"I will never use Python in production ever again" - <AUTHOR> http://www.onebigfluke.com/2013/09/i-will-never-use-python-in-production.html

<comment><USER2> >Static typing doesn't ensure correctness for languages like C++ and Java.

Types provide a pretty high amount of proof towards correctness, in theory and in practice.

In my experiences working with Haskell (and its type-system), I've found the amount of runtime bugs I hit to be almost non-existent, because usually the type system catches all my stupidity beforehand. It's weird, because the type of runtime bugs I get in other languages (like Python) are rarely type-related issues, but for some reason it seems to help a lot.

The arguments for dynamic typing are very less convincing when you start getting into systems with very expressive type systems such as Haskell.

There are so few use-cases of un-type-able code out there that it really shouldn't be as demanding, but unfortunately people have conflated typing with verbosity and uselessness, instead of things that can work extremely well as proofs of some amount of correctness.

<comment><USER3> The ideal: "if it compiles it is guaranteed to work as you intended when writing it".

<comment><USER4> Reality: "Type systems don't keep you from writing wrong logic, they only forbid you to write inconsistent logic."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _> All other things being equal, I expect the total time spent in Python will be lower than C++._

I hear this a lot, and for the most part, I don't really understand it. I know Python and C++ at about the same level and for a lot of things I find myself taking less time in C++, particularly with Boost giving me a bunch of handy tools in my toolbox. I don't find static typing onerous, and it does save my bacon more often than it gets in my way.

Nits about C++ aside, since there does exist the general perception of C++ as having those problems, wouldn't a fairer comparison be Scala or C# as it pertains to statically typed languages? (I don't know Scala great yet, but I find myself able to build good, reliable code fairly quickly--although sometimes, due to unfamiliarity, I end up writing code that's too clever and it's hard to read afterwards--and I am _ridiculously_ more productive in C# than Python. The miracle of a good IDE...)

<comment><USER3> He picked comparison that would make Python look good[-ish]. Or he is ignorant about modern C#/Scala capabilities.

<comment><USER5> That was what I was driving at, yeah.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This has nothing to do with tests. Tests would catch this, but so would sensible development practices like running your code at least once before deploying it.

<comment><USER4> That would catch the SyntaxError instances he mentioned but certainly not every case of AttributeError or ValueError exception. Even good testing would not catch all of them.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, regression tests are not a silver bullet. It's a patch for dynamic type system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I once ran into an issue where a base class's method's signature changed thus breaking some subclasses. No compiler warning but also no refactoring support either. If you ran tests only on the base class you would be fine. Especially if different people were responsible for the base class and subclasses.... Wonder if Python tools have refactoring support...</comment>


What to write (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://jacobian.org/writing/what-to-write/ <comment><USER2> "But not too easy. There's always going to be a class of users who aren't really qualified to use your project. Someone who's never written any code before isn't going to get very far with Django; those types of users should fail quickly. Don't get them through the tutorial only to run into a wall later on."

I couldn't disagree more. Are you going to purposefully obfuscate your tutorial to 'keep the noobs out'? Obviously, you need to have a target audience in mind and to not bore them with ultra-basic stuff, but this attitude of "not qualified" is slightly nauseating. There are a lot of self- taught people who learn by going through tutorials that are 'too difficult' \- if there's any doubt about whether your reader might not be familiar with something, then explain it.

Tutorials are not the place to be elitist.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the original author's intended message was that it would be pointless to have part one of the Django tutorial being a Python tutorial. If you don't know Python but you are trying to learn Django, you're starting in the wrong place.</comment></comment>


College Humor: The Hardly Working Startup Guys - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMmdl4VltD4&feature=youtu.be

<comment><USER2> they were missing a few terms, like "collapsed user models" and "elastic network".

If you don't get this video watch this: [http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/24/lumier-adds-a-new-coat- of-p...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/24/lumier-adds-a-new-coat-of-paint-to- windows/)</comment>


Your startup is not a startup, it's just a website. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.crranky.com/startup/your-startup-is-not-a-startup-its-just-a-website/ <comment><USER2> I love this post. People always ask you "Are you doing a startup? A hobby? A side project?". I always respond "I just wanna make revenue, damn it, call it whatever you want".

There's this website called MyFitnessPal.com. Has over a million uniques. Run by just 2 guys from their own house. No coverage in TC, VentureBeat, or any startup publications. Yet they probably get more visitors and more revenue (and less employees) than 99% of the startups covered.

