><USER86> This just sounds like unwarranted negativity to me. There will always be innovation.

<comment><USER87> I don't think the takeaway is that innovation will slow down. The point of the article is that the large, powerful companies that we have now are on top of the game, understand technology, networking, internet, and there's no big new shift where they'll lose to startups.

Innovation will continue and Alphabet and Amazon etc. will remain dominant and powerful, controlling and doing much of the innovation.

Startups had whole new markets to enter in the past where big corporations were not prepared to go. Now, any potential new markets aren't wide open for small startups and the big corporations are ready to jump in and dominate. It's not the same.

End of widespread startup success ≠ end of innovation (but it will mean some types of innovation are stifled or don't happen)

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> I'm pretty heavily involved in the Ethereum ecosystem, and it's a great place for startups.

<comment><USER89> I have some questions as to why you would say that - could you reach out to me at my email or add yours to your profile? Thanks.

<comment><USER90> Why do you say thanks? They may not want to say any more than they've already said, or they may be unfriendly to you.

<comment><USER88> No worries, I'm not an unfriendly person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > It is widely accepted that the next wave of important technologies consists > of AI, drones, AR/VR, cryptocurrencies, self-driving cars, and the "Internet > of Things."

While I agree with a lot of this analysis, the fact that the author seems not to understand the difference between cryptocurrency and blockchain doesn't exactly signal credibility in this domain.

<comment><USER28> I think each one of those platforms are growing rapidly. So what if they haven't hit critical mass yet? Each one has that potential. What are we looking at then, a few years before one or several of those become as big as mobile?</comment></comment>


It is 100 seconds to midnight - <AUTHOR> https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock <comment> cia-killer Kind of sad for them to lose complete credibility just to prove that "orange man blumpf is bad"</comment>


Why are so many companies using Node.js? - <AUTHOR> I've seen it being used in quite a number of places now (specially startups) and I don't get why people use it over other stacks which might be easier to maintain and code. Here are couple of things that comes to mind<p>- Most startups have inexperienced people writing async code (which is hard) and make too many mistakes<p>- The reason Javascript is used in frontend let's use it for backend (even using the same programmer) seems flawed. Backend programming would require intimate knowledge of threads, mutexes, async and other things which a frontend programmer may not be familiar with so using the same programmer or language may be moot.<p>- Flaky drivers. Surely it works great with MongoDB but try using MariaDB, Postgres with concurrency and pooling and there are so many issues (async is hard ?).<p>- Is Node.js performance really that good when people start making mistakes and bugs arise that infact hinders performance. Why people move to Node.js when horizontal scaling can provide sufficient performance needed by most.<p>These are only couple of points, may be Hackernews can give more perspective towards why some of the people/companies choose Node.js with these flaws. Is it because it's new or the love of Javascript (designed in less than 1 month) is so much that it has bleed into the backend realm. <comment><USER2> It's a fad (which is fading in favor of Go). A few comments:

 _Backend programming would require intimate knowledge of threads, mutexes, async..._

Not if they use Node.js. One reason to use it is that it doesn't allow you to use threads or to even decide whether to use threads or not.

 _Surely it works great with MongoDB..._

And that's what people use.

 _Is Node.js performance really that good..._

People who choose programming languages based on hype are never going to get good performance anyway, so it doesn't matter.

</comment><comment><USER3> > when people start making mistakes and bugs arise that infact hinders > performance

That statement is true of any language stack.

> The reason Javascript is used in frontend let's use it for backend (even > using the same programmer) seems flawed

I am a backend dev at my company and we use Node.js, and I can tell you while the frontenders are not great at knowing the APIs of the internal Node.js modules, for example, but can provide great PR reviews of the code in general, for overall logic, flow and readability.

As for your statements regarding in general, I think you'll find quite a bit of people in various orgs who do not know a ton about the intimate details of threading but are for example backenders using RoR, and they just install a server like Puma or Unicorn to abstract away a lot of that complexity.</comment>


Show HN: PHaker News - A Stupid Markov Chain Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://namuol.github.io/phaker-news/

<comment><USER2> Nicely done, this is fun.

I remember the last thread with Markov-chained mashups of HN titles, but it's been long enough that it's funny all over again, especially seeing it in a form that actually looks like HN. The site names make it that much more convincing.

