Bitcoin's Shared Ledger Technology: Money's New Operating System - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/09/09/bitcoins-shared-ledger-technology-moneys-new-operating-system/ <comment><USER2> Bitcoin and blockchain enthusiasts have been claiming that bitcoin (or etherum) is going to take the world by storm _any day_ now, yet all I ever see _anywhere_ are big claims (revolutionizing payments, disrupting remittance, ending wars, freeing the people, destroying the banks etc, ad nauseam) with very little substance and _lots_ of scams, frauds and dead-end ventures. Dark markets, internet gambling and a handful of other novelty and niche communities can extract genuine utility from bitcoin, and that should continue into the foreseeable future, but the general population just has no use for it. None. Despite all the hand wringing about having to endure the treachery of big banks, pull style payments, and entering long credit card numbers, bitcoin is still harder to use, even harder to keep secure, and without any guarantees, assurances or consumer protections. Bitcoin is an interesting novelty at best, and everyone knows it, even many bitcoin enthusiasts.

Now, in recent months, we're suddenly hit with a bevy of stories about big name financial brands and famous VCs pouring cash and research into the blockchain, and just like that, the goalposts have shifted. _This_ is what we've all been waiting for; _this_ is what will _really_ bring bitcoin into the mainstream, there _has_ to be something big here when you look at all the colossal mountains of cash that have been dumped into the bitcoinverse... yet somehow, we're still at a loss as to exactly how the "x but with blockchains" formula is meant to revolutionize everything. If the 100 million dollar investment into 21inc's vision of putting a bitcoin miner in every refrigerator is any indication of what we're to expect from all this investor cash, I think we can safely assume that what we're witnessing is simply the hyperbolic bitcoin hype machine functioning within normal parameters.

Of course, I'm probably just an idiot who doesn't "get" bitcoin, it's pretty difficult to understand, since even after all these years I just can't grasp the amazing potential of bitcoin. What other explanation could there be?

<comment><USER3> You're not an idiot -- the things you described are very real. I've heard about tons of scams and quite a few dead-end ventures. The 21inc thing sounds pretty bizarre to me as well, but there is more going on in the bitcoin world than just that.

I'm involved with a VPS hosting company called ChunkHost, and we've accepted bitcoin for many years. We're not criminals, and we don't tolerate criminals on our network, and nonetheless bitcoin has served us well as a means of payment. We've written on our blog[1] about how bitcoin payments are 20-30% of our revenue.

Another interesting company is purse.io -- they let you get something like a 20% discount on your Amazon purchases by paying in bitcoin. coffee.foldapp.com lets you get 20% off your Starbucks purchases by paying with bitcoin. Again, this is not a scam -- I use it and it works. Don't you think this is a real benefit that real people could appreciate?

I'm curious how long you've been following bitcoin. I've been interested in it since 2009/2010, and have seen the goalposts move a great deal: every time a goal is reached, the critics change it so they can declare bitcoin a failure. First it was that "you can't buy anything for it," which was true until a pizza was sold for 10,000 bitcoins in mid-2010.

Then it was "no store accepts it" \-- which was true until a few months later when you could buy things like web hosting from tiny bitcoin-only companies. Then it became "no large company will ever accept it." That remained true for a while, but eventually Wordpress became the first large company to do so. Others like Newegg, Overstock, and even Microsoft followed soon after. "Nobody will ever pay with it" was another one, and that was shattered once those companies started posting bitcoin revenue which, despite being a tiny share of their overall revenue, showed that people were consistently spending their coins.

I'm not saying that grandma will be buying gas with bitcoin anytime soon (or ever) -- just that there is substance there: merchants accepting it, consumers spending it, and interesting things like purse.io that couldn't exist without it.

[1] [https://chunkhost.com/blog/17%2Fbitcoin_revenue_in_2014](https://chunkhost.com/blog/17%2Fbitcoin_revenue_in_2014)

<comment><USER4> We at prgmr.com started accepting bitcoin recently via bitpay, and I think that a payment gateway like bitpay which allows you to accept bitcoin without actually having to hold bitcoins at any point make a huge difference. In the US, bitcoin counts as property which means you can have a capital gain or loss when it is exchanged later, which can become an accounting headache.

The reason we first started really thinking seriously about bitcoin was because existing customers weren't able to get very many US dollars anymore due to economic restrictions in their home country, and without offering bitcoin they couldn't pay us. As long as these sorts of economic constraints exist, there will be a market for bitcoin.

<comment><USER5> Economic restriction imposed by the government of the home country or imposed by Western governments?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The "shared ledger" analogy for blockchains is limiting. If you want to understand the potential applications, you should stop using it in your thinking.

Blockchains give us _publicly writable databases_. Such a thing never existed before. A blockchain has one or more programs that define what can be written to the public database. Bitcoin's program is mostly about distributing the 21 million coins to miners and preventing users from sending more bitcoins than they own.

A blockchain's program can manage any data, though. There are so many human interactions that are governed by private databases—that used to be the only way to do it. The sea change you are about to witness is those interactions transitioning to public databases. Everything will be rebuilt, especially where companies are charging for those interactions, like Uber and Airbnb.

Applications will be able to read from and write to all of the public databases, and they will all use the same cryptographic identities for seamless integration. Every application can trivially have payments built in. Or ride hailing. Or package shipping.

Network effects are public goods, and we now have the technology to provide them in a public manner. Go build something.

<comment><USER7> It gives you a publicly writable database that is only secured by people desiring to throw away large sums of computation in an environmentally unfriendly manner.

Writes are also slow (10 mins...) and requires relatively high bandwidth and space to be used securely.

There's no reason that AirBnb or Uber would want their database to be public, slower, and broken as soon as people lose interest in splitting up mining.

In fact, the more valuable stuff goes on a block chain, the more people will want to break it in order to be able to manipulate that information.

It's neat how the generals problem can work when the blockchain is for money. If it weren't for money, then why would people have an incentive to throw computation at it? To secure their AirBnb trip? If it's only AirBnb that has such an incentive, then suddenly it's a massively expensive enterprise to do so compared to running a normal distributed database that they control read/writes to.

<comment><USER6> Blockchains can be built without 10 minute block times or wasteful proof-of- work for mining. You can just pick people the users trust to make blocks or use proof-of-stake mining.

Blockchains are harder to break than most corporate databases.

Reading up on Ethereum will answer most of your questions.

<comment><USER7> If your "blockchain" doesn't have a proof-of-work beyond trusted people, that's hardly different than a company publishing their database full of signed transactions.

I'm aware that 10 minutes is a configurable number, but there's a reason it's as high as it is.

I'm also familiar with Ethereum, and I still don't see it as better than a company-run database for anything like uber/airbnb/etc with a central company behind it.

> Blockchains are harder to break than most corporate databases.

Strange, Google and Amazon and many other sites have done just fine with databases (though there are exceptions like Ashley Madison etc) while there have already been real double-spends with the bitcoin Blockchain and numerous other issues.

Proportional to usage, I'd say bitcoin has proven to be terrible compared to databases.

So yeah, citation needed.

Additionally, if you change your mining to be "people users trust", your security is now equivalent to corporate database security -- a lead pipe to the head to get a password in.

<comment><USER6> _> I'm also familiar with Ethereum, and I still don't see it as better than a company-run database for anything like uber/airbnb/etc with a central company behind it._

It's better because no one is taking a cut off of the transactions that the network enables. No one has to approve a new application that uses the network, so every application can build on top of the network. The people own the network, not companies.

