Remington Is Planning to File for Bankruptcy - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-12/cerberus-s-remington-will-cede-control-to-lenders-in-bankruptcy <comment><USER3> Part of the problem gun companies face is that guns are reliable -- very reliable. Like "last 100 years" reliable. And guns are likely to be maintained, stored properly, and not simply lost.

I think that's part of the reason for all the gear and "tactical" stuff and expensive assault rifles... they tend to keep the revenue flowing.

And I also think that's why people who are against guns in general want assault rifles banned -- they drive the success of the gun industry. If you just go by the numbers, I don't see any justification for banning really any kind of rifle (unless it's full auto or something)[1].

[1] Around 5% of murders and probably lower for accidents and suicides [https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in- the-u.s.-...](https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in- the-u.s.-2014/tables/expanded-homicide- data/expanded_homicide_data_table_8_murder_victims_by_weapon_2010-2014.xls)

<comment><USER4> Doing my best to walk on eggshells here.

>I think that's part of the reason for all the gear and "tactical" stuff and expensive assault rifles... they tend to keep the revenue flowing.

Fear sells. In the case of ARs and the vast accessory market, it's been quite lucrative since 2008 or so.

>And I also think that's why people who are against guns in general want assault rifles banned

As people on both sides of this debate are bound to point out, "assault rifle" doesn't mean much in terms of operating characteristics. It means a lot in terms of marketability, though!

<comment><USER5> > As people on both sides of this debate are bound to point out, "assault > rifle" doesn't mean much in terms of operating characteristics. It means a > lot in terms of marketability, though!

I honestly don't recall the last time I saw a gun company market something as an "assault _____".

Many pro-gun folks have been trying to get the term "Modern Sporting Rifle" to stick. I find it kind of silly, myself. They're just "ARs" (for AR-15-pattern rifles) or "AKs" (for AKM-pattern rifles).

<comment><USER6> What are semi-automatic Mini-14s, M1As, Sig 556s, Steyr AUG, Bushmaster ACR, etc. (the list is endless), then?

They're not "assault rifles" because that definition requires select-fire capability.

It would be nice to have a catchall term that means "semi-automatic detachable-magazine-fed rifle chambered in an intermediate cartridge" but is a bit less of a mouthful, and doesn't have an inaccurate, negative, politically charged connotation like "assault weapon" does.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps "modern sporting rifle"? That seems to be the term the gun industry has settled on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Remington Outdoors isn't filing for bankruptcy because of politics or because guns last a long time, as others have suggested. They've been acquiring big- name arms manufactures like Remington Arms, Bushmaster, and Marlin, then throwing quality control out the window while they ride the reputations of their subsidiaries into the ground.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. See the fiasco with the R51.

<comment><USER9> I just read bout that...what an appalling effort, and they should have known better. They have serious issues of a newly designed pistol cannot match a $150 Makarov in terms of manufacturing quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _" Half the guns in America are owned by only 3 percent of the adult population, with an average of 17 firearms each."_

Interesting. So there are really two target markets - people who want one gun for use, and people who are into guns as a hobby.

<comment><USER6> This isn't really something that's specific to guns. Any hobby is going to end up with statistics like this. If you take a sample of say, motorcyclists - <USER2> might find that for 10 people who own exactly one, there's a collector who owns 20 who skews the average strongly (and a few more who own 2-5).

Guns are cheaper (on average) than motorcycles, they last longer, have been around longer, and tend to get passed down by generations (so one might find themselves with their grandfather's collection of 20 guns, and then add another 20 over their lifetime, then pass them along to their grandchild), so the skew is going to be much stronger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Remington has been badly mismanaged for years - this isn't news to anyone in the gun world.

<comment><USER6> This needs to be closer to the top, no need to extrapolate further. Remington has been outputting crap for years, this doesn't represent the gun industry as a whole like some other commenters seem to be inferring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The irony of it all - by electing a republican* president, the democrats have a victory which would not have been possible if a democrat president took office.

I wonder if this effect has a name and whether it can be applied to computer security too? For instance, having a pro-encryption-backdoor president inadvertently increasing security.

*republican in name only

<comment><USER12> Guns are easy to make if you have the right tools. There will always be someone making and selling; even if it is the local store down the road. This will change nothing.

Arms sales are a big market. I think what happened here is that Remington took a bet on the Civilian Market in the US and lost.

<comment><USER13> >> Guns are easy to make if you have the right tools.

That's a bit much. Rifling barrels is not a trivial task.

<comment><USER14> It's more trivial now than it was when they did it in the 18th century...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Belief in Fake News Is Associated with Delusionality - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211368118301050 <comment><AUTHOR> > Participants were recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) in two > waves (Study 1: n = 502, Study 2: n = 446; Demographics: SI Section S1).</comment>


Using science to rebrand - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pistollake.com/post/36656367475/using-science-to-rebrand

<comment><USER2> Good to hear you guys survived that challenge. The new name's nice, it should be popular with outdoorsmen, hunters, and gamesmen. I'm not sure how well it'll go over with backpackers, conservationists, and tree-huggers like myself.

<comment><USER3> There are some liberals who like guns. And lakes. And lakes named after guns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Whats the deal with validate.io? I'd like to rebrand my website (flapcast.com -- sort of a silly, brash name decision :) and this looks like a great tool to use, but the website only has an email address on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its an incredible service in alpha by the guys from SocialSci.com -- happy to make an intro if you'd like.

<comment><USER4> Sure, thanks, my email is in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's how every rebranding has been done for the past 50 years, lots of field research. But usually more importance is given to qualitative research, not quantitative. Focusing on numbers gives too much leeway for interpreting data in the wrong way.

btw I'm right in the target demographic and I'm not very fond of the new name. Something with "pistol" in it evokes not-so-nice concepts, and teenage brands with words like army/fight/420/skulls/maryjane/etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well then, hopefully we can win you over with quality products, a great value prop, and a nice design and brand aesthetic!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The name's good, but maybe it's not the best URL-wise... pistolake or pistollake?

Wish you the best anyway :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like the name. We bought the variations we could think of and we'll redirect them soon!

<comment><USER6> Awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please include a link to your main site from your blog, for your readers' sake.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean a link on the blog.pistollake.com index page or within each blog post?

Just added to the index page.

Thanks for the heads up!

<comment><USER7> Like in the title would be ideal, I think.

Also, what you have right now is the URL but it's not linkified. You might want to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Regardless of what the math said, I'm afraid it's a big notch down from Holden. Holden was cool, masculine and _classy_. This is just masculine, in a fishing trip kind of way.

More specifically, "pistol" = wild west, unkempt cowboys, sweaty mexicans, dusty towns, etc. Similarly, "lake" = tranquility, fishing, retirement, discomfort (to the urbanites). It's just a conflicting mess of associations. I think you are shooting yourselves in the leg with this rebrand, and I really wish that you weren't.

<comment><AUTHOR> We loved From Holden as well; we grew up there and it meant a lot to us. We might have been able to contest the C&D but at the end of the day, those guys have done exactly what we are doing -- poured their blood, sweat, and tears into building a company from the ground up. If they felt we were going to do harm to their brand, we definitely weren't willing to move forward because we loved the name or felt attached to it.

So that leaves us with establishing a new brand, and while there were some good ideas, none of them really stuck. We're investing our lives into building a long-lasting company and I'd rather build a brand around something that is already really meaningful to me than a made up word or one that has less emotional connection.

<comment><USER8> I know the story behind your name change, and I can't complement you enough on the way you handled it. But the new name is not engaging, it's off. It doesn't even connect to the imagery you have on your Kickstarter's page, and it feels like a rushed decision.

Also, I think you might have your priorities wrong. There certainly should be an emptional connection, but it should be that of your _customers_ rather than yourselves. In the end it's not you who's going to be buying your shirts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool process.

I'd guess that for the desired characteristics -- masculine, trustworthy -- respondents wound up applying a sort of 'handicap theory' analysis to the names. That's the idea that in certain status/fitness competitions, sometimes strength is signaled by demonstrating the ability to take on otherwise costly/tangential burdens. (A peacock's feathers and other sexually-selected exaggerated characteristics are the classic examples.)

That is, certain _flaws_ in the names actually indicated: this brand is strong enough not to pander. 'Rowe Brook' is a bit mysterious. Probably a name, but one that is uncommon, not definitively gendered, and perhaps prone to mishearing (that silent 'e') or teasing puns. A person with that name, and choosing to use that name for their business, has nothing to prove and isn't cloying for approval: hence the high 'trustworthy' rating. (Two of the lowest- trustworthy are pandering: 'rogue ethike' and 'unbeholden'. Real unbeholden rogues don't have to remind people they're that way!)

'Pistol Lake' is sure to turn off a few people due to its gun-association. But again, the subconscious reasoning among a wider audience may be: if a brand can shake that off... maybe it's strong in other dimensions? ...or they're so manly they don't care what some may think?

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting concept -- handicap theory. At the end of the day, we're confident our craftsmanship will speak for itself and will be what matters most, and the data from the survey did a lot to calm our own doubts about a name that we were very personally attached to.

It has been fascinating though, and we definitely plan to do further research for other decisions in the future.</comment></comment>


Show HN: FAQ Off – Open-Source Gamebook-Style Q&A Builder to Mitigate Trolls - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/soatok/faq-off/releases/tag/v0.1.0 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

I've been developing some open source projects on my Twitch.tv channel for the past few months. I just got this project feature-complete enough for a first beta release.

      Why?

When someone either accrues a large social media following, or become the target of someone else with a large following, it can become very draining to have the same conversation and debate the same tired arguments with hundreds or thousands of different people with varying degrees of intellectual honesty and good faith.

      What is FAQ-Off?