Time to observe some amusing titles before it gets old:

> Rails Authentication With Bitcoin

> YC W13 Is Illegal

> Ask HN: Which companies are our feet, literally

> Ask HN: How do math

> Becoming Productive in Javascript, by Buckminster Fuller

> Dropbox Deprecating the Cloud

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't render at all in Firefox 37:

"TypeError: undefined has no properties"

<comment><AUTHOR> Firefox is too forward-thinking for ES5 transpilers...

Fixing the issue. :)

EDIT: Fixed

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Took me a second to realize this wasn't real.

> Ask HN: Free for free for MeteorJS and open (codeguide.co.uk)

...too close to the truth, damn.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd actually like to read some of these articles, for example "Markov chain using machine learning and teeth" or "Lisp in medieval name tags".

</comment><comment><USER6> Favorites:

* Social Justice Bullies: Google Sued by Google

* Deleting the Teacher

* Show HN: Code

* Sorry grandma, That Way</comment>


A smart artist's guide to income taxes - <AUTHOR> https://thecreativeindependent.com/guides/a-smart-artists-guide-to-income-taxes/ <comment><USER2> I really love the way they explain tax bracket. It's very easy to understand.

" Let's say my total income was $50,000 in 2018. This means my income would be portioned out into the following tax brackets:

You must pay 10% on income up to $9,525:

$9,525 x .10 tax rate = $952.50 owed in 10% tax bracket

You must pay 12% on income between $9,526, and $38,700:

$38,700 - $9,526 = $29,174 of income in the 12% bracket $29,174 x .12 tax rate = $3,500.88 owed in 12% bracket

You must pay 22% on income between $38,701 and $82,500:

$50K (my income) - $38,701 = $11,299 of income in the 22% bracket $11,299 x .22 tax rate = $2,485.78 owed in 22% bracket

Add taxes owed from all brackets together:

$952.60 + $3,500.88 + $2,485.78 = $6,939.26 in total taxes owed "</comment>


Ask HN: Write a C compiler in Ocaml? - <AUTHOR> I have completed an internship in a research lab in the compilation field, specifically in program analysis for embedded systems and I've always been fascinated by compilers.
After writing a basic C parser in Objective Caml and since I'm fairly comfortable in C and low-level programming, I'm asking : what do you think of writing a C compiler in Ocaml or C, given the main goals : fun, getting experience in compiler writing, and maybe bootstrapping (maybe not directly).
However, I am not crazy enough to believe that I will be able to support the whole language or compile any non-trivial program in a short term, I am talking more about a long term experiment.
Note : It would be based on Lex / Yacc. <comment><USER2> "A tiny C compiler ... in a restricted dialect of OCaml":

[http://c9x.me/qcc/](http://c9x.me/qcc/)

</comment><comment><USER3> There is also Compcert written in Coq and extracted to OCaml: [http://compcert.inria.fr/](http://compcert.inria.fr/)</comment>


Ask HN: Reference book for the Ethereum protocol? - <AUTHOR> Just read Mastering Bitcoin 2nd ed. and looking for something similar for Ethereum — something to get a good overview of the protocol and relationship between different the actors. Many thanks! <comment><USER2> Mastering Ethereum is coming out Feb 2018</comment>


737 Max pilot training should include simulator time: Marc Garneau - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/737-max-training-flight-simulator-garneau-1.5102010 <comment><AUTHOR> For reference, Marc Garneau is the Canadian minister of transport (the regulatory authority for aviation in Canada), as well as a former astronaut.</comment>


Lack of Smart Engineers Considered Harmful  - <AUTHOR> http://vijaygill.wordpress.com/2009/05/18/lack-of-smart-engineers-considered-harmful/ <comment><USER2> I was surprised to see AOL called out as having brilliant network engineers. On the other hand I suppose they must have some competent sector of the business.

<comment><USER3> He mentions AOL and UUNET because he has worked at AOL and UUNET. The blog post is 90% strokefest and has no real point.</comment></comment>


Maps of Seven Deadly Sins in America : Gene Expression - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/05/map_of_seven_deadly_sins.php <comment><USER2> Does anyone have any good resources on creating a county by county map like that?

I've tried to find a good one to use, hopefully to output some data I've played with in python, but I can't seem to find any good resources.