<comment><USER3> Actually, their office is next to ours at 333 Bryant Street, and there's probably around 20 people in there. We borrowed a chair from them last week.

<comment><USER4> This reply made me smile, and is such a great example of why it's so hard to trust anything we read on the Internet, anywhere. I don't know which response to believe, if either, and don't know why I care so much either way.

Edit: A little coverage in VentureBeat [http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/19/health-tracking-app- needto...](http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/19/health-tracking-app-needtoeat- keeps-your-waistline-in-check/) I just had to check. :)

<comment><USER5> I'm sure a great many web companies that have 20 people today had 2 people not so very long ago. Stats have associated timestamps :)

<comment><USER6> I would venture to say that almost every start-up begins with 1 or 2 driving forces, and branches from there. I am hard pressed to remember any that haven't. Anyone here think of one?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having had my own revenue-positive "startup" called a hobby, a toy, a blog and various other diminutions, generally by people who've never managed their own company's budget or, if they have, have blown millions in startup capital, this was great.

Whether your company's a startup or not can drive you up semantic walls, when the the focus should (for some people) being on building something of value, whether that value's for shareholders, investors, or just yourself, and to hell with all the labels.

<comment><USER8> "I managed $ABC million budgets..." always makes me think, "Was it your money? Or were you just dipping into the seemingly endless corporate coffers?"

I think working with big corporate budgets negatively trains you for running your own company. You can just throw money at things and if it doesn't work out, no big deal. Drop $80k on a booth at a trade show that didn't result in a single sale? Well, at least you got some good face-time, right? That kind of thing just doesn't fly when you're just starting out on your own.

It's much harder to manage a $20k budget and go from $0 to >$0 revenue than it is to manage a $1 million budget that just magically refills year after year.

<comment><USER9> _Or were you just dipping into the seemingly endless corporate coffers_

At both large companies I've worked at each department had its own budget, and each department head was responsible for that budget. If a manager keeps losing too much money, they get fired, if a department continually fails to turn a profit the department gets closed down. So while it's not the same as a startup it's also not like you have infinite money to throw around without consequence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well it's not as clear cut as the post suggests, though it's clearly stated as an opinion piece so they are entitled to whatever they want to think/believe.

The difference I'd like to point out is how scalable and reliable the business model is for generating value (aka money.)

For example, I run a web design company that offers custom services and consistently generates revenues each month. However it's not a scalable business. If I got 100x more sales next month, I would need more people and the number of people needed would most likely be a linear function of the number of sales I got. Also, it's not a completely reliable business model in the long run.

Compare that with that of Wix.com, which is a DIY website builder software. I would bet that they know that for every X free users, they'll generate $y in add-on sales. If they got 100x more users/customers, they would need more people and resources but likely it would be an logarithmic function.

Now if you had a "startup" like Wix without a clear focus on figuring out how to generate revenue, that's just foolish. That wouldn't be a startup. That would be wishful thinking.

Basically what I'm saying is that it wouldn't be fair to say that my business that consistently generates $x/month is better than a "startup" that might generate 1/10 of the revenue each month _IF_ they are deliberately trying and succeeding at figuring out an effective, scalable & reliable business model because in year Z, they could be 10x my revenues.

</comment><comment><USER11> This trend needs to change. There's too many guys out there running Wordpress blogs on shared hosting plans and/or making Android (or iPhone) apps, just to call it a 'start-up'...my Facebook friends list is full of these guys, calling themselves with ridiculously random titles like CEO/Founder/Co-Founder/MD of <insert-wordpress-blog_or_mobile_app_here>

Back in the days, a start-up was something different, something the society looked down, you know...a real challenge (which is why the society looked down). Today, the scenario is like as if its cool to run a Start-up (and fail).

X: "Hey dude, I run a startup..howz about you?"

Y: "Cool story bro..I runz one too..wanna be my co-founder?"

X: "sure thing bro...right away"

[now X can call himself a 'Serial Entrepreneur' because he sabotaged his old start-up for a new one]

<comment><USER12> Exactly. What is even more annoying is that so many of them have ideas that require millions of users to make any money.

What's wrong with creating a SaaS for $80/month and finding 500 users? $40k/month is more than so many of these clowns will ever make.

they need to keep their heads down and mouths shut. rant over = )

<comment><USER13> _What's wrong with creating a SaaS for $80/month and finding 500 users? $40k/month is more than so many of these clowns will ever make._

No love from your peers? Seriously, B2B is way undervalued around here...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The definition of startup that I like is Steve Blank's, _a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model_. By that definition, his website was not a startup. It was a lifestyle business.