FAQ Off allows users to create a gamebook-styled Q&A, which can be linked to when someone responds to a social media post with the same dumb question or tired arguments.

At the bottom of the page, you can link to more Q&A posts that contain further responses to the same, tired arguments.

In essence, it allows you to tell trolls, "FAQ off, dude!"

(For maximum impact, users are heavily encouraged to thoroughly cite their FAQ Off entries with a diverse range of reliable third party sources.)

      What problems does FAQ Off solve?

If you find yourself being dragged into the same exhausting discussions over and over again, especially from Twitter trolls, you can save yourself a lot of time by pre-writing a branching FAQ adventure that answers users' questions, and their follow-up questions, etc. to render their tired line of questioning obsolete.

      Does it cost money?

No! You can self-host your own instance. I've tried to make it easy to setup. All you need is:

* PHP 7.3 or newer, with ext/sodium

* PostgreSQL 9.6 or newer

* Apache or nginx with LetsEncrypt (for HTTPS)

If you want access to the instance I'm running at [https://faq.dhol.es](https://faq.dhol.es), I'm only giving invite codes out to close friends and Patreon supporters. Invited users are free to invite any of their friends.

      Why the borderline-profane project name?

The project exists to tell boring Internet trolls, "Fuck off", in a way that obviates their entire strategy. I feel that the name captures the spirit of my intentions well. Also, I like puns.

      What motivated its development?

I'm very active in the furry fandom. We're frequent targets of thinly-veiled homophobia. I wanted to arm my fellow furs with tools to better mitigate mob harassment (e.g. the kind of behavior we see after tweets from toxic YouTube personalities like [https://twitter.com/keemstar/status/1100493020523347973](https://twitter.com/keemstar/status/1100493020523347973)).</comment>


What Arc should learn from Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/10/26/what-arc-should-learn-from-ruby/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure a lot is gained from this comparison (caveat: I've used neither language in anger).

PG states that Arc is intended as a 100-year language, so getting your core axioms and constructs right is pretty key. This kind of approach has a higher activation energy, but momentum can continually build.

The philosophy for Ruby is getting things done _now_ , although arguably it gained a lot from it's time in the Japanese niche. It's a fantastically productive language and favoured by a lot of productive "lets get it done" people (not to say Arc isn't...). This philosophy accelerates quickly, but tends to eventually hit conceptual limits. In my view this happened with Java - but this doesn't mean it's a bad thing.

I'm struggling with some of the same problems (in microcosm, maybe nanocosm in comparison). For example, if you build an exception mechanism - do you make it an ultimately flexible signal system, or do you constrain it to certain norms?

The latter favours rapid growth as all your libraries have consistent exception mechanisms. I can build a library and integrate it easily with another library. The same applies for a whole bunch of other constructs, such as network models, concurrency, etc, etc. So what you have done is constrain X to allow growth in Y... (A lot of what a language is about is what it _doesn't_ let you do, rather than what it allows).

The former may result in some nasty mutations in the short-term - For example, libraries that aren't interoperable because they have different exception mechanisms. However, if you are taking a long term evolutionary view then this approach may yield a much more innovative, stable mechanism in the long term.

So really, they are just two different philosophies with different start and end points - that's how I read pg's quotes also.

<comment><USER3> Does a hundred year programming language make sense at all? Is it possible to have the faintest clue what people will want to be programming then? Feel free to point me to prior responses :)

<comment><USER2> For the background, take a look at: <http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> He makes it seem as if I said libraries are a bad thing. To do that he conveniently truncates the quote just before

      I'm not saying that languages *shouldn't* have
      powerful libraries, btw, just that they may not
      be 100% upside.

If he'd included that, it would have been clear to everyone that there was no counter in this counterpoint.

<comment><AUTHOR> I edited the post to include the whole quote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was hoping from the title that this would be an article about language features, instead it's more like "what Kubrick should have learned from Spielberg (in terms of box office success)"

I don't write Ruby personally; are there actual features (as opposed to ways of generating ephemeral hype) that could make Arc better?

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow! Great reading!</comment>


Microsoft announces the Surface Pro 3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/20/5734102/surface-pro-3-features-pricing-announcement <comment><USER2> That's a really nice piece of hardware. I've used MacBook Airs since 2010, but the Surface 3 looks to be strictly dominating in the hardware department.

Unfortunately, I don't think Microsoft will convert many OS X devs unless they make some changes to their software. One of the advantages of OS X is that it's a Unix, and lots of Unix software runs on it. It's not hard to compile tools such as nmap, Vim, or steam locomotive.

It would be _very_ interesting if Microsoft made Windows a Unix. They could bundle bash or zsh, add the typical BSD tools, and (most importantly) build a cc front-end for the Visual Studio compiler. They'd also have to ship a libc of their own. To save effort, they could base it on BSD's libc. It'd be like Cygwin, but installed by default and officially supported and maintained.

With such a set-up, you'd be able to run your unix tools alongside Adobe CS and Outlook. You wouldn't have to worry about driver support, since Microsoft made the hardware and the OS (just like Apple). The only thing missing would be the ability to dual-boot OS X (to test on Safari or other OS X stuff).

<comment><USER3> I'm rooting for MS. My (not so serious) test for windows is simple: the day I can resize dos command prompt as easily as terminal windows on linux/osx is the day Microsoft I need to seriously consider going back to windows :)

<comment><USER4> I know you're not being serious, but there are some other terminal apps that are better than the basic DOS prompt. Check out ConEmu, for example.

Now, once you've got ConEmu or something like it that will resize nicely and do other things, you'll still be stuck on the crappy DOS-style prompt though. :)

<comment><USER5> I feel similarly, and seriously. It's not so much just the usability of the command prompt, but that it would be a symbol of a change in priorities towards adding functionality for developers, and welcoming non-Windows technical audiences.

If I'm using a non-built-in terminal, and a non-built-in Unix compatibility layer, why am I using Windows?

<comment> vertex-four Why are you using Windows if you want it to behave like Unix?

<comment><USER5> I'm not, in that at work I use a Mac. I write Java server code for web servers and batch data-analysis, deployed on Linux boxes. A significant portion of my time is spent either ssh'ed into a Linux machine, or using the various Unix utilities as well as git and mvn in the terminal.

My point, perhaps poorly stated, was this: I prefer a terminal-heavy development environment because that is the most efficient way of interacting with remote servers for the work that I do. I can't consider using Windows without a sense that they've made it a priority to address my use cases and scenarios, and the single lowest hanging fruit possible in that regard is to spend half a dev team (2-3 devs) on modernizing the terminal to the point where when I'm at home and want to check something on a server, I use my Windows desktop instead of switching to my Mac laptop. Even better would be dedicating one or two dev teams to supporting a Unix environment natively, so Cygwin isn't necessary.

For what it's worth, I much prefer the Windows GUI to either Mac or Linux. I was a test developer at Microsoft for Windows 7 and part of 8, and I wrote this comment on my home PC running Win7. I would like to be able to use Windows for the UI and the familiarity I have with it, but those two things, a good terminal and a Unix-like environment, are requirements for my job. And I know from experience that this scenario is absolutely the furthest thing from the minds of the people working on Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm starting to see more and more Surface devices in my area. It seems to be getting popular with the Starbuck's salesguy crowd who need something as compact as a tablet, but they can use real applications on. I know that's kind of cliche, but you don't really "get" that meaning until you walk into a coffee shop and see 2 or 3 people sitting around with tablets sticking up on the tables. The Android and iPad guys are usually surfing the web while the Surface guy is editing a spreadsheet or doing something in Powerpoint.

Actually a great network effect is getting a presentation of some business proposal off of a Surface. Everybody who see the presentation usually asks what kind of Android tablet it is, and it suddenly turns every real-estate sales guy in the area into an impromptu Microsoft sales guy, extolling the virtues of the device and OS.

They're still too pricey by my estimation. You should be able to get one of these (maybe a low-ebd 32GB model) with keyboard for $799. I don't get why the keyboard/cover is an optional buy.

<comment><USER7> They've kind of killed this whole angle of "Surface is for getting work done" after they hedged by releasing Office on iPad.

<comment><USER8> Office isn't the only thing people use to 'get work done.' One of the reasons I'm planning to get a Surface Pro instead of a Android tablet or a iPad is it is a full, real windows OS on an intel processor. I can install and run ALL my existing Windows applications on it.

For me it's more of a light laptop then a limited tablet device.

<comment><USER9> And then there's the ARM version, which manages to not have the single best feature of Windows: the outstanding backwards compatibility. A very weird decision. Maybe they'll kill it with the 3rd gen.

<comment><USER10> In a way, the ARM version makes sense; if you're going to buy a bunch of new apps anyway (iPad or Windows RT), why not get the Windows you're used to? I mean, if you're going to buy new apps all over again…

The problem with this logic is that if I'm going to buy new apps all over again, why wouldn't I buy an iPad, which has more apps and an easier interface than Windows RT, which is essentially nothing like the Windows I'm used to. If I have to re-learn a new system, why wouldn't I pick the one that everyone else uses and knows than the new one that no one else really cares about or understands (and which everyone hated when it came out).

The real key now is Universal apps; if you can build one app that works on Windows 8, Windows RT, and Windows Pro (and maybe the XBone in some cases), then we're going to see the potential for a huge increase in apps as people start realizing they can hit all three markets with 'one' build (and three UIs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Warning, rant. Why the duck isn't there information on the Surface Pro 3 on the MS website? Apple has done this so well, for so long, I am pissed-off MS can't get its act together. You make an announcement, you need _presence_ on the web. You need to start your customers expectations building, whet their appetite, and tease them. Their experience starts _now_ and right now that experience is reading news articles and reading a press release. Pathetic. Where is the video of the announcement? Where are the beautiful images and specs. Where are the carefully and lovingly crafted pages that _sell_ this hardware to me? Tomorrow isn't good enough. Next week is utter failure. You step off stage, your site is live. Period.

