Ask HN: anyone leave a high paying job to work at a startup? - <AUTHOR>

And on a similar note, is a chance at a big payout an important factor for anyone going the startup route (founder or employee)?
maybe it's just me, but it seems like it's just taboo to talk about money - everyone says do it because you love it, job descriptions talking about passion this and passion that. not that I disagree with those ideas, I don't - but how do you all look at the financial element?
I make a significant amount of money now (not bragging, just providing some context), so leaving it behind for a startup is a difficult decision. yes, it could be an awesome working environment, and yes, it could be a stepping stone to other opportunities. but given startup success rates and typical equity I would expect as a non-founder, it's a big time loser, at least purely financially.
anyone have similar experiences, whether they decided to go with startups or not? what was your thought process? alternatively, how much would you have to make to stick with a day job, assuming it was at least somewhat stimulating?
(throwaway account since I didn't want to go into my finances with my main account) <comment><USER3> When I was in middle school, I left my usual clique of friends to be in the "Abercrombie & Fitch" clique. Reasoning that being popular would expose me more to cooler people and prettier girls.

When I was in high school going over college, I decided to go to a school based on its prestige over the school I fitted in. Reasoning that a school with a better name would help me get a better job and impress people when I go to dinner parties.

When I was in college, I decided to chase girls that I can't have and break off with girls who I clicked well with. Reasoning that I should get what I can't have and that most people will judge me better with a good-looking girlfriend.

When I'm working, I chose to work at a well-known Wall St. company over a unknown startup. Reasoning that the compensation and the cocktail impression factor would be better this way.

Like a trader, everyday people make choices. Some people choose to play it safe their whole life, stay, work, marry & die in the same town that they were born in. Some people take incredible unwarranted risks, like dedicating their lives to be a professional athlete/musician/actresses despite overwhelming evidences that they don't have the talent for it. Some people take huge risk by letting themselves emotionally vulnerable when they fall in love. Some people follow the most optimized investment plan, go to the right school/major, work at the right company, choose the right partner, put the right contribution into one's 401(k) plan, have the kids and then retire the right time and finally die the right way.

But the market is simpler than life because in the end, everyone's measuring stick is the same, how much money you made/lost. But in something vague as life, everyone has different measuring stick; what's even more frustrating, your own measure stick is constantly changing; what I thought was important two years ago is completely trivial to me now and vice versa for what I thought was trivial.

And there's no use in predicting what you think would be important to you in the future because you most probably end up being completely off; plus, it'll just leave you frustrated to forgo your present moment to work towards a future that you might discover that you won't want anyways. Attribute that to any philosophy or psychology B.S you want (cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, existentialism), all I know is that it has happened and will happen again.

The only certain I'm certain about is the present; I'm not talking about being hedonistic, but to take risks for the present and to leave the present moment without any regrets. Kiss the girl, stay up late to finish coding & take the day off just to take a walk.

<comment><USER4> _what's even more frustrating, your own measure stick is constantly changing; what I thought was important two years ago is completely trivial to me now and vice versa for what I thought was trivial._

Life loves to subject us to the useless positional (numbers) measuring sticks that mean nothing in the long term. Case in point: Someone name (off the top of their head) the ten wealthiest men - in the correct order - back in 1970.

This is why it's so important to develop a set of principles that you want to live by, and let those principles be the compass that guides you through life. You'll never know the path that you'll be taking, but at least you know you're headed in the direction that you want.

These principles I'm referring to are things like love, honesty, integrity, etc. For me, I think the example provided by Jesus in the Bible highlights the best example of human principles I've ever seen, so I try my best to follow those.

I will add though, very easy to talk about this concept, extremely hard to do.

<comment><USER5> _Someone name (off the top of their head) the ten wealthiest men - in the correct order - back in 1970._

Irrelavent. Can anyone name the top 10 wealthiest in the correct order, today? More importantly, why does it matter whether you know or not. What counts is whether they consider to be living the life that makes them feel great. What's wrong with that involving money for some people?

You think money can't bring happiness? Look at the f __*ing smile on my face. Ear to ear, baby.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvICN8DNMpY#t=2m10s>

<comment><USER4> Dude, you completely, totally, utterly missed the point of my comment. Where did I say that money can't bring happiness? Where did I say that wealth is a bad thing?

Let me restate the point of it for you, since it clearly went over your head: In life, it's best to have a personal (internal) measuring stick that keeps you grounded regardless of how you choose to play the "numbers" game...

<comment><USER5> _Life loves to subject us to the useless positional (numbers) measuring sticks that mean nothing in the long term._

It means a lot to me in the long term that I'm living in a nice big house with a nice big garden for my kids to play in, which is also close to a world class city and world class companies. That's going to be very expensive. Therefore money isn't a useless positional measurement stick that means nothing in the long term to me. It's an incredibly important number that if I attain will mean fulfilling a dream and bringing me and my family much happiness. No internal measurement stick is going to make me happy about being forced to bring up my kids in a trailer park in rural Texas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From my answer on Quora ([http://www.quora.com/What-made-you-quit-your- comfortable-sal...](http://www.quora.com/What-made-you-quit-your-comfortable- salaried-job-and-start-a-company))

Jeff Bezos' Regret Minimization Framework:

"...it really was a decision that I had to make for myself, and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called -- which only a nerd would call -- a "regret minimization framework." So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, "Okay, now I'm looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have." I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision. And, I think that's very good. If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, "What will I think at that time?" it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That's the kind of thing that in the short- term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won't regret later."

See: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ>

A big payout is definitely a large factor in jumping ship if you're arrogant enough to believe that you can attain such a thing. If you just want to "work at a startup" without having much of an idea about which startup and no intention of starting one yourself, then frankly in my opinion, jumping ship isn't for you. If you're this concerned about your financial status today, at a company you don't drive the vision for you're going to find it harder to drum up the ambition and drive it takes to get through times where a huge financial payout is not as certain.

</comment><comment><USER7> throwaway account: When I left my job a few months ago, my total income from my employer to that point this year was over 400k. It includes payouts from my last startup I sold, but this would have continued for the next year or so had i stayed.

Since this is a financial article, I'll focus on financial stuff.

Its anecdotal but I think the average financial return for doing a startup is slightly better overall, and probably decently better if you are highly intelligent and skilled overall.

If you are not highly intelligent and skilled overall its possible working at a company is a better deal.

Two questions to consider:

Q1: Long term--what will open up more avenues of opportunity for me?

In general I was not a very good corporate climber. Some ppl are. Some ppl aren't. I am not. I dress casually, speak colloquially and comparatively don't care too much about what other ppl think and don't like 9-5.

Given I already have startup success, it was easy for me to decide startups are financially more lucrative for me.

Why didn't I stay and wait for all my earnings to pay out?

1\. I got most of it already

2\. I'm not getting any younger

3\. I found a great team that I wanted to start a company with.

4\. The remaining cash would not change my life significantly.

Given all of that, I decided I'd rather leave.

Q2: Having been in your position when I was a bit younger and first starting out (relatively high paying job...didn't love it but i wasn't going to shoot myself), I'd ask myself the "bezos/jobs question" : When you are 80 and on your deathbed, your life flashing before you in your last days, will you look back and regret the decision you took to jump ship and do a startup?

Imagine all sorts of realistic worst case scenarios....completely flops, you go bankrupt, waste 3 years of your life, gf leaves, mess up your health for a while...whatever is really bad but realistic.

Does the 80 yr old regret the decision of doing the startup? If so, then thats fine. Don't do it. I think I would have balked if I had a mortgage, kids and no savings.

However, in general people regret things they haven't done more than things that they did.

<comment><USER8> I really enjoyed this answer and would love to know more details, however I can understand why you are leaving out some of the details and posting from a throwaway account. I'm personally most interested in the idea for the new startup and that talent in the team that helped you make the decision to walk from the employer. Is there any way I could ask you a few questions? You can contact me since that is a throwaway account unless you have better things to do. ;-)

<comment><USER7> Well we may end up ditching our idea after some initial customer feedback so the idea itself isn't too important.

The team is definitely the most important. I've been looking for the last year. The advice has been oft repeated but here is my top criteria:

\- Get people who can, at the end of the day, do everything.

\- Get people who are better than you at something or multiple things (for example, coding, sales)

\- Get people who are awesome at as many things as possible.

\- Make sure your values and your expectations are in alignment about the endeavor. If one person expects VC funding and good pay to support a family and the other wants to go into ramen profitable mode it'll be tough.

\- Make sure they are not pansies. Some people who have succeeded all their lives will give up at the first sign of trouble for 'easier pastures'. As best you can, try to find people who have grit and determination.

\- If you're not sure, pass. Its alot cheaper to make the right decision than to have to divorce later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I left a high paying job two weeks ago mid-project to start a start-up. I did it because each day in that cube I cared less and less about money and more and more about freedom. I spent the better part of the past two years making my company over 7.6 million in just six months, and actually much more over the full two years.