This isn't just better, it's better to the degree that the Internet was better than private networks. That difference was world changing, and this one will be too.

 _> Additionally, if you change your mining to be "people users trust", your security is now equivalent to corporate database security -- a lead pipe to the head to get a password in._

Blockchains have programs that validate transactions. You'd have to get every validator to incorporate a fraudulent transaction. Hacking three financial institutions at the same time, for example, is pretty hard. Ten is even harder.

<comment><USER8> That's a nice pipe dream. Unfortunately, it's not how Bitcoin has played out in the real world. The Bitcoin network has unfortunately not been owned by the people, but instead dominated by Chinese miners with ASICs. The current low- ball estimate based on public numbers is that Chinese miners account for ~70% of the hashrate -- see [https://blockchain.info/pools](https://blockchain.info/pools)

As the database gets larger and larger, less and less people can afford the disk space, bandwidth, and electricity, and they will be pushed out by people who can. The current scalability of Bitcoin, with its absolutely miniscule userbase, and incredibly high miner count, can barely scrape past 3 transactions per second. Attempts at trying to fix this have absolutely fractured the community. See BIP101 / BitcoinXT and the resulting blowout, especially on the /r/bitcoin subreddit.

The security of Bitcoin is abysmal. There are major mining pools that don't even bother to validate the incoming transactions, since validating was slower than not validating, and more blocks means more money -- [https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2015-07-04-spv- mining](https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2015-07-04-spv-mining)

Oh, how are these BTC miners getting money? BitPay's statistics say that $76 million, a disproportionate majority of their payouts, go to miners: [http://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1433561/bitcoin-merchants- mai...](http://d.ibtimes.co.uk/en/full/1433561/bitcoin-merchants-mainstream- bitpay-cryptocurrency.jpg)

So Bitcoin seems to be a vehicle for Chinese BTC miners to trade cheap electricity for VC money. Up until everything bursts, at least.

It's also worth mentioning that if anybody was able to get these miners to collude, they could completely crash it if they wanted to. Bitcoin's security is largely based on no one entity having a majority of the network's power.

Etherum has all of the same problems and none of the solutions. The official FAQ even says that we're going to see a tilted hashrate arms race ("AMD GPUs will be 'faster' than similarly priced NVIDIA GPUs") -- [https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/197/how-to-help- secure...](https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/197/how-to-help-secure-the- ethereum-network-faq)

<comment><USER9> _" Bitcoin seems to be a vehicle for Chinese BTC miners to trade cheap electricity for VC money."_

I suspect that some of the Chinese BTC mining is simply a way to convert yuan to dollars. That's hard to do from inside China, because the People's Bank of China imposes currency controls.

Back in 2013, it was possible to buy Bitcoin with yuan transferred through the banking system within China and sell it outside China for dollars. That's what cause the big run-up in Bitcoin to over $1000. Then the PBOC clamped down, which caused the big drop in Bitcoin to around $250.

Bitcoin mining, though, is viewed as manufacturing and export under Chinese law. Those activities are encouraged, and subsidies may be available for construction and power. The Bitcoins can be sold outside China for dollars or euros. So, even if the mining just breaks even, it has utility for the owners of the mining operations.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure how flooding the market with bitcoin trying to buy USD would drive the USD price of bitcoin up. I think you have something backwards here.

<comment><USER9> It has nothing to do with driving the price of Bitcoin up. It just turns yuan into dollars or euros, which is otherwise quite difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of two things: I either do not understand Wall Street's obsession with blockchainesque technologies, or Wall Street's obsession with it is totally emblematic of their buzzword-obsessed technology-ignorant groupthink that fried the tech industry in the late 90's.

I'm seeing companies like this pop up all over the place. Blythe Masters's new venture[1], which made the cover of this month's Bloomberg Business, seems to be the pinnacle.

Bitcoin technologies solved some very important problems in the creation of currencies: double spending, decentralization, cost distribution, &c. These are not problems that need to be solved in securities trading. One company running on one platform doesn't have a double spendng problem. Decentralization is irrelevant. And cost is no issue.

Yes, the securities trading industry is wrought with disgusting inefficiencies, and technology should play a central role in becoming more efficient, but I do not see how shoehorning in blockchain tech helps in any way. If keeping track of ownership and transfer of securities is such a cumbersome process, make a company that keeps track of ownership and transfer of securities. Use computers. Use web interfaces. Make transactions publicly viewable. Create robust contract definitions. Remove paper trails. Hire programmers. Pay AWS. But I have no clue how they think blockchain technology adds to any solution here.

I don't know. Someone please explain.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-09-01/blythe- mas...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-09-01/blythe-masters- tells-banks-the-blockchain-changes-everything)

<comment><USER6> People pay Nasdaq to make their trades reliable and safe.

Reliable and safe trades can now be done by a swarm of computers running free software, and they only charge a tiny margin over the costs of bandwidth, energy and storage.

How is Wall Street supposed to make money now? They're all trying to find out, and they all need to be the first. Financial profits will be much smaller, and the slow movers will have a smaller slice of a smaller pie.

<comment><USER7> > only charge a tiny margin over the costs of bandwidth, energy and storage.

The margin charged in terms of energy is _massive_. The bitcoin network can't handle many TPS because each transaction needs significant computational work to secure it.

On the other hand, if I trust my database I can do the tiny work to write it, make sure I've got consensus among my DB nodes it's written, and be done with it.

I'd say that bitcoin so far has neither been reliable nor safe. Hell, if you look at MtGox alone, I bet a higher percent of bitcoin users were impacted than the total number of USD users who have experienced any kind of fraud.

In addition, there was the Nth "stress test" last week which crashed nodes and delayed transactions for hours... yeah, great tiny margin and reliability...

<comment><USER12> That's not even a little true. The transaction requires little/no work whatsoever. The miners require precisely as much work as there is speculative value for bitcoin. If Bitcoin were worth $10,000 per bitcoin - the energy burned per transaction would be 40 times higher. But that is not to say that the transaction itself required this expense.

Mt Gox had as much to do with bitcoin as it did to do with http. I wouldn't argue with you that centralized databases are way more efficient than blockchains (hence why _some_ nodes went down), but you simply don't understand the basics of what's going on with bitcoin.

<comment><USER7> The transaction has to be included in a block. That requires proof of work.

As you say, the energy burned should be proportional to the value of bitcoin; if I have 100 BTC then I have a vested interest in mining outside of gaining new BTC -- I also want to protect the BTC&transactions I have from attacks.

The argument that it's okay to spend that amount of money securing that amount of money, however, is nonsensical.

Transactions in traditional databases do take almost no work. There's no thousands of computers computing and discarding hashes just to be able to add and subtract some numbers.

I'll acknowledge that MtGox isn't a good thing to reference here, but the fact of the matter is that bitcoin is rife with things that a regular man would call "unreliability".

I don't appreciate that you immediately condescend that I don't understand anything to do with bitcoin when your response has little substance.

Your response is basically "transactions don't require that energy is burned but energy is burned for transactions" and you have the gall to say I don't understand anything?

<comment><USER12> Your claim was that there was a 'cost per transaction'. This is easily proved false when you examine the number of transactions in a block. If there were a cost per transaction, some blocks would cost less to produce than others (and/or returning varying rewards to miners. 2. the cost per transaction is directly relative to the price per bitcoin.

As for traditional databases,they are almost always more efficient - I think many of these bitcoin companies are absurd.