<comment><USER12> > Apple has done this so well, for so long, I am pissed-off MS can't get its > act together.

Apple doesn't pre-announce products _at all,_ do they?

This was sloppy (Microsoft is going to have something up for preorders tomorrow, why not just put it up when the speech is finished?) but it's not something Apple even _does._

<comment><USER13> As soon as Apple's press event is done, anything they've announced is up on their site to read about or often buy.

Is MS announces something, you should be able to go to microsoft.com to read about it.

<comment><USER12> You seem to be deliberately missing the point. Apple doesn't pre-announce products at all. Criticizing the way Microsoft did it is reasonable. Making a comparison to Apple while doing so is a little bit nonsensical.

If Apple were to get into the habit of pre-announcing products would they put detailed product data on the web? Would they allow for preorders, as Microsoft is apparently going to do tomorrow? Who knows? Not having to make decisions like that is part of the advantage of not pre-announcing products.

<comment><USER13> I'm not expecting it to be available for purchase/pre-order (although that's nice). But if you announce it, the information you announce should be on your website.

That just seems like common sense.

What if Amazon announced they were going to start selling houses and then decided not to put any information about it up on their site for a few hours? Plenty of people would go to Amazon.com to learn about it and they're only frustrating those people who have already shown themselves interested in the product.

<comment><USER12> I don't disagree. If it wasn't clear from what I wrote, I just think the comparison with Apple was gratuitous. Saying Apple gets this right when they don't do it at all makes no sense to me.

I guess as a consumer I have to ask which I'd prefer: this slightly broken Microsoft process, or not learning about products at all until they go on sale. I actually do prefer the Microsoft process.

<comment><USER13> Ah, that's what's going on. I'm not talking about announcing products before they ship, that doesn't matter to my point.

When a company makes an announcement, _any announcement_ , they should put the information on their website. To leave a vacuum when you have that information ready is odd. I don't understand how a company could, in 2014, announce a product and not update their website.

Let's pick another company: Tesla. When they announced the model S and the model X they put the information on the site. The model X _still_ isn't out (and won't be for what, a year+?) but they put the information they announced up on their site for interested people to see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Small things continue to kill the surface pro acceptance:

\- The Surface site on the surface site hasn't updated with surface pro 3 info/pricing. The run way for this is long, why isn't the site updated or ready to go?

\- Accessories are notoriously out of stock. Why are they hard to get? Docking station, keyboards, mice. Fix that.

\- The dock has 10/100 Ethernet. In 2013-2014? Why?

\- Updates for firmware and drivers assume enterprise infrastructure. Without the infrastructure you need a manual upgrade using command line tools. The updates don't come through the normal windows update channel. You have to discover them on your own.

\- The track pad on the type/touch cover is flaky . Its forever getting stuck in a fixed place and stuck on gestures you cant turn off or control. You end up having to disconnect the cover and reconnect. this is stupid for an elite/pro device.

Despite the gripes these devices continue to show promise and I see them more and more around airports and coffee shops.

<comment><USER15> >The run way for this is long, why isn't the site updated or ready to go?

I don't think that's a big problem.

> The dock has 10/100 Ethernet. In 2013-2014? Why?

Dog slow as well, I suspect it's USB!

> Updates for firmware and drivers assume enterprise infrastructure.

Not my experience at all, windows update did all my driver updates and at least one firmware update too.

> The track pad on the type/touch cover is flaky

They claim to have addressed this (which you know, because you read the article right?)

<comment><USER16> >> The dock has 10/100 Ethernet. In 2013-2014? Why? > Dog slow as well, I suspect it's USB!

The weird thing is that the dock has USB 3 ports, which can easily support a GB LAN connection. I was going to buy one for my Surface Pro (gen1) until I saw that it was 10/100\. You're better off buying something like a Plugable (plugable.com) USB 3 dock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ldd- As a proud Gen 1 Surface Pro owner, this looks spectacular.

My Surface replaced my laptop, and while I definitely had my issues with the transition (trackpad sucks so often use external mouse, aspect ratio is inconvenient for Office, display angle is limiting, and no built-in LTE), I've ultimately come to enjoy using it.

I've almost always got it with me, and I've found I've become nearly as productive on it as I was with my laptop. I've been willing to make the "nearly" tradeoff since I have it on me more often, so more opportunity to be productive, and I do use it as a tablet in ways that I obviously couldn't with my laptop.

The updates in the Gen 3 address nearly all of my gripes (why can't they integrate LTE??). I'm not sure if I'll pick up a 3, but only because my Gen 1 is less than 2 years old and still under warranty. If not a Gen 3, then a Gen 4 will definitely be on my shopping list.

I can't imagine I'll go back to a normal laptop. I guess I'm exactly who they are targeting.

<comment><USER17> Yeah I have a Surface Pro 1 and I now use it for everything - development, taking notes, writing apps, playing minecraft, scribbling on PDFs. The direction they're taking the Pro 3 seems to be a good clear message at last 'the tablet that can replace your laptop' [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t7rSZT_77E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t7rSZT_77E) The bigger screen is a good move I think.

I've started using the ArcTouch mouse with my surface when I'm out and about, rather than the touchpad on the cover. Works pretty nicely and folds flat. But then I've always preferred a proper mouse to a touchpad.

<comment><USER18> Just out of interest, are you developing on Windows? Do you have any experience running Linux on them or know if that's pretty much a no go?

<comment><USER19> For my case, windows runs vagrant pretty well, so i have no problems developing web apps on windows as i have used vagrant on OSX before anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Microsoft needs to keep at it. While this iteration is great, the platform will not flourish if they falter or take a release cycle off. Consistent upgrades to the Surface hardware, and support of the developer community is key to winning the overall tablet war for MS.

<comment><USER21> While it's great to see Microsoft innovating like this and pushing their product aggressively forward, it must really chafe with their OEM community. Why would you buy some clunky classic notebook when you can get a Surface 3 for virtually the same price?

It's basically impossible for OEMs to compete when Microsoft can include Windows for free and they have to pay a premium to bundle it.

<comment><USER14> I really haven't seen the surface pro compete on price. Similar Lenovo offerings for 256GB and 512GB SSD ultra books have similar pricing. I honestly think MS shopped around the concept of surface to OEMS and I think the OEMs said "Pass. No Thanks. we'll stick with our incremental and existing form factors".

I think MS was forced into a corner and concluded they needed to go it on their own.

<comment><USER22> Kind of like how Razer built their own laptop - the OEMs have stagnated and their hardware isn't competing on an innovation front.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just when I was "boohoo"-ing over Sony Vaios entirely leaving (WORLD & ~JAPAN), MS does this. Awesome. I would probably buy one if I didn't just buy a new laptop 2 months ago.

The slightly bigger screen also makes this a worthy competitor to "real" laptops (as in, 13" and up) - a first for the Surface IMO.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 3:2 screen ratio is a killer feature. The size (800g, 9.1 mm) is quite unbelievable as well.

<comment><USER24> Except there's not much point to a 12" portrait tablet. How often do you think you'd be using such a tablet in portrait mode?

<comment><USER25> 12" portrait is the right size for working with Word documents and PDFs.

<comment><USER26> Well, 14" would be _better_ for letter-sized documents, but 12" is tolerably close to right.

<comment><USER27> Do you print your letters on US Legal or something like that?

<comment><USER26> > Do you print your letters on US Legal or something like that?

No, "letter size" was a reference to US Letter, which is 8.5"x11", which has a 13.9" diagonal, so a 14" screen would be about right (a little small for a 100% display if it is 3:2, because US Letter has a 1.29:1 aspect ratio rather than 1.5:1.)

US Legal is 8.5"x14" which is closer to 3:2 (1.65:1) but also 16.4" diagonal.

<comment><USER27> Whoops, forgot about the difference was of measuring screens & paper...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Really impressed by this, especially the 3:2 ratio screen which will be great for writing and for browsing, and amazing for photos. The pen looks great. I've recently been given an iPad by work as part of a trial. It's great for quick e-mails, but really seems hard for me to get 'proper' work done. This might be the thing - shame I have to pay for it.

<comment><USER29> It's really irritating that Lenovo won't source these for the X-series laptops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks awesome.

I always say I won't buy a tablet until it is as useful as my laptop - this is a great step in that direction with the multi position stand, 12" screen, core i7, thin and light...Will I actually enter the tablet world?

</comment><comment><USER30> Did I miss that or they said nothing about the battery duration? For me that's a very important information. For the rest is a really great piece of hw

edit:

Yep I missed: "Over ~20% more battery life than any product Surface has shipped before"

and: " battery life is up to 9 hours on the Surface Pro 3."

<comment><USER31> The anandtech live blog says it's 20% better than surface pro 2.

<comment><USER32> What version are they testing though, the Core i3? What is the Core i7 battery life I wonder...

<comment><USER33> Idle power consumption of Cores is about the same.

<comment><USER32> I really hope a real world battery test isn't just checking stuff at idle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I was holding out for this announcement to upgrade my Surface Pro, which I've been happily using as a main work PC for more than a year now. I'm not big on the size/aspect ratio change--I don't carry a bag around, and the current surface is about as large as I'd want to handle. A bigger, presumably floppier keyboard isn't too enticing either.

3:2 makes the portrait mode go from silly to potentially useable, except for the part where almost no Windows programs are actually usable in portrait mode, and of course the keyboard requires landscape mode anyway.

With no interesting spec upgrades over the Pro 2 (I was hoping for LTE, or more ports) I think I'll get one of those instead.

