$4,829-per-hour supercomputer built on Amazon cloud to fuel cancer research - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/4829-per-hour-supercomputer-built-on-amazon-cloud-to-fuel-cancer-research.ars <comment><USER2> While it's nice from a technical perspective, this is unlikely to lead to a cancer cure. Having worked in cancer drug development, I can tell you, there is no shortage of cancer targets. Researchers have a list of targets they want to hit, and chemists are pretty darn good at designing small molecule compounds to hit them.

The problem in cancer is not that we don't understand individual proteins or the way that drugs bind to them (the problem being solved in this article). It is that the biology of cancer is a crazy web of highly complex interactions and feedback loops of which we have a pathetically rudimentary understanding. So even when you think you're hitting a target that should kill the cancer, you find out there's some side pathway that spools up and limits the drug's efficacy (or worse, the cancer cells actively pump your compound out). If I recall, something like >95% of new cancer therapies fail in clinical trials. Most of the failure in this drug category is due to lack of efficacy (even though they hit a target, they don't do jack for treating the cancer). If you could make that number 85%, you'd probably be a Nobel contender.

Unfortunately, there's no digital route here. What needs to be done is a _lot_ of slow, messy "wet bench" biology. There is no electronic shortcut to understanding how living cells work.

<comment><USER3> (Bioinformatician here). Although I think bench work is the most obvious route and the most likely way these problems will be solved, there are _in principle_ some computational ways they could be addressed.

If we had good computational models of how perturbations would affect transcription networks, for example, we could predict these "side pathways" that so often occur in humans but not in mice.

But you're right, the reality is complex, and you have do deal not only with transcription, but translation, post-translational modification, non-coding RNAs, the list goes on... And most current models of this type don't delve into 3D simulation. Some people are working on whole-cell modeling but that's in its infancy.

Ultimately I believe the breakthroughs will come fastest if we can "close the feedback loop" by automating a lot of bench biology, and then have computers both generate and test hypotheses.

<comment><USER4> (former bioinformatician here)

I agree, the totality of the interactions for a single cell is so many orders of magnitude above what we are capable of currently modeling that I fear these computational approaches are dangerously over-hyped. Having been privy to the state-of-the-art projects in a lab with a ~5,000 node cluster it was still disappointing to see how rough the whole cell modeling approaches were. It's really tough just to model a small corner of the cytoplasm and get the diffusion of different protein and metabolites right, let alone address organelles or chromosomal folding and surface availability. It's a mess.

<comment><USER3> Over-hyped? In my neck of the woods these approaches are treated with extreme skepticism for just the reasons you mention.

For instance: _De novo_ protein folding is not a solved problem, so how can a simulation predict dynamics for a protein whose conformation isn't even known?

I'm sure in the year 2150 when my grandchildren go to the doctor to be scanned by the tricorder, the results will go to the full-cell (and full-body) simulator...but for now, I think bioinformatics is better served by sticking to higher levels of abstraction like transcript and protein counts (for disease modeling purposes).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > As impressive as it sounds, such a cluster can be spun up by anyone with the > proper expertise, without talking to a single employee of Amazon.

This isn't actually true. There's initially an instance limit of 20, and you have to contact Amazon to get it lifted. You could probably order just as many servers at Softlayer or purchase them at Dell without talking to anyone (except the guy who confirms your credit card).

After all, they're not going to let anyone run up a $3 million bill on the hope that it'll be paid at the end of the month!

<comment><USER6> Bump ... I've had personal experience where I needed a few 100 VMs for a short experiment. A quick message to Amazon got the job done. Took less than a day to get approval.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> $4,829 per hour isn't the most impressive metric here. It ran for only 3 hours, at a total cost of $14,486 - compared to the build cost and lead time involved in building a "$20-25m data center".

This has huge implications for the availability of supercomputers for smaller organizations and use cases.

</comment><comment><USER8> _The cluster used a mix of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 1 Gigabit Ethernet interconnects. However, the workload was what's often known as "embarrassingly parallel," meaning that the calculations are independent of each other. As such, the speed of the interconnect didn't really matter._

Ah, if only this were true for everything. It'd make everyone's lives a lot easier. :-) Unfortunately there are a lot of applications out there where inter-node communication is incredibly important: computational fluid dynamics, in all its varied forms, is a good example of a latency-bound application. This covers weather forecasting, aerodynamics, dynamic mechanical modeling, and so on.

What I find interesting is that to get to 51,000 cores, they had to use AWS datacenters all over the world. I'd love to know what kind of resources are actually available in any given datacenter. It will vary at any given time, but it would be useful to know how many cores are "close" to each other in a networking sense, for applications were latency matters.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow. This press release even got covered in the NYT!

[http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/supercomputing- rent...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/supercomputing-rented-by- the-hour/)

The actual feat accomplished here would not surprise anyone involved in supercomputing, and companies have done very similar things with non- scientific tasks, such as this article from 2008:

[http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/the-new-york- times-...](http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/the-new-york-times- archives-amazon-web-services-timesmachine/)

describing how the New York Times itself did a similar computation.

</comment><comment><USER10> Stowe was just speaking at AWS summit, lots of AWS goodness there: <http://aws.amazon.com/live/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Man, and I thought it was bad when I set in motion a 3 hour computation and lose it due to a bug in the code that writes the results to disk. At least it doesn't set me back $15k to redo the computation...

</comment><comment><USER6> I was in the audience at the NY AWS summit ... quite a loud applause when they give their per hour cost number. I was also impressed. However, I found it a bit surprising that that it took 2 hours to acquire the VMs, and 1 hour to do the actual work.

<comment><USER12> I was there as well. Pretty cool stuff!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Two things struck me about that article, the pharmaceutical guy who felt like with enough cores they could find the cure to cancer, and Cycle's challenge of moving past 50,000 cores.

What struck me is that I wonder why Google (or Amazon) hasn't put out the cure for cancer. The actual extent of Google's infrastructure is classified, but using open sources its clear that putting together even half a million 'cores' is not a huge project for them. (Think of it this way, they spent a billion dollars building a data center that the actual building/land/etc estimates out at about 200M.)

<comment><USER14> Google does invest in life sciences startups: <http://www.googleventures.com/portfolio#life-sciences>

<comment><USER13> Perhaps I should be a bit more clear and less snarky. I think Cycle has had a great press release, it has advertised their product well, and like any good press release it doesn't so much read like an advertisement for a particular company as it does as real news. This defines great execution of the PR technique known as 'article placement.'

One of the qualities of making it a great soundbite is that Schrodinger, the company that it nominally the topic of the story, goes on about how their 1,500 core cluster can't give them the resolution they need but a 50,000 core cluster makes everything clear. Understand that a 'westmere' processor is potentially 12 cores (if you use Intel's defintion of threads and I'm sure they do), and the typical motherboard is 2 CPUs so that is 24 'cores' per machine [1]. A 1,500 core cluster is 62 machines, that is a couple of cabinets worth if you're using Supermicro boxes, less than a cabinet if your using OpenCompute type cabinets [2]. And at maybe $3K each that is an investment of $186K, maybe $250K if you included switches. Which is about 1/3 what it would have cost a pharmaceutical company to buy a VAX minicomputer back in the day.

My point is that if you're in a multi-billion dollar market place, you can afford to spend more on your hardware. And even at approximately $5K/hr a 50,000 node cluster is only 2100 Open Compute servers in 24 of their 'triplet' cabinets.

That is about 1MW critical kW of compute power. (1MW being the power commitment you would have to buy from a colocation center to power it) and even _that_ is a fairly small foot print at Amazon, Google, Facebook, or even Apple with its new $1B data center [3].

So when I read the story, I was left thinking "Gee, if using a cluster that was 33x bigger got them such great results, why not use one that 3000x bigger? Wouldn't that just answer the question?" And of course I took a moment to analyze that thought and asked the question every critical reader has to ask which is, "What is this article trying to say anyway? And do I believe it?" And that was when it becomes obvious what the article is saying is that Cycle, the company that makes a living creating virtual super computers for embarrassingly parallel problems out of EC-2 instances has reached the point where they can get 50K cores running the same problem." Which is great and all but like a long story that is just a setup for bad pun, it leaves me feeling jaded, and hence my snarky remark that if all it takes is more cores, Google should stop trying to be a great advertising company and switch to being a pharmaceutical company. Which, when you say that out loud you realize it couldn't possibly be that easy and yes, its a snarky way of expressing irritation that I was lead to believe there was something newsworthy here when there wasn't.

[1] <http://opencompute.org/projects/intel-motherboard/>

[2] <http://opencompute.org/projects/triplet-racks/>

[3] [http://gigaom.com/apple/apples-new-north-carolina-data- cente...](http://gigaom.com/apple/apples-new-north-carolina-data-center-ready- to-roll-2/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How efficient is this compared with running your own cluster? 2x slower? 10x? In addition to latency between nodes, surely you're paying some kind of performance penalty for virtualization?

<comment><USER15> Our department which currently runs a 1000+ core machine and 2500+ core machine for MD simulations is still waiting on jumping onto the Amazon/Cloud bandwagon mostly because it's still not cheaper than owning a cluster for a few years. Granted, being at a large research university means they're not the only clusters on campus and there's an infrastructure already in place to maintain it.

In terms of speed, I would assume Amazon to be faster than most clusters since they probably offer the latest and greatest computers. Lastly, MD is an embarassingly parallel problem (don't ask me how it is) so latency isn't a major issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> In what programming language would this cross-CPU simulation software be built?