I needed to create and to be rewarded for my efforts fully. Everyone I know was against it, wife, family, and friends. Thought I was throwing away something they could only hope for. At the end of the day we live once I'd rather be poor and happy trying something I always wanted than stay in that cube always wondering.

What prompted my move so abruptly was interviewing a guy for a senior position. We asked him what his ideal job would be, and he gave an answer of doing his own business. He excused it as a dream because he has kids, and that's when I realized everyone I worked with had the same reason for not just doing it. That's when it snapped in me.

Week later I put in my notice. No jobs no nets to fall back onto. I actually worked on my own project last week and it was heaven. I have a meeting for a three month contract next week to feed my funds to continue this dream. Brother this has been the best two weeks of my life.

<comment><USER10> That's great to hear. Recently (some months), myself and a friend got past through the same situation than yours. We have a project we were building at night for some other months and then we thought we should be courageous and give it shot and jump into the adventure of leaving you day-job to create a startup. With some dedicated search through our contacts, we have found an investor willing to help us feed our funds too and we have been making real progress towards our company's success. I must say, it has been great to work with my own project and a fellow partner that helps me through ups and downs to create this reality for us. :-) Everything just depends on our own effort and willingness. It's hard at first, but once we'd crossed that path, its invigorating that we can live without 9-5's.. :).. Thanks Hacker News to make us meet so many great people! Best wishes for you all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> OK, the goal is independent wealth: a low risk passive income. The math for this is pretty simple.

Say you are a rock star making $100k/yr. After taxes, in CA, that's ~$60k/yr. If you are single and super-cheap (i.e. celibate), you can live acceptably on about 30k. Thus, you build 30k/yr in capital.

Say you need $3k/mo bare minimum, pre-tax, to retire, and refuse to draw down on capital. At a 5% return you will need $720k. It will take 20+ years to get there, assuming you survive as a corporate cog for that long, which is unlikely, given competition from emerging markets.

Of course, if you ever get married and have a family, this won't work at all. And if Wall St somehow takes 30% of your portfolio one year, you are in serious trouble.

Now, instead, say you quit working for The Man, and build a service priced at $10/mo. You have the tech background already, and work hard to learn the necessary ops, marketing, sales, and other skills. You automate everything. You work from home (saving 1 hr/day commute), have excellent margin, no employees, etc. With a web app, to hit $3k/mo, you probably only need to average 400-500 paying customers.

There are several billion people on the Internet. You just need 500.

Sure, a business producing $3k/mo after expenses is not exactly equal to having $720k in liquid investments. It's much less liquid, requires more of your time, faces competition, etc. But it also has some advantages, such as the potential for very rapid growth.

Most importantly, it scales: you can build more than 1 app. So even though you'll probably fail a lot before success, you're probably still better off.

I wish somebody told me this 10 years ago.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure if you're just naive, but "rock star" programmers make a lot more than $100k/yr, try tripling that.

<comment><USER13> 300K inboulder? Where do you live? 300K is like C-suite salary in most of the country.

<comment><USER14> That's true, but a "rock star" engineer at Google Mountain View earns a base of ~ $150k-$200k. Add on a bonus/stock of $75k-$100k, yeah, upper bounds is $300k. Glassdoor also backs up what I've heard.

<comment><USER13> Options are pretty much worthless till you can execute them. Even then theres only a one time cash-in-hand situation. Believe me I have a ton of options right now and its not helping ;)

<comment><USER14> Are you at Google? If you are, and aren't getting GSUs (fully vested stock units), you're missing out.

<comment><USER13> No and no. I have only had traditional stock options which are essentially funny money that are vested over a period of years. You still have to purchase the stock but after the stock is vested you just get the ability to execute once there is an equity event such as IPO or sale...

<comment><USER14> Yeah. Google offer options and stock units, so are definitely a valuable component of the salary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've turned down very good offers to stay in startup-land. But you're right: given success rates and the upside exposed to non-founders, it's not a great move.

Start something small on the side. Fix your personal finances so you can build up a warchest (it's easy: just live the lifestyle you're considering living as a startup employee). Then, in a couple years, go work for yourself.

</comment><comment><USER16> I didn't leave a high paying job, but I did turn down a high paying job offer from Google. My consideration wasn't "will this make me rich"; rather, it was "can I make enough money in the long term doing this that I won't be dramatically worse off".

I suspect that for most people the calculation comes down to some version of "what's the most interesting work I can do while still having a reasonably comfortable income".

</comment><comment><USER17> I did not leave a high paying job to start my own company but I rejected an offer and didn't collect others before I started my own company directly after finishing my studies.

I have a double Masters in Business Administration and the "traditional" way for students like me is to start as a consultant (McKinsey and the gang), investment banker or whatever. In Switzerland that meant a starting salary of at least six figures but money was not really a factor in my decision it was mostly based on the fact that I wanted to do what I liked.

In the year between my Bachelors and Masters degree I interned 6 months for a Swiss web/technology consulting company and 3 months for Accenture. Both experiences bored me to a degree I had not thought possible. It wasn't that I had no responsibility - which I had - or that the tasks were repetitive - <USER2> were only slightly - but I just wasn't faced with the challenges I was looking for. From quite early on I loved to create my own things and I realized that just was not possible in a corporate environment and I had to do something about it. My first plan - following conventions - was to be a part-time entrepreneur. I wanted to work at one of those strategy consulting companies and have my own thing on the side. When I look back that idea seems crazy but at that time I was convinced I could do both. But in March I talked to a successful Swiss Entrepreneur and he convinced me that this is an all or nothing game. Either I went all-in or I had to fold. I decided to go for it and haven't looked back.

As I said before money wasn't really a factor in this decision and that is for a few reasons:

1\. I have a safety net through my parents. This obviously is a very comfortable situation that not everybody has.

2\. I looked at my potential salary as opportunity costs and decided that it was worth the costs that I could do what I wanted.

3\. If I need to I can still go work for those companies I decided to forgo now or another company. I have an excellent education and I see my entrepreneurial endeavors as an extension on that. Obviously after having been an entrepreneur for several years I probably won't fit into the mindset that Strategy consulting companies look for but there will be plenty of opportunities if need be.

4\. I never had massive amount of money available to me. I always lived comfortably and still do but I was never a big earner and therefore don't have an expensive lifestyle to support. Also at the moment I don't have any responsibilities, no family, no children to support.

On a side note: The consequences of my decision to start my own business have not always been easy. One of the harshest things is that many of my friends now almost can swim in money but once I talk to them about their Job I am convinced to have made the right decision.

</comment><comment><USER18> I left a high-paying job as a senior .NET developer at a company in LA. I was unhappy with the town and the situation I had put myself in, so I planned to take a year off to travel and develop my fledgling startup. I got rid of nearly all of my possessions, put a few boxes of keepsakes in storage, and left with only a small backpack. Now almost three years later, my startup is profitable enough to pay my rent and for the occasional beer, and I'm typing this from a country house in southern Belgium.

Leaving the high-paying job was the best decision I ever made. I make far less money now than I used to, and even less than almost all of my friends; but I work on what I want, when I want, and at my own pace, and I can take as many days off as I want. (Yesterday I spent the entire day exploring Waterloo in the sunshine, because I felt like it. Next week I go to Oktoberfest in Munich).

Basically, I went from rich and dangerously depressed to comparatively poor yet happier and more satisfied with my life. As long as you have enough cash flow to keep a roof over your head and some healthy food on the table, that's all you need.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'll provide a counterpoint. I have a corporate job that pays pretty well and I am very happy with it, to the point that I wouldn't consider leaving it outside of a ludicrous offer. I love managing people and complex projects involving wide variety of variable inputs. I love a global organization. I am enthralled with coming to work everyday and being able to pick any number of opportunities for a) improving people's lives, b) streamlining business process, or c) creating new business opportunities. I'm only one step removed from CIO and I have a boss who encourages me to run my org (currently 60 people) like a startup. I am encouraged to learn about customer development, cutting edge technology, business law (mostly contracts at this point), and all sorts of semi-random business processes. I love the chaos of it all, and I especially love that I am trusted enough to be autonomous. I _feel_ like I'm running my own little company... that just happens to be inside a Fortune 200 global mega-corp.

<comment><USER20> Sounds like you have a great gig, but real entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship (which is what you are) are very different beasts primarily because of risk:reward.

Your risk is lower but so is your upside.

And that is one thing that entrepreneurship/startups offers - the chance at building something and being rewarded big (albeit generally at insanely high risk)

<comment><USER19> Mostly true, but... it depends on personal values. For me, the lower risk rewards me with consistently high quality (and regular) family time. That said, I am granted enough flexibility that if I come up with a saleable product/service idea I am allowed to pursue it with company financing. The odds are extremely low that any idea at all relevant to our operations would end up with a huge payoff, but the odds are much higher that my work will payoff in incremental business wins, and I'm ok with that. I'm not in it for the money [as long as the money is stable and my income has a positive slope].

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I did this, primarily to do work that was interesting and more fulfilling, and it didn't end up working out after a trial period. But I did want to share my experience about the payout question.