<comment><USER35> 3:2 is the feature that makes me actually want one of these now. I find that 16:9 on a screen the size of the Surface's is okay for watching video and not much else. I have the original "RT" Surface and my biggest complaint, even over the awful performance, is the aspect ratio. It's not comfortable to hold in your hands in either orientation and it isn't helpful for most productivity-related stuff.

Portrait orientation is important to me, but there are very few applications that I actually use in it, the top one being a browser. With a keyboard attached in landscape, the extra screen area will be extremely welcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Looks good, but I was expecting a screen with the same specs as Google's Chromebook Pixel. I understand that, beyond a certain point, pixel density ceases to be relevant, but the different numbers mean this is a different part.

Now, I wonder how good would Linux support be.

Also, weighting a keyboardless tablet with a MacBook air is disingenuous at best.

<comment><USER22> They put the typecover on - stills weigh less.

<comment><USER36> Is that a mechanical backlit keyboard? Are we comparing apples to apples (no pun intended)?

<comment><USER22> The point of the comparison isn't to compare the two products against each other, but rather to suggest that the Surface is more power/technology for less weight as a portable device.

<comment><USER37> Putting two objects on a scale is pretty much the most literal way to compare them. You're being far too generous in your interpretation here.

<comment><USER22> No, I'm not. I was watching the live feeds - they even put both iPad plus MacBook Air on the scale versus the Surface Pro with the pure intention that one would carry both laptop and tablet on a daily basis, and that they are aiming to have the Surface be a full solution in a single, smaller form factor. Again, it is pretty clear that the intent wasn't to present the weight of product A vs product B, but rather the weight of one solution versus others.

Edit: Otherwise, the comparison is completely redundant - different form factors, different materials, difference screen sizes, etc.

Even the whole theme of the event was that the want the Surface to replace laptops. "You've been told to buy a tablet, but you know you need a laptop. Today we're going to focus on that, and only on that, taking that conflict away."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I look at the environment in which the product was presented and it's just one no-no after another. Check out this photo:

[http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2014/05/20/microsoft- unveils...](http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2014/05/20/microsoft-unveils-new- touch-cover-surface-pro-3-68-larger-trackpad-magnetic-sealing-mode/)

They've picked some awful desaturated blue/green wallpaper image that clashes with the tiles that are supposed to be so great in Windows. Then the tiles themselves have this weird whitespace issue that creates an imbalanced appearance and even allows some tiles to use a right-aligned symbol rather than the default center.

To say nothing of the shirt Panay is wearing. Nice and shiny, I'll give it that.

Then I watch the MS dubstep ad for this product and it's just a bunch of meaningless flash. You don't even get to see people smiling, just music and lights (dah dah-dah). Oh and a pen writing on the screen, as if that's some miracle of modern technology. You can take notes with pictures in them, too.

This is a step up from most Windows laptops, I'm sure, but the presentation really needs improvement. There is amateur work that is so much better than this. Example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugmR9nq3Yiw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugmR9nq3Yiw) \-- Wacom review done by an Australian cartoonist.

<comment><USER39> I have a similar issue with the Metro color scheme. It's incredibly overstimulating. Each time I open the start menu, I feel like I just walked in to a kindergarten. I wish there was a way to make it black and white b.c applications icons are generally colored as it is (but get washed out by the tsunami of color coming at you)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Really akward that they made a point of saying the device is 'fanless' when it clearly has a fan and vents around the side. Sure it might be a very nice and quiet fan, but it sounds disingenuous to be saying there isn't one.

<comment><USER40> Yeah I watched the event and I didn't understand that part, he first called it fanless and then waxed poetic about how nice and hidden the vent is and how thin the _fan_ is. Maybe marketing told him that it was okay?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> For reference:

Surface Pro 3: 12" @ 2160x1440 => 216 PPI

MacBook Air 11": 11.6" @ 1366x768 => 135 PPI

MacBook Air 13": 13.3" @ 1440x900 => 128 PPI

MacBook Pro 13" (Retina): 13.3" @ 2560x1600 => 227 PPI

(Rumor) MacBook Air 12" (Retina): 12" @ 2304x1440 => 226 PPI

<comment><USER42> Don't forget the horrors of Windows high DPI scaling.

Poor, blurry Google Chrome.

Edit: I was inspired to look into it a little more, and it looks like Chrome does have high-DPI support: [https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chrom...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium- dev/U_K1NHuMLic)

It has to be enabled by a registry key and seems to break Chrome's notification tray icon.

<comment><USER43> Win8 desktop is definitely better than Win7. The worst thing is that the scaling (and touch) breaks all the non-standard GUI kits.

XMind, for example, has icons that you can hardly see on my Pro2.

Unity3D's GUI scales up correctly but there are a whole load of fixed-sized panels that become too large to be useful.

Chrome's font rendering is _still_ screwed even on low DPI windows machines, especially if Google Web Fonts are used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Notice in the video he didn't weigh an iPad, he weighed the MacBook Air. Microsoft is going after laptops – not tablets – with the Surface. This makes sense to me because when I'm working I need a keyboard (typing is just too important). When I'm in a meeting I want to jot notes down with a stylus (feels more personal then typing). This is a pretty impressive bridge between these ideals.

</comment><comment><USER45> I bought a Surface Pro 2 a while back, mostly excited about the digitizer. I was definitely not disappointed.

From a casual digital artist's perspective (read: I draw a webcomic and occasionally dabble in hobbyist animation), this is a dream device. The ability to sit at my desk with the tablet hooked up to KVM via a USB hub, write and edit my script like on any desktop computer, then simply unplug and start drawing right on the screen is an amazingly satisfying work-flow. Looks like the Surface Pro 3 will only make that even better with the larger screen area.

With the right tools that are touch-enabled for panning, zooming, and rotating, it's basically the perfect way to work.

</comment><comment><USER46> If this has good support from *BSD (or perhaps, Linux) -- this sounds like it might be the device that'd tip me from laptop to tablet user as a primary machine.

</comment><comment><USER47> $799. Impressive. I think this is a big moment for Microsoft.

<comment><USER48> Looks like the specs / pricing might be as follows.

Core i3, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage - $799

Core i5, 4GB RAM, 128GB storage - $999

Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB storage - $1,299

Core i7, 8GB RAM, 256GB storage - $1,549

Core i7, 8GB RAM, 512GB storage - $1,949

[http://www.zdnet.com/surface-pro-3-price-and-spec- leak-70000...](http://www.zdnet.com/surface-pro-3-price-and-spec- leak-7000029604/)

<comment><USER49> Why not let me choose how much of each component I want? I'd be interested in having 64GB storage, with 8GB+ RAM and at least an i5. I personally don't need so much disk space on a portable device.

<comment><USER50> Because all the components come soldered to the motherboard out of the factory, I suspect, the same way Apple has been shipping notebooks recently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> > According to Microsoft's Panos Panay, "This is the tablet that can replace > your tablet."

Does that man have his doctorate in Tautology, or a PhD in saying the same things twice?

<comment><USER52> _This_ tablet will replace _your_ tablet (probably an iPad).

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is a notebook killer literally. It is for taking notes as a notebook should do. Maybe it is a laptop killer for some too.

Comparisons with Ipad and ohter tablets are ridiculous. This is a working machine.

I think this will be my next machine.

Nobody in the press has mentioned the new power connector by the way. If you look at the docking station all connections are done by this connector. I hope there will be a cable based adapter for usb+dp+power too.

</comment><comment><USER33> And there goes Samsung Note Pro 12.2. The Surface Pro 3 cost's the same, is only 1mm thicker and 50g heavier. And runs full Office and Photoshop.

</comment><comment><USER54> The ability to use Visual Studio on the go, while keeping the capabilities of a tablet is quite nice.

It sure is on my list, in case I need a laptop replacement.

</comment><comment><USER55> The only downside to this is the HD 4400 graphics unit. [1] I'm worried about it running everything smoothly at 2k. The HD 5000 is much better suited to run at that resolution.

[1] [http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/news/download/presskits/surfa...](http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/news/download/presskits/surface/docs/Surface3ProFS.docx)

<comment><USER56> My Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus has a HD 4400 graphics unit and runs fine at 3200 x 1800, so you shouldn't have to worry unless you're doing something pretty graphically intensive.

<comment><USER57> Same here. I run graphical software like Office and Photoshop on my 3200x1800 ATIV Book 9 Plus and haven't noticed any performance issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some interesting decisions here. No RT version. Home button on the short edge not the long edge. Clear marketing message: "The Tablet that Can Replace Your Laptop" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t7rSZT_77E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t7rSZT_77E) I think they might finally be figuring out what they've got here.

</comment><comment><USER58> While the device is nice, I still see it as very niche-y item. It's too expensive once you add in a more reasonable amount of storage and the keyboard. For those who benefit from the stylus, I can totally see it being a really useful device. I don't think it will fare any better than the previous iterations.

</comment><comment><USER59> I wonder what the battery life and graphics performance are like? If they're decent (6+ hours of moderate use, plays CS:GO at 60fps), this will be a really great machine. The latest i7s tend to have pretty good integrated graphics, so I think at least that won't be an issue.

<comment><USER19> Looks like HD4400 which is not great, but should run older games on 720p pretty good.

<comment><USER59> Ah, that's too bad. I was hoping for Iris graphics. (CS:GO at 60 might still be doable, though.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I would love to see Microsoft come out with Windows/Developer which targeted people who were creating applications rather take existing Windows, which focusses on the big market of App users, and bolting on some developerness.

I could imagine something like CTRL-Alt-F4 on Linux where you press the key combo and the Windows/Apps view is replaced with the Windows/Develop view. Easy access to terminal screens, build tools, layout creators, etc.

<comment><USER61> Win+D is the desktop shortcut. I know you were talking more about a general OS paradigm but you can get pretty close.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I don't see GPS anywhere mentioned in the article or the specs on Microsoft site[1]. Is this taken for granted or did they really not included a GPS sensor with this?