<comment><USER17> The actual application used was Glide, <http://www.schrodinger.com/products/14/5/>, which is likely Fortran or C++ given the type of app. Don't know what Cycle's core sofware for managing the whole infrastructure is written in, but they use a lot of Chef and schedulers like Torque or Condor in addition to Boto to orchestrate the EC2 side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> And yet, no results from their massive computation. Schrodinger is well known for being a company of liars and frauds, and unfriendly to open source and other ideals of our community.

<comment><USER19> To be fair, Gaussian is orders of magnitude worse. See <[http://www.bannedbygaussian.org/>](http://www.bannedbygaussian.org/>).</comment></comment>


Probiotics labelled 'quite useless' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45434753 <comment><USER2> Isn't the idea to give probiotics to people who do not have a healthy gut? Such as someone who had been taking antibiotic for a prolonged period of time? So why did they give the probiotic to 25 healthy individuals?

Also 25 seems like a very small sample.

Edit: it appears they also did a study on 46 people after taking antibiotics but that I still find to be a small sample size.

<comment><USER3> In Canada at least,probiotics are largely bought of the shelf by healthy people.

Last week I accidentally bought a bottle of water from seven eleven,which turned out to have probiotics added. Cost the same as regular water too...

<comment><USER4> I was surprised by a probiotic addition the other day as well. It was added to a vegan protein powder I bought off the shelf.

<comment><USER5> Do you think it's really an addition or something that was in there already they could market as a probiotic?

Like how a lot of things became "gluten free" despite not containing gluten to begin with.

<comment><USER6> Gluten free also refers to processing. If something is made in the same facility / alongside a product with gluten it's a serious problem with people with Celiac.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd conclude the opposite.

If in half the cases the newly introduced bacteria "lingered" before being expelled then that demonstrates some kind of traction. e.g. You might just need to combine that with a diet that favours the new bacteria you're trying to introduce.

i.e. Some sort of effect in 50% of the cases is better than I expected honestly

<comment><USER8> I mean maybe, but that's just speculation, and it really doesn't get us anywhere.

The main point of the article is that off the shelf probiotics don't do the wonders they are toted to. You would have to have probiotics tailored to the unique bacterial composition inside of your gut.

<comment><USER9> > The main point of the article is that off the shelf probiotics don't do the > wonders they are toted to.

That's the main _claim_.

OTOH, they didn't test any off-the-shelf probiotic products in isolation, they tested their own custom probiotic mix.

<comment><USER10> > During the probiotics phase participants consumed Supherb Bio-25 bi-daily, > which is described by the manufacturer to contain at least 25 billion active > bacteria of the following strains: B. bifidum, L. rhamnosus, L. lactis, L. > casei, B. breve, S. thermophilus, B. longum sbsp. longum, L. paracasei, L. > plantarum and B. longum sbsp. infantis. According to the manufacturer, the > pills underwent double coating to ensure their survival under stomach > acidity and their proliferation in the intestines. Validation of the > aforementioned strains quantity and viability was performed as part of the > study.

[https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)31102-4?_re...](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674\(18\)31102-4?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867418311024%3Fshowall%3Dtrue#secsectitle0075)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _" The research group also looked at the impact of probiotics after a course > of antibiotics, which wipe out both good and bad bacteria.

Their trial on 46 people, also in the journal Cell, showed it led to delays in the normal healthy bacteria re-establishing themselves.

Dr Elinav added: "Contrary to the current dogma that probiotics are harmless and benefit everyone, these results reveal a new potential adverse side effect of probiotic use with antibiotics that might even bring long-term consequences."_

If you only read the first few paragraphs (where they discussed the effect of probiotics on healthy people) you might have missed this important piece of information.

This discovery is hardly surprising. Probiotics aren't regulated by the FDA as drugs, but rather as "food supplements", which basically means they have the same standard of regulation as regular food [1].

[1] To be sold as a drug (i.e. pharmaceutical) a product must undergo rigorous trials to show efficacy and find any unintended side effects. Clinical trials typically cost around $60-80 million, which is part of the reason drugs are so expensive.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone believe anything these articles say anymore?

About two weeks ago, two somewhat prominent doctors from Harvard Medical School got into an enormous disagreement over whether or not coconut oil was "healthy" or "killing you". No one knows anything under the current system.

There is absolutely no way the public can reasonably believe yay or nay on any new thing about healthy living.

<comment><USER13> This is so true. I used to be consume articles about healthy eating, but it after all the contradiction I have decided that I'm done reading about it all. I keep it simple with the opinion that eating protein, your veggies and drinking water will be near optimal for most humans, and anything after is just not worth the effort to optimize. 80/20, people.

<comment><USER14> Make sure you get some fat and carbs in there too, nutrition is nutrition.

I've concluded that eating is good for your health.

<comment><USER15> > _I 've concluded that eating is good for your health._

[citation needed]

Jokes aside, you and GP are right; with this level of confusion, there's not much ground for trying to micromanage your diet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Probiotics always struck me as one of those pills that mother gives you that don't do anything at all.

These products were developed commercially based on what they could make and not on any analysis of what a person's intestinal flora should be, nor any proof that the deliver system worked.

<comment><USER17> All commercial products are developed based on potential profit.

<comment><USER16> Then you need alignment.

One of those cases where the patent model works is the development of prescription drugs. The possibility of monopoly profits leads pharma companies to develop and test drugs and run them through a regulatory gauntlet. Critics say it is expensive, but it does work in the sense that new drugs get invented and some of them really are a boon.

For something like fish oil you can do the research but it benefits everybody else who sells fish oil, which, oddly enough, lowers my blood triglycerides like a drug although having put up no real benefits other than that for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm pretty sure it's solid science that probiotics definitely help at treating or preventing certain digestive tract disorders/diseases. For instance, SIBO:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28267052](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28267052)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3329544/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3329544/)

<comment><USER10> Interesting science.

But, I don't feel that the second is a legitimate use of meta-analyses. Due to publication bias, the conclusions it draws are only useful if the efficacy of probiotics is a forgone conclusion.

Moreover: I have a huge question regarding their primary measure, specifically regarding their use of number from this study:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14608267](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14608267)

Which show up as the 8th line of their risk-ratio calculation, but whose results have no relation to the values on that graph.

Moreover, this isn't peer reviewed, as far as I could see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It doesn't seem very surprising that if you keep eating mostly what you normally eat, your microbiome is already well-adapted to that diet and will out compete almost anything new you try to introduce.

I would expect if they tried limiting their diet to foods compatible with the probiotics, they'd get more significant results, because the existing microbiome colonies would be stressed from lack of their usual junk/meat/fat and be weaker. (Almost all standard probiotics, other than dairy varieties [yogurt etc], are veg-carb-loving.)

Before refrigeration, there couldn't have been many probiotics consumed in isolated form rather than as fermented foods. Give the new bacteria some food to eat when they're trying to out-compete your existing (bad parts of your) gut microbiome. One of the most likely good foods for them to eat is what they've been cultured on.

It may not even be necessary to eat probiotics, if you already have some of the bacteria you want, you merely need to encourage it to out-compete bad microbiome bacterial strains. Eat food compatible with the good bacteria. But it's such a hassle to change diets, everyone wants a pill or a powder or one serving of probiotics they can add to their diet, keep everything else the same, and have the bad bacteria / imbalance miraculously disappear. Is it any surprise that's less likely to work?

</comment><comment><USER20> One of my friends who has severe dietary/gut problems did several isolated experiments on himself with different probiotics and found success from very specific ones like PHGG and GOS..

<comment><USER21> It may also depends on how you get them. For example somebody told me that turmeric helps with joint inflammation. Bought some turmeric capsules and they did nothing. But then I used it in cooking and it definitely makes a difference for my joint pain. It comes back while traveling and I don't get turmeric. But as soon as I get home and eat my own food the joint pain gets better. It also gets worse when I stop using turmeric in my own cooking for a while.

<comment><USER22> Did the supplement contain pepper? AFAIK you need to consume turmeric together with black pepper to make it effective (blocks something in the liver IIRC). Maybe that was the reason?

<comment><USER21> I don't know about the supplement. But yes, I always use some pepper when I cook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I had chronic I.B.S. for many years, which I talk about here way too much.

Basically I used to poop my pants weekly and couldn't work in an office.

Probiotics and keeping my eating to an 8 hour window (Intermittent Fasting) basically solved the issue for me.

However it makes sense to me that probiotics wouldn't do anything for someone who already has healthy gut bacteria.

<comment><USER24> > _Basically I used to poop my pants weekly and couldn 't work in an office._

Any office? Even the U.S. Patent Office?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Looked at a actimel ([https://www.actimel.co.uk/faq_about](https://www.actimel.co.uk/faq_about)) and yakult ([https://www.yakult.co.uk/](https://www.yakult.co.uk/)) and was surprised by how little they attribute to the "good bacteria". Yakult promises that: _is scientifically proven to reach the gut alive_ (!)

Was that always like that?

<comment><USER15> From the days I was a teenager and we had TV at home in Poland, I remember the brand "Actimel" being _all about "good bacteria"_. So this must have changed recently. My guess is, the EU told them to stop spewing bullshit in commercials.

EDIT: This might indeed have had something to do with 2007 change in EU's health regulations, as per [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actimel#Debates_surrounding_he...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actimel#Debates_surrounding_health_claims_on_probiotic_foods).

<comment><USER25> This is from yakult us, boy this is underwhelming: _Because everyone 's biological make-up is unique, each one of us may experience our own unique health benefits_ Generally speaking, Yakult may help balance your digestive system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This article is a great example of how scientifically illiterate modern society has become.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's funny that this research claims is spin to prove that supermarket probiotics are useless, but instead of broadly testing actual supermarket probiotics products, or even testing a single such product, it tests a single specific custom blend product created by the research team.