As for your pennies reference, I simply don't understand why the cost of a penny is at all relevant. At best, Bitcoin isn't "real" money, and even if it were, I don't know what seniorage costs add to this discussion.

The unreliability of bitcoin may be worth discussing, but that's tangential to your original post. Thus far, I think it's done pretty well in that department considering how new and exotic this technology is.

Your hubris on matters that you clearly don't understand justifies my response, which IMO was fair, balanced, and respectful. Don't rephrase my response unless you wish to misrepresent them, my words stand alone and don't need a tldr.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why do blockchains need proof of work at all? It seems that this is only to solve the Byzantine Generals problem, not to prevent spam or something like that (which HashCash used).

Given a network where every node eventually communicates with every other node, a vector clock is enough. You can simply have append-only trees! This data structure is ideally suited for distributed applications.

In a smaller network, question about double-spend is simply solved by having a MAJORITY of parties report that they've seen a certain precondition at time A (ie Person X has Y coins) before any subsequent transaction is considered validated.

What is also beautiful about appending to a TREE instead of a ledger is that you can have subsets of the network which care about a particular subtree. You don't need everyone to store everything!

<comment><USER7> Proof of Work does disincentive spam a little because you can only spam as quickly as the network can incorporate transactions (6tps iirc) due to the slow nature of the network. If the network were more efficient and used vector clocks, you could spam much more efficiently too.

If the majority of parties can decide such things without a proof of work, then a single person can just create a large number of accounts and own the network. You need to avoid the problem of fake accounts somehow. Proof of Work does that and you don't propose a solution.

<comment><USER12> Miner fees mediate spam, not the transaction count. (which btw is likely to be enormously higher than 6tps)

<comment><USER7> [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Scalability_targets](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Scalability_targets)

> Today the Bitcoin network is restricted to a sustained rate of 7 tps due to > the bitcoin protocol restricting block sizes to 1MB.

I've heard the number from other sources as being 6 or 7 before too, particularly after the scale tests I believe.

I know there's the blocksize increase debate which will make this comment inaccurate soon.

Also, I believe that a 0 fee transaction will still get processed _eventually_ and, since such a thing is valid, it's not going to stop spam entirely, just slow it a lot.

<comment><USER12> There are numerous proposals on the table to scale past 7tps. The reason that they aren't implemented yet is because it hasn't been needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hi, I'm the writer who wrote this story. Someone on Twitter alerted me to the conversation. Thanks, Paul Pajo! I didn't get to read the whole thread as I am heading out on a flight today but I just wanted to say that I am coming out with a story tomorrow morning Eastern Time that addresses some (though not all) of the initial question. This is the Forbes page where you can watch for the story. [http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/](http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/)

One thing I will mention quickly is that the main thrust of my story is that Wall Street is interested in using it to make their own processes more efficient. In a developer economies, because or existing systems work so well, we will have a slower road to consumer adoption than developing economies will. One of the sidebars to the story goes into this a little bit. Plane is pushing back from the gate, so I have to go. But I hope hats helpful.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Express now collect 1% to 3% of domestic credit and debit transactions, > generating more than $70 billion a year in fees in the U.S. market alone. > "That's a tax on all payments," says Wedbush analyst Luria. _With Bitcoin > that goes practically to zero._

There are and will be also tx fees for Bitcoin.

> Here's how primitive the infrastructure is now: The Bitcoin blockchain can > currently handle 7 transactions a second

That's not an infrastracture issue but an intentional limitation by design.

[[http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/855/what-keeps- th...](http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/855/what-keeps-the-average- block-time-at-10-minutes)]

</comment><comment><USER16> It's unfortunate this is basically (another) piece on the funding that chain.com recently landed. The article itself has about zip in the way of new content related to blockchain technologies.

</comment><comment><USER17> > By early 2014 the three had $4 million in seed funding and had narrowed > their focus to Bitcoin apps. But they found that the software tools they > needed to build those apps didn't exist and pivoted to building the tools > themselves.

> ON A MONDAY MORNING seven Chain.com employees sit in a circle on their Aeron > chairs plotting the week's plan of attack for various projects. The shoptalk > is a jargon-fest of "open assets," "confirmation time," "UI," "sidechains," > "federated chains" and, of course, "coins." Khosla Ventures' Rabois, the > company's lead VC investor, says he backed Chain.com because it had a > nucleus of "10X engineers," which he defines as "engineers who have the > output and insight that's ten times better than a regularly good engineer." > Elite groups like these, he says, are essential to build tools "so more > regular engineers can build applications" for blockchain.

In The Industry, how common is investing $4 million in a company before they have even "narrowed their focus to Bitcoin apps," based on the unproven potential of the founders? What am I missing?

</comment><comment><USER14> This is my followup story, which answers some of the questions about how we'll end up using Bitcoin, and how people in developing economies will likely deal with it more directly than people in developed economies -- at least at first: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/09/14/bitcoin- blo...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/09/14/bitcoin-blockchain- technology-in-financial-services-how-the-disruption-will-play-out/)

</comment><comment><USER18> For all the bubble talk...if there is any sign of a bubble, it is Bitcoin. Bitcoins are completely worthless, they have no value. The price action shows it - they are currently bouncing between $230 and $235, six months ago that was $260, and one year ago it was $400. It is headed to $0.

The smell of scam is all over it. The inventor hides his identity. Bitcoin companies are awash in scams and criminal charges - Mt. Gox, Butterfly Labs etc.

The Bitcoin hype machine can't answer one simple question - why do Bitcoins have any value? They can't give a rational answer to this. You can get a Florida real estate swamp land sales shop, or MLM organization running for a little while, but eventually it folds.

I'm glad to see that two people who have had a long, long history of observing financial markets agree with me - Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. They've been around long enough to see every snake oil scam under the planet. That's why Munger says Bitcoins are "rat poison" and Buffett expressed similar sentiments.

Incidentally, I knew this when Bitcoin was $460 and even mentioned it on HN ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6753545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6753545) ). Those who listened to me saved themselves from losing half their investment. Soon enough I will be pointing to this post when it halves again to $115-$118.

<comment><USER19> > The Bitcoin hype machine can't answer one simple question - why do Bitcoins > have any value? They can't give a rational answer to this.

The answer is simple:

Because there's enough number of people that agrees to use it as commodity money and medium of exchange.

<comment><USER18> That's a tautological answer. When a Bitcoin was worth over 4 times its present value a number of months ago, the same answer could be given - "it's worth that because people will pay for that".

I can give a rational answer for why commodities like apples have value, or a gallon of gasoline, or a table, or a shirt. Even houses in 2007 real estate development projects in the outskirts of Sacramento have a rational (if at one time overblown) value. There is no rational explanation why a hashed number called a Bitcoin has any value. A bar of gold had value 4000 years ago, it has value today, and if the concept of commodity value exists 4000 years from now, it will have value then.

As I said, I pointed all of this out on HN before Bitcoins lost half of their value. I'm quite confident they will be halved again from their present value, and eventually hit $0. They're worthless hashes. Your explanation for why they have value would not have me comfortable as someone holding onto such commodities. Warren Buffett and Charlie ("Bitcoins are rat poison") Munger agree with me.

<comment><USER20> Things don't have value on their own. They have value to someone in some context. Your Apple has value to a hungry person because it can be eaten, it has value to an apple producer, or merchant, because it can be sold, and it has value to a truck driver because it needs transporting. It's not an intrinsic property of the apple. It is entirely a result of the plans and hopes of those individuals who deals with the apple.