Note that this definition does not describe startups as inherently good thing. Just inherently different than other types of businesses in many key ways.

</comment><comment><USER15> I can really relate to this. I have a site that provides a service, does about 175k uniques & 900k pageviews per month and generates revenue from paid accounts ($1k), adsense ($4k) & partnerships ($10k).

Do I consider it a startup? Not really. But I don't really consider it to be just a website either. I guess my definition of a startup is an entity that has a team behind it, provides some type of service & could be substantially scaled with funding or revenue.

<comment><USER16> Mind telling us more about your site? :)

<comment><USER17> One could extrapolate from the username...

<comment><USER15> I was waiting for that. I'm a longtime HN frequenter and didn't want to post under my real account so I used a username generator and low & behold the first suggestion wasn't taken - what luck... Debated on it's appropriateness but figured I had to use it since it wasn't taken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Words mean different things to different people.

Startup. Ninja. Hacker.

There's absolutely nothing to be gained by arguing about word definitions, people treat definitions as axiomatic. People don't logically derive what a word means through etymology or historical usage, they define it as what they understand it to mean.

Telling someone that their definition of a word is wrong is like saying their preference for one colour over another is wrong. It's a personal view, accept it and move on.

<comment><USER19> Eventually, that makes communication impossible. If people are constantly reassigning different values to the same terms, you may have a conversation where each participant is actually discussing something different, and where the conclusions are therefore irrelevant.

To give you a current example, take REST. When a service says it has a REST API, it tells me absolutely nothing, since I don't know if they mean REST as in Roy Fielding's dissertation or REST as in "JSON instead of XML and some URL templates".

Their ability of communicating with me has been destroyed by people constantly reassigning different definitions to the term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Call me old-fashioned, but if you're not making new technology, you're not a start-up, you're a small business. Making a small business is cool, and if your small business happens to be a website, that's cool too.

But if all you want is to make a successful small business, and you don't care about technology, you're not really part of my community, and I don't really want you there. I want my community to be people who care about technology first, and business second. People who care only about business and don't care about technology tend to be the kind of people who ruin the companies and the communities I like, where people care about technology first, even if those companies became valuable because they were full of people who cared about technology first.

<comment><USER21> All new businesses are startups, whether they use technology or not. They may not be _technology startups_ , but they are still startups.

Indeed, legally, the first year of any business is considered its "startup" year (and possibly longer, in specific situations), and during this time the "startup" is eligible for tax breaks or exemptions under state and federal tax codes. This use of "startup" precedes Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER21> (reply to dead comment)

Yes, a bakery is a startup if it is just starting up. So is a taco cart, if it the vendor is just starting out. This is the classical definition of startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> g-garron "You are not the CEO, you are the fucking janitor" <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4169206>

As someone said already, it is not how you call your "company" or the position you have in there. The results should be the important thing.

The whole thing about Startups, definition, is that every single John Doe, want to say he is a hacker "just because he knows how to code", and want to say he has a startup "just because he has an idea, and a software/site based on it".

Well, definitions might be OK, but I agree with you. At the end of the day what really matters is how much money comes into your wallet, it does not matter if you are called "the janitor of the website".

</comment><comment><USER22> Startup is about starting a new business isn't it? If your first project was making money, but wasn't a business, with at least a rudimentar business plan, goals, and all the formality involved in doing real business... then maybe it was really just a web site that was making money as a side effect.

It looks like people enjoy romanticizing this darker side of starting up a new business. It's not your fault if you don't fail the first time you try :)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm with the author on this one. I'd pick a simple blog with millions of pageviews per month than a fledgling start-up idea that is losing money.

Is it super sexy? Of course not, but in the end, who cares?

</comment><comment><USER24> Trying to define _startup_ these days is like trying to define _hacker_. The meaning changes, depending on your company. This is a good thing. It signifies a culture shift.

<comment><USER25> PG defines a startup as a business with very high growth potential.

According to my accountant, the IRS defines a startup as a business activity that is not yet profitable, but you're actively working to make it profitable.

By either of these definitions, not every new venture is a startup. This is just semantic. I don't think "not a startup" should be an insult.

EDIT: I see from another comment that Merriam-Webster defines start-up as a fledgling business. IMHO this makes the English language a little less rich, since you could just as easily say "new business", but it is what it is.