At best, they've shown _that blend_ to be quite useless as tested.

</comment><comment><USER27> Probiotics used incorrectly can have mixed results; and thus, there will be endless religious debates on the matter.

If the reason you are taking them is to cull dangerous bacteria such as H.pylori, you would first have to bring their numbers down to a point where the probiotics have a fighting chance. This is typically either done with anti-biotics, or a combination of supplements such as aged garlic, mastic gum, coconut oil, etc... to first kill things off. Then after taking the probiotics, the candida overgrowth has to be purged with garlic extract. Very few people will take the time to go through the right steps throughout the days/weeks required to balance things out. This lends itself to a wide variability in results.

<comment><USER28> H. pylori isn't a yeast? Or did you mean that the probiotics would include yeasts (possible, certainly, like S. boulardii, but it dies off by itself pretty quickly). Though of course the process you describe is similar to what anyone taking a course of antibiotics to treat an illness could do, I was hospitalized after being hit by truck and given lots of kefir along with my antibiotics.

<comment><USER27> H.pylori is a bacteria. When you add bacteria in large amounts to compensate, they will cause candida overgrowth which is a fungus. The fungus has to be killed off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does this potentially also have consequences for fecal transplants? That has been an upcoming area of research and relies on a similar idea: You can colonise bateria. If they aren't going to stick around via probiotics, they may also not via fecal.

<comment><USER10> Different bacteria, different condition, different delivery methods.

As the article states - "The researchers said probiotics of the future would need tailoring to the needs of each individual."

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The main purpose of probiotics I've heard of is to repopulate a gut that's been wiped out by antibiotics. This experiment was performed on 25 healthy subjects; its results don't seem to bear on that purpose.

</comment><comment><USER31> Seems like a pointless study if you're only sampling people who are already healthy. "Probiotics don't do anything if you already have a healthy gut." Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.

</comment><comment><USER32> "These are very innovative studies, but they are preliminary findings that need replicating."

</comment><comment><USER33> one yakult a day has been highly beneficial to me.

<comment><USER34> That's a nice anecdote.</comment></comment>


Show HN: File uploader for your website or app with FB, Dropbox, Gdrive support - <AUTHOR> https://www.uploader.win <comment><USER2> alt [https://fineuploader.com/](https://fineuploader.com/)

[https://github.com/FineUploader/fine- uploader](https://github.com/FineUploader/fine-uploader)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, while the file upload functionality is the same, uploader window comes with ready made integration for uploading via link, image search, paste from link, facebook, dropbox, mic, camera, youtube, and many more.

It can also save the files directly to S3 or Digitalocean spaces. Plus it's hosted with a wysiwyg editor so all you need to do is copy paste a single line of javascript and you're ready to go!

Appreciate more feedback</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What company were you at when the dot-com bubble burst in mid 2000? - <AUTHOR> General sub-questions: What was your title? What short lessons did you learn at your company? What did you wish that you knew then, that you know now? <comment><USER2> I was living on a tiny platform (Sealand) in the north sea, working on my startup HavenCo (offshore datahaven, hosting a variety of services which were worried about legal and jurisdictional issues), from 2000-2003.

My title was initially CTO, and then "last person left".

Short lessons:

* lots of press coverage can be a pain to manage.

* be careful about plans which depend on a full funding round (make sure you are still able to do at least 1/3 of the work with 1/3 of the money, and get to a viable product

* try to prove concepts cheaply early on

* don't let the company use your personal credit, it might collapse and you'll be >$200k in debt at 21...

I regret not bailing for Google in 2001 when it was an option.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had just left a mobile healthcare company (Palm VII's and Palm V's with a giant data sled!!!) I had founded in college with some friends that was doomed for failure.

I had just graduated and started at a small mobile company (hockey-stick growth!) that was trying to convince distributors that putting cell phones in Coke machines to call home was a good idea. I was told the company was planning to double in size that year. I was the last guy they hired.

About 4 months later I got laid off when the company went from 60 employees down to about 10 in one afternoon. I felt horrible. I then went through a get- hired/layoff cycle despite giving 110% effort at each new job. Oddly enough, each new position paid better and I sharpened my skills. I learned the art of the interview, and I learned that sometimes getting laid off has nothing to do with you.

Being rejected and forced to claw my way into the field with little experience was good for me, but for a while I overvalued job security.

I learned this: always have a few months living expenses in the bank. When the music stops, you won't have time to run and grab a chair. Live on Ramen and pickles until you have saved up enough and then make that number your new "empty". If you increase your cost of living, increase your reserve. Bank account:2mos is the new Inbox:0

<comment><USER4> 4 months of emergency funds + 4 months per dependent is my rule of thumb.

<comment><USER3> I like that rule. Two months is definitely an absolute minimum. That's when you pull your pockets inside out and say you're broke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was working at a video streaming company called in CT. They bought tons of bandwidth and had HUGE datacenters throughout the country. We streamed events live that had not been done before (Island hole @ Master's championship etc).

We started to do TV shows and movies (had deals with major movies studios...). We were basically Hulu in 1999/2000 but the technology sucked at the time. Our choices were Real or Windows format video. Both were bad and required conversion to that format which took a long time in those days.

$75 million in funding, lots of bandwidth bough, some good examples of what we could do, but ultimately we burned money like most did back then. We tried to sell but when the market tanked most suitors walked away and the company just folded. Great lessons to learn right out of college.

After that experience I wanted to work for a more stable company right after. Since I was getting married I wanted to work for a company making money and one that would weather the down turn in the market. I accepted a job w/ Enron :/ Anyone want to guess how long that one lasted? I still have option certificates for something like $62.50...yikes.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was working for this little company called Trailworks.com, burning through a mere 25 million dollars in the course of six months.

They hit the ground hard shortly after launch, laid off all their staff, then brought me and one dba back on contract to mothball everything. I quoted an extortionate rate and they gladly jumped on it. For the next 3 months, the phone would ring several times a week with recruiters offering progressively more ludicrous contract rates for new gigs. Times were fat, so I turned them all down.

Mothballing complete, I turned down a new slew of dream gigs and hopped a flight to Thailand and Australia. 5 months later, tanned and grinning, I landed in the 'states and called up my recruiter:

"Hey, remember all those awesome gigs you had for crazy contract rates? I'll take one o' them, thanks."

"Uh... We don't have any more of those. Didn't you hear? We have some regular jobs for regular money, if you'd like."

"oh."

"Yeah. And you might want to check your eTrade account while you're at it..."

Gotta say though, it was a fun ride while it was happening. Everybody knew it was too good to be true, but we were happy to party like it was 1999. Cause, you know, it was.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was in a software company with a product that made it easier to interoperate with different OSes. I was doing tech support on e-mail and phone duty and did QA work on the side.

The #1 thing is to sniff out the signs of a poorly run company which, believe me, even if you couldn't care less about the machinations of business much less have never run one, you can still see the warning flags a country mile away.

When there is no clear oversight of who is keeping tabs, you're in trouble. This ill-fated company company had a staff at most 60 and yet we had a tech closet with _literally_ a laundry basket full of RAM; for WHAT? I had no idea. That was just the tip of the iceberg.

I knew it was over about 6 months later when the CEO hired a friend to run marketing and the guy ordered Aeron chairs for him and his hangers-on "team". Then we had a huge blowout shindig replete with house band, Filet Mignon and an open bar. Everyone was completely wasted and well-fed. It was glorious.

3 months later we were all laid off.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was working for a company in Irvine, CA that did VoIP/telephony.

Some of our stuff was pretty neat. We ended up open sourcing part of the project. It was a C++/CORBA system that allowed for passing of messages of different types (calendar, bulletin board, e-mail, faxes, and voicemails) across the various transports.

It looks like the sourceforge site still exists: <http://tucan.sourceforge.net>

Ironically, the company was called Difinium at the time it folded and I ended up moving from there to Digium doing similar things with Asterisk.

</comment><comment><USER9> I was a C++ developer at Be, that made an alternative OS called BeOS. Perhaps a few of you have heard of it (heh).

Unfortunately, I started too late, after the company had more or less given up trying to market BeOS as a standalone product. They had shifted their focus to internet appliances. We were working on the Sony eVilla at the time, which proved to be a huge disaster.

The company had been managing to get investments for 11 years, based on their excellent tech demos. But when the dot-com bust happened, the funding dried up. The company was acquired by Palm, and all but the 50 most valuable employees were laid off. I definitely wasn't in that elite group, so I was out the door.

That was the one and only time I've managed to get hired at an A-level tech company. I suck at marketing myself.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was working at a tiny company (at times just me and the president/owner) providing shopping cart SaaS. Initially I quit 'cause I was tired of working there but continued on as a contractor at higher pay for several months. I left completely when they stopped being able to pay me. I can't tell if they're still around but the company certainly hasn't lived up to its potential, they never made a serious investment in technology and have fallen hugely behind all of the competition.

My title was irrelevant due to the size of the company.

Short lessons? Probably to get out sooner rather than later when you recognize deep problems in a company.

I wish I knew how much my skills were worth back then and a better way to market them.

</comment><comment><USER11> Principal Software Designer for embedded systems at Simplex Time Recorder, a subsidiary of Tyco International.

The dot-com bubble involved more than Internet companies as Tyco's stock crashed amid scandal involving its CEO. For me this led to downsizing, layoffs, a year of consulting, three of working under lousy conditions and finally a complete career change to teaching.