You can of course counter that all value is derived from the hunger of the apple eater, why else would the driver, merchant and producer bother?

And that's where something like Bitcoin could enter the picture. It establish value in the other direction. It has value to the apple eater because it can be used to buy an apple, to the truck driver because it buys fuel, to the merchant because it buys more apples, and to the producer because it buys a well earned vacation trip.

The intrinsic properties of being of a fixed supply, securely transferable, highly divisible and cheap to store and move around makes it useful as an intermediate token of value exchanged.

That said, I do think the high volatility of Bitcoin takes away much of is usefulness as a currency. In this regard it's to much like gold. A future replacement should probably have an elastic supply like the credit based currencies we are used to dealing with.

<comment><USER18> > And that's where something like Bitcoin could enter the picture. It > establish value in the other direction. It has value to the apple eater > because it can be used to buy an apple

Right...but this can be said about any commodity. If I own a new iPhone, or a bar of gold, or what have you, it won't take me long to sell those and buy apples. But iPhones, gold etc. have inherent value and use, Bitcoin has no use value.

> fixed supply most commodities

> highly divisible, cheap to store some commodities have these > properties...like precious metals

> securely transferable fortunes are wired from bank to bank around the world > every day

Gold is a useful commodity. For wiring, for filling teeth, for other purposes. It is also durable, divisible, uniform, portable, and all those things which make a commodity useful as a currency. Bitcoins are not a useful commodity, they are a hash number ultimately. When the game of musical chairs ends, people flock to commodities that have had value for thousands of years, like gold. They have inherent usefulness and value. Bitcoins don't.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Relocating our startup from Seattle to Morocco - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/371657/relocating-our-startup-from-seattle-to-morocco-was-the-best-decision-we-ever-made/ <comment><USER2> Those of us who can work remotely are incredibly lucky. I spent last winter motorcycling and working in Mexico.

The photo of the Macbook by the ocean brought back memories. I had a nice little house on the beach for $500/mo. Unfortunately computer equipment won't last long in the salty air. My keyboard gave out after about a month.

<comment><USER3> The salt air is the biggest downside that no one ever mentions for beach condos.

We replace most electronics (including A/C units, microwaves, etc) every 18 months.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely. I lived on Oahu for six years and blew through all kinds of hardware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a solo-founder, but I made the move to the mountains of Puerto Rico for similar reasons. Next year I'll move with my wife and kids to the beach.

By moving, we're able to survive on passive income from a few web properties so I can do nothing but think about building new websites and services.

For a team, I highly recommend it. You can stretch that runway really far and decrease your burn rate by moving lots of different places.

<comment><USER6> How do you find Puerto Rico? I spent two years in Chile, and it was really nice, love the people, the visas are good, but there's a lot of bureaucracy and its hard to import stuff.

<comment><USER5> There is a lot of bureaucracy here as well, but people here are nice and patient. Knowing Spanish is a big plus as it's the official language.

Navigation is tricky as the addressing scheme relies on naming the road and then how many kilometers the house is from the roads starting point. Google Maps is practically ineffective here.

Some things are far cheaper here and some things are far more expensive. Used vehicles are about equal as they would be on the mainland, but vehicle maintenance work is much cheaper. Rental prices outside of San Juan are very good. I'm living in the mountains around Adjuntas, in the interior, and paying $300 a month for a 1100 sqft 3 bedroom, 1 bath house. Since I'm at a higher altitude in the interior, the temperature hasn't gotten above 80 degrees yet (or dropped below 65) so we don't need to spend money on AC or heating.

Food and goods in stores is more expensive because of an ancient merchant marine law that requires goods shipped from US ports to US ports travel on US flagged ships _constructed_ in the US. This means that the few ships that can make the journey legally get to charge what they want and that increases the costs of all goods delivered.

The way around it is ordering things online and having them shipped via USPS which treats Puerto Rico as domestic. Unfortunately, FedEx and UPS treat Puerto Rico as a foreign location and charge more. It's difficult to buy things on eBay because of that incongruity.

We're likely to remain here until next August and then we'll decide if we want to stay another year in the mountains, try living on the beach, or go back to the mainland. We left from Austin but we think we'll try either Chattanooga TN (for the 10gb connections) or some small town in Colorado (the kids demand snow) next.

All in all, I recommend a hacker retreat to Puerto Rico if you want to have some seclusion to get work done. It's easy to do on a budget and it's a bit easier for a (mainlander) American to pass here than it is in Central or South America.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm interested in similar options for startups. Where was the company registered, and what would be the taxes, etc?

I would ideally want to start a company in Silicon Valley or any other tech centres of the U.S., but I guess such an option would require shelling out a great deal for taxes, offices, living expenses, salaries, etc.

Being Indian, Bangalore isn't an option either given it's rise in CoL.

<comment><USER8> OT, but any idea what the internet speed/power uptime situation is like in India these days?

Thinking of traveling around (Varanasi, Goa, southeast of Bangalore) but from what I gather you're doing well with 2MBs download and most days without power outages in a given month if outside the major cities.

I've done it before with spotty access/power but can get stressful scrambling for connectivity.

<comment><USER7> Metropolitan city centres have pretty good power/connectivity (4G/LTE, Fibre 100+ Mbit connections at ~$50USD). If you can get a cheap office space (with power backup of-course), you'd be golden.

Suburbs and other tier-2 cities are a bit of a gamble. A few states seem to be developing and positioning a few cities to be favourable for investment.

LTE and Fibre networks are mushrooming every other day, but I'm not sure about Varansi and Goa. Bangalore has pretty decent connectivity.

<comment><USER8> Thanks, helpful. I may delay my trip until the spring if that's the case (when can take time away from work).

I'd like to check out some areas outside of the big cities. Obviously India is an enormous country, will just be dipping the toes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Weren't you guys in Startup Chile? I swear you've been getting play out of the "we relocated to Morocco" story for years-- not a criticism, good on ya!

</comment><comment><USER9> I spent 10 months traveling and contracting in hostels, and struggled through some pretty shoddy and slow internet connections; However, Taghazout was the one place I couldn't find a consistent internet connection. I only lasted about 2 weeks trying each cafe and even some of the more expensive hotels, but the bigger problem was the power dropping out every 2 hours or so. I tried to get myself to be able to with develop offline, but unfortunately the product ending up getting more and more tied to SaaS products and I wasn't able to stay in Taghazout for longer.

I was curios to see where they found to setup and it turns out they are actually in the adjacent town. I can think of a couple other good reasons to setup somewhere else, but I imagine reliability is part of the reason they are located in the next town over.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can anyone tell me, what sort of visa do you need (or is ideal) to relocate to Morocco (considering that I'll be working there and get paid)?

</comment><comment><USER11> The big question is how they are going to grow, or is it small enough to only ever need 3 people (err...)

A company needs to grow and while this will work for the short term, to attract talent you need to have a talent pool.

<comment><USER12> Which is why so many startups are located in the SF Bay area. Rent is absurdly expensive and hard to find (both office space and residential space) thus salaries and operating expenses are high -- _good_ tech people can pretty much name their price.

Yet, despite this, at the end of the day, it's still the best place for many tech startups - they have a nearby talent pool (even though it can be challenging to entice people to make the leap), plus there are plenty of investors nearby.

But if you're trying to bootstrap a startup with your own funds and a few friends, I can see why moving to a place with a very low cost of living would be beneficial.