So I was making $85K a year as a project manager/developer. I went to work in a contract period for a startup who, if I had gone full time, would have offered around $65K to me as well as much worse benefits.

That would have included a certain number of shares. The founder gave me his expectation as to what would be a low, medium or high exit. Based on that I would have made between a couple thousand dollars and, at most, $100K. Now, I would have to work at the startup for 4 years to fully vest, meaning I would have lost $20K per year in salary. This means even if had a large exit and I made $100K, it would still just be a little over what I had lost in salary.

After a couple of months there, I went to work at another "regular job" and made $100K per year, which means it would have been a loss no matter what. Now I still work making good money and am working on my startup on the side. Since the startup-people were expected to put in significantly more than 40 hours a week anyways, I'm probably just working about the same amount of time and making way more money AND controlling my own destiny with a startup I am personally passionate about.

</comment><comment><USER22> Keep in mind that however much people talk about startups as a shared mission or a calling, it's also about the money. Try asking for a meaningful chunk of equity if you want proof. The goal of every startup is to reach an exit, which is an acquisition 99% of the time. Once the retention agreements expire a year or two later, the newly-enriched founders will be gone while the employees will watch the acquirer systematically dismantle the company. Or they'll be laid off.

This is a business; don't get too romantic about it.

</comment><comment><USER23> I felt seriously underchallenged at my day job, even though I was making six figs. It was quite a difficult decision, given the fact that you hear horror stories about people not able to find jobs in the current economy. However, what it came down to, for me, was I was just wasting my time at my day job, and after awhile I realized that time and my sanity was my most precious commodity.

You say there are a lot of risks associated with a startup. As part of my decision process, I realized I had to consider the long-term risk of being unfulfilled at your job, not developing your skills and talents the way you expect. This is a bigger risk IMO.

</comment><comment><USER20> I left a well-paying gig but left knowing 3 key things:

1\. Had a solid financial cushion via savings to really give myself enough runway to do the startup thing sincerely and whole-heartedly

2\. Knew that if even things blow up, I'd always be employable

3\. Very few folks become really wealthy working for someone else

The upside monetarily is a motivator, but the bigger thing I've realized after jumping to startup-ville is that my worst day in my startup is honestly better than my best day in corporate America. There are immense non-monetary benefits (and a whole lot more stress as well)

</comment><comment><USER24> I left a great well paying job at TripAdvisor for a startup. It was definitely a hard decision and I don't know which way it would have gone had I not gotten into YC.

Had my job offered to double my salary or something rediculous like that I probably still would have left, but coming from a middle-class family where having a high paying job was a major motivator (for the stability, not the luxury), it would have been a very painful thing to do.

</comment><comment><USER25> This just boils down to "what are you looking for in life?"

18 months ago I was at a "high paying job" by most standards. I worked 45 hours a week, had great coworkers, and even generally enjoyed my work.

I left because a regular job gets in the way doing other things that are important to me: enjoying the sun in the middle of the day, not working on tuesday if i don't feel like it, traveling for 3 weeks at a time, etc.

Being incredibly rich or owning shiny toys isn't nearly as important to me as scheduling freedom (and hopefully eventually location independence), so it wasn't for me.

Sure, it'd be great if I somehow had a big payout for doing what I'm doing now, but its not even in the top 5 factors for why I chose to pursue "the startup route".

No amount of encouragement or advice from others who have left their jobs will help you decide if its the right choice for you. You have to dig deep, figure out what you ACTUALLY want, then you can decide if leaving the day job is right for you.

<comment><USER26> Next time, ask for vacation days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> High paying is relative but after doing the calculations of joining a startup with ≈15 employees the possible upside was really low when compared to benefits such as stock options, employee stock purchase programs and 401k matching.

I realized the the upside really exists for the founders...so that's what I'm doing.

</comment><comment><USER28> Jeff Bezos is a great example of someone who had a high-paying job, but quit to go create a startup (Amazon.com).

"...and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called -- which only a nerd would call -- a "regret minimization framework." So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, "Okay, now I'm looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have." I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this..."

\- quoted from <http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/bez0int-3>

<comment><USER29> Terrible example, definitely an outlier, nothing to base your career on.

<comment><USER28> It only takes one person to prove that something is possible.

Your comment also implies that people should only base their career decisions on what non-outlier (average) people have done. That sounds like a recipe for mediocrity.

"A reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> You probably won't get the same pay to work at a startup as you would get at a bigger company. However, I currently work at a startup and I wouldn't consider myself destitute. Just because you're working at a startup doesn't mean you'll have a low standard of living.

If salary is important to you, I'd recommend a later stage startup. It will likely be the happy median between an early stage startup and BigCo.

<comment><USER31> That can be the worst of both worlds though... it's late enough stage that your equity isn't really worth much even if the company has a relatively successful exit but still less salary because 'it's not a BigCa'.

You'd be working mainly because a) it isn't a BigCo and b) the startup culture is still apparent.

Sadly both of those things are only going to get less and less true as time goes on if the company is successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> No. A startup is very risky. Being asked to take a pay cut means, really, that you are investing cash (annually!) into the company (lost earnings) with normally no compensation. Sure you get a stock option etc, but is it calculated on lost earnings? Is it increased over time to account for this loss? No, probably its commeasurate with others etc.

</comment><comment><USER32> speaks, are you trying to find a rationalization to stick with what you're doing?

the whole 'fun' thing has two aspects.

There's the practicality aspect i.e. business in general and startups in particular are painfully difficult and you can't really win if you don't like (or ideally love) what you jump in to.

If you can work only 8 hrs a day but your opponent loves his work and words 14 hours a day you're screwed.

There's also the reality aspect. NO ONE ever does a start-up without motivations like money and pleasure and importance.

If your prime modality is making money and comfort then a start-up isn't right for you at all.

Also, all your reasons for wanting to do a start-up are meaningless. stepping stone to other opportunities?

if you're taking such a big risk fucking do something that is the ultimate opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER33> I did about two years ago.

I took a 50% paycut to work at a company that was "re-inventing" itself and starting up a technology organization. I switched jobs, because my current job at the time was moving from building new stuff to maintaining old stuff, and the new job was all about building from the ground up and learning new skills.

I loved the new job, but then due to severe fiscal mismanagement multiple rounds of layoffs came about and the remaining people got their salaries cut by 20%. I went from cashflow positive to cashflow negative. With a mortgage to pay, I went back to a job with a high salary (and more boring actual work).

Without the salary cuts, I would still be at the job. Too bad, I really liked it. However, the family's well being comes first.

</comment><comment><USER34> Yes, and the high-paying job I left was at a big company that acquired my previous startup.

Post-acquisition, the salary was good, the bonuses amazing, but the company was dumb as a bag of hammers, and the job became soul-crushing. Dilbert bosses, communication by powerpoint, pointless projects. It got to a point where I just had to get back to a startup. All but one of the really early employees left for similar reasons, and also to join startups again.

That said, I'm not sure I'd make quite the same decision if I couldn't get in very early to a startup that I thought had a really good chance of succeeding.

</comment><comment><USER35> My suggestion:

if (there is a very promising good startup offer): take it else: work on your side project until it takes off as a real startup

</comment><comment><USER36> I wouldn't call my previous job "high paying," but it had a good enough salary. I could've stayed for years and save enough to live a good middle class life.

I've since left and joined a startup, I'm making slightly less and with less benefits but I'm definitely having more fun and learning 10x as much working in a small very early stage startup versus a corporate 100+ year old company.

</comment><comment><USER37> I did - and this is in India, where "high" isn't really all that high to begin with.

My thought process was pretty simple: at the time, I was more or less independent, and living /very/ frugally, which made the decision easy. I do know this: if my financial needs were different, I wouldn't have moved.

<comment><USER38> Hey,

I am also in India. I am interested to know more about your story.

<comment><USER37> Well, there's not much to say, really: I finished college, joined a dull-ish corporate job (that nonetheless taught me more than I wanted about politics, including the fact that I suck at it), and then joined a startup.

This is the kind of startup that doesn't figure all that much on HN, since it's in a rather specialized niche of a specialized industry to begin with. I'm not a founder, but one of the early employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> You may want to read this, written by an Indian so more in lacs and rupees than in dollars and millions. But you would get the point. <http://www.pluggd.in/why-work-for-a-startup-297/>

</comment><comment><USER40> I turned down a good offer from Lehman Brothers front office to continue working on and launch my first startup. That startup flamed out within 3 months of launch, but I have never for even one second regretted that decision.

</comment><comment><USER41> yep, i did. i found out that you go from $ to 0. And it's very hard to make the first .01 cent. But you will learn a lot, so take it as having fun for a year and learning more than you learned in Univ. and you will be ok.

Actually I wish our profession wasn't just 0 or big chance payout but had some in between too.

<comment><USER42> >Actually I wish our profession wasn't just 0 or big chance payout but had some in between too.

It's not. I mean, if you don't take on investors or debit, it's pretty easy to setup a sub-minimum wage business for yourself. I've set up more of those than I care to remember.