Lesson learned? The free enterprise system is seriously flawed. I watched a thriving, innovative American business get eaten alive by Tyco. A handful got filthy rich while thousands of workers lost their jobs as production moved overseas. Shameful..

</comment><comment><USER12> I was working for a IT recruiting company, managing a team that essentially was pulling down and parsing every resume from the job sites at that time - Monster.com, Dice.com, HotJobs, etc. Recruiters were on the phone every day to try and find guys who knew all the 'hot' tech at the time - Vignette was a really big ticket item, for example, with six-figure salaries and a high percent for recruiters.

It wasn't a 'boiler room' mentality--far from it--and we had plans to really grow, after creating our own database of resumes.

Of course, that ran out of steam when the bust came and there was only really one company which had the resume database market covered, and that was Monster. By that time, I had moved on to another company called ArsDigita. Hmm, out of the frying pan...

</comment><comment><USER13> I was a web developer at The Motley Fool (fool.com). I learned that even a company whose credo was fiscal responsibility is not immune to hype (but it was an awesome place to work). I wish I knew then that stock options are _not_ guaranteed riches in the future.

</comment><comment><USER14> I was a developer at a startup that specialized in creating some cool fleet management software for the trucking industry, as well as some way-ahead-of- its-time mobile technology (WAP).

I personally believe that if this company re-booted and started up again today, it would rock.

<comment><USER15> I don't anything about that industry but I would assume that the trucking industry already has pretty advanced fleet tracking & management, do they not?

If I'm a Walmart or a Best Buy I'd make it a priority to know exactly where all my trucks are at all times.

<comment><USER16> Neither do I, but I wouldn't assume that either. What about all the small fleet truckers that you never hear about? Everyone needs software, but not everyone needs Enterprise Level Software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> McDonald's (Back Crew). :)

</comment><comment><USER18> CTO at a domain registrar. Our company actually survived the pop and eventually was "sold" for other reasons. The main things I learned from that experience was that it is important to be conscious of competitor pricing and how it affects your market. It's ok to be more expensive than your competitors, but you have to differentiate to back that up. Being expensive just because you're ignoring the marketplace will end up causing trouble. Also, be frugal and focus (although I don't think I really learned this until after I failed numerous other times - sometimes I still wonder if I have learned the lesson).

</comment><comment><USER19> Working for Internet.com as, bizarrely, one of two editors-in-chief of WebDeveloper.com (along with David Fiedler). I quit sometime in 2000 but then, unfortunately, Internet.com turned it into a forum instead of a news site not long after.

I learnt a lot about how to write, how to get content out quick (mine or edit someone else's), how to stick to a style guide, and pretty much everything about running a high octane content site. Skills that have proven useful right up to the current day.

</comment><comment><USER20> Motorola. "Remote Access Server/Software Deployment Engineer".

I learned that I never wanted to work for a big company again. It was a big ordeal to a manager's sized cubicle for me so I'd have the proper space to do my job (build and image servers).

The good things I learned were process/project management, UNIX in a production environment, and an appreciation for Sun workstations.

</comment><comment><USER21> I had just started at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeserve> as a developer. And stayed there for a further 4 years. The bubble burst but the number of people wanting to get online to look at boobies was still boooooming.

</comment><comment><USER22> I was working as a developer for a large outsourcing organisation (Capgemini) in Europe at that time. What I remember the most is the enormous amount of middle-management that was retrenched. Most people I knew in tech seem to have made it through the burst in one piece back then.

</comment><comment><USER23> WebGain, a company that could not have existed without the bubble, though it staggered on through 2001. First wave of layoffs in November, the company died 5 months later.

Taught me to never value stock options more than common sense.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was working at E.piphany ( Steve Blank was one of the founder). I remember going through three rounds of layoffs in three months in the professional services organization, which I was part of. Good old days :)

</comment><comment><USER25> I was in college working part-time doing websites, etc. Should've dropped out and went full-time with several of the offers being given. But at the time I sort of wanted to finish the college thing.

</comment><comment><USER26> I was working at Linuxcare. I wish I knew more about business and economics then - I was pretty focused on the open source stuff.

</comment><comment><USER27> My own, and it was crashing, though only coincidentally coinciding with the dot-com crash.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm getting so old I already have experienced several bubble bursts ;)

</comment><comment><USER29> Wasn't the .com bubble more mid-90's than mid-2000's?

<comment><AUTHOR> My apologies for not clarifying...I meant when the dot com bubble burst in the mid-2000's.

Edit: to prevent any other miscommunication in the title.

<comment><USER30> It popped year 2000, there was no event in the mid 2000s

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nasdaq2.png>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> In 2003 I was just a few years out of college, working for ClickSitez Japan, K.K., a startup trying to convince VCs that people were going to do their photos on the interweb tubes. We had angel funding and a prototype/demo with one and only one error-free path through it (the "shining path", one of our advisors called it, and the name stuck). We on the engineering side divided our time between coding the prototype and helping the bizdev guys pitch it to anybody who'd listen: VCs, other dot-coms, even NTT.

My business card read VP/UX, which was supposed to mean "Vice President, User Experience". Like a lot of dot-com startups at the time, we had like 7 vice presidents of this or that, with only 2 staffers below VP level.

What I actually _did_ know then, and simply wish I had factored into my decision-making processes more, was that the dot-com bubble was a bubble and that trying to play the stock game in a bubble isn't fundamentally different from playing blackjack. Bootstrapping is preferable to chasing investors, in retrospect.

Of course, everybody knew it was a bubble; the technology stock analyst I was dating at the time told me, "Yeah. It's a bubble, but it's still paying out. So there will still be money to be made here, until the day comes that it _was_ a bubble."

It was March 2000 when that day came, as near as I can recall. We never got that next funding round, and as it started to become clear that the party was over, the three of us who could code went our separate ways, and the company was acquired by some short-lived web consulting company, which was in turn acquired by somebody else, and ultimately was bought by the posterboy of dot- com Internet flameouts, marchFIRST.

The most valuable lesson that has stuck with me is that none of these people-- investors, analysts, "experts", bosses, underlings, dot-celebrities of the day --knew what the hell they were talking about.

I'm not saying that I did, mind you--nobody did. That's why these things are assigned descriptors like "revolutionary, disruptive technological paradigm shift". Because nobody knows what the hell all the effects are going to be.

Not many of the things such hyperbolic labels are applied to actually turn out to do all that much disrupting. But the dot-com revolution was different--it was a bona-fide Gutenberg-level event, and for all the billions of dollars that were bandied about and the huge transfers of wealth and the frenzied investment in it, that was really just a pretty minor part of the whole picture. The impact of the Internet becoming a mainstream part of modern human society goes much deeper than that.

And that's what made it fun to be living and breathing every day. Despite all the missed opportunities and inevitable what-ifs looking back, I'm glad I was there.

<comment><USER32> Ooops, second word there is a typo--should be 2000, sigh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Born in '83, so in 2000 I was in high school :-)

<comment><USER34> :D me 2

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm from '90, so in school... :)

</comment><comment><USER36> Cupertino Middle School. B-)

</comment><comment><USER37> I was 13 or 14...

</comment><comment><USER38> I was working as a Senior Project Manager / Designer at Contempo Design (Architecture and Design) in San Francisco. One of my project was goto.com in Pasadena, California. It was beautiful, 4 floors of pure modern. Goto.com went belly up not long after (under Disney). Large projects with Bank of America and Charles Schwab kept me busy for 3 years.</comment>


See Where People Are Coming to Startup School From - <AUTHOR> http://hackrtrackr.com/blog4.php

<comment><USER2> Knowing where the Hacker News readers come from is interesting. Does anyone have enough karma to setup a poll for the ages of readers?

Thanks

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great idea - thanks to this, I can see that there is at least one person coming from my hometown of Ottawa :)

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem, if you have any suggestions just let me know.

<comment><USER4> I went ahead and submitted my location info, but then realized I had already done this in the past. Now there are two entries for my username and location in your database. You might want to consider only keeping one location per username (or allowing a user to delete previously entered locations).

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll take care of that. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Retiree Discovers an Elusive Math Proof (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/04/elusive-math-proof-found-almost-lost <comment><USER2> >"He had formulas that enabled him to pull off his magic," Pitt said. "And I didn't have the formulas."

The more I do pure mathematics, the more I realize just how important these kinds of insights are. Very often, solving a theoretical problem involves two key ingredients:

1\. Rewriting your problem in a particular way, so that it is amenable to a certain suite of methods/looks like known results.

2\. Apply a key bit of knowledge gleaned from intuition. This is unrelated to the formal way the problem was written down.

Sometimes, showing your intuition is true formally actually takes a lot of work. And for some proofs, looking at the problem a particular way makes the solution obvious on its own, with no need for a step 2. And other times, like this, all the technical tools in the world are no match for just _knowing_ the right piece of information.

<comment><USER3> I think many highly productive mathematicians are very good at organizing formulas and facts in such a way that they can be retrieved easily from memory based on context. Maybe something analogous to a hash function from computer science.

Some mathematicians seem to index facts based on geometric images, others seem to be more inclined to symbolic or algebraic statements. Whatever the representation, when confronted with a new mathematical situation they then scan quickly for matches to various aspects of the problem at hand.

Maybe to some degree my observation here is obvious. But I thought a lot about it while I was in grad school studying a book called Geometric Measure Theory by Herbert Federer. That book is enormous, and full of highly intricate technical proofs that require pulling together a large number of detailed technical facts.