<comment><USER13> The reasoning about investors is circular. In order to be nearby investors, these startups need lots of money, which means they need investors, so that they can be nearby them. These investors then end up owning most of the shares in these startups. That is good, because these startups are nearby anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinque_Terre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinque_Terre) ?

<comment><USER15> Italy is not particularly cheap, unfortunately. Beautiful place, though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Working remote from somewhere less crazy than SF might have worked too, but I guess packing up and leaving the country is an extreme version of that.

<comment><USER17> The article said their visas were expiring.</comment></comment>


Sublime Text Build 3067 Available - <AUTHOR> http://www.sublimetext.com/3dev?3067

<comment><USER2> Hey, I have a question for people using ST3... Should I upgrade from ST2? There's not a real reason I haven't, just a question of utility.

<comment><AUTHOR> ST3 is noticeably faster for me with some plugins like SublimeIntel, and faster with large files as well. It may be my imagination, but RegExp "feels" faster compared to ST2 as well.

And as others mentioned, a few plugins are ST3 only. The linters are on my must-have list for editors. ST3 added support for additional "decoration" of the gutter and of code, as well as minimal "dialog" support - I suspect that's why those plugins are ST3 only.</comment></comment>


Your mission today, should you accept it… - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/2009/07/23/mission-today-accept/ <comment><USER2> Taking a photo of your keychain is supposed to be kind of a bad idea since someone could easily cut a key from a decent quality photo. Of course I'm sure there are easier ways to break into your house but still.

<comment><USER3> As someone who has tried cutting keys that way, its a little harder than it sounds. Doing it by hand, from a picture, is rather difficult (took around an hour to make an even close to working key), and while it should be possible to make an automatic cutting device fromt he picture, someone in the position to do that is probably very unlikely to break into your house (especially considering the effort to find out which key it is, then track you down and figure out which house is yours, then figure out when you won't be home).

As far as the site goes, the idea is interesting, but it seems rather bland to me. When I read it I thought it might be interesting to try, but by the time I got to the site I didn't want to do their missions any more.

<comment><USER4> It's pretty impressive/scary what can be achieved by application of machine vision (reconstructing shape, dimensions and correcting for angle etc.) to the problem:

[http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release....](http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=791)</comment></comment></comment>


3D Face Reconstruction from a Single Image - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~psxasj/3dme/index.php <comment><USER2> Note that this is just one recent work in a well established research problem that has been worked on for decades. The interesting bit here is that they appear to achieve state of the art results by doing something simpler than other approaches - instead of fitting a well thought out generic morphable face model, they use a pretty standard deep learning model to map a 2d image to a discretized 3d model of the face (voxels). Intuitively this feels a bit off, since outputting a discretized 3d model instead of fitting a continuous model has inherent resolution limitations, but the benchmark results are pretty impressive.

<comment><USER3> I guess this means that the method easily generalizes to any type of object (?)

> Intuitively this feels a bit off, since outputting a discretized 3d model > instead of fitting a continuous model has inherent resolution limitations, > but the benchmark results are pretty impressive.

Isn't this because deep learning _is_ in fact a type of interpolation?

And another question: are there any techniques based on neural networks that combine multiple images into the most plausible model?

<comment><USER4> > Isn't this because deep learning is in fact a type of interpolation?

No The output is still discrete.

> And another question: are there any techniques based on neural networks that > combine multiple images into the most plausible model?

Could work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Had some fun with it yesterday :)

[http://alteredqualia.com/xg/examples/facial_expressions.html](http://alteredqualia.com/xg/examples/facial_expressions.html)

[http://alteredqualia.com/xg/examples/max_headroom.html](http://alteredqualia.com/xg/examples/max_headroom.html)

It seems to be working pretty well, results do look nicer than earlier methods which were based on morphable faces [1][2].

See also continuous face reconstruction from video on their project page [3].

\</comment><comment>

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nice6NYb_WA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nice6NYb_WA)

[2] [http://gravis.dmi.unibas.ch/publications/Sigg99/morphmod2.pd...](http://gravis.dmi.unibas.ch/publications/Sigg99/morphmod2.pdf)

[3] [http://aaronsplace.co.uk/papers/jackson2017recon/](http://aaronsplace.co.uk/papers/jackson2017recon/)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is incredible. It seems to perform well on faces with dysmorphic features including cleft lips, asymmetric eyes, and abnormal locations of facial landmarks. It even creates an appropriate 3D representation of a cleft. I've found that some other face detection implementations actually fail at even localizing faces with these abnormalities. I don't have the background to fully understand the paper, though. Is there anything truly novel in how they are detecting faces? Could their work be leveraged to more accurately label facial landmarks for "abnormal" faces?

<comment><USER7> I'm really happy to hear that it works on those sorts of cases. I've tried a few images during testing, such as unusually long noses, and was pleased with how they came out. The novelty comes from a simple approach to a usually quite complex problem (i.e. posing the problem as a semantic segmentation problem, to produce a spatially aligned volume)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It definitely constructs _a_ face, but how accurate is it?

Would be interesting to see a measurement of error against a known result. Maybe try rendering an image of a 3d model of a face, then attempt to reconstruct it from the rendered image and measure the displacement from the original model.

<comment><USER9> It's fitting faces to some kind of assumed model.

I tried it on a few Japanese faces; it basically gave them a Caucasian-looking side profile: big foreheads with over-hanging eyebrow ridges; big noses.

Completely unrecognizable after turning more than a few degrees from front view.

Which is not to flame the project---nice work!---but as a potential improvement for certain applications, it would be useful to simply have these details as parameters that could be interactively tweaked.

Being able to adjust the overall roundness of the face, and prominence of the chin/forehead/nose would probably go a long way.

<comment><USER10> You could use an expert system to classify the face by race. Then fit it over the appropriate model.

<comment><USER11> That is the wrong tool for the wrong problem. You don't need to classify by race, and an expert system would be a horrible way to do it.

Just get more Asian people in the training data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It struggles to create a likeness on the side profile but that's to be expected. Nose and mouth details lost and it ends up looking like someone else. Still it's very cool, but it can't perform miracles.

A good test is when you have a front and side source image, such as police mug shot...

Take this famous David Bowie mug shot. I also tried Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, the side profile never looks like the person.

[https://ozimg.s3.amazonaws.com/temp/bowie_mug.jpg](https://ozimg.s3.amazonaws.com/temp/bowie_mug.jpg)

An improvement to the engine might also accept a side profile source image to improve the details. Now that would be something!

<comment><USER4> You're never going to get an accurate side profile from ONE photo (front); otherwise, you are pulling information out of thin air -- like "enhancing" an image by somehow zooming in 100x.

<comment><USER12> Never say never.

A smarter algorithm might analyse the light and shadow to a greater degree, and better predict side profile details.

Or, take it further and have the algorithm silently check the internet for match of person and then look for more images of that person. Not cheating if the measure is "upload at least one image to start with, the service will then do the best it can to perform a miracle".

<comment><USER4> You're missing the point; if the information content isn't there (i.e. "no clues") and you're not providing it somehow (e.g. by "cheating" and providing more than one image from the Internet), there's literally no way to reconstruct it -- this reeks of the Nyquist sampling theorem.

It's not something that can still be accomplished by someone who isn't a pessimist; it's provably impossible.