Now, getting yourself up to ramen profitable from that is a little more work, (I can live on $15/hr, but not on $5/hr) and getting yourself to opportunity cost profitable is a lot more work. But if you are bootstrapping, there is a whole continuum between zero and 'big payout'

<comment><USER43> I havent even taken up a job yet. But I envy Isc for the satisfaction he gets out of running Prgmr. Wow wondering how it feels to be like a hero running the most affordable vps services and getting all those thanks for supporting people at such low prices.

P.S: he also wrote a book on Xen which is in my ToRead list.

<comment><USER42> thank you for your kind words. Prgmr.com is, right now, somewhere between ramen profitable and opportunity cost profitable. My net worth, if my understanding of standard industry prices, is going up significantly faster than if I were to work a regular job, spend what I'm spending, and save the rest, but I'm still living on 1/4th to 1/3rd what I'd make as a SysAdmin elsewhere, so I feel like I'm on the right path, but I haven't arrived yet.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


JavaScript Developers: The New Kings of Software - <AUTHOR> http://thefullstack.xyz/javascript-developers/ <comment><USER2> _" npm is the bigger than any other package manager of any language."_

that isn't necessarily good, cf: _" Kill Your Dependencies"_ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11065769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11065769)

<comment><USER3> how many of those npm packages exist because a js developer didn't want to use/know about an existing shell command so s/he created a node shell script?

And how many are tiny little packages that provide a single piece of functionality that other languages either include in the standard library or bundle up with related functions?

I laugh and cry every time someone says npm is a good package manager.

I recently had to help a client debug why their angular(I think?) front end wasn't working in safari or Firefox. Turns out they were (via various packages) requiring 9 different copies of a package that just handles parsing query strings, and at v6.0 it went to let/const syntax and broke browsers.

That package was created 18 months ago (July 2014) and is already at 6.x.

I don't do js dev these days but if I did, npm would be the last resort for me.

<comment><USER4> Could you clarify which parts of your anecdote can be attributed to `npm` in a way that's at all unique to `npm`? This story sounds like it amounts to "I saw a bad piece of software" and "People put modules I don't like on NPM".

<comment><USER3> It amounts to "npm is a pig of a dependency manager and the statistics about how many packages it has are not realistic because JavaScript developers a) insist on recreating every single tool as a node script; and b) distribute the tiniest pieces of functionality via seperate packages where more sane packaging systems/communities tend to group things together logically.

<comment><USER4> Is it not a testament to how easy NPM has made it, that it is flooded with beginners? Is that not the fate of any sufficiently popular package manager? Your disdain seems to be more about how much you dislike the javascript community than how much you dislike the tool that is NPM.

<comment><USER3> "Easy" should not be the primary goal of a package manager.

Someone releasing (I say releasing and not maintaining, because I'm certain a good number of the npm packages available are effectively unmaintained) a package should be sufficiently aware of both the language and the package manager itself to understand how they work.

In my earlier tale I mentioned a package that was included 9 times. I _tried_ to dig into finding why the various dependencies have such old versions, but I gave up in sake of my own sanity when I discovered this scenario:

The project requires 47 packages at the top level, 33 of which have exact version match requirements.

One of the dependencies is `grunt-contrib-watch` with an exact version requirement of 0.6.1.

That package has a dependency on `tiny-lr-fork` with yet another exact version requirement of 0.0.5. But it gets worse, because `tiny-lr-fork` (as the name suggests) is a fork of an older package called `tiny-lr` which was unmaintained for a while. But now, `tiny-lr` is _more_ up-to-date than the fork is (and more confusingly, the `fork` npmjs page points to the upstream github repo, NOT the fork repo).

And that is where we find our dependency on `qs` with a "approximate" (as npm calls it) version requirement of ~0.5.2

I actually dug a little further with a one-liner I found to identify (and count) the duplicated dependencies from the tree: 120 unique packages, the highest dupe count is 24. TWENTY FOUR copies of the same module, again ranging from 0.X releases to 3.x.

The node_modules directory is 200MB. The entire back-end application that actually makes the fucking thing work, is 1.1MB.

Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME!?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How was your move into a BA/RE or agile position from dev? - <AUTHOR> Is there someone here with a strong dev background who switched into a role as Business Analyst, Requirements Engineer, Agile Coach or Scrum Master?
I seem to be getting more and more frustrated with programming & implementing software. The growing move towards devops doesn't make any happier. When in the past I could focus on what I thought I like (programming), now I am unable to stay clear of operations (which I hate).
By having some sneaky job interviews, I got offered great opportunities switching into any of those roles, without making less money (surprsingly!).
Is there anyone here who took the jump in that direction? How was it? Was it the right choice?
Writing the user-stories instead of implementing them?
Helping teams succeed instead of being a programmer in a team? <comment><USER2> I think it makes sense.

I have frequently seen it that "Product Owners" don't know how to specify anything in enough detail to estimate or plan the work, never mind do it.

Good specifications up front can have a 10x or more impact on a team, see:

[https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201000...](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20100036670.pdf)</comment>


How Shyp uses GitHub for design collaboration - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/shyp-design/managing-style-guides-at-shyp-c217116c8126#.pn3dpfi82 <comment><USER2> How much of your design assets are diffable? Are the assets in the same repository as the code?

<comment><USER3> Zero.

> There also isn't a clear way to see a "diff" of the visual changes being > made on Github which makes the feedback a bit more difficult — we have to > download the file and manually compare with the previous version.

This also ignores the fact that design assets are massive regardless, more than what git is intended to be used for in the first place.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, this was my concern as well. The clone performance on continuous integration serves probably degrades.</comment></comment></comment>


Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction - <AUTHOR> http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php

<comment><USER2> Absolutely amazing stuff. Makes me wonder if we're doing something wrong with education in the 'modern' western world.</comment>


Armdroid - <AUTHOR> http://www.fernstrategy.com/2010/10/16/armdroid/

<comment><USER2> I remember as a student, years ago, writing a little hobby OS for my PC and thinking of the assembly language "and this is the most popular architecture? Ye gods." It was just so arcane compared to the MIPS we'd been taught in class. I don't know if the situation has improved over the (10 or so) years, but I think that student-me would be pleased at the emergence of a common platform with a RISC architecture.

Sent from my Dell Streak. Hey young Jimmy! Dell have made a RISC box. It's a bit smaller than that Ultra 1 though...

</comment><comment><USER3> Android can also run just fine on MIPS processors, and there are MIPS options available which are competitive with the offerings from ARM. And of course it has been ported to Intel's Atom processor.

Windows only really runs on x86 these days, but the Linux-based Android OS is not so encumbered.

<comment><USER4> Is the MIPS architecture still seeing continuing development the way ARM is? After Sony stopped using them with the PS3, I stopped paying attention and had begun to write them off.

<comment><USER5> The chinese processor Loongson [1] uses the MIPS instruction set and it is used in some netbooks (Stallman is using one of those netbooks as his main computer)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _...and Google's growing suite of cloud services (e.g., Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Android Market)_

...that run on commodity hardware running Intel chips.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think the most special achievement of Android is that it created a very successful mobile application environment on top of the Linux kernel. This was missing and the state of software on ARM-Linux was a set of crippled versions of desktop linux software retrofitted for embedded. Now its all different.

As a separate note, anyone interested in kernel-level work on ARM and Android feel free to contact me. (contact on profile) We do some interesting work on ARM Linux kernel and need skilled people.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would suspect it won't take long until Microsoft simply _has to have_ a Windows ARM build that is also tuned and/or redesigned to consume as little electricity as possible.

Considering the _backwarts_ -compatible bloat that Windows is this might even turn out to be a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> "As of September 2010, the Windows OS controlled 91% of the PC market (Net Applications, 2010), while Intel microprocessors controlled just over 80% (IDC, 2010)."

Not sure how Windows can control 91%, but Intel only 80%, since Windows only runs on Intel. I would think, in the PC market, Intel would have almost 100% now, since Mac OS and Linux run on Intel. Not sure what other OS he is thinking about.

Anyway, this is great to see, and why Microsoft is so worried. It is possible the reason they let Windows Mobile OS stagnate in the first place, fear of Mobile market becoming to popular.

<comment><USER10> AMD has a decent share of the current 'Wintel' market. In the recent past IDT, cyrix and transmeta also dabbled in x86 processors.</comment></comment>


Is Google blocking the discovery of information due to political correctness? - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/aI2xQ6G <comment><USER2> Was pretty skeptical until today they censored pro democracy related searches in Hong Kong [0].

First screenshot shows simply "yellow" \- a synonym for pro-democracy stance, nothing is suggested.

Second shows "blue" \- a synonym for pro-China stance, first suggestion is "blue economic circle", meaning a pro-China economy.

I'm in Hong Kong so I'm not sure if it's a region specific thing, but it's real at least right before I post this.