The book is also very highly structured, and that led me to conclude that the text likely mirrored how Federer organized this information in his head. It reads like code for a complex but cleanly architected software system, and that's a big part of what led me from math to software development.

<comment><USER4> are you under the impression the people write books like that without referring to sources themselves? because they don't. I doubt any one knows all the proofs in a book like by heart or could reconstruct them without references for key facts.

<comment><USER5> People of that calibre are quite rare but they do exist. I've seen final year undergraduate courses pulled off without the lecturer once having to refer to notes. All proofs were completed in exacting detail on the whiteboard.

<comment><USER6> Sure, but those math profs have probably taught the same course 20+ times. Going through material that many times will permanently burn it into your brain.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. And in mathematics, advanced structures and theorems are built up layers by layer upon more elementary material. A professor who has mastered presentation of undergraduate material on a topic also likely teaches a graduate course on it, and mentors students on it, and does research on it.

They can talk about their chosen topic at many levels to many different audiences, from general audience (who may provide funding to them), high school students (outreach and recruiting), university students, and peers. This flexibility is an important part of being a very successful mathematician, and you have to burn it into your brain to reach that level of fluency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is from 2017, previous discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13977554](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13977554)

</comment><comment><USER8> It would be nice if the title named the proof. Math is a giant field, and very few HNers are mathematicians or interested in any particular area of mathematics, so it would be helpful to know what the general topic is without clicking on the link and reading a few paragraphs.

"A Retiree Discovers an Elusive Math Proof of the Gaussian Correlation Inequality (2017)"

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm sorry to be mean, but this title is stupid and condescending. He didn't use Word to solve the problem, he used Word to write the paper about the solution. It really has nothing to do with how the problem was actually solved. Might as well claim he "used Windows" to solve the problem.

<comment><USER10> For context, the submission title was "This 67-year-old retiree solved a math problem–using Microsoft Word". Thankfully, it's been fixed.

<comment><USER11> Ahh, thank you. I was very confused

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like a stretch to call this a big discovery in the math world. Even if it had been published in a top journal etc, it would be unlikely to be heralded as a major achievement.

<comment><USER3> Is it being characterized as a major discovery somewhere in this article? I see it described as an elusive problem, and it's claimed that the solution is a major paper worthy of publication in Annals of Statistics, but mostly it just comes across as an interesting story about how this proof came to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> (regarding the current title of this submission, in case it gets changed:)

>This 67-year-old retiree solved a math problem–using Microsoft Word

What does Microsoft Word have to do with this? The fact that the document was typeset in Microsoft Word instead of LaTeX does not really sound remarkable.

<comment><USER14> > What does Microsoft Word have to do with this?

It's an indication that the person who solved it is an amateur, that's all.

<comment><USER15> No, he's not an amateur but a retired statistian. And the fact that LaTeX is the standard for DIY typesetting in academia nowadays has nothing to do with your competence as a mathematician, or the rigour of a proof published as a Word document. Likewise, it doesn't matter if you work with pen and paper or with pencil and paper.

This title is absurd.

<comment><USER16> Well it got me to click on it. Which in the end I'm pretty happy about; it was a very interesting article. Can clickbait be justifiable if the end product is good?

<comment><USER15> You're opening a can of worms there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is based on experience, i used to teach math. (~4000)

And i found it easier to teach math to people whoes father, grandfather, great grandfather all had masters in math.

So, i wonder if mathematical abilities are in genes and gene function changes when you bring a person with such genes into a math intense environment.

<comment><USER18> Not sure why you would even remotely assume genetics over just skills being passed down..? Pre war if you look at careers in census everyone used to do what their parents did. Its because its what they taught you!

<comment><USER17> > Not sure why you would even remotely assume genetics over just skills being > passed down..?

There were also orphans who had never seen their parents or grandparents.

When genes are responsible for being lactose tolerate, why is it hard to hypothesise that only some people benefit from being raised in a math intense environment and not others?</comment></comment></comment>


How Three Kids with No Experience Beat Square and Translated Final Fantasy V - <AUTHOR> http://kotaku.com/how-three-kids-beat-the-odds-and-translated-final-fanta-1794628286 <comment><USER2> A long time ago, I translated Civilization 1 to Brazilian Portuguese. Eventually (like, 15 years later?) I got to work for a guy that worked on CIV I, and he told me they just found my translation, fixed some stuff and put it up as the official one (I put it in the most popular BBS at the time)

Good times.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, what a flashback! I remember following various translation teams and their progress while in college and playing all sorts of SNES games I'd never gotten to play as a kid (via zSNES). I remember the drama of the early leak and the eventual "proper" release. Realizing that it was 20 years ago caught me by surprise.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. I remember playing through all the FF games (and a bunch of other RPGs) that hadn't been translated into English when I was in college in the late 90's. It's great that most of them have been remade since, but there is a lot of nostalgia in playing the originals on emulators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Projects like this caused me to fall in love with tech as a kid, and my subsequent career arc was largely premised on the notion "how do we bring this type of amazing innovation into safe legal waters and allow it to flourish". I played FFV. I played a ton of fan translations. Heck, I completed the entire SNES rpg catalog, both JP and ENG. Thanks for sharing this.

<comment>

Re: Translation and Fan-mods in general. Many game developers fail to recognize that their works inadvertently become platforms, and that the platformization of stellar works is both the cause and effect of their spectacular success. There are a ton of crystal clear examples of this phenomenon. Unfortunately it is tremendously common that developers and publishers chop their own legs out from under them when attempting to re-seize control of these platforms to monetize them. Often their attempts destroy value, and terminally damage their brands.

<comment><USER6> What good is brand value if you can't monetize any of it?

<comment><USER5> There's a false dilemma stemming out of the word "any". In reality there's an equilibrium between giving and taking.

If you don't monetize enough, you can't stay afloat as a developer and you're left with a brand asset for sale upon liquidation.

If you take control of community produced goods in order to take the entire pie for yourself, your fanbase will slow or stop producing incidental free value for your projects and your core evangelists will begin jumping ship to greener pastures. This doesn't kill you immediately, but it also doesn't position you for long term growth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, the modifying assembly code part was impressive! I wouldn't even be able to find the dialog drawing routine amid thousands of lines of undocumented assembly, let alone modify it. It's amazing that a high school kid could figure it out.

<comment><USER8> To get an idea of how rom hacking works, check out this video from doublefine:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FolqIgQRtl0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FolqIgQRtl0)

Its mostly setting watches and breakpoints in the emulator, not digging through code. My mind was blown the first time I watched it.

<comment><USER9> The early stuff he shows can be done on most emulators as a way to cheat. Done it ever so often when i get bored with a game. Sometimes locking the health value will freeze a game though as developers use a cheap refill animation on leveling up or beating a boss, and you end up with the animation getting stuck as the emulator keeps resetting the value.

I have never owned one, but i think gamesharks and others work similarly.

<comment><USER10> Yes! Gamesharks / Action Replays / similar gave you an "instruction set" of sorts that was interpreted as instructions of sorts - write value to address, do if value at address is X, and so on. When I was messing with one on the Nintendo DS a few years back, you were actually able to write ARM (and THUMB, I believe) ASM and compile it to the target system (NDS) that could be loaded through the Action Replay. I'll have to check if I can dig up my old notes on this stuff when I'm home...

<comment><USER11> I'd really like to read your notes if you find them. I'm assuming the Action Replay could be used for the first bypass/homebrew loading exploits, then?

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure; I never got that involved in it. Back when I was involved, there were some communities entirely centered around taking apart individual games and figuring out how to tinker with them. Things like loading up the unused tracks in Mario Kart and changing the colours etc. to make "custom" courses.

Here's one of the main pages I used as a reference at the time: [http://doc.kodewerx.org/hacking_nds.html](http://doc.kodewerx.org/hacking_nds.html) Even without ASM, you could still write to arbitrary memory addresses, jump around with conditionals, patch, copy memory, and all sorts of things. The linked page also touches on the basics of ARM/THUMB ASM tinkering. I seem to have lost my notes, so this is all I can get you :(

<comment><USER11> Thanks anyway. I really like reading about these "unofficial" devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >"It's hard to express how big of a deal it was at the time,"

Every so often I meet someone who worked on something that was influential on me as a youth. I'm glad I got a chance to read this, playing the rom it was always a mystery where it came from. A lot of us owe Myria a debt of gratitude.

</comment><comment><USER13> Translating a video game was also one of the primary ways that I learned Japanese. Playing through Chrono Cross while grokking the written form was tremendously rewarding.

To this day, I still choose Japanese audio for games if available.

<comment><USER14> I find mind boggling the amount of games that have been released only in Japan.

Even series popular in the West like Final Fantasy, Shin Megami Tensei, Ace Attorney, Fire Emblem have had Japan-only releases, I cannot even imagine how many lesser known titles are lost to western audiences.

Probably Japan is kind of an outlier, but I guess other countries with a large enough market to support games developed for local (not global) audiences would have a similar phenomenon, I wonder if there is some hidden gem developed in China, Korea, India, Brasil that we will never be able to play...

<comment><USER15> It's way worse if you were European. Did you know that the first OFFICIAL release of Chrono Trigger in Europe was the 2009 DS remake?

<comment><USER11> Same in Australia, I think. I owned a ridiculous setup with a NTSC->PAL cart converter and an old CRT just to play Chrono Trigger, at one point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am so happy to see this article. I used to play the Japanese release PSO with Barubary a LOT and heard bits and pieces about the FFV translation. At the time they were at UCI I believe and I was just in 7th grade. Baru always seemed incredibly skilled and was extremely patient with me and helped me learn some basic coding, such as creating custom names for items that worked online. It got me into engineering in general and though I ended up working in Materials Engineering rather than software it was an excellent influence on me and pushed me to learn by reverse engineering. I always imagined Baru would end up somewhere with a career in Video Game development and am thrilled to see it is true.