<comment><USER26> PG also stresses the importance of creating a _new technology_ in his definition of startup.

A startup is a 'Useful infrastructure' previously and wholly 'nonexistent' that 'fills a need' for a population and thus earns revenue. I'm sure I've left something out but this definition helps me sort between startup ideas and content ideas in my head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Somewhat related- foreign correspondent (a news show in australia) ran a story last night on the new goldrush for people creating apps. Besides the cliché camera work, it seemed to be full of 'founders' who had written a single, sometimes unproven phone app and were talking about getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding, and getting acquired for a billion dollars.

I'm not sure if you can watch it outside of australia, but it's available here: <http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2012/s3572792.htm>

</comment><comment><USER28> The guy who runs the accelerator program at my university once yelled at me for calling my startup a website when I was explaining it to him. He told me to call it a product or a service and that I should NEVER EVER call it a website - and that "fuck, my 5 year old son can make a shit website". It really made the rest of the phone call awkward since he kept talking down to me and I was being super careful to avoid the W word.

Thoughts on his advice? He was the only investor I've ever talked to so just wondering for the future when talking to other investors...

<comment><USER29> He sounds like an asshole, for one. But maybe there's a point there - if you want to get investment, you should be talking about your business. That means employees, roles, taxes, stock, lawyers, planned growth, goals, etc. The website may be the medium by which you operate, but if someone is to invest in you, they are going to want to see you thinking bigger.

Consider it the difference between someone with a corner store and someone wanting to build a new franchise. No one "invests" in a corner store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Trying to follow the logic here. Keep getting stuck. The problem appears to be that folks feel like the term "startup" is abused and watered down to the point of being meaningless. Admitting a self described content aggregator (from one source!) into the club helps out how?

I think it's awesome this individual displays the ability to generate $10K in free cash flow per month. (I edited this as it sounded snarky when I read it back) The more you widen the definition the weaker the definition becomes.

</comment><comment><USER31> A startup usually comes with the connotation that you will scale it to some sort of ideal (whether that be revenue, the people or businesses you have an impact on, etc.). A site that pulls in a decent income via advertising is really just a lifestyle business with little chance of scaling. Now if you made a network of these sites or found some other scalable product coming from this site.. then you'd have a startup, no? No one says you have to build a startup though.

<comment><USER32> "A site that pulls in a decent income via advertising is really just a lifestyle business with little chance of scaling"

Would that make facebook & google the grand daddies of all lifestyle businesses?

<comment><USER33> No, because they have successfully demonstrated that they don't have "little chance of scaling"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Anyone have more info on the gaming site mentioned?

From the tone of the article it seems like it's no longer earning, Google slap? The old Adsense ban? Game fell out of popularity?

<comment><USER35> I would like to know as well. I can't find anything about it on any of his sites.

<comment><USER34> From a quick Googling looks like it was a blog covering the club penguin game and riding that popularity wave a few years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Really, so much revenue from 100K uniques and 1.5M page views a month? I wonder if that's typical or just some kind of Crranky's blog speciality?

<comment><USER37> Those figures fit with what I remember about ad revenue. If I remember right, it's normal for around 2% of hits to convert into an ad click. If we pair that with a $0.50 mean earning-per-click (memory and a cursory search of the Internet say this is reasonable), we get:

      $0.50 * (1.5 million * 2%) = $15,000/mo.

That leaves some leeway for Crranky to have worse performance and still hit his quoted $10,000/mo.

<comment><USER38> $0.50 per click and 50 impressions per click implies $10 CPM... Isn't that a bit high?

<comment><USER39> It's achievable today, and was even more easily achievable 5 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> A startup is a company that has captured a small percentage of the overall market it is attempting to fulfill. For example, I would say Tesla Motors is still a startup.

By contrast, I would not consider crranky's Blogspot website a startup because I suspect it has captured most of the small, shrinking market it targets.

</comment><comment><USER41> Both the OP's and that guy at the conference's attitude is wrong. One demeaning someone's work, the other chasing a ghost.

Where did that revenue-generating website go?

That said, this might not be the case, but if your work is creating the same value as the standard car salesman (i.e. none), you'll get corresponding respect.

</comment><comment><USER42> A company with a goal of making revenue and dividends is a normal company (or 'a website' in some cases). It may be a large company or a small company, growing or shrinking - but not a startup. A company with a goal of making huge (not 100%, but 100 times) growth is a startup.