It even mentions the digital compass and gyroscope sensors. I'm having a bad feeling about this.

[1] [http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface- pro-...](http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/products/surface-pro-3)

</comment><comment><USER32> Was anyone else really uncomfortable with Panos singling out Joanna Stern during the event? I don't know if he was trying to praise or berate her, but it just looked terrible and made me feel uncomfortable about the whole thing. Really weird why they would do that--I have no idea what message they were trying to send but it doesn't seem like a good one.

</comment><comment><USER63> Which CPUs are there in Surface Pro 3?

I was sure the Broadwell Microsoft won't release them for another half a year, because Broadwell CPUs are not announced yet and are expected early next year, or for Christmas season at best.

I wonder whether they are the same Haswell CPUs as in SP2, or did MS get a very special treatment from Intel for Broadwell CPUs?

</comment><comment><USER64> Does anyone know how the N-Trig digitiser compares with Wacom? I'm interested in this as a Cintiq replacement.

</comment><comment><USER4> One thing that Microsoft could learn from Apple is to have their online store ready _immediately_.

Sure, you can't always buy Apple stuff immediately when it's announced (see Mac Pro), but you can always go onto the online store and 'window shop'.

</comment><comment><USER65> Unrelated to the actual article content, but what kind of website autoplays two videos when loading the page?! One is annoying enough, but to have two videos start simultaneous doesn't even make sense. That is a terrible user experience.

</comment><comment> shawn-butler Does anyone have any actual working experience with the new pen/stylus capabilities?

The only interesting part of the surface pro was the Wacom digitizer and they are ditching it.

Pricepoint is more attractive, that is for certain.

</comment><comment><USER66> How can it be 3:2 aspect and HD at the same time? It's one or the other or it has rectangle pixels.

Edit: nevermind... comes in 3:2 AND HD display. This is what happens when you read while doing something else.

</comment><comment><USER67> Quite a lot of digital artists were using the surface pro 2 instead of buying the Wacom companion. I think the n-trig stylus will scare a lot of them away from the surface pro 3.

</comment><comment><USER68> No wonder it's cheaper - N-trig instead of Wacom. (I'm not commenting on the technical merits of either choice, just that one tends to be cheaper than the other.)

<comment><USER16> The parallax and purported improvements in accuracy are a big deal though. Even with a >100 point calibration, the stylus on my Surface Pro gets weird tracking on the screen's edges or when the pen is held at off angles.

I was sold once Panay clicked the Stylus and popped up OneNote instantly. There's a lot of value in that for people like me who still prefer to use a pen to take notes.

<comment><USER68> Yes, N-trig's edge performance is better. But Wacom is better supported in terms of software, has more granular pressure sensitivity and the pen does not require a battery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> What strange pricing.

        i7/256GB = $1,549
        i7/512GB = $1,949

That's a lot of money for a slightly larger SSD.

</comment><comment><USER17> Any word on the batter life, what with it being thinner and lighter the previous models?

</comment><comment><USER70> Awwww, man. N-Trig pen.

</comment><comment><USER71> Is this an x86 or ARM cpu?

<comment><USER72> x86

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Anyone else felt like the presentation was done by the Shamwow guy?

</comment><comment><USER24> Figured that Tom Warren would write the most hyped-up sensationalist Microsoft PR-fed headline for this.

</comment><comment><USER74> Price is too high, it'll never sell in the volume they expect to get (unless their expectations are quite low).

</comment><comment><USER75> This sure is a bummer for people who recently bought a Surface Pro 2 (like me). It's unreal that a 6-month old $1200 machine already is outdated

<comment><USER76> I wanted to buy a Surface Pro 2 but the model I wanted has been out of stock at the Microsoft Store for a few weeks now.

<comment><USER77> You may be in luck then as early adopters dump their 256Gb models on craigslist and ebay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Anyone tried the keyboard on this model ? It's unusable, it's too soft. Did someone try another keyboard for the Surface ?

</comment><comment><USER79> > _When you write notes using OneNote you can then click the top of the stylus > again, just like an ordinary pen, and it will sync those notes up to the > cloud instantly so they 're available elsewhere._

Elsewhere -- as in the laptop you will inevitably go crawling back to when it's time to get real work done. It's always humorous when an article about a device that is supposed to kill the laptop ends on a note like that.

<comment><USER80> Yeah, he could not have possibly meant your phone, work issued pc/laptop, etc...

<comment><USER79> Why differentiate between a personally owned and work issued desktop/laptop?

<comment><USER26> Because on of them I'm making the purchase decision for and one of them someone else is. So if I work at a place that isn't BYOD friendly, and have to do certain things on my work-issued desktop, its very good if I can easily access the notes from my personal tablet convertible that I'd prefer to take to meetings when I am using that desktop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Why are they still trying to turn a tablet into a desktop? They are different things, with different purposes - not everything needs to be the same thing.

Tablet All The Things!!

<comment><USER82> Try looking at it another way. I have my laptop plugged into my monitor 90% of the time, and I use it with a keyboard and mouse attached. So, I rarely touch the hardware.

When I do, use my laptop, I'm using it for the same type of things I would use a tablet for 70% of the time. Rarely am I actually doing any coding on it, but when I need to, I need to.

Therefore, I can add a 3rd device, a tablet, into the mix, but why bother? One well built device now handles 100% of my use cases.

I suspect many people don't use the surface as a tablet most of the time, but when you want to, it's nice to have that capability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> It's nice but it must suck when faced by the behemoth that is the iPad.

<comment><USER84> The differentiator is the OS. One of them is for play, the other is for productivity. Comparing full Windows 8.1 to iOS is Apples to Oranges.

<comment><USER85> Keep telling yourself that. Meanwhile, back here in reality, iOS dominates the enterprise:

[http://media.www1.good.com/documents/rpt-mobility- index-q413...](http://media.www1.good.com/documents/rpt-mobility- index-q413.pdf)

<comment><USER84> iOS is great for certain tasks but comparing it to OSX or Windows for productivity is silly. I have 3 iOS devices in my household, we love them. None of us use it for work though, they're leisure devices. No one at my company uses iOS for work, they use Windows and OSX. Also, your link is showing smart phones and tablets used at work, which certainly favor iOS. What does this have to do with the Microsoft Surface?

<comment><USER85> I agree, what does anything have to do with the Microsoft Surface? As I can tell, it has virtually no traction for "work," which makes it entirely irrelevant outside of the flood of fanboys in announcement discussions on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Anyone wanna sponsor a broke but aspiring student (me!) with one? :)

</comment><comment><USER87> I still can't get my head round paying for one of these at £1000+ when it's effectively disposable if anything goes wrong. I bought a used i7 Lenovo T410 a couple of weeks back for £150. Totally serviceable and the battery it came with lasts 6 hours. This will be my workstation for a couple of years, plus if its like my T400 it lives in the back of the sofa and takes a beating every day. I'd kill a surface in about two days.

<comment><USER84> You bought a used laptop which is slower, no touch screen, digitizer, pen, Windows 8, SSD, etc. That's like comparing an old Blackberry to the iPhone 5. There's really no reason to try and compare them.

<comment><USER87> I don't use a touch screen or a pen. It's fully supported on windows 8 and I stuck my Samsung 840 Pro in it.

It does however have a decent keyboard, a trackpoint, 3G card, a service reputation and a bomb proof chassis. All of which reduce the ownership risk and make my day slightly better.

<comment><USER16> >> I don't use a touch screen or a pen.

Simply put, the Surface Pro isn't designed for people with your use case. And more likely than not, your laptop isn't useful for the people MS had in mind for the Surface Pro.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Throws Open Doors to Its Top-Secret Data Center - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/ff-inside-google-data-center/all/ <comment><USER2> Seems to be a dup - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4663946>

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4663946> for earlier post</comment>


Ask HN: request HITs on mturk.com from outside the US? - <AUTHOR>

I live in Canada and am intrigued by Amazon's Mechanical Turk service.  I actually want to do some market research, but am a bit stumped as to why only US residents are officially permitted to sign up and use the service (from a requester's point of view).
I don't particularly advocate this sort of thing, but is there any reason why non-US residents can't just put in a fake US address and proceed to get the results they need?  Has anyone living outside the US successfully used mturk.com directly rather than one of the 3rd-party wrapper services?
This has been asked on HN once before (that I'm aware of) but with no responses - see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=624053. <comment><USER2> _is there any reason why non-US residents can't just put in a fake US address and proceed to get the results they need?_

I believe you need a US billing address to pay for Mechanical Turk, so a fake address won't work. I'm not sure why this is the case, since you can pay for other Amazon products from outside the US.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/02/why- mecha...](http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-mechanical- turk-allows-only-us.html)</comment>


Join.me launches Cubby.com - <AUTHOR> https://www.cubby.com/ <comment><USER2> It's Actually "LogMeIn launches Cubby.com" as Join.me is another product of LogMeIn :)

<comment><AUTHOR> you're right, I forget this often, and when they sent the notification to me it came from join.me, not the actual company.</comment></comment>


I'm a DC-based geek visiting San Fran, CA. Anyone willing to show me around? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
I'm a Washington D.C.-based geek visiting San Francisco, CA for Thanksgiving and an upcoming weekend. Would anyone local be willing to make me a company and show me around?
http://gplus.to/bisaram <comment><USER2> You should checkout Noisebridge and ask over their mailing list! I'm sure someone would be happy to put you up for a few nights and show you around.