<comment><USER13> That's, like, the entire opposite of the nyquist sampling theorem. Faces are a low dimensional space. Images are a higher dimensional space. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing)

<comment><USER4> There just isn't a learn-able (or "un-learnable" for that matter) function _even_ on the restricted domain of frontal profile images that maps surjectively onto the MUCH larger space of possible 3D face reconstructions. Intuitively, maybe the side of my jaw is deformed in a way that is not visible from the front, for example -- how can any oracle recover this information without seeing the side of my face?

Many people are mistakenly under the impression that certain signal reconstruction techniques like compressed sensing "violate" the Nyquist sampling theorem. Compressed sensing is still under the same umbrella of the Nyquist Sampling Theorem, as is CNN-based reconstruction (the technique used by this paper). I realize my analogy might have been poor; my claim is that there is still unrecoverable information loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As far as the demo user interface goes, I find the controls to be weird. Dragging the 3D model left and right will move the nose left and right. But dragging up and down will move the face model in the opposite direction.

<comment><USER15> That is a bit inconsistent!

Try the right mouse button instead; it seems to have a nicer rotation action, and the two axes are consistent. Also you can use the middle mouse button to zoom in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Absolutely stunning! Congrats!

Thanks for releasing paper & source to play with!

</comment><comment><USER17> Impressive, but I'd be interested to see if this approach works well if you add extra images (i.e., stereoscopic).

Notably, the shape/depth of my nose is very, very wrong.

</comment><comment><USER18> I want to see some hair reconstruction!

</comment><comment><USER19> Like all these machine learning generation things, it provides a plausible model, but not necessarily the correct model.

</comment><comment><USER20> Amazing.

It's also amazing how far Vision has come in a few short years.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder whether this could be used to crack face id.

<comment><USER22> Probably not. Apple specifically said that they've tested Face ID against masks (even Hollywood quality ones). Also, Face ID checks for user attention, so a static 3d-printed would not work. I wonder though if it worked if you put a mask over your face with eye cutouts? When the devices arrive I'm pretty sure some very clever people will try to tackle this problem, this should be interesting :)

<comment><USER23> Man are they good at marketing. They just knew this precise conversation would come up and created the perfect brief counter-argument preemptively ("hollywood quality masks").

<comment><USER24> Is it good marketing or engineering (the latter implies both)? I guess we'll find out soon enough.

<comment><USER25> If it were good only engineering no one would know about it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Tryied it on Harry Rowolth- didnt get along with the beard.

<comment><AUTHOR> It also caught my friend's collar and made it part of his face. Still pretty impressive technology, regardless.</comment></comment>


Hardest thing about making money on the Internet - <AUTHOR>

what is the hardest thing for you to make money on the internet ? <comment><USER2> doing it legally</comment>


Space: It's cold. It's boring. It's not our concern - <AUTHOR> https://theweek.com/articles/937835/space-cold-boring-not-concern <comment><USER2> (Upvoted for visibility, not agreement.)

Contrast this excerpt from the article

 _[S]pace is simply not a good place to go. It has no history, culture, museums, or restaurants. The celestial nihility is immensely boring and perpetually unpleasant. The scale is all wrong for us. Your accommodations, at least in our lifetimes, would be something like a glorified camper trailer, and your food would at best rise to the level of a TV dinner. [...] Visiting space would be the most miserable road trip ever devised, except when the vehicle breaks down, you die._

with the following quote

 _Kirk: You know if Spock were here, he 'd say I was an irrational, illogical human being for going on a mission like that. [pause] Sounds like fun!_, from [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Star_Trek_Generations](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Star_Trek_Generations)

I suppose these two individuals, one real, the other imaginary, have vastly different ideas of what a fulfilling life should look like. So do I.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I don't agree either.

For example, it feels like the author would argue that it's "worth" seeing the Grand Canyon, but not worth seeing Space. But the idea of being outside of the Earth's atmosphere, or better yet being able to see the entirety of Earth from the Moon would change my life in ways I'm sure I can't even imagine.

<comment><USER2> It indeed seems to have that effect on astronauts! It's called the "Overview Effect". Here is a link, just in case you haven't already read about it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect)

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Population goes up, useful land does not. That's why we're paving suburban farmland and cutting and burning rainforests and even going to war. I agree that space makes Antarctica and Death Valley look inviting, and major settlements in those places would be good practice, but how feasible is that while we're limited to a share of the energy and resources readily available on Earth?</comment>


GooglePlus: How come Islam-related posts find their way to hot pages so easily? - <AUTHOR>

If you have been on Google+ lately you may have noticed that "Hot & Recommended" pages these days are seldom free of Islamic related posts (some of which find their way to that page by a ridiculously low number of shares and pluses. Evidence: http://imgur.com/a/x8diO )
First question is that how these posters manage to send their content so easily to Hot pages (in some occasions with only 4 pluses and zero shares, see the link above) whereas other posts (NASA for example) need hundreds of shares and pluses to find their way up there.
Google, apparently, has managed to keep Hot pages spam-free but it seems reluctant or unable to keep it secular. What do you think? What do you recommend? <comment><AUTHOR> link: [http://imgur.com/a/x8diO](http://imgur.com/a/x8diO)

</comment><comment><USER2> you probably have a Muslim or 2 in your circles somewhere

I have 0 people in my circles and none of that is showing up

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the hint. It seems that Google thinks if your circle members are turned into Islam that makes you a devoted muslim too who want to hear about Jihad and Hijab every other post. Let's hope none of us incidentally circle a pedophile or something.

<comment><USER3> Wow, that's quite an antagonistic reply. It uses posts that are "hot" within your circle of friends as part of it's "hot" calculation. If your friends like it, its possible you might like it too.

<comment><USER2> This guy is actually trying to use G+

He doesn't have the right to complain</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Physicists Reverse the Flow of Time Using Quantum Computer - <AUTHOR> https://sparkonit.com/2019/03/19/physicists-reverse-flow-of-time-using-quantum-computer/ <comment><USER2> Discussed recently: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19378567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19378567)</comment>


Ask HN: How valuable to my resume is 5 years at Microsoft? - <AUTHOR> There have been some interesting discussions here and on Quora (http://www.quora.com/What-companies-teams-are-toxic-on-a-resume) about certain companies not being good for your resume or two much time at one of these companies not being good for your resume.
I have no college education so when I first started at Microsoft when I was 22 I decided that I wanted to work there for 5 years and do well (best reviews possible, multiple promotions).  I also wanted to spend the time trying to influence Microsoft as an organization to do something interesting in the Linked Data/Semantic Web space.  I am now a Senior Engineer and have pioneered the use of data semantics within Bing. This experience feels extremely valuable as I pursue a longer career working with start-ups.
I am confident that I will complete my 5 years and meet my goals but I'm interested in better understanding how this experience will be perceived by members of the start-up community that I hope to be a part of in the future.
Is it really perceived as a negative to work at an engineering organization like Microsoft? What other things will be valuable to demonstrate on my resume as I look to enter the hacker community more actively? <comment><USER2> I almost always consider it a strong positive, because Microsoft has a strong selection process (everyone who works there went through a day of interviewing).

That said, the way that Microsoft has been dealing with its extreme uncoolness lately has been by paying salaries that are far above market. With very few exceptions, every time I've tried to recruit a Microsoft veteran to a startup, they've started to pull out the spreadsheets and given me complicated sob stories about how they can make $1m in the next three years if they stay at Microsoft, whereas I'm only offering them, eh, a few % of a hot startup.

The bottom line is that spending a lot of time at Microsoft could very well ruin you for startups.