<comment><USER17> I wonder if it's the same barubary. I started a psx dev group in the 90's gridlock. I just finished high school and this kid barubary joined and his work was amazing. Most of us in the scene went into the industry. I didn't cuz I didn't want 80hr weeks.

<comment><USER18> PSX dev was lots of fun and challenging at the time with so little documentation. Still something I'd love to get back to if I have the time. Someone spun up a site a bit ago called psxdev net that's pretty active. Btw, gadget from gridlock :)

<comment><USER17> Hey mate!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember playing this when it came out! It was such a magical moment. It completely blew my mind that there was a SNES Final Fantasy game that we were never meant to play - I think I only found it accidentally when I was browsing ROM sites. I thought it was a homemade hack or something. I never imagined that it was a real game! Haha what a great memory.

</comment><comment><USER20> Holy shit, this bring back memories. I did something similar with the Harry Potter series about 15 years ago - beat the publisher to translating the book. Doing that, strangely, is _the one event_ that shaped my life the most.

I discovered Harry Potter series up until book 4 (The Globet of Fire) by renting books from a bookstore when I was 15. At that time, many Vietnamese kids were all eager for book 5 to come out. Except for when book 5, The Half- blood Prince came, we had to wait for it. We would have to wait for the "blessed" translator and the publisher to translate and churn out the whole book when a new book comes, and with all the proofreading it would take about 4-6 months. I decided that was too long and started posting on a quite popular forum my indie translation, then moved to my personal website. Being a 16-year-old having a summer break at that time, I had nothing better to do. My timetable was something like stay up all night to translate half a chapter, post the new translation, go to bed at 6 AM, wake up at 11 AM, the next day rinse and repeat. People _loved_ it and many started contacting me to help with the translation. We had a YUUUUGE following to the point that I had to do nothing but just organizing and assigning who-does-what and then proofread it with my 16-year-old brain, but mostly we flew under the radar and it was easy. The complete translated book came out about 20 days after the English version. The normies still had to wait for the blessed book to read it, but anyone who had the Internet already read the whole story months earlier. People would bring A4-sized printouts to read at school and my older brother was asked more than once whether he knew the person who translated it from time to time.

Book 6 wasn't a happy story but a fun one. When book 6 came, I knew so much better that I knew to appoint someone that did the logistics for me. I did the fun part, code a website that allows us to automate the translation submission and make sure it can handle the traffic. At that time Vietnam has just signed the Bern copyright convention, and my indie translation was the center of attention. In the past book translation, we gave out our real names or real nick-names, however the translator wanted it. We had about 4-5 chapters churned out before we realized that we were in big troubles. I remember one night I received an email to my personal mailbox at 10 PM from a journalist asking something along the lines of "Do you know you're doing something illegal?" I was scared shitless and _fucking deleted everything_ , thinking this is it - this is the end, and went to bed, not responding to the journalist. Then at 5 AM, not being able to sleep, I checked email again and the same reporter sent another email...

"I see that you deleted everything. This is totally not my intention. I won't rat you out. If possible, please let me know if we can do a secret interview. You might think that I am being dishonest but please trust me this time, I want you to continue what you are doing. I hope to see the new chapter coming out tomorrow."

I immediately removed all real names and asked everyone on the team to choose a nickname for themselves. I actually gave out my home address to the reporter and he turned out to be a hipster-looking student studying journalism writing part-time for a newspaper. We became good friends after that. Besides the interview, the translation at that time was so controversial that it sparked the discussion whether it is "right" or "wrong" to do on many online forums. I had google analytics at the time so I knew who was linking to the website. I registered a nickname just to talk my side of the story in one of them. It turned out that the admin of the forum was someone who studied in Princeton and three years later, when I dropped out of college, disheartened by what I saw and discouraged by what happened, he asked me to go study abroad. I would otherwise have never dreamt of doing that. Another online friend who is 40+ at that time asked me to work for him in the gap year, appointed me to his "vice- president" role of his company. The rest is just history. Thanks to the event and all that came after it, I knew probably 50% of all online friends that I admire and probably won't ever know otherwise.

By the way, when book 7 came out (when I was having my "gap year"), I decided not to do it anymore. It was too much to handle. Someone else I knew did it, though.

<comment><USER21> > At that time Vietnam has just signed the Bern copyright convention, and my > indie translation was the center of attention. In the past book translation, > we gave out our real names or real nick-names, however the translator wanted > it. We had about 4-5 chapters churned out before we realized that we were in > big troubles. I remember one night I received an email to my personal > mailbox at 10 PM from a journalist asking something along the lines of "Do > you know you're doing something illegal?"

What illegal thing were you doing? If Terry Brooks can translate Tolkien from English to English without running afoul of copyright, I don't see what copyright would have to say about translating from English to Vietnamese. You're certainly not infringing on the author's original wording.

<comment><USER22> > What illegal thing were you doing?

Unauthorized use of a copyrighted work. Translations are included under the category of derivative works, and those have a requirement of lawfulness. They have to be somehow licensed or authorized from the copyright holder of the work they derive from.

The Shannara books were unoriginal, but not to a degree that they'd be considered derivative works.

<comment><USER21> > The Shannara books were unoriginal, but not to a degree that they'd be > considered derivative works.

First, as far as I knew only the first book was unoriginal. But I'm certainly willing to believe others are unoriginal too.

Second, when nobody can read a book without noticing "hey, this is exactly the same story as this other book, but with different names", what's left that both

(1) distinguishes it as "not a derivative work", and

(2) doesn't also automatically apply to any translation into a foreign language?

I have seen it said many times that copyright will not protect ideas, only the particular form they have taken. Without a pretty gigantic loophole, those terms would provide absolute protection to a translation, which necessarily cannot use _any_ wording from the original.

<comment><USER22> > First, as far as I knew only the first book was unoriginal.

Maybe. It's been a long time since I read the series. I remember getting to the third or fourth and realizing that the plots of later books also seemed to crib off the earlier ones.

(1) The story isn't exactly the same, just noticeably similar. The presentation is also significantly different, with a different premise for the setting and such.

(2) Copyright laws (Berne convention and US copyright law) specifically note translations as being afforded copyright separate from the original work, but falling under the "exclusive rights of authorization" that govern the original work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Great read that brings back some good memories.

As an avid FF fan, I never quite understood why SquareSoft decided to not bring over some of their games to the US market. If anyone happens to know the reason(s) - please share!

<comment><USER24> For _Seiken Densetsu 3_ , Wikipedia links to an article that stated: "...the game's North American release had been canceled by Square's American branch due to programming bugs that they deemed impossible to fix in a timely manner."

For _Final Fantasy II_ : "the long development time, the age of the original Japanese game and the arrival of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System [...] led Square Soft to cancel work on the Final Fantasy II localization in favor of the recently released Final Fantasy IV"

Similarly for _Final Fantasy III_ : "...Square was focused on developing for Nintendo's new console."

<comment><USER25> On SD3, I read that the "bugs" are mostly because English text took up more space than Japanese. From an article by Jermey Parish [1]:

 _" Seiken Densetsu 3 was among the first games to receive a fan translation, and Neil Corlett's localization crew was fairly open about the difficulty of that process. SD3 was a huge game on a cramped cartridge, and the Japanese version -- already benefiting from the density of kanji text -- employed a custom compression system that would have made it practically impossible for a localized version of the game to fit within the confines of the ROM without the removal of massive chunks of content. The simple fact is that SD3 was likely never intended for localization, because the process would have been impossible."_

[1] [http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Games/G637-Sec...](http://www.gamespite.net/toastywiki/index.php/Games/G637-SecretOfEvermore)

<comment><USER9> Yeah i recall various ROM patches coming complete with special fonts so they could fit the english text into the boxes etc of the original game ui without having to hack in extra pages of scrolling or similar. Kanji allows for some very info-dense UIs.

<comment><USER26> The same thing applied to Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2): the original translation had to drastically simplify/cut details from the English translation to fit into the dialogue boxes, which used a large fixed-pitch English font. There's a ROM patch ("Variable Width Font edition") that changes the dialogue font to variable-width, and uses the additional space to improve quite a bit of the dialogue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I learned how to program in the Rom Hacking scene and was involved with a team that released 4 patches for games.

The amount of dedication and hours our team put in was incredible. I think I managed around 30-40 hours with high-school.

Also, a lot of the reasons some games never made it stateside or came way late was often financial or political. The US versions of these companies often ran slightly independent from the Japanese game studios and the RPG adoption was not huge in the early console days here yet.

</comment><comment><USER28> I love stories like this - right from Sneferu in ancient Egypt to a driven high-schooler - drive leads people to great things. And when we see the output we are just left to wonder what fueled it and how we can harness that same drive.

</comment><comment><USER29> title should be "...Square _Enix_ and...". The company "Square" ≠ "Square Enix"

<comment><USER30> No, the article is correct. This was before the merger with Enix, and the company was called "Square", and sometimes used the name "Squaresoft".

<comment><USER29> Thanks

<comment><USER31> Squaresoft was the american subsidiary. The name didn't came out of nowhere

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> reading about how all these guys were meeting up in IRC's just to hang out makes me miss the old web. Anyone know any welcoming IRCs?