Noisebridge is around 17 1/2 and Mission. More info on their website. I'd offer but our hacker house is currently overpacked as it is. If you have any questions, feel free to email me email@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I forgot to mention I have a place to stay. Just looking for a company and/or guide.</comment></comment>


Regarding Work: Hire based on interest not credentials - <AUTHOR> http://regardingwork.com/2011/05/13/hire-based-on-interest-not-credentials/#more-59 Smart recruiting advice particularly relevant to startups <comment><USER2> Much commentary from the submission half a day ago.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2549462></comment>


Ask HN: How do you read/parse HN comments? - <AUTHOR>

I tend to read a comment thread once, then often come back to it again when I see that the comments count increased by a significant number.<p>For the people who have a similar habit: Is there a way you guys extract the content diff or do you just reread the whole thread again? With upvotes hidden, I find myself to scan the longer comments first. Or does anyone have another, 'better' reading mode? <comment><USER2> I usually do a depth-first search. Skip over huge mega threads and just read the top-level ones.

If any of them look interesting I'll recursively dig deeper.</comment>


Big Breakthroughs Come in Your Late 30s - <AUTHOR> http://m.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/big-breakthroughs-come-in-your-late-30s/283858/ <comment><USER2> A distinction I read somewhere, that I think is useful, is that people tend to be either primarily conceptualist in their thinking, or they are empiricists who learn from experience. Conceptualists have their big breakthroughs before the age of 35, and empiricists have their big breakthroughs after 35.

In conceptual fields, such as math and physics, the big breakthroughs happen young. Werner Heisenberg was 27 when he came up with the Uncertainty Principle, and Einstein was 26 when he discovered relativity.

In fields where progress is primarily empirical, such as biology, the big breakthroughs tend to happen later. Alexander Fleming was 42 when he discovered penicillin and Jonas Salk was 40 when he invented the vaccine for polio.

This distinction can be extended to artists. To write a great empirical novel, one rich in observed life experience, one must live a long time, and therefore Tolstoy was 41 when he wrote War and Peace. But to write a novel where one demonstrates new techniques for grammar and structure and pacing (a novel noteworthy for conceptual innovation) then one will be young, and therefore Hemmingway was only 26 when he wrote The Sun Also Rises.

<comment><USER3> Einstein, in particular, is an interesting case. He was 26 when he had his annus mirabilis (1905) in which he published 5 ground-breaking papers in physics, including the Special Theory of Relativity.

 _However_ it took another 11 _years_ until he was able to grasp enough of the mathematics to finally formulate the General Theory of Relativity in 1916, at age 37. Of course, if you're going to use statistics from Nobel Prize winners' works, you have to keep in mind that Einstein won not for the General Theory nor the Special Theory of relativity with which we usually associate him. He won for his paper on the photoelectric effect, one of the other papers he published in 1905...at age 26.

 _Edit_ : It's probably also worth pointing out that, someday in the future, it's not inconceivable that we may eventually place the Einstein-Podolsky- Rosen Paradox in the same league as Relativity. That paper was published in 1935, when Einstein was already 56 years old. If it is not currently considered of the same merit as Relativity, that is only because we still don't have a good handle on the full implications of that work. (And, yes, I realize that ultimately EPR will likely prove to be wrong, but a great scientist teaches as much by being wrong as by being right.)

<comment><USER4> Could you elaborate a little on why is (or might be in the future) the EPR paradox as important as Relativity?

<comment><USER3> I can give it a shot...

So Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen were sitting around (presumably) looking over the mathematical foundations of Quantum Mechanics, when they noticed something. In certain situations, you could end up with _one_ wave function describing _two_ physically separated particles in a mutual superposition of states. The consequence is that altering the state of one particle would instantaneously cause the state of the other to become resolved. Effectively they "discovered" quantum entanglement (which has since been verified as a real phenomenon, not just a mathematical curiosity).

What really makes the EPR paradox important, though, is what it implies about reality. Einstein, et al. realized that there were only two ways to explain quantum entanglement. One possibility is that the entangled particles contain extra information, inaccessible to normal observation, about their respective states and which way the superposition will resolve. This is the so-called "hidden variables" solution. The other possibility is that an action on one particle is, in fact, instantaneously causing an effect on the other particle. While this is not, strictly speaking, a violation of General Relativity as no information is exchanged, Einstein found this possibility so unsettling that he famously coined it "spooky action at a distance". The conclusion from the EPR paper was that the "hidden variables" solution was more likely, implying that Quantum Mechanics was an as-yet incomplete theory.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and we're just beginning to appreciate that "spooky action at a distance" is actually more likely to be the correct explanation. As I mentioned before, what this implies about reality _itself_ is pretty mind blowing. To go even further, we've since learned that entanglement can not only occur between particles separated in space, but also between particles separated in time. Quite literally, the future and the past may be linked by this "spooky action at a distance".

We still don't fully grasp what, exactly, this means. One possible implication of this is that our existence as sentient beings may simultaneously be a consequence and the cause of a universe that can give rise to sentient beings. Needless to say, even though it's likely that Einstein was wrong about "hidden variables", the course of investigation that the EPR paper set the physics community down is at least as important as Relativity.

<comment><USER5> Not to be "that guy", but a lot of this is terribly incorrect:

* General relativity did not come from "grasping the mathematics" of special relativity. SR can be completely understood by an undergraduate and is an internally consistent description of mechanics and electromagnetic phenomena. Like Newtonian mechanics before it, it doesn't need anything more to be consistent.

* Local hidden variables are not "likely wrong", they are provably impossible. It is impossible to have hidden variables without breaking the principle of causality.

* Entanglement does not break the principle of causality. "Spooky action at a distance" is not an "effect" in a well-defined physical sense. It cannot be used to send information or cause things to happen.

* All of this could be--and was--understood without the EPR paper. Relativity was the most important thing since Newton. EPR was minor in comparison.

* I have no idea what connection you're trying to draw between sentient life and QM.

<comment><USER6> Note _local_ hidden variables is impossible. The pilot wave theory is the theory of "hidden variables" that led Bell to his theorem. Basically, EPR shows that either nature is nonlocal or there were hidden variables. Bell showed that hidden variables had to have something nonlocal about them. So Einstein created relativity and helped to highlight how nature has an aspect that seems incompatible with it (basically, there is a "now" which, however, may be undetectable and is not our "now").

For those curious, the nonlocal hidden variables are the positions of the particles. Very hidden. So hidden, they are the only thing we see in experiments!

The particles are guided by the wave function. This resolves all the weird paradoxes such as Schrodinger's cat. It provides a great way to understand and investigate nonlocality, spin, identical particles, etc. in a very precise theory that even has broadly applying existence and uniqueness of solution theorems, unlike classical mechanics.

[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm- bohm/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/)

<comment><USER7> Hi! I'm a mathematician, I've always been curious about physics, but I've never understood some of the concepts of QM, such as what is "observation" in the Schrodinger's cat paradox, why QM means the universe is not deterministic, why hidden variables cannot exist, ... mostly because every physicist that I was able to talk to has been unable to properly explain these concepts. Do you know any books/articles/sources about QM that could understand these concepts, without going in unnecessary mathematical and physical details (i.e. using the least physics and mathematics necessary to explain the paradoxes of QM)?

<comment><USER6> Tough question. The reason you probably did not understand them is that there are reasons are faulty.

The textbook QM says that when experiments happen, the continuous wave function evolution stops and a new wave function is used in its place, chosen randomly based on a prescription using probabilities coming from the original wave function's decomposition in terms of an operator's (matrix) eigenvalues. This is a postulate in their view and that's that.

It makes no sense since what is an observation? They don't explain. They just know it. They use it when doing their experiments and it works well enough. Attempting to formalize it leads to wrong conclusions.

Bohmian mechanics/pilot wave theory is a deterministic, hidden variable theory that works. Within that context, you can understand the rise of operators as observables and the entire collapse rule which turns out to be a convenient approximation to reality in this theory; no actual collapse occurs. There is just one wave function on configuration space (3n dimensional space, n being the number of particles in the universe) evolving continuously via Schrodinger's equation and the particles themselves being guided by the wave function. It is the configuration space for the wave function where nonlocality arises from. Understanding its role in relation to relativity is the key question to understand.

The wave function evolves with lots of its branches being irrelevant which is why we can effectively get rid of them, i.e., collapse the wave function.

As for resources, I recommend the stanford page I linked to above. There is also [http://www.bohmian-mechanics.net](http://www.bohmian-mechanics.net) which has a great deal of material including an introduction: [http://www.bohmian- mechanics.net/whatisbm_introduction.html](http://www.bohmian- mechanics.net/whatisbm_introduction.html) and some faq videos [http://www.bohmian-mechanics.net/videos_faq.html](http://www.bohmian- mechanics.net/videos_faq.html)

I like Bell's book of his articles, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics. A wonderful read from a master.

<comment><USER8> If you'd read the book and worked through it you would understand why a hidden variable theory is not experimentally justifiable.

<comment><USER6> I have read it and I must have missed the part you refer to. He was a strong proponent of pilot-wave theory though towards the end he also started to like GRW which itself consists of two distinct ontological possibilities.

In as much as QM makes predictions, pilot wave theory makes the same predictions. But pilot wave theory has the advantage of being an honest theory that actually does make predictions. QM suffers from needing an external agent to collapse the system, an agent that is never specified, particularly on the universal level. Bell puts it very eloquently about whether one needed to wait for the first form of life to do it or perhaps one with a PhD to collapse the universe. He concludes it must be happening more or less all the time and that the mechanism needs to be explained in the theory. We can either change Schrodinger's equation as in GRW or we can add additional variables such as positions of particles as in pilot wave theory. Or we need to accept that most of reality is unlike our actual experience of a single reality such as in many worlds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone in my late 30s I think the main reason is this- Its time then to stop fking around and just get it done. It dawns on you at this age where you are in your life, how far you've got to go and it annoys you that thus far you didn't get 'it' done yet.