[0] - [https://imgur.com/a/Zf4piAb](https://imgur.com/a/Zf4piAb)

<comment><USER3> Wow, google has jumped the f __*ing shark on that. Another reason to use www.startpage.com and duck.com I suppose

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a very simple HN share. This title isn't for an insightful blog post like you normally might see. it's just an image screenshot comparison of five search engines for a given query, whose search results say it all.

I really hope this doesn't blow up in my face. Here we go.

I'm an LGBTQ man, and politically on the left. I suddenly wanted to know whether the not often used word 'lesbianism', in trying to find a noun to grammatically express the sexuality of lesbians, is considered offensive or not. It was a harmless enquiry, just trying to work it out.

To my shock, in response to this query, Google acted like the word didn't exist. It even suggested "lesbian" like I shouldn't have typed the word in that sentence. It absolutely is a word: [https://i.imgur.com/scdLe3W.png](https://i.imgur.com/scdLe3W.png)

The winner in this case? Yandex. They seem to never be afraid to show me what I'm actually looking for, if it is on the Internet.

We need to know about words, and to see them with our own eyes. We need them to be discussed, to even discover and be educated about how other people feel about them in our society. By hiding words, concepts, and information in this censorship-level way, Google only lets ignorance increase in the world.

Is this a case of politically correct censorship gone too far, or just a random blip in Google's vast algorithm and an unfortunate false positive? This is not the only example that I have increasingly experienced recently, which is why I'm sharing this particular one.

I fear it is just one in a string of upcoming experiences where Google will no longer show me real information which, from non-Google sources, I know: 1. exists, 2. is most relevant to the query, and 3. Google used to show me.

The other search engines prove it to be true. The fact that I have to even go to other search engines to confirm it is worrying.

Am I being paranoid? Is it just me? Has anyone else noticed the quality of Google results becoming increasingly worse, and even trending towards 'political' censorship?

This one might be a random mistake or seen as a weak example, but I can give other live examples.

Certain words, concepts, and information exist in the world, and Google is starting to have a say of what people can find, _even if they 're searching for it_. People want to learn more about certain things, but Google is no longer showing it to them.

This is chilling. This is a horrifying abuse of power. I don't care that it's capitalism, because the issue is larger than that. The problem and the effect is societal.

Facebook is equally guilty in their own domain of influence - in shaping and censoring culture on a global scale that is unprecedented in human history.

Google's main abuse: knowledge.

Facebook's main abuse: culture. (and also knowledge.)

To me, very concerning.

<comment><USER4> To me, Google's result seems to more precisely answer the question you've asked, as I understand it.

The others mostly give a definition of lesbianism which is fine but may or may not tell you whether it's offensive in context. Whereas the Google top result is to a page about specifically avoiding offensive bias, and and the second is generally about homosexual terminology.

If you wanted the definition of lesbianism, why not search definition of lesbianism?

Also there's nothing offensive about lesbianism so why would you think Google is censoring it? It just means "being a lesbian".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This submission is a screenshot with unsubstantiated flamebait as title.</comment>


Show HN: Vitally – Analytics Platform for Customer Success/B2B SaaS - <AUTHOR> https://play.vitally.io/?ref=hn <comment><USER2> Hi all! We're a new analytics platform built with Customer Success teams in mind. We help B2B SaaS companies track 1) the product metrics critical to customer retention and 2) the impact their post-sales efforts have on those metrics.

We're currently part of the Techstars NYC batch and just launched a private beta this week. Happy to field any questions or hear any feedback! We're targeting fast-growing B2B SaaS startups, so we thought HN might be a good launch platform :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't seem to load for me :(

Just a blank white screen.

</comment><comment><USER4> This looks really cool, congrats!</comment>


Futuristic Design Concepts We Wish Were Real - <AUTHOR> http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/04/100-amazing-futuristic-design-concepts-w-wish-were-real/

<comment><USER2> I can sum up almost all 100 for you: solutions in search of problems. Cool to look at, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not the cloud sofa!

I repeat: There is more to designing than dreaming.

1) There is no stable arrangement of magnets to support a static object. Physicists prove these sorts of things to show off their stuff.

2) When that top part flips over and the magnets attract, and then get _much_ closer together the occupant is going to end up as a red stripe around the perimeter of the room.

Unrelated blabbering: Wheels without spokes I can live with, but wheels with three or so spokes look quite dangerous. The nice things about spokes is one comes along to whack your body part out of the opening before you get so far in that physics takes the easy way out and chops off the body part instead.

</comment><comment><USER4> Some very cool motorcycles. Otherwise mostly endless variations of the laptop, iPhone, and iPod.

OK, I did think the transparent toaster was pretty cool, as well as a few others.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just how practical are the many variations of spoke-less wheels shown in various bicycle and motorcycle designs? They look great. Do they work well in practice?

<comment><USER6> Perhaps spokeless bicycles are safer, meaning that there is nothing that could get caught in there and get it stuck. I'm sure it's also light with fewer parts and no messy chain (but you get messy gears instead).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do the ultra rich maintain homes when they are not occupying them? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Surprizingly, most don't. You need to run the water, maintain a standard temperature in the house throughout the year, flush regularly, use all the appliances, etc. You can't just have your gardner coming once a week, your cleaning lady twice a month, you need someone to live in your house to make sure it works properly. It's like an engine in a car or a motorcycle, it needs to run to stay healthy, otherwise it needs to be conditioned for storage purposes.

So, to answer your question, family members, friends, etc are what ultra rich people use in order to maintain their real estate portfolio. Not only personnel. Personnel is useful for an occupied house only.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure about Europeans or Americans, but here in Latin America they have butlers, "ama de llaves" (best translation I can find is housekeeper) or groundskeepers living 24/7 at the property (not in the house proper, usually on a separate house).

</comment><comment><USER4> The same way they maintain them when they _are_ occupying them: they have staffs of workers to clean, maintain the grounds, provide security, etc.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, most ultra rich people have a business and maintain it like a business. Everything is automated without them being around. They might even have a person dedicated to managing the hiring and firing security guards, pool boys, maids, lawn mowers, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The book Empty Mansions has an extreme account of this.</comment>


AI Is About To Take The Ship's Helm Away From Humans - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremybogaisky/2019/01/14/ai-is-about-to-take-the-ships-helm-away-from-humans/ <comment><USER2> Several issues with this idea:

1) On the open ocean, what is there to even avoid? In the harbor, you often don't have a choice; the harbor master is going to _require_ you to pick up a harbor pilot who is rated and certified for the harbor you'll be in and they must be in command of the ships steering and propulsion in order for your ship to even enter their waters.

2) Only 20% of the global merchant fleet is dedicated to shipping. The two other major types of ships, tugs and passenger ships make up most of the rest and neither of these are exactly suited to this technology.

3) Over 50% of the ships in use right now are more than 15 years old. Yea, a new one is _only_ $200 million, but that washes over the real economic picture of ship ownership and maintenance and the likely market for this product.

4) Most ships are not giant Maersk style super-container ships, so staffing reductions aren't likely to be a huge win here, if at all. Ships already run with the _minimum_ crew necessary, usually determined by already established maritime laws and agreements.

5) Microphones and pictures are nice, but ships have actual radar; why not just use that and skip all the fancy "sensor fusion" and off-brand retrofitting?

<comment><USER3> There are some ships, small sailing ships for example, that do not get picked up by radar. They often need to get radar reflectors fitted to be visible. You certainly wouldn't want to be on a sailing vessel while an automated cargo ship barrels down on you. Sailing ships get right of way to powered ships as well so detecting the difference between vessels is important and the automation would need to take that into account too. Although I am not sure how it actually plays out in practice. I somehow doubt a tanker is giving way to a cruising sail vessel once it is underway.

<comment><USER4> Might makes right.

Sailing vessels only get right of way with small vessels. You can't sail your little 20 ft trailer sailer in front of a container ship and expect them to give way.

I can't remember what the actual rule is, but I think it's somewhere around the 250 t mark that sailing boats no longer have right of way.

<comment><USER5> The exceptions have nothing to do with tonnage and everything to do with maneuverability, either due to the nature of work or the need to stay in a channel to prevent running aground.

Of course you can't expect a tanker to break/turn on a dime, but there's nothing in the rules about tonnage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > In the near term, it's more likely that the helm will be controlled by an > autonomous system or a remote human operator while a smaller crew takes care > of the vessel.

Hopefully the helm and navigation controls are governed by a secure, air- gapped connection; otherwise someone could hijack the signal and commandeer the ship remotely, and that would be the first case of _actual_ internet piracy.

<comment><USER7> There has been experiments with GPS successful Spoofing attacks against ships, so even if it is airgapped, it's not 100% safe.

[https://insidegnss.com/gps-spoofing-experiment-knocks- ship-o...](https://insidegnss.com/gps-spoofing-experiment-knocks-ship-off- course/)

<comment><USER6> Sure, but then they wouldn't be _internet_ pirates, they would just be electronic pirates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "However, autonomy will play out very differently on the water than on land, and in many cases it won't take humans off the ship—or entirely away from the controls. ...

In the near term, it's more likely that the helm will be controlled by an autonomous system or a remote human operator while a smaller crew takes care of the vessel."