100k company aiming to be a 200k company is not a startup;

100m company aiming to be a 200m company is not a startup;

100k company aiming to be a 200m company is a startup;

0$ company aiming to be a 200k company is a startup.

IMHO. Does it make sense?

P.S. and it is often determined by the actual business ideas. There are some ideas that can grow and scale if everything goes well; and there are some ideas simply that have a market ceiling of, say, a few million even if everything goes perfectly.

<comment><USER43> IMHO No, that does not make sense at all.

Think about the word "startup." The etymology of the word means, literally, "start up [business]". A new company that has yet to prove itself is a startup. The Merriam-Webster definition is "a fledgling business enterprise."

If that's not a startup, then calling what you're referring to "startups" is very counter-intuitive.

It's as if I had referred to a recently founded car manufacturer as a "new business" and then subsequently everyone started referring to 20-year-old car manufacturers as "new businesses."

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Both the author and his critique have different labels for the same thing. Its a non-issue.

A startup is company which doesnt have a stable cashflow and is searching for one. Thats about the only difference that really needs to be applied from a taxonomy point of view.

Impact is also completely unrelated to the label "startup". Private citizens, companies, NGOs, social communities and even projects-on-the-internet (eg: Linux) have had a huge impact on the world and its hard to say who has had more. Again another inane and useless conversation - who has more impact.

First make enough money to attempt to make an impact. Then you can try your hand at actually making an impact.

</comment><comment><USER45> The best definition of a startup that I've heard so far is from Eric Ries's book, the Lean Startup:

"An organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty."

I think anyone that wants to take a risk and actually create something should be allowed to call themselves at startup. Does it really matter if it's a business, website, startup? At the end of the day, it's pretty easy to tell who is serious and generally talented verses the people who are just hobbiest or not putting their full effort into their businesses.

</comment><comment><USER46> I mashed this down into a tweet a few weeks ago.

:%s/startup/website/gi

<https://twitter.com/reustle/status/224870973923532800>

</comment><comment><USER47> I rather have 10k monthly from a blog than headaches and stress that will give me nothing in return besides telling my friends I am a serial entrepreneur.

</comment><comment><USER48> I would say that a startup is something that generates value (hard to do), not cash flow (which is easy).

I had a lot of businesses that generated $10 K+ a month, some without me doing much at all, or working 5-10 hours a week. But they didn't worth a dime, so they weren't startups. I couldn't sell them for any meaningful amount. So is yours.

</comment><comment><USER49> Good post, even though had a bad experience.

I think whether site or startup, it is just a (hopefully informed) crapshoot. In the end, the goals are to be happy, make money, and make a difference. Whether you do that via startup, or other means, doesn't matter. And, if you fail, you (hopefully) learn and can do better next time.

</comment><comment><USER50> What if the website's hosted on Geocities?

</comment><comment><USER51> Sometimes it's not a website. When you make an app, the App Store really plays a big role in both promoting and selling it. I just wrote about how to get your apps promoted there:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4415473>

</comment><comment><USER52> Actually, a startup doesn't even need a website, or be anything software, a startup is a new company trying to create a new service or product that will bring revenue. No revenue, no company, no startup. Tesla motors is not a startup?

</comment><comment><USER53> I always felt the same way doing internet marketing stuff. I had fun and was making money, but I didn't consider my company a "startup" because I wasn't really creating any new technology. I think that is kind of the difference...

</comment><comment><USER54> Do what you want. Build what you want to work on. Bills need to be paid, but ultimately I would rather work on an application that provides needed functionality than on copying and pasting blog posts and negotiating ad deals.

</comment><comment><USER55> This article made me think of profitable Internet companies in two categories: 1) content monetizers / producers 2)software projects making apps

I think engineers admire apps more than content. But money and fame can be made with either.

</comment><comment><USER56> If it makes money it's a business. If it doesn't makes money than it's a problem.

</comment><comment><USER57> Something I wrote on the matter:

[http://www.kludgecode.com/index.php/startup-in-the- silicon-v...](http://www.kludgecode.com/index.php/startup-in-the-silicon- valley-sense/)

</comment><comment><USER58> Completely agree. My favorite 'startup' that's 'just a website', handsdown: Slickdeals. That forum probably pulls in more revenue than 99% of startups.

</comment><comment><USER59> Literally speaking, if you have "started something up", it is a start-up!

</comment><comment><USER60> I just have a website that sells people websites. What do we call that?

<comment><USER61> A startup incubator?