Even though I did it that way, there are two different ways of thinking about your career, and if you're REALLY a startup person, you're not going to be hedging bets by serving out your 5 year Microsoft prison sentence. If you're telling yourself that as soon as you're fully vested you'll leave, you have failed to take into account the new incentives that Microsoft will put in front of you by the end of the fifth year. And eventually you're going to be stuck in the $300,000/year treadmill at a life-sucking anonymous job with no chance of ever hitting it big (or making an impact on the world).

<comment><USER3> I worked as an early employee (< 10) at 3 startups that were going to change the world and hit it big. I now have tens of thousands of worthless stock options.

Where do I apply for the $300K/yr life sucking anonymous treadmill job?

<comment><USER4> I know several people in $300K+/yr treadmill jobs. I wouldn't trade places with them for all the world.

I like to think that if I found myself with their salary I would have my priorities in a different order, but there's no guarantee of that. My own sense of avarice and comfort has changed a lot since my 20's.

<comment><USER5> Try a $12K/yr treadmill job (see: World, Third).

(yes, I know I'm repetitive, but I can't resist putting things in perspective whenever I see someone complaining about U$ 300.000 !!! )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like that's great to put on your resume, anybody that would not hire you based on it being microsoft where you worked before is probably best avoided anyway.

Be proud of what you achieved in such a short time, not ashamed.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't hurt that Bing is highly regarded. You've managed to work on one of the best technical successes that Microsoft has pulled off in the last few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I worked at Microsoft for five years in the 90s. I dropped out of college prior to joining, so I was on the same trajectory as you are.

I always say that Microsoft is a great place to have worked. It's great for learning how to ship real software (large and small) with all of the attendant processes and politics that go with it. You will learn what you think is important to take with you and what is important to leave behind. Both types of learning are important, because as you move to startups, you will have a hand in determining the equivalents in your new microcosm of that world.

One interesting quality I see from many people who have worked there is that there is a perception that life after (i.e., outside of) Microsoft is scary. That's partly because you can change jobs there endlessly and never actually leave. You can go from working on operating systems to large binary (client) applications to Internet apps to video games, etc. I've had to assure several of my friends that were contemplating leaving that the water outside is safe and warm. Every one of them has thanked me afterwards.

Another poster made a good point about some companies' HR departments not taking a second look at you. That's true. However, I generally wouldn't want to work at those companies anyway. I've never had a problem finding work at great places. In fact, I've never had to apply for a job since I left. If you're good, and your network is sound, people will reach out to you--degree or not. Microsoft is a great foundation on which to build your resume.

<comment><USER9> ps -- MSFT has no clue how to ship software.

At Scribd, we often shipped software ten times a week. That's slow compared to lots of web startups that deploy continuously -- see the advocates at IMVU for example. Nonetheless, most web startups deploy more than daily to production. I've worked on classic desktop software with a 6 month release cycle and it's very different.

pps -- deployment process? hah.

rake specs

rake deploy production

<comment><USER6> > MSFT has no clue how to ship software.

Come again ? Microsoft has shipped more software than any other company on the planet.

> At Scribd, we often shipped software ten times a week.

I'm not even aware of a single piece of scribd software that has been released, aren't you confusing server side deployment with shipping software ?

<comment><USER10> > Microsoft has shipped more software than any other company on the planet.

Do you know this as a fact or are you just speculating? (I don't care if it was speculation, I would just like to know if this is true and how it was measured if you know.) I would imagine it would have to be either Microsoft or IBM who have shipped the most software in history but I'm not sure the best way to measure the "most" software (does one count titles, licenses, revenue, etc.)?

<comment><USER6> Microsofts cumulative revenues since their start is roughly 390 billion dollars, the vast majority of that was software.

[http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_company.h...](http://www.thocp.net/companies/microsoft/microsoft_company.htm) (crappy, but convenient page and the numbers seem to be ok, it only goes to 2005, so I've added another 150 billion)

IBM has a much larger total revenue but the vast majority of that was hardware leases during the mainframe years (and it probably still is), as well as consultancy.

Software was a huge component compared to other manufacturers but I doubt it comes close to what microsoft has made.

I can't find a good breakdown of IBM revenues that splits it out by category though, if someone else has access to that it would be nice to know.

<comment><USER11> Also IBM mostly does enterprise software. Microsoft has been successful in many different types of products: video games, operating systems, software development (IDEs, programming languages, etc), search engines, office applications (word, excel, etc), just to name a few. I think regardless of how much IBM has made from software compared to Microsoft, it is safe to say Microsoft has been much more successful at delivering products in a whole gamut of industries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 5 years at Microsoft is boring. But you say: _I pioneered the use of data semantics within Bing_. That will get you a job interview anywhere where people care about search or semantics.

You are now branded :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think at a company like Microsoft you have a lot to do with whether or not the work is boring. There is a lot of political/organizational dysfunction that comes with a massive company that can make things a little tedious or boring. My experience has been generally positive and I have been able to focus on interesting problems for most of my time here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Approximately as valuable as 2 years at Microsoft.

No, it's not a negative, at all. Get out of the echo chamber. Mostly, the people with the loudest opinions about MSFT are the ones with the least influence over hiring.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point about the echo chamber :)

I think my purpose for posting this question was to provide myself with a reality check as I get more serious about my next career move.

Do people just like to be negative about Microsoft because it's the cool thing to do or are there legitimate concerns that I will need to mitigate?

Thanks for your perspective.

<comment><USER13> Two "valid" concerns people will have about MSFT employees:

* MSFT is a huge company, and is run nothing like a startup or a small software company. They'll be worried that you're processbound.

* There's a perception that Microsoft is massive and loaded with middle management and that anyone with a "do-ing" role is pigeonholed very specifically, so you'll want to stake very specific and aggressive claims about the breadth of your get-shit-done experience.

These concerns would also apply to anyone from IBM, Sun, or Cisco.

Generally, compared to a recent CS grad, multiple years at MSFT doing real work is a huge win. My only big caveat is that 5 years is a long time to be at a BigCo.

<comment><USER9> Ditto. Similar to tptacek's processbound argument, I'd be very concerned that you'd be dumped into an environment with very little supervision and flounder. My experience at four startups has been that they really mean it when they say they need selfstarters and you tend to get very little direction as compared to bigger companies. Instead, you're expected to jump in and find work yourself.

Also, if you are interested in startups, remember that virtually none of us use MS tech anywhere in our stack. It's not a huge problem, but I generally prefer engineers that have put in a couple years somewhere else and aren't new to the LAMP/postgres/mysql/linux/java/ruby/rails environment. All the way from the different dev tools to the ethos of source distribution and the skills you pick up around installing and configuring software from source. As far as I remember, the MS stack generally seems to ship as binaries and have very little of the admittedly sometimes annoying issues that come with distributing software as source. That's a problem for you because I expect engineers to be able to install software from yum / rpms and deal with more common link / library / configuration issues that come up. Finally, it seems to me that MS typically has a blessed method of doing everything -- there is a preferred method to connect to MS SQL server, a preferred method of parsing xml, a preferred method of sending mail, etc. The open source / linux tech stack is _nothing_ like that -- there are always multiple ways of doing anything and it's often an unwritten part of the job description to help sort that out.

Finally, again specific to startups, I think you'll be shocked how different a 15 person company, or even a 100 person company, is to a 30K person company. For instance, there will often be no review process, etc etc.