Lots of different things rattling around in the ol' promise of "autonomy."

<comment><USER9> I don't foresee this changing anything for ships. All modern vessels, both commercial and for pleasure, have auto pilots and they are used extensively.

The primary job of a captain isn't to drive the vessel, it is to basically be a project manager ensuring that the vessel is running smoothly. This includes everything from crew schedules, maintenance schedules, supplies for the vessel, quality control of procedures, and on and on. The actual piloting is a very small part of what they do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hey, what could go wrong?

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

</comment><comment><USER11> I could see a potential with completely autonomous vessels that could sail for weeks/months on solar/wind power without any human presence. Crew would only board the ship when approaching a harbour, and steer her to the dock.

Solar panels and wind turbines could generate electricity which would be stored in batteries and then used to drive electric motors propelling the ship. Slower than diesel but also cheaper and with less moving parts.

<comment><USER12> > Solar panels and wind turbines could generate electricity which would be > stored in batteries and then used to drive electric motors propelling the > ship.

I wonder what the efficiency of a wind turbine + engine would be compared to a sail.

Ie. if the wind blows so a ship with a sail moves at 20 mph, how fast could the wind turbine + engine move it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can someone explain why there aren't that many autonomous _trains_? And I don't mean SFO airport train and others like it, but a real, full-size train moving people or goods around the country. Seems like every other year a train flies off the rails due to nothing more than negligence of train's engineer. Why not automate this completely? You don't even have to steer.

<comment><USER14> I'm assuming you're talking about the kind of trains pulling 1,000 mile runs as opposed to metro trains.

Train drivers do more than just drive a train. They also have to deal with dropping off and picking up cars from the consist. They also need to monitor track conditions that aren't necessarily easy to pick up from track circuits, such as deep snow ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yja2VmZOfdA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yja2VmZOfdA) shows you how some trains deal with snow).

In general, the costs of upgrading track to be able to support autonomous driving aren't worth the savings you get from eliminating driver. The main counterexception to this is Western Australia, where everything of value is 1,000 miles away from where anybody lives (and is transported by trains to the coasts for export), and so railroads face tremendous costs actually getting their drivers to their trains. Unsurprisingly, the mining companies in Australia who own/run their own railroads have invested heavily in autonomous trains.

<comment><USER15> The mining operations in Western Australia have also invested heavily in autonomous EVERYTHING.

The massive dump-trucks and drill rigs are going autonomous, with anywhere between 10% and 100% (depending on the site) of the heavy vehicles are now driverless.

<comment><USER16> The financial incentive for these mining companies are huge though, as a driver can earn A$120k before even considering the total cost of employment for a remote FIFO site.

Mine site are open cast, mine large tonnage and have long mine lives justifying the large initial investment.

Australian mining operations are also very dry, which helps a lot. Rain introduces a lot of variables.

Large scale automation is particular to the Australian mining industry at this point.

South African deep level gold mines have been working on this for many years with little success, and I think they have mostly given up.

<comment><USER15> The dry conditions help the automated vehicles, but there's special challenges when it DOES actually rain.... everything tends to be underwater, by a lot :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if that's on purpose, but I interpreted the title as metaphorical first, thinking it was another dystopian fantasy about computers taking over the world.

<comment><USER18> I went on a similar, but slightly different path. I thought it was an article not so much about a dystopian fantasy, but about the harsh (and in some ways also dystopian) reality of AI and ML systems not being "debuggable" and understandable by humans like traditional algorithmic systems had been, which effectively means that we can only reason about decisions of such systems to a very limited degree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Remember the movie Hackers when the DiVinci virus capsized those ships?</comment>


Semantic MediaWiki: Toward smarter wikis - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/451456/18a7f87fc3f79843/

<comment><USER2> Related: <http://dbpedia.org/About>

_DBpedia_ is a project aiming to extract structured content from Wikipedia. DBpedia allows users and programs to query relationships and properties associated with Wikipedia resources, including links to other related datasets. This structured information is then made available as a downloadable database. The data is also available on Amazon EC2 instances.</comment>


Show HN: Sync – Realtime partials with Rails - <AUTHOR> http://chrismccord.com/blog/2013/04/21/sync-realtime-rails-partials/ <comment><USER3> Wow this really should become part of core Rails. This is definitely real time done the "rails way". I prefer Rails to anything else I've tried but my ideas increasingly revolve around real-time, so I either settle for a framework I like less or Rails + jQuery nonsense. This will be my new go to.

</comment><comment><USER4> I really like this.

The only thing that kinda threw me off a bit was putting the partials in the /views/sync/resource/ folder. Feels a bit non-RESTy.

I imagine, for a sufficiently complex app that sync folder will become a bit messy - although, I guess it's like the 'layout' folder.

That's just me being nitpicky though.

This is awesome.

As others pointed out, this would be perfect if it weren't for the fact that you have to use additional resources to use it properly. i.e. another dyno for Faye or use Pusher.

Thanks for this though.

Edit: One thing I would love to know is how this interacts with caching though. Russian Doll Caching specifically. Every time an attributed is update, does it bust the entire cache and have to reload that entire fragment - <USER2> opposed to just the partial?

<comment><AUTHOR> The partials each get separated into their own folder based on their model name. So it's not a grab-bag of random partials – it's the same folder structure an application would use for its regular views, but instead with a parent sync folder. ie, if a views/users/ directory contained "_profile.html.erb", you would move the sync partial to views/sync/users/. Having to run an additional process is the best case scenario right now unless we can get websockets into Rails/Ruby land, but I'm a believer that this approach is the best solution for current tooling suits the problem quite well. In regards to russian doll caching I'll have to take a look and verify what's going on under the hood, but sync will work fine with fragment caching outside and within a sync'd partial as long as the cache keys properly account for the resource/scope. When a model is updated on the server and `sync_update user` is called, Sync will render every partial to string in the views/sync/users directory, and dispatch a message to listeners on each channel for each partial. So the sync will only re-render what's contained in the sync'd partial. If you have fragment caches within your sync'd partial, they will only bust if their cache key has expired just like a normal render. Hopefully that helps. Thanks for the input/complements

<comment><USER5> Can you provide some details on why the partials have to be namespace'd to the sync directory? My guess is: sync partials can only be "resource" based, and can't be given locals like a regular partial. Therefore, sync-partials are a subset of regular partials, so a different directory makes the distinction very clear.

Just curious what the reason is.

Looks very cool, I will definitely try it out!

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right about part of the reason. One reason the partials are namespaced is indeed to serve as a distinction since at the moment, only the resource can hold the context for the partial. ivars will be visible from both the parent view render and controller sync calls, but likely not reliable since the partials will be rendered from different actions. The main reason they are namespaced is to allow rendering of all partials for the sync'd resource when publishing syncs in the controller. We can just ask the resource to give us all its partials in the views/sync/[resource pluralized] directory and only render those partials that are realtime, versus needlessly rendering all partials (including non-realtime) in the 'normal' resource directory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks neat, but I am curious why you would pick such an overused name for the project. Perhaps call it PartialSync, or something you could google?

<comment><AUTHOR> I struggled with the naming to be honest, but settled on something short and sweet that sounded nice to me. Googling hopefully won't be a problem when coupled with a copule modifiers, ie "sync realtime partials"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks really great. Does anyone have any thoughts on how this could be combined with client friendly templating so that the rendering of the partial could be done client side for updates, but server side for the initial page load?

<comment><USER8> If I understand right, the whole point of Sync is to avoid having to do this.

<comment><USER7> It would simply be a change in the templates that you use and how the changes are communicated to the client. It could still work the same way from the perspective that the changes are pushed to the client and the DOM is automatically replaced. The reason that I ask is that this could offload some of the server side processing to the client and also reduce the amount of data transfered over the wire. The server would be pushing JSON instead of HTML. From the dev's perspective you'd just be using a different templating framework. I wonder how the current implementation would scale, I imagine it would take some serious processing power to get to 100k+ concurrent, active users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks neat. I actually would have made use of this a couple of weeks ago, but I'll keep it in mind if we rewrite that section of the app (as the current solution isn't quite as elegant).

</comment><comment><USER10> Me gusta. Can this potentially replace a client-side MVC framework like backbone.js or ember.js entirely or are there limitations?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sync is an _alternative_ to Ember/Backbone, but not a replacement. If you're trying to replicate desktop software in the browser for instance, a heavy client-side framework is the way to go; however, for certain use cases for web applications with lots of "richness" but not trying to replicate desktop level interactivity, think Basecamp, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, the Sync approach could definitely hold its own against these types of apps. I've greatly enjoyed building Backbone apps, and I look forward to playing with Ember, but not every web application needs to be rendered client-side against a JSON api. Sync also allows you to wire up your own javascript, so you could even use backbone models submitting over JSON and render your realtime views with Sync on the server. I'm excited to see how far we can take this approach.