You're not staring death in the face but you're close enough to feel its influence. If not now when? That spurs you on, beyond any motivation you ever had at any age before. The experience helps, the realisation that those before you weren't any more special than you helps, but the ticking clock motivates like nothing else.

Here's my own personal motivator that has meant the most at this age.. — 'Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.' \- Henry David Thoreau. That should scare the hell out of you, unless you're not old enough yet.

<comment><USER10> There is always a back-up plan of having kids, focusing on raising them well and hoping that maybe they will come up with something cool.

<comment><USER11> That's a really heavy load to put on your kids. They should be free to live their lives as they want to live them and not shoulder the weight of mommy & daddy's unfulfilled dreams.

<comment><USER12> Eh, that partly depends on how narrowly you define "something cool".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seems to be corroborated in tech by some nice examples:

Jimmy Wales: founded Wikipedia at 35 and Wikia at 38; Marc Benioff: started Salesforce at 35; Mark Pincus: started Zynga at 41; Reid Hoffman: founded Linkedin at 36; Robert Noyce: started Intel at 41 with a 39 year old Gordon Moore; Irwin Jacobs was 52 and Andrew Viterbi was 50 when they founded Qualcomm; Pradeep Sindhu: founded Juniper Networks at 42; Tim Westergren: started Pandora at 35; Robin Chase: founded Zipcar at 42; Michael Arrington: started TechCrunch at 35; Om Malik: started GigaOm at 39; Reed Hastings: started Netflix at 37; Craig Newmark: started craigslist at 42

... and the list goes on and on. check out this Quora post (source of the above) for more interesting examples: [http://qr.ae/tG78W](http://qr.ae/tG78W)

</comment><comment><USER14> I just finished Marvel Comics: the untold story by Sean Howe. One thing I was really surprised to learn was that Stan Lee was in his 40's and had already been a comicbook editor for 20 years before he co-created all the famous Marvel heroes like Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and The Hulk.

<comment><USER15> What about Bukowski, that was working in a post office, til 49 years old, when he dropped out to start his first novel ?!

<comment><USER16> He didn't 'drop out', he was incentivized to the tune of $100 a month for life to quit.

<comment><USER17> And that was when $100 was an equivalent of 3 ounces of gold which is about $4k today. Barrel of oil and S&P500 had roughly the same price in gold then as they do today.

<comment><USER18> By CPI deflator, $100 in 1969 is worth $634.76 today.

[http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/](http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/)

Not sure if that calls into question your statement, or suggests that the CPI is drastically understating inflation.

<comment><USER17> By CPI deflator we never doubled our (US) monetary base since 2007.

<comment><USER18> I'm not following you. What's your point?

<comment><USER17> What exactly you don't follow? You need me to define 'monetary base' to you? You need me to explain to you how to use google/wiki?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> But look at the variance on those distributions. "Late 30s" is a poor description. How about "half of the winners are between 28 and 45"? Not so exciting then, I would guess.

Better yet: look at distribution of "age when paper was written", modeling the generating process is scientist X at age Y writes a paper with Z=0 if no award is won, Z=1 if award is won. Is it obvious that this distribution conditioned on Z=1 is different from the unconditional one? Not to me.

</comment><comment><USER20> The corollary is Cheap, Easy To Exploit Labour Is Most Readily Available In Your Twenties™.

(The VC lemma being, "Labour costs are a big majority of web startup input costs")

<comment><USER21> That's assuming all labor is equivalent which seems ridiculous on the surface. I mean start-ups are hardly shoveling snow.

Young founders get more free publicity seems far more realistic to me.

<comment><USER22> > _That 's assuming all labor is equivalent which seems ridiculous on the > surface. I mean start-ups are hardly shoveling snow._

They hardly do anything impressive computer-science or programming wise either.

Programming like something Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr et co, including a lot of the early scaling challenges, is not that much removed from "shovelling snow".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Correlation != causation

To me, a lot of these folks are artificially limited by slow and encumbered education methodologies. The data seems to confirm that, as a physicist can more easily begin independent work, while the others need to wait until they have accreditation/equipment/funding/etc.

I think this delay of productivity would be especially avoidable in high school and undergrad programs.

If you could begin advanced fields in your early 20s, instead of your 30s, I speculate the distribution would shift left quite a bit.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am in my middle thirties now, and I feel that I'm probably the best I've ever been. Part of this, I think, is that true understanding comes from the ability to contextualize ideas into some larger framework of knowledge. I find myself revisiting things that I've learned earlier in life, but am now able to see them in a more meaningful way because of the experience and knowledge that I've gained in the interim.

In some ways, the idea that knowledge in combinatorial is perfectly obvious, but it can be really encouraging to realize that the things you learn today are making you more capable of learning and internalizing new things later.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'd like to see this data evaluated across different time frames. Maybe prodigy was more pronounced at a young age in the past century because people, well, became full adults and died at earlier ages? Now that in today's Western democracies, we've essentially delayed adulthood to at least the mid-20s, marriage until the 30s, and retirement into the 70s...this time delay, plus the fact that the discoveries we make now are more specialized and require more domain knowledge...it seems that the average age for breakthroughs will continue to rise.

<comment><USER26> Dying between 15 and 40 was almost never statistic-perturbingly common in human societies that were stable enough to support anyone doing creative work that survived to be noticed later.

Most variation in average lifespan is explained by infant mortality and life estension of the elderly.

<comment><USER27> Flaw Of The Averages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Actually, Khazan is losing the plot. The whole point of the research she's referencing through 3 levels of indirection ( _the Atlantic_ , _NBC News_ , _Nature News_ , and _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_ ) _is that key breakthroughs in Phyiscs are occurring at ever increasing age with time._

Granted, the research looks only at Nobel Prize winners in physics, but the general reason stated: that there's more information to learn and assimilate, suggests a general principle of increasing complexity and decreasing returns to innovation, which is a key point raised by Joseph Tainter ( _The Collapse of Complex Societies_ ).

See Weinberg & Jones: "Age dynamics in scientific creativity" [http://www.pnas.org/content/108/47/18910](http://www.pnas.org/content/108/47/18910)

Also highlighted in an earlier Nature News item on W&J is the increasing reliance of breakthroughs on expensive equipment, not always accessible to the most junior researchers, an observation also consistent with increasing complexity and diminishing returns with time:

 _Other experts in scientific creativity welcomed the study but note other reasons why the age of laureates might have increased, such as improvements in health or the fact that, in many fields, research now requires expensive equipment. "21- and 22-year-olds simply don't get access to this kind of equipment," says Paula Stephan at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who provided some data for the Nobel study. She adds that it isn't always possible to pinpoint "one magic date" when scientists made their discoveries._

[http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111107/full/news.2011.632.ht...](http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111107/full/news.2011.632.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> As a twenty-eighteen year old, this article made my Sunday.

<comment><USER29> As a 27 year old, I can't help but wonder how much of the article was written to be aimed at the older millennial/Reddit crowd's insecurity of aging. But I welcome the prognosis and look forward to my days as a 37 year old still pwning young noobs in Dota2/League/CoD/2K.

<comment><USER30> My thought is that if the achievements of a 40 year old took 20 years to accumulate, then they must have been working at something for 20 years.

That sort of achievement is one that is earned, rather than coming from luck. Which means it is the sort of success one can emulate, but only if we have the personality and determination to put the work in.

The 22 year old that got bought out by yahoo for 1bn probably did nothing other start-up founders didn't. There is little that can be learned from him, except to throw the dice more often.

The 44 year old who slowly built a property portfolio by living cheap and seizing opportunities (cheap mortgages, cheap properties) that come around only every decade or so, simply by playing the game so long... I could copy his example, but then I wouldn't be able to buy nice things with that money, or use it as startup runway. I'd have to make sure I was always in a stable (boring?) job to support the credit rating needed for several mortgages.

So the difference between the two kinds of success is important, and we can learn from the second. But if what we learn is that you can spend your life buying success, is that cost too much?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Most of these people were working extraordinarily hard up to that point, though. Not necessarily hard at one thing. But hard.

</comment><comment><USER32> It goes without saying those achieving breakthroughs have been building up to that moment basically all their adult (and most likely teenage) life.

As a soon to be 40 year old jack of many trades but master of none, I am still looking for someone achieving anything meaningful starting from scratch later in life.

What I mean by this is someone achieving a mastery of some skill, when one has not done deliberate practice previously.

I suspect the answer is that unless you have been building your inner pattern recognition for basics of your field of expertise since late teens/early twenties, you are unlikely to get very far starting at the later age.

For example Einstein already had fluid mastery of calculus at 15 (just like Feynman), which was a nice building block for later work. I am not even going to start on Von Neumann.

</comment><comment><USER33> Is it possible that studying Nobel Laureates skews these numbers? It would be extremely difficult to receive a Nobel for an achievement late in life because of the usual lag time between the achievement and the award and the fact that Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously.

<comment><USER34> It's possible. Furthermore, the article talks about _noted_ achievements -- the case where someone's work is _recognized_ as particularly good.

Your best or most-creative work isn't necessarily the most-recognized.

Being better-recognized probably also correlates with having built a network of connections, understanding institutional politics, having built up social capital (favors to call in), and so on. And it wouldn't be shocking if that tends to skew stronger among older, more experienced people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Here's an interesting exception : The poet Rimbaud wrote all of his poetry before the age of 20 and is considered to be one of the greatest poets of all time.

<comment><USER36> Keats similarly wrote all of his extant poetry between 19 and 25. (He died at 25.)

<comment><USER37> "Last December 13th, there appeared in the newspapers the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary it has ever been my pleasure to read.