Note to HN: There is so much information out there now. Lets see more people playing with it ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> Many, if not most, of these factors are strongly correlated with wide income disparity and particularly greater poverty levels. Greed, obviously, but also those pertaining to crime rates (envy, wrath), arguably lust, and potentially gluttony.

It would be interesting to see these charts adjusted for wealth levels in some manner.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a much better link if you ask me from the original:

[http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/mar/26/one-nation- seven...](http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/mar/26/one-nation-seven-sins/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I find it pretty amusing that the Bible Belt states tend to be pretty "sinful".</comment>


Modernizing Common Lisp: Recommended Extensions (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://lists.tunes.org/archives/tunes/2001-February/003058.html

<comment><USER2> The actual recommendations email is from 1999.

<comment><USER3> I lolled when they said the CLIM standard should provide a way to control Java applets running in browsers.

<comment><USER2> If you ignore a problem long enough, it will go away.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: githero.es - Nominate and Vote for your personal GitHub heroes - <AUTHOR> http://githero.es

<comment><USER2> Didn't vote because it asks for permission to update my profile info and repository's as well as reading my public data. Can't see why it would need anything but read-access to my github profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't realize that. Fixed now to only have read-only scope.

Edit: Obviously, we aren't going to do anything malicious with your data too, but apologies for the oversight.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for fixing. Didn't think you would've done anything with it, but I prefer to boycott apps that ask for more than they need just in case. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This page could benefit greatly from any sort of explanation. What should my criteria be?

Also consider either changing the "Nominate" form to an actual <form> or adding a keypress event on the button so that I can submit by pressing enter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points - as for criteria - this is just a fun little app we did over New Years weekend to give us coders a way to say thanks to our personal GitHub heroes.

Will fix the form issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I open the page from here (either foreground or background) it closes immediately. Works fine if opened in new tab.

Opera 11.60, no extensions, Windows 7 x64, logged in to github

<comment><AUTHOR> Woops was a stupid bug, fixed now, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Github is convenient and all, but for a popularity contest like that couldn't you accept just any email/account url? Or Ohloh committers, which are looked up in a number of forges?

</comment><comment><USER6> instead of voting for someone why would you not just follow them on github. that is essentially a vote.</comment>


Users Trash Wal-Mart On Its Facebook Site (advertising on social sites gets harder) - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9032718&intsrc=news_ts_head

<comment><USER2> For another example, see <http://community.livejournal.com/lj_biz/profile>. All the Pepsi virtual gifts are a protest against sponsored virtual gifts by paid users, who were promised that paid/permanent accounts would never have advertising on them.</comment>


Manager Mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://blog.assembleron.com/2007/07/16/manager-mathematics/ A simple equation to see how much money is being wasted each day due to stoppers. And without havint into account the fact that these stoppers break the flow. <comment><USER2> "What I hope this demonstrates is that some of the most common programming/design tasks (such as compiling/rendering) which can take perhaps 1-2 minutes but are performed 50 times a day can mean a serious waste of time and therefore money. And by using simple Manager Mathematics you can calculate how much is being wasted and use it to justify buying hardware/software which will reduce that time."

So 'manager math' means figuring out the total cost of wasted time by multiplying wasted time per task by number of tasks by cost of time? It takes 'manager math' to say "If you make $50/hour and screw around for eight hours, you'll cost us $400"?

I look forward to tomorrow's installment of Manager Emailing, in which we find that if you write a message, and send it to a particular email address, the owner of that email address will get _a message saying exactly the same thing_! It's like magic!

<comment><USER3> You'd be surprised at how few people think of situations this way. Even managers that can do "Manager Math" aren't the norm.

Managers (smart ones at least) sell their ideas by spelling them out in dollars and cents. The guy wanted new pc's for his staff. In order to sell that he simply calculated how much more efficient they could be in a way that a two year old could understand.

That's his whole point.

<comment><USER2> His point was that to figure out if something is worth doing, you compare the costs to the benefits?

Am I missing something important? Is it a parody?

<comment><USER4> Maybe the point is that you tend to overlook the total cost because of the small cost per event and because you are conditioned to accept the cost as a necessary evil.

IDK, but I do know that managers love those kinds of justifications.

<comment><USER2> In that case, it's a question of attitude, not (simple, ridiculously obvious) equations. Why is it called 'math', much less 'manager math', when it's really about being stingy?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>