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> [http://boxngo.tumblr.com/post/29561118300/5-things- startups-...](http://boxngo.tumblr.com/post/29561118300/5-things-startups-do- that-i-hate) Covering the same thing

</comment><comment><USER63> I always feel awkward with things like this... I'm more interested in building cool things and making them open source and/or interoperable than I am instantly trying to revenue-ize it. I'm so tired of all of these apps that do the same damn thing with (insert some random useless gimmick) that will _never_ amount to much because they're all competing with each other for critical mass because their products are largely useless without a large- enough network.

<comment><USER64> no, but seriously, this will be the best to-do list app ever

<comment><USER65> Well, it really is different this time.

It is a big data local social gamified MVP'd pivoted to-do list built on a distributed paxos consistent lock-free real-time column-based k/v persistent memory grid.

<comment><USER66> No bootstrapping? That's my favorite word.

<comment><USER67> Not really compatible; bootstrapping (in the business sense) is kinda the opposite of VC-chasing, which is what such buzzword-fests are typically a symptom of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Paying someone for developing a (IMHO not really fancy and useful) webapp isn't the same thing as leading "real" startup. A "Startup Guy" works on his product 24/7, talking to investors, partners, costumers and much much more...</comment>


Watch Out Boston, a Rip-Off Is Coming to Town - <AUTHOR> http://www.jasonmendelson.com/wp/archives/2010/02/watch-out-boston-a-rip-off-is-coming-to-town-young-startup-ventures.php

<comment><USER2> _Just for toppers, this group offered one company that I know a featured "Top 20 innovators spot" if they paid their bounty._

"We loved the innovative way in which they wrote us a check"

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if most of the VCs, lawyers, and accountants who generally participate in this sort of thing realize the effect it has on their reputation.

For example, Goodwin Procter's supposed to be a reputable firm, but not only do they host the youngStartup events in New York, the one time I was at their office it was because they were providing space for 'award committee interviews' that turned out to be a thinly-veiled attempt to sell pricey conference tickets to the 'winners'.

On the other hand, the law firm I used for my startup has a history of sponsoring interesting talks by experienced entrepreneurs, which are free to attend. I didn't pick that firm because of this, but it certainly made me feel better about my choice.</comment>


When Does a Consciousness Test Not Test for Consciousness? - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/when-does-a-consciousness-test-not-test-for-consciousness

<comment><USER2> The whole article seems faulty. At least I fail to see how this experiment proves wrong to use mirror test to check for self-awareness as opposed to proving pigeons can be trained to be self-aware.</comment>


The End of Monkeypatching - <AUTHOR> http://www.rubyinside.com/the-end-of-monkeypatching-4570.html <comment><USER2> It misses the most important step: submit a pull request to the project maintainer, so that you don't end up maintaining every project yourself for which you ever fixed a bug.

<comment><USER3> I see so many pull requests that get no feedback and being totally ignored, it gets me wondering about this whole forking fanzy...

For major projects it may work, but sometimes you're updating an old library to work with a newer version of a platform and get dead silence. It doesn't do anyone any good.

<comment><USER4> It's just laziness. I recently sent the ditz maintainers a patchset for 1.9 compatibility, which they promptly ignored. They aren't on github/bitbucket, so I had to manually diff a copy of the original code against mine in order to create the patch. Then I needed to subscribe to the mailing list and send them the patch. On their end, they would need to run patch to apply my changes. None of this is hard, we've been doing it for a long time.

But at least with github/bitbucket, most of this friction is reduced to a few simple clicks. It's certainly no worse.

<comment><USER5> _It's just laziness. [...] Then I needed to subscribe to the mailing list and send them the patch. On their end, they would need to run patch to apply my changes._

If only things were that simple. A proper maintainer would have to:

a) decide whether what this patch claims to do with the code moves the code in a direction where the maintainers want it to move.

b) review the code for quality, security concerns and outright backdoors.

c) possibly: compare it to a zillion patches that (more or less) claim to do the same.

d) assuming the patch is perfect: check with collisions on other pending patches, recently committed changes, etc.

I do not know about this project, and have no real expertise as a maintainer, but I am fairly sure it is not "just laziness". If it were, all projects would have an email address that blindly applies each patch sent to it to the code base.

<comment><USER4> > I do not know about this project, and have no real expertise as a maintainer

In my example case, it certainly is. There certainly aren't zillions of patches. The maintainers are just not "maintaining". Plain and simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes, instead of getting support hell for monkeypatching, we