"It was that of a lady named Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, who had, in her lifetime, managed to acquire as lovers practically all of the top creative men in central Europe. And, among these lovers, who were listed in the obituary, by the way, which is what made it so interesting, there were three whom she went so far as to marry: One of the leading composers of the day, Gustav Mahler, composer of "Das Lied von der Erde" and other light classics, one of the leading architects, Walter Gropius, of the "Bauhaus" school of design, and one of the leading writers, Franz Werfel, author of the "Song of Bernadette" and other masterpieces.

"It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."

(Tom Lehrer)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I co-founded my first startup at 19, and several more before I was 25. I've done a couple since. I'm now nearly 39. Not had the big payoff, but I'll try again sometime.

To me, it feels like the biggest thing is the combination of willingness to take risks coupled with outlook on life and experience.

At 19 I had no business experience, no experience at the business I went into (4 of us started an ISP), had never set up a router or a Linux server. We all had to learn everything from scratch. I ran board meetings, did phone sales, configured Cisco routers, took support calls from users using Trumpet Winsock - a program I'd never seen on anything but screenshot - using Windows 3.x, an OS I'd never spent more than 10 minutes consecutively with. I negotiated with suppliers, and creditors at times. I negotiated contracts with partners. And so on.

Five years later, I knew just how unprepared we had been. Had I known what I did then about how tough it was at 19, I would likely not have started the company (but had I known what it led to in terms of contacts and opportunities - I still would have; did not get an exit, but it still paid off). Had I had the knowledge and experience I have _now_ on the other hand, with the willingness to take a risk and life situation I had then, I'd have jumped right into it.

What has changed apart from having had 20 years to learn is partly that I make far more money and have far greater outgoings, and a family. I can't take the same risks, and my potential loss if a company can't pay a good salary is far greater.

I'm _also_ more risk averse simply because my experience makes me far more likely to spot fatal problems with many potential startups I might have jumped at in my youth. But of course there's also the risk that I'll overlook things because of changes in perspective or because I misjudge the risks, or because I would have gotten lucky if I'd taken the risk.

Another major change is simply life outlook. While I was never the totally reckless type, and never all that obsessed with money, today the money just isn't particularly important. I want enough to ensure security, and it'd be nice to have enough to just work on my own projects, but I don't particularly care if I get rich. That changes my assessment of any startups drastically - I'm no longer prepared to jump at an opportunity to get rich if it's not something I'm sufficiently excited by. I don't feel I'm in a hurry to prove anything. I have what I need, and then some. I'm far more secure in myself in every way than I was at 19. I'm not going to pretend like I wouldn't love to get that multi-million exit, but it's not something that matters to me _now_ (I'm sure it'd matter to me if it happened, though).

Instead, what I _do_ think about, are ideas that fascinates me. And some of those ideas have been germinating for 20 years. Maybe none of them, nor any new ideas will ever _click_. If so, no big deal. But if something "clicks" I am vastly better prepared, and I believe I'd be far more likely to succeed.

<comment><USER39> I created 4 reasonably successful companies in my life, and about 12 that fell flat. The first success was in high school. But the first million+ was at age 34. At first I thought the article was a little too academic, but... honestly it fits my life pattern. So... there you have it.

<comment><USER40> 12 fell flat? what made you keep going?

<comment><USER38> Consider that the vast majority (something like 9/10) of companies fail within 2-3 years. If you're not willing to deal with failures, chances are you'll stop trying long before you get to 12. If you deal with the odds, you keep going as long as you get something out of it

Also, even companies that "fall flat" may be worth it. For my part, a large part of my current salary is down to my experience and contacts from my various startups. And each one of them have been fun for the most part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> \- Mom, it's not that I'm a slacker, it's just that I'm only 34!

</comment><comment><USER42> What I took away from the OP was... the curve keeps going after 35. Phew.

</comment><comment><USER43> For immigrants from relatively underdeveloped nations,add another 10 years.

</comment><comment><USER44> We ned to to make some serious progress on extending youth!

</comment><comment><USER45> The timing of this submission is impeccable. My 36th birthday was yesterday. Thanks for the inspiration!

</comment><comment><USER46> It's mostly just related to having had enough time to work on a problem.

</comment><comment><USER47> Or not - I'm over 40 without any big breakthroughs.

</comment><comment><USER48> A 25-year old brain may have more raw "horsepower" than a 45-year-old brain, which would make a big difference in math and physics, but wouldn't matter as much in e.g. poetry.

<comment><USER49> It doesn't have more horsepower, a 25 year old brain has a lot more gaps in its knowledge that is skipped over, whereas the 45 year old brain has more to connect and consider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> There may be hope for me yet according to this, but at the moment, I really have no fucking clue what to do.

My early thirties were filled with great ideas for startups. My early fourties are filled with depression that I'm past my prime, don't have the energy, risk tolerance, or money to do a startup, and don't have money to go back to school, so it really doesn't matter what my passion is. Somehow I still need to find a passion and change, though, because my death is impending. Maybe my fifties will be the realization that I am who I am and I'm fine just being bad at everything.

<comment><USER13> Just because you find a passion, doesn't mean you have to spend money on it. There are an insane amount of free learning resources online (in tech/dev, which I'm assuming what your pro background is). Similarly, I'm seeing an increasing number of bootstrapped startups (they just don't make as much noise as the funded ones).

My twenties were about realizing and coming to terms with the fact that there are people who are smarter, more clever, and more knowledgeable than me. My thirties are about figuring out how to work with these people as much as possible. I do feel that I'm late to the game on this. If I got over my ego earlier and/or had a more collaborative mindset I'd be in a better spot.

Keep looking for that passion. But don't do it alone. Once you find it, it'll be with a group of people "better" than you to help you figure out what to do with it. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Who would have thought? That in your late thirties, you have gained experience, knowledge, contacts, maybe even a degree of financial support, all of which lend towards the formation of breakthrough ideas. Now, where is my prize?

<comment><USER52> Its common sense that universal health care and higher taxes for everyone is a great idea. Depending on who you ask its also common sense that universal health care is a ridiculous concept and no one wants to pay for other people's hospital visits.

<comment><USER53> I do! We've been doing it in the UK for decades, very few people complain about it.

<comment><USER54> If you really lived in the UK you would now that lots of people complain about everything, all the time. Especially the NHS.

Now, that doesn't change the point that universal health care exists in most countries, and they are better of for it.

<comment><USER53> Actually, strictly speaking I do live in France at the moment, so your bizarre implication is actually true - but I did just move here 7 days ago.

Anyway, yes people _do_ complain about the NHS in general, for all sorts of reasons, but I'd wager that most people don't complain about the fact that we _have_ the NHS, and realise that it's actually really great compared to the situations in countries which don't have universal healthcare. Just a clarification, really.

<comment><USER17> I'm a Polish guy with US passport who spent many, many years in the USA and my feeling is as follows: In the US people complain about one single thing regarding the healthcare - cost. In Poland they'll complain about long waiting lists, not enough doctors, not sufficient care, basically everything is worse than in the US - except the cost.

I for one don't think that the major objective of healthcare system is not to bankrupt people. Its main objective is to safe life. I wish more people would be worried about saving lives more than money.

<comment><USER55> Most countries with socialized healthcare systems that I am aware of actually has a longer life expectancy than the USA. This is true for Canada, Germany, Norway, etc.

I do not know if life expectancy is a measure for quality of health care, but it is at least an indicator of how good the general health is.

On a personal note I would say that my experience with the US health care system has left a lot to be desired, and I experienced the care as better in my native Norway. That said, my girlfriend is a doctor and her health plan seems a lot better so my experience can be anecdotal.

<comment><USER17> > Most countries with socialized healthcare systems that I am aware of > actually has a longer life expectancy than the USA. This is true for Canada, > Germany, Norway, etc.I do not know if life expectancy is a measure for > quality of health care, but it is at least an indicator of how good the > general health is.

I agree. Actually Poland which is 2nd world country really, has better life expectancy that USA! However, this doesn't mean that Polish healthcare system is superior to American. This means that if all you do whole life is eating, stressing out at work, having no friends with family 2 time zones away, and zero exercise - even the best healthcare system in the world won't help you. So while I agree that people live longer in most civilized places than in the US, I still claim that the US healthcare system as long as money isn't a major concern for you - it is just the best system in the world, period. But even they can't help you if you have been on McDonald's diet foe the past 20 years and the most exercise you do is 10 meters from home to car.

> On a personal note I would say that my experience with the US health care > system has left a lot to be desired, and I experienced the care as better in > my native Norway. That said, my girlfriend is a doctor and her health plan > seems a lot better so my experience can be anecdotal.

Not sure how good they would be about it in Norway, but in the US they diagnosed me with Ehlers Danlos type 2 in a matter of weeks while in Poland literally dozens of doctors I visited didn't know what's going on. In my particular case, where the condition in from 1 in 3,000 to 1 in 50,000 the major incentive to find out what's wrong with me for the doctors was really fear for me suing them. Again, money in this system really works both ways. I said my insurance company, you test me genetically for ehlers danlos or I sue your ass. They paid $6k for testing and I was tested positive. From perspective now I think that in Poland some doctors at least knew or suspected my condition but had no incentive to do anything. And money or loosing it is a great incentive.

<comment><USER55> Yes, I agree that the USA is the best healthcare system for people with money and/or great insurance.

I do not know which insurance is great and how many people has access to this. I do however know that when I tried to read my plan, the legalese was so dense that it such as well have been written i Japanese.

My University of California at Davis group insurance plan costs $500 per quarter, and that rate is given for a pool of generally healthy young students. Do you know what a startup person has to pay for a great health care plan? Is a obamacare plan good?

<comment><USER17> Obamacare has many plans in it to choose from. I don't save on "these things" and get as expensive as I can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I wish that I could have a breakthrough this year, at the age of 27 my life's mission was to make it before turning 30 and times running out and I'm super anxious that I have not had much success.

</comment><comment><USER57> Great post! I agree with this!</comment>