</comment><comment><USER33> I hope this observation doesn't come across as bigoted or insensitive in any way, but I find it interesting how common transgender people (like the star of this article) are in the emulator/rom dev community. I can think of four or five other very prominent examples just off the top of my head – and it's not a very large community. It's certainly a greater proportion than the general population. Honestly I can think of more trans-women coding emulators than biologically-born women. I just wonder why such an unrelated-seeming correlation occurs.

<comment><USER34> Many online communities historically have been bigoted and misogynist.

If the effect you observe is real, perhaps it's just the reflection of a community that attracted and kept more people over the years because it wasn't (as much) like that?

<comment><USER33> I have no direct experience, but I would be surprised if that were true. Emulator development is the perfect intersection of, like, three different communities (low-level tech, video games, and open source) that are (at least on HN) perceived as extra-unwelcoming to women. I don't see why combining all three would cancel that out.

I would also note that writing an emulator is not something you just stumble into because the people are friendly or whatever. It requires an extremely honed set of quite niche skills. I think it takes something more to become successful at it than just "I guess I'll stick around because everywhere else is even meaner."

<comment><USER35> Is that really the case? I think Silicon Valley is perceived as _specially_ unwelcoming to women, not necessarily every computer subculture out there.

My personal guess is that as a traditionally underground community the ROM/emulator scene was more welcoming to certain groups due to the use of pseudonyms. It's easier to not draw attraction when you don't walk into an office every day and meet people face to face.

<comment><USER9> At this point i find it hard to separate honest problems from SJW shit storms over bike sheds.

That said, the valley's VC fueled death marches, and the resulting bravado and "machismo" probably do not help.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Deutsche Telekom wants to be like Comcast - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/continental-grift-77db392b9e06

<comment><USER2> This is not directly related to the article but it helps to put the code of conduct of the Deutsche Telekom into perspective:

The Deutsche Telekom inherited the copper infrastructure, when the state-owned Deutsche Post AG was split into private corporations in 1989.

Due to this inheritance they are reluctant to build fiber-optical infrastructure. Because they are obligated to allow access to this infrastructure to competitors, they try different ways to put obstacles in competitors path, e.g. by suddenly embracing vectoring which effectivly denies access to competitors.

So the customer cannot benefit from fiber optical tech, has bought the whole infrastructure for DT and now pays for it again.

The competitors - if not denied access to the DT infrastructure - pay fees to use the infrastructure.

So basically the DT has a copper infrastructure which it never paid for, is unwilling to improve and gets money for from many different parties.

Their much advertised IPO worked... for the DT, while most of the private investors still feel the burn. They paid roughly 63 EUR per share which immediately dropped to round about 15 EUR which equals the current share price. There are still 17.000 investors sueing over the assumption that the DT knowingly falsified the IPO information.

</comment><comment><USER3> All companies want to be like Comcast. Comcast's model is rather profitable. Most companies, however, don't think they would ever be able to get away with the kind of stuff Comcast does.

<comment><USER4> Actually, Merkel seems to endorse what Mr Dannenfeldt wants.

> Wir brauchen Veränderungen im Wettbewerbsrecht, weil wir heute einen > fragmentierten Markt haben, weil wahrscheinlich auch der Blickwinkel – Was > ist eine Monopolstellung in Europa? – ein falscher ist. Und wenn wir in > China wenige Telekommunikationsanbieter haben, in den USA wenige, und in > Europa mehr als die Zahl der Mitgliedsstaaten, dann können die nie eine > globale Kraft entfalten und hier muss das erst ansetzen.[0]

What she basically says is this: laws of competition need to change. Since the USA and China have much fewer telcos Europe needs to have fewer as well so that the remaining companies can operate on a scale that is globally competitive.

[0] [https://netzpolitik.org/2015/merkel-stellt-sich-gegen- datens...](https://netzpolitik.org/2015/merkel-stellt-sich-gegen-datenschutz- und-netzneutralitaet/)

<comment><USER5> Ugly, ugly, ugly.

Just to copy anything, because it comes from the US. Monopolies help only one: The monopolist. We already have a de-facto monopoly in Germany.

And, yes, I hate Mrs. Merkel, because she makes anything, the big bosses want! She is our Walker Bush and is the leader of the Lemmings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How does Deutsche Telekom stack up against Comcast on a _per-mile_ cost basis? I.e., what does it cost, on average, to send a bit over the same distance, with the same latency, on each network?

We have to go by a per-mile (or per-km) statistic here because Germany has a vastly higher population density than the US, which means that it has to put or buy far less cable in the ground to build an equivalent telecommunications network in Germany.

Before anyone pours more hate on Comcast, does anyone actually know the answer to this question?

</comment><comment><USER7> After recently moving to Berlin from the states I miss Comcast. Not something I ever thought I would say but it's true. Internet plans are expensive, most if not all the reasonably priced ones have data caps and the support is horrible. To get my internet connected not only do you have to wait months but once an appointment is made it is actually impossible to reschedule or cancel it. This is all anecdotal granted but from others I talked to experiences have been similar with DT.

<comment><USER8> Really? Comcast also has similar caps and customer support is horrible but I pay around US$70/mo for 50Mbit/s downstream compared to something like Kabel Deutschland which seems to offer 100Mbit/s downstream for US$22-44/mo (lower price is promotional for first year).

Also, while I bought my own modem and router to avoid Comcast's additional rental fee, the German company includes it in the cost.

I don't doubt that they also suck in terms of customer service and will take your word for that since I don't have experience with them. Still, unless there is something I'm missing, it would seem that you can get double what I can get for 2/3 or less cost.

(*disclaimer: I only looked into some popular cable internet providers and looked at their site to get a quick overview. If I'm missing some detail that customers would know about, I would not be surprised.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sensationalised title

Granted, Deutsche Telekom is already responsible for a lot of crap German users have to endure (like long waits to have an internet connection)

But I guess since most of their customers would be satisfied of using a disk dial phone and usage is kept low by fines to torrent users and half of Youtube being censored by GEMA they have little incentive to change.

<comment><USER5> > But I guess since most of their customers would be satisfied of using a disk > dial phone and usage is kept low by fines to torrent users and half of > Youtube being censored by GEMA they have little incentive to change.

I see, that you don't know the German internet customers.

Internet usage is also rising in Germany and things like Netflix, cloud and other (legal!) broadband services are also known in "good old Germany".

There are also Germans, that own no disk dial phone any more ...

The commentator "jand" already explained very good, how the Telekom is acting in Germany ...

<comment><USER10> I think that jand was sarcastic ...

<comment><USER5> I think, you mean the OP, not jand. Since jand did describe the situation rather well.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sencha Touch - Mobile App Framework - <AUTHOR> http://www.sencha.com/products/touch/

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty cool little framework, still in beta and viewed the demos on my Android phone. Didn't work as well as I'd hoped, but this is still in beta. =(

</comment><comment><USER2> The demo is amazingly smooth on the iPad.</comment>


I Don't Care - <AUTHOR> https://t37.net/i-don-t-care.html

<comment><USER2> >At some point, I was about to retweet those articles, but something prevented me from doing it....

>I didn't care about them.

Many people don't care about the things they promote, they care about the potential effect of the promotion. Either on themselves, attention, self- promotion, ego, or upon something that they do care about i.e. it might get more attention to a third party. In a sense, even the article was written for a reason.</comment>


Streaming Out the Monolith - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/commit-engineering/streaming-out-the-monolith-21c5e90e464b <comment><AUTHOR> An efficient and effective way to stream data out of a monolithic code base and into a services-based architecture.</comment>


Red Hat and Microsoft Reach Deal Red Hat Available on Microsoft Azure Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-and-red-hat-reach-linux-deal-1446642000 <comment><USER2> ZDNet article, for those who don't have a WSJ sub and don't feel like going to Google:

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-make-red-hat- linux...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-make-red-hat-linux- available-on-azure/)

<comment><USER3> Sometimes also worth checking archive.is, and today we're in luck:

[https://archive.is/ghh2v](https://archive.is/ghh2v)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember when Novell (owned SuSE Linux) and Lindows (another Linux distro) partnered with Microsoft.</comment>


I thought we were hackers. - <AUTHOR> http://www.kpkaiser.com/mindhack/i-thought-we-were-hackers/

<comment><USER2> So, there are two main points made in this essay.

The smaller, more confused point OP makes that actually applies to everybody: Everybody feels like they're not up to par, that they just need X more ($, followers, social proof) and then they'll be happy. I don't really know if we can just change a systemic, individual view like our evolutionary 'inadequacy' (never having enough) so easily, it's so deeply ingrained into our physiology. We've had a lot of people and a few religions/philosophies attempt that.

The more clear point is a better version of one that HN has seen for a few weeks now, that we've gone astray from our roots of playing with things and creating fantastic technologies. Worse, we use our time to make apps that distract people instead of helping them.

I wasn't around, but from what I've been told the 'good old days', when the music was better, kids respected their elders, and in this example, the hackers had heart and never really existed.

However, what OP says about our current world really feels true. I'm in college and it really feels like there's pressure to make something shiny, maybe SoLoMo, maybe Open Graph, but something that in the end isn't profoundly useful. A good example is Dan Shipper, with wheremyfriends.be. It was a little app that shows you where you friends are, geographically. Mashable called him "Future Zuckerberg". I understand that example may be a bit extreme, but really, more and more of my friends are pushed to making things like this.

This is sad. The HN community is likely a contributing factor, because in the aggregate we all like shiny things like yc valuations, spaceX costs and AWS stats. For a group of people who pride themselves on liking "real" things that make a difference, we're quite bad at it.