<comment><USER10> thanks for the info chris, I will be following the project closely. I think I will try and implement it in one of my instagram-API driven web apps as a test.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem. Let me know how it goes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great! This will come in handy for new projects. Unfortunately we had to create the same thing for our existing stuff.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anybody know of anything like this for Django? I'm very much interested in better integration between client-side and server-side code. I'm really not sold on the client-side MVC paradigm, and I think this sounds like an awesome alternative.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is brilliant, looking forward to using this.

Is this in use anywhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just pushed out the official release this weekend and don't have any apps yet running in production. My goal is to have people start building out apps and support any uncovered use cases that crop up. Having said that, there's no reason this can't be run in production and I plan on deploying a couple example apps so people can play around.

<comment><USER14> This looks perfect for a current project with a quite a bit of jQuery and partials. I may just redo using Sync. Do you have any recommendations for using on Heroku? Should I just use Pusher? Also does this work with Rails 4?

<comment><AUTHOR> Faye will gladly run on Heroku with a foreman process, but I think Pusher is a tough choice to beat to get you up and running quickly. Sync does indeed support Rails 4. In fact, the demo app in the screencast is a Rails 4 app :)

<comment><USER15> So either Pusher or Faye are required, and Pusher is a commercial service, whilst Faye requires a dyno to run on Heroku? Have I got that right? TBH I'm not familiar with either Pusher or Faye, so just trying to grok the dependancies for Sync.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's correct. If on Heroku, Faye would run in it's own dyno process, while Pusher is a commercial product. Sync requires a pubsub server to talk to, so either is a must. I suggest prototyping out with the Pusher free plan if you just want to throw something up to experiment with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is awesome! The next time I need functionality similar to what a client- side MVC framework provides, I'll give this a try first.

</comment><comment><USER17> awesome, great way to spike out real time behavior in minutes.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very cool, I like

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow. I'm really impressed. Great work, Chris.

</comment><comment><USER20> OMG this is great - should be a standard part of rails.</comment>


Ask HN: Hacker News Source Code - <AUTHOR>

I've been using Hacker News for a while and what I like the most (other than the people) is the platform.
The system that Hacker News runs on is unique and being dependent on feedback and time, it keeps relevant stories up while they are still "hot".
Is the source code for hacker news out there somewhere? If not, would PG be willing to give it? <comment><USER2> The language is a Lisp dialect called Arc. The language site is here: <http://arclanguage.org/> The source file for HN itself can be read here: <http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc>

<comment><USER3> <http://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc> = 404 not found, lol.</comment></comment>


US military draws up 'do not buy' list for software - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45007337 <comment><USER2> They should really just have an open-source mandate by now.</comment>


Rackspace launches Performance Cloud Servers - <AUTHOR> http://www.rackspace.com/blog/got-the-need-for-speed-meet-performance-cloud-servers/ <comment><USER2> Wouldn't poke them with a 20' long stick.

When we spoke to their rep about data security and access in the UK they made no guarantees about our stuff being secure from meddling by their own staff or external agencies. They literally told us that we'd be better off elsewhere and refused to comment further.

we're in a position where we have UK data protection to consider and shipping data out of the EEA is illegal for us. Obviously this is still a problem if someone takes it.

In the end we ended up with a wholly UK owned DC and company.

<comment><USER3> Where did you end up?

<comment><USER2> [http://www.thebunker.net/](http://www.thebunker.net/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/pricing/](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/pricing/) (scroll down a bit) has the pricing, they start at $0.68/hr for 15GB of ram, 40gb ssd system disk, 150gb ssd data disk and 4 vcpus. Significantly cheaper (however with lower specs) than the cheapest Amazon offering with an SSD ($3.10/hr I believe).

<comment><USER5> That pricing is the "performance 2" group. The "performance 1" group starts at:

$0.04/hr for 1 GB RAM, 20GB SSD system disk, 1 vcpu.

That is about $30/month. More than Digital Ocean but a much cheaper entry point than the prices you listed.

<comment><USER6> OK but not only is Digital Ocean a lot cheaper but so is Linode. Does the Rackspace server have a better CPU, or am I paying for better support supposedly, or what?

<comment><USER5> I haven't tested all the providers heavily enough relative performances or support realities to know and I wasn't contradicting you but the parent post listing incorrect entry pricing for the performance models.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having used rackspace for the past 5 years, I'm happy to see some more performance machines in the cloud.

We have quite a CPU intensive infrastructure so will be benchmarking the new performance servers against themselves to see if it is still cheaper to scale out then scale up.

<comment><USER8> If you have a CPU intensive infrastructure, why in the world are you using or considering cloud servers? Unless these are in use just a fraction of the day?

You can get several times the CPU capacity for around the same price with dedicated servers. And nothing stops you from combining and scaling out with cloud servers to handle peaks.

<comment><USER7> We scale based on load, so rather then having dedicated boxes being unused during quiet times we can scale our infrastructure down and then up when we need to. Going to a hybrid platform maybe in the future

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used Rackspace back in 2000 for my first startup after our existing hosting solution could not take the load.

This was a huge mistake!

Rackspace canceled our contract without warning and without the ability to get our data. Their customer care was extremely rude and completely incompetent. I will never ever host anything again with Rackspace.

Luckily we had external backups and were able to purchase our own hardware and install it in a local Boston data center.

<comment><USER10> I'd seriously hope things have changed in 13 years, there's a pretty big difference between 2 and 15 years experience. You're probably safe to drop the grudge at this point

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> wouldn't touch rackspace with a stick. We tried them for 6 months - particularly because we weren't price sensitive and wanted the "fanatic service" they promised. The service however is terrible bordering on non- existant. Digital Ocean or Linode on the other hand - price + service I'm happy with!

<comment><USER12> Their service was terrible? Maybe you just had some rather unlucky experience. We've been using RackSpace (I'm based in the UK) for almost 2 years now and their service has really been fantastic. To give you one example, I had an almost 2 hour phone call (no charge by the way) trying to track down an issue with our LAMP stack.

<comment><USER13> We've had a horrible experience with Rackspace. Truly awful. We're in the UK, hosting in London (as a backup) with Linode as a primary. The main problem is that Rackspace has no proactive monitoring or support in any way, and their boxes tend to thrash a lot due to misbehaving "noisy neighbours". Their support staff are really poorly trained as well and most of them are new.

I'd be interested in hearing from them if the noisy neighbour problem will still be relevant now that everything is on an SSD, or if it just delays the inevitable.

Regardless, we'll just wait for Linode though - they'll deliver it cheaper and better, with much better support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you're a developer looking for more benchmarks / comparisons - I put [http://developer.rackspace.com/blog/welcome-to- performance-c...](http://developer.rackspace.com/blog/welcome-to-performance- cloud-servers-have-some-benchmarks.html) up this morning. Raw data in github; and I'd love to get more to run.

</comment><comment><USER15> Someone in their design team apparently made a mistake and removed the "next generation" server pricing (non SSD). For reference, those prices are: [https://web.archive.org/web/20130627213956/https://www.racks...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130627213956/https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/pricing/)

These "next gen" servers (now 'Standard' flavor in their API) are still available and the 'Performance' servers are currently only available at their IAD (Northern Virginia) datacenter.

</comment><comment><USER16> To bad this is still about 26x more expensive than Hetzner.

Hetzner just launched new servers themselves.

[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver- pr...](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver- produktmatrix-px)

For €139/mo. :

\- new E5-1650 hexcore CPU

\- 128GB of ECC RAM

\- 2 x 240GB SSD

Edit: formatting and price comparison of €139 vs $3971/mo. [http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/pricing/](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/pricing/)

</comment><comment><USER6> How much do they cost? Seems like this is a response to Digital Ocean.

I wonder how long until Rack space and the rest provide a Docker container service.

<comment><USER17> DigitalOcean isn't really Rackspaces competitor in terms of pricing.

Docker works fine with rackspace, doesn't it?

edit, pricing: As Performance Cloud Servers roll out, they will replace Standard Cloud Servers as our default offering.

<comment><USER8> > Docker works fine with rackspace, doesn't it?

I'm assuming what he meant is support for deploying Docker containers _directly_ rather than renting a server and installing Docker on it and running your containers in that.

<comment><USER6> Right. Its similar to the distinction between installing Xen yourself on a dedicated server versus using a VPS provider.

I am actually working on a service where you can easily deploy VPSs that have Docker installed on them with a control panel for conveniently managing the containers. I can then have features like a menu option to move containers between VMs and automatically creating DNS and proxy configuration for container-based virtual hosting. I.e. you click a button on the container and just type in the sub domain or domain name next to the public port exposed by Docker and then that gets automatically set up so you can access that service on that container through a domain name.

<comment><USER14> We have single click Docker deployment - go to servers, select "deployments" then select the docker option. We also have scientific python images, and more

<comment><USER18> Is the 'We' here Rackspace? Am confused :s

<comment><USER14> Yes, sorry - the "we" is rackspace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I still dont get these so Called Cloud Hosting, When i can order 2 Dedicated Servers in OVH / Hetzner for Redundancy and it will still cost 50% less then what RackSpace offers.