Depending on what exactly you've been doing at MSFT you should have some valuable experience, so don't be too pessimistic. Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I left MSFT at the end of 2008 after ~3.5yrs (search, Mesh, Azure), took 6 months off, and started my own company. In the processing of recruiting & fundraising, the experience at MSFT was almost always a good thing (people respect it)--but I got a couple of comments from investors saying "it's a good thing you left when you did, > 5 years is a red flag for us".

I also have the same reaction hiring people now...a few years means I'll always interview them, MSFT's selection process is generally good. But after about 3-4 years, I've found most people (even the ones who express an incredible, proactive desire to "do a startup") never actually follow through on the decision. I think this is what Joel was referring to as the $300k/yr treadmill.

Finally...a couple people pointed out that the skill set you develop at MSFT is of marginal utility externally _in specific settings_...the specific setting that most HN readers assume is Silicon Valley. :) Assuming that's your goal as well, .Net-specific and Windows-specific experience isn't highly transferrable to LAMP down here. Obviously good developers can pick up new languages pretty quickly, but you are missing some depth there. And clearly the MSFT process isn't going to be helpful in most companies < 10k people, or honestly most web companies (and I worked on services there :) ).

Long answer short--I think 5 years is longer than you need or want if you want to go elsewhere, especially a startup...I'd vote for 3 years.

</comment><comment><USER15> Having worked at Microsoft should get you an interview just about anywhere. And anyone who considers it a negative is, frankly, an idiot.

<comment><USER9> Seriously? Working at MSFT can be a huge negative for us, for three specific reasons: * an entirely different software stack from the operating system to the web servers to the databases to the programming languages to the dev tools;

* I've interviewed 3 different people from MSFT that were experts in eg a tiny area of DCOM; as startup needs generalists;

* a 30 person company is nothing like a 30K or 60K or whatever they're up to these days and it seems that people comfortable in one are often not comfortable in the other.

<comment><USER16> Regarding point 3, MS isn't so much a 60K company as it is a coalition of variously sized groups, usually from a few hundreds up to low thousands.

<comment><AUTHOR> During my 4.5 years I haven't worked on anything but incubation projects. Meaning I have never been on a team with more than 20 full time employees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Potential employers perceived my four years in Microsoft as being extremely valuable when I left in 2007.

Just make sure you leave on good terms. I still chat with my last manager on occasion, and expect that I could get back in without too much trouble if things ever got really hairy out here.

Also, I looked at your LinkedIn profile, and recommend describing your accomplishments in less HR-centric terms: an 'exceeded' contribution rating is great, but it might not mean much to a hiring manager at a Madrona portfolio company. Like alain said elsewhere, be more specific with what you achieved.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that feedback. I do plan on a pretty extensive refactoring of my resume as I get closer to my 5 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I did a double take when I saw this thread - I finish 5 years at Microsoft to the _day_ today :)

</comment><comment><USER19> So, how about this for an answer:

I'm the founder of <http://Newsley.com>, and we're pivoting away from being a financial social news site. We're doing a lot of semantic web using OpenCalais, and we're building the engine to process a bazillion financial news articles in real time and use semantic meta data as a basis for a search and recommendation service.

If you want to see some of the semantic stuff we're doing click on the discuss link for any article: [http://newsley.com/articles/one-tenth-of-all-us-banks- on-the...](http://newsley.com/articles/one-tenth-of-all-us-banks-on-the-fidcs- list-of-problem-institutions-in-the-first-quarter/2154). Those entities are all automatically extracted. It's pretty basic, but there's a lot more cool stuff we're planning.

We're waiting to pursue funding until we apply to YC this fall. I'm sure we'll be hiring early engineers within the next 9 months or so...

ping me: <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=iamelgringo>

<comment><USER20> Unrelated - but I love the look and feel of your site. It doesn't feel like a web page at all - more like a document. Its pretty striking.

<comment><USER19> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've ran across a couple ex-MSFTers that were way too expensive for their skill set. But I still wish I could have hired them, they were smart guys.

Aside from that, if you are being interviewed by real tech people, not an HR machine, there's no way MSFT could ever count against you.

Way more damning is if you _only_ have experience with .NET or something like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point regarding .NET. I have been working hard to have significant expertise beyond .NET even though we are rather .NET focused in my day to day work at Microsoft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have some influence over certain hiring decisions at a startup. I'd look at experience like that and think "this guy is probably pretty awesome." The MS name might be a bit tainted, but there's no doubt that they have a lot of very talented engineers, and if you really did pioneer the use of data semantics within Bing, well that's pretty impressive.

That said, we'd look at that experience and guess that you would probably not be interested in working at our startup-sized salaries, so I wouldn't expect much effort to recruit you in the first place. The other thing we'd need to make sure about is that you're not stuck doing things "The Microsoft Way (tm)"; you'd be joining a very different culture and if you're not going to fit in, it's not going to work.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's not that big companies, or big companies some of us love to mock are always bad, it's that it can be very easy for mediocre programmers to fly under the radar in those environments for years, and never accomplish or learn much of anything. As you've done in your question, focus on your project experience and what you learned and the company where you worked on those projects becomes inconsequential.

</comment><comment><USER24> Keep in mind that Google and Amazon did hire a lot of MS employees (especially Google at Kirkland) a few years ago. I'm sure they're still opening their door for MS employees. I'd take Google or Amazon mindset than a cocky startup.

Don't sweat over your 5-6 years experience at MS especially when your case is "special", you work at Bing and probably you work from the beginning until you launched. 5 years is not a long time to launch a product like Bing.

In fact, you should be proud and feel a bit more comfortable with your resume so far. 5 years show determination, loyalty, and hard work. Like any other poster said, if a startup didn't like your resume because of your experience at MS, you wouldn't like them anyway.

I've seen people who just talk about "how bad MS products" are after a link from Reddit/Digg showed up but they don't have anything to prove themselves.

Good luck with your decision whatever that is and keep your mindset in a neutral zone.

<comment><USER9> Google or Amazon are nothing like a startup, particularly a small one. We don't have time for 6 months or a year of ramp up time; instead, we need people to come in and start being productive far sooner than that. As I said upthread, this isn't insurmountable, but someone with 5 years in on .NET is going to have a rough transition to a rails/django shop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Being versatile is prized. I don't expect your MS work to count against you.

</comment><comment><USER26> If anyone wants, I'll write about my experiences going in the _opposite_ direction -- from the start-up world to Microsoft.

<comment><AUTHOR> do it, I'm interested

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Randomness dominates startups in a way that makes your concern about first impressions unnecessary.

</comment><comment><USER28> Without college you will hit an HR brick wall at some employers, but likely these will be ones you wouldn't want to work for anyway.

Sounds to me like your 5 years at MS is probably equal to or better than an undergraduate degree at least as far as technical competency is concerned.

</comment><comment><USER29> I tend to judge people by what they have accomplished. With that said, I tend to favor consistency over a big grand accomplishment. It just show that you have sustaining skills.

It's the knowledge that you've retained from your work at Microsoft that is of importance. Focus on that. Better yet provide some guidance in your domain of knowledge to the hacker community.

</comment><comment><USER30> No college and you got a jo at M. at 22? This was in the early eighties? Serious; the fact that they hired you at all implies you got some gift that any tech. company probably would value.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was not in the early 80s. It was the beginning of 2006.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Side note: does anyone have a Quora invite?

</comment><comment><USER32> Goodness, how could that NOT be great? Did you steal from them or something? I can't imagine why you would ask this.</comment>