I don't know. It's intrinsically hard to measure unsexy things like starvation in Africa or access to clean water around the world. Maybe their lack of visibility makes them unsexy. Maybe now we have better tools to do important things, and they're not as visible. Does anyone have an answer to how we might solve this?

</comment><comment><USER3> Spot on. Social media is a nice achievement, but we can do much better as a specie.

Let's build things! Let put humans outside the solar system!

Let's dream big!!

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not a hacker but I think this is relevant to everyone, especially young professional males. Good stuff, dude.

</comment><comment> far-I best blog post I read in a while. It's real and tells it like it is. The process that matters.</comment>


IBM Announces Magic Bullet to Zap All Kinds of Killer Viruses - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3059782/ibm-announces-magic-bullet-to-zap-all-kinds-of-killer-viruses <comment><USER2> I was about to bitch, but then I realized that's biological viruses, not computer ones.</comment>


Can anyone clear Google cookies from Chrome? - <AUTHOR> I notice today it's impossible to clear google cookies.  I had several tabs open, including one to gmail and one to calendar, and I have "Do Not Track" set to "yes".
Then, I clear cookies and close my browser.
Then, I open my browser (it re-loads all my tabs automatically).
As soon as possible, I again clear my cookies.
Finally, when I load the google home page, it still has my account showing in the top corner (my logo, my name, and my email).
My guess is google have some JS which detects cookie loss, and immediately reconstitutes the lost cookies - so all my "clear" requests are being surreptitiously violated...
Does anyone know how to tell chrome to actually get rid of google cookies?  Even the "new tab" window contacts google and sets more cookies every time! <comment><USER3> This is a resault of the Chrome feature called "Account Consistency" that signs you in and out of Chrome itself and Google Services in synchronisation

You can disable the feature under "Identity consistency between browser and cookie jar #enable-account-consistency" chrome://flags/#enable-account- consistency

<comment><AUTHOR> You ROCK! Thanks heaps for pointing out this obscure setting :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> __Shameless plug __\- I 'm actually working on a small tool at the moment to help with this[1] (the repo is a mess as the project is very much under development).

But my new approach to cookies, _especially_ with Google (I use Firefox over Chrome actually), is to just remove them from their physical location - <USER2> sqlite database that browsers put on your computer.

I imagine Google plays all kinds of tricks and games in their browser to prevent their cookies from going away (another reason I stay away from Chrome).

[1] [https://github.com/ralston3/moz_cookies](https://github.com/ralston3/moz_cookies)

<comment><USER5> is messing with sqlite database safe while its opened in the browser? is it even possible? I know for example Chrome locks History database while running.

I was thinking of different approach, an extension implementing firewall shim on top of cookie/localStorage/sessionStorage. Selectively prevent the storage in the first place. "Fun" fact - afaik you cant disable/limit localStorage in Chrome/Blink, you can only bulk disable all forms of data storage including cookies.

<comment><AUTHOR> As we have just found out... "cookies" have evolved exactly the same way that malware has.

Persistence is maintained _without_ writing to disk, using a variety of methods.

Three of those which I now know about include a) all google pages have javascript which polls or gets an event when cookies change, and this script fires to rejuvenate the cookies using an ID stored inside the page HTML. b) some google pages store an ID inside the browser URL, so the next page you visit tells google who you were again via the referrer c) Chrome itself tracks you if you don't switch off that obscure setting mentioned above.

Probably the more-likely method of solving this problem is to _poison_ the cookies, instead of remove them. Google will be tracking billions of devices, so it seems probable that their client side code will not know the difference between a "real" and a "fake" cookie - so long as your code produces cookies that their JS etc thinks is "real", it's not going to trigger the rejuvenation step.

<comment><USER5> This isnt a problem,. you can override default cookie method

        var cookieDesc = Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(Document.prototype, 'cookie') ||
                         Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(HTMLDocument.prototype, 'cookie');
        if (cookieDesc && cookieDesc.configurable) {
            Object.defineProperty(document, 'cookie', {
                get: function () {
                    return cookieDesc.get.call(document);
                },
                set: function (val) {
                    console.log(val);
                    cookieDesc.set.call(document, val);
                }
            });
        }

and filter what gets stored before it touches the Cookie database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> if you need a browser without cookies, use open guest window. It doesn't log cookies to your browser but have in mind that it doesn't save your browsing history.</comment>


Why Seed Investors Don't Like Convertible Notes - <AUTHOR> http://www.cdixon.org/?p=252

<comment><USER3> Convertible notes are great bridge instruments that, in practice (at least in my experience), do not create any particular friction between the bridge investors and the later angels or VCs who fund the qualifying round forcing conversion. VCs typically accept the 20% differential without any problem. A bigger practical problem in my experience are bridge investors who push for an even larger discount. On this point, founders just need to hold a firm line.

The biggest practical problem with these notes from the bridge investor's side is what happens if the startup finds an exit path before a qualified funding round occurs. In the worst case, such investors effectively find themselves in a position where they get only their money back with a little interest - <USER2> all for having taken the largest funding risk of all (not quantitatively but qualitatively, since the early bridge money comes in at the point where the startup is at its most under-developed).

The problem is mitigated by putting in provisions for a so-called "merger premium" - that is, a 2x (or some other multiple) payout in the event of a liquidation that occurs before a qualified funding. This is not a perfect solution, but it helps. I have also seen the opposite problem here, where bridge investors demand a "merger premium" that becomes almost extortionist - this only works, of course, if the startup is utterly despairing for cash (which does happen from time to time).

That said, the utility of such notes is beyond question. The problem of a premature value put on a startup's stock based on an arms-length investment is huge. It messes up option grants to early-stage people. It enhances tax risks for the founders if a valuation is done too closely to the time of the founder grants. And it puts the company in a position where it needs to start doing 409A valuations at a time when money is particularly tight and they can least afford to part with the cash needed to do them. The convertible note eliminates all of these problems with a pretty elegant solution. That is why it has become a staple in the startup world.

Such a note can also be prepared at the cost of a few thousand dollars max in a typical case, which is another plus that gives it large appeal among founders looking for bridge solutions to their funding needs.

<comment><USER4> How embarrassing. One of the best first comments, chock full of _really_ useful information that is difficult to discover on your own, when I finally get the dreaded iPhone smush and downvote it to 0. My apologies, I'm sure you'll have your karma back shortly.

<comment><USER3> No problem. I appreciate the kind words. And thanks for fessing up. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> just wondering about pros and cons of offering founder's stock to early seed investors? I know few incubators/investors asking for the same ....</comment>


Show HN: Send Coal to Congress - <AUTHOR> http://coaltocongress.com

<comment><USER2> Heck, at least half the people on HN won't get why coal was chosen. Perhaps an answer as to "Why coal?" would be appropriate on the home page.

Also, there is no call to action (or it's not clear enough). I clicked through to the cart and it gives me a three-step explanation but no links or buttons that say "Click me to get started". I was on the cart page and, at the bottom, it just says "It appears that your cart is currently empty!" This could be massively improved if you just sit your mom (or someone non technical) down at a computer and watch what they click while trying to accomplish a given tasks (or just exploring).

<comment><USER3> As someone who does not get why coal was chosen, I was hoping you would explain why coal was chosen in lieu of waiting for the website to update.

<comment><USER4> The reference to "The Naughty List" makes it clear why coal was chosen: _Santa Claus has been believed to make a list of children throughout the world, categorizing them according to their behavior ( "naughty" or "nice") and to deliver presents, including toys, and candy to all of the well-behaved children in the world, and sometimes coal to the naughty children, on the single night of Christmas Eve._ [1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus)

<comment><USER3> My first thought was obviously that of Santa Claus, and leaving coal in the stockings of naughty children. However the commentary here and the text on the website lead me to think it was perhaps referring to something more localised to America or its politics.

<comment><USER5> I thought of the Santa Claus connection as well... but it's not Christmas. Not even close. Satire is humor, and with humor, context is important.

If this really is a "you get coal for xmas" joke, then it's going to fall flat for a lot of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FWIW packages sent to member offices get scanned by a mail processing center off site, I'm not sure if they'd actually deliver the coal on to the office or not =P.

<comment><USER7> I looked into that some and it didn't sound like coal was an item that'd get flagged

<comment><USER8> Coal contains things that are considered toxic.

The dust of coal itself can also have adverse health affects if inhaled. You might want to properly shrink wrap the coal. You don't want some poor unpaid intern to get a whiff of coal in their lungs between when they open the package and throw it in the trash. The workers who inspect all packages might not appreciate it as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What does sending coal to a congress member do? Why not donate the money to the candidate you think you should be in congress?

<comment><USER4> > What does sending coal to a congress member do?

Makes money for the person selling the service of sending coal to members of Congress (and, secondarily, for the coal industry.)

> Why not donate the money to the candidate you think you should be in > congress?

Because there is no way for someone to throw up a quick service to make money off of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Please sort the list of states in the filter. Reading each of 50 entries to find my state is suboptimal.

</comment><comment><USER11> This plan crashes and burns at Step 3. Hope you make money though.

</comment><comment><USER12> this is pretty awesome, do you make a profit off of this? how many orders so far?

<comment><USER7> I'll make a small margin if I get I bunch of orders, but haven't had many orders yet. Any improvement suggestions?

<comment><USER13> You should add an option to send coal to the President, as well. I know it is Coal to Congress... but we should give credit where credit is due!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Christmas has come early!

</comment><comment><USER15> But... by buying coal, you're supporting their interests. Much of congress has an incentive to blow up Appalachia.

<comment><USER7> But maybe they'll get so much coal they never wanna see another piece again?! ;)</comment></comment>