</comment><comment><USER20> you better try: [http://www.df.eu/de/cloud-hosting/cloud- server/](http://www.df.eu/de/cloud-hosting/cloud-server/) (cheaper + more power) → a strato company!</comment>


VW Group, BMW and Daimler are under investigation for collusion in Europe - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/vw-daimler-bmw-european-commission-antitrust/ <comment><USER2> I don't really get the charges here. No manufactorer competes on how environmently clean their cars are, as most consumers don't care beyond fuel efficiency. As such there's no real point for manufacturers to glue on more emissions equipment once government standards are reached; if this upsets the government than make standards stricter.

I vaguely remember some collusion accusations over inflated AdBlue prices, though I'm not sure how you're supposed to get a supply/demand thing going on there if the government requires consumers to buy diseal additives.

<comment><USER3> Reading the comments first, but haven't gotten to the article, but this part of your comment stands out: _though I 'm not sure how you're supposed to get a supply/demand thing going on there if the government requires consumers to buy diseal additives_

I don't understand. I am "required" to buy gasoline to fuel my ICE car, but there appears to be at least some competition in the fuel market. How does this change for the blue stuff I put in my diesel RV?

That said, though I've yet to fill the blue tank on the recently-purchased RV, the stuff doesn't appear to be all that expensive to fill a four gallon tank. In light of your comment, should I assume the stuff used to be more expensive and perhaps evidence of collusion?

<comment><USER2> Doing more research on this it seems like the accusations were the result of a game of news article telephone rather than the actual accusations, though I did find an article[0] that cites a german article[1] that references price control.

As for the fuel market, I don't think its exactly a healthy supply/demand system either due to the necessity of car ownership in certain parts of the world; hence why OPEC is able to fuck with the market so much. It's better in that a car can use fuel from multiple sources though, where in the case of these emissions systems it seems you can only use a certain mixture for their cars, who's patent is owned by a german automobile interest group.

[0] [https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/bmw-vw-daimler- colluded-t...](https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/bmw-vw-daimler-colluded-to- fix-diesel-system-prices-report-alleges/)

[1] [http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/vw-bmw- daimler-...](http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/vw-bmw-daimler- aktienkurse-brechen-nach-kartellverdacht-ein-a-1159117.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> _" These technologies aim at making passenger cars less damaging to the environment."_

...all for the low, low price of an additional $1200/vehicle. I don't _know_ that, but I know it won't be free. Before we break out the gallows, I want to hear a cost estimate per vehicle for this "carburetor that runs on water that the oil companies won't let us have" (to reference an old conspiracy). Because even if the exhaust air is cleaner than the air going into the intake, it doesn't do anyone any good if no one can afford it.

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure being able to afford shouldn't be the issue for buyers of premium brand cars like BMW and Mercedes-Benz. If it is, the buyers should really reconsider their life choices.

But let's see first if they colluded. If then hopefully proper penalties are applied, I have the feeling car companies are rather softly handled by the EU...</comment></comment>


Peter Thiel, Trump's Tech Pal, Explains Himself - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/fashion/peter-thiel-donald-trump-silicon-valley-technology-gawker.html/ <comment><USER2> The link was broken for me, but the article is available at archive.org: [https://web.archive.org/web/20170112142324/https://www.nytim...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170112142324/https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/fashion/peter- thiel-donald-trump-silicon-valley-technology-gawker.html)

<comment><USER3> if you remove the trailing slash it loads.</comment></comment>


Active SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) could be courting trouble - <AUTHOR> http://www.straight.com/article-320615/vancouver/gwynne-dyer-active-seti-could-be-courting-extraterrestrial-trouble

<comment><USER2> The article assumes you need faster than light travel to make aliens potentially dangerous. You don't need FTL. Relativistic travel is dangerous enough. The time of danger will approach when we start to develop relativistic spacecraft. If we can do that, then we could also develop weapons using that technology. Once we reach that point, we become dangerous enough that aliens might be interested in wiping us out.

The problem with relativistic weapons, is that there can be no Mutual Assured Destruction if societies that resemble the current human civilization are involved. High relativistic velocities can preclude detection with significant warning time. If the first strike can be coordinated to completely wipe out the enemy, then there is no chance to launch a retaliatory strike.

If intelligent aliens already uploaded their minds into their starships, then it would be safe to deal with them. A civilization composed of such sentient starships would be impossible to wipe out in a preemptive strike, so there would be nothing we could do to them, and there would be no reason for them to fear us.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unless they're active colonizers, moving from solar system to solar system consuming all available resources, I don't see why we would want to fear them. Assuming they are, if anything they would avoid solar systems that might have active defense.

It's also possible such a civilization might follow much the model many hope to create for humanity, colonizing worlds then sending out new seed missions to every available world. If that's the case, there are three possibilities:

A. They respect other life, and avoid inhabited systems. B. They fear other life, and seek out inhabited systems. C. They don't care about other life, and attempt to colonize all systems they can.

Because of the assumed exponential growth life is capable of, and the distances between stars, the limiting factor is travel time, not growth, so it follows that the difference between B&C is negligible.

Now, if they have some form of FTL travel, then B could be a problem. However, it seems likely that if FTL aliens were interested in destroying us, they would have found us by now and begun monitoring anyway.

</comment><comment><USER4> It seems silly to blame active SETI for giving away our position. (I'm looking for that image that shows how far some famous radio signals have reached over time, but I cant find it.)

<comment><USER2> A couple of hundred light years isn't that far in galactic terms. Also, the signals will have attenuated greatly by then. The likelihood that TV and radio signals will give us away is actually pretty small.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would say the thousands of nuclear detonations we've done (global weapons tests) have probably sent a fair number of powerful signals. No information per se (other than "we like 'splosions"), but those are likely unmistakable indicators.

Of course, there's also these: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_SETI#Realized_projects>

(but their argument seems to be: "don't keep doing that")

<comment><USER6> Undirectional bursts of noise dampen out in the usual n^2 manner, and at the distance of light years becomes difficult to sort out from the undirectional burst of noise that we are pleased to call our Sun. Also, as noise, they don't yell out "intelligence!" as much as an analog radio signal, which is clearly from an intelligent source. Nuclear explosions may have some special characteristics, but frankly there's always something exploding somewhere out there in the cosmos. It's difficult to characterize the exact detection radius, but it's probably much smaller than you think.

Interestingly, as we become more efficient with our radio transmissions, which is to say, use less power, and ever more of it is locked behind at least one of excellent compression or encryption, it seems that the natural evolution of a civilization may return it to something that looks pretty natural again at a distance of light years. Dim, high-entropy signals once again become difficult to distinguish against background noise.

To be honest, the thing that yells "LIFE!" that is probably detectable out to a far greater distance than anything we humans have done is our oxygen atmosphere. We stand on the verge of doing elementary spectroscopy on distant planets ourselves.

Come to think of it, this is probably the most powerful argument against the paranoid alien. The paranoid, relativistic-projectile-firing alien isn't even looking for a sign of intelligence; the logic says they should extinguish _all other life_ , just in case. But our planet has been broadcasting "I'm alive!" across the cosmos for between 1.6 to 2.5 _billion_ years. If somebody out there was looking to preemptively kill everybody around them, they would already have gotten to Earth.

(Waiting until you can see a trace of intelligence is too late, after all, without FTL. In cosmological terms that's the striker hitting the alarm bell. You want to get there _long_ before that. And even if you have FTL you're still safer preemptively neutralizing planets. Remember, it is _trivial_ to neutralize a planet and reset its biological clock to zero; if you can wait a hundred years or two then very gently nudging a very large asteroid will do the trick, and if you're impatient there's any number of faster ways to do the same thing with very, very, _very_ modest energy investments. Sterilizing a planet is _easy_.)

(On that note, no, neither the dinosaur extinction event nor any other impact would match this profile. An intelligence would _successfully_ sterilize the planet, not merely "substantially stress the ecosystem".)

<comment><USER5> That's a great post, and yes, I was certainly working under the assumption that a nuclear explosion would have a distinct spectroscopic signature when compared to the emissions of our Sun. Is that false?

If we can (eventually) detect the oxygen atmosphere of a planet through passive spectroscopy, then it does seem to follow that we could easily detect nuclear explosions from the surface of that same planet. Unless I'm missing something...</comment></comment></comment>


Markdown in webpy templates - <AUTHOR> http://sitecanary.com/blog/4

<comment><USER2> I love the fact that you use webpy for that project. Do you have any posts with more details how smooth the development went with that framework, etc.</comment>


Testing Vim Plugins With Vimrunner and RSpec - <AUTHOR> http://www.vimninjas.com/2014/02/18/testing-vim-plugins-with-vimrunner-and-rspec/

<comment><USER2> Wow! Testing vim plugins - I didn't know that it's possible! Great!</comment>


Bang A Gong – Create a Corporate Culture of Celebration - <AUTHOR> http://www.johngreathouse.com/gong/

<comment><USER2> I worked in an office with a bell and the rules were similar. You really, really wanted to ring the bell - it was both a motivator and a celebration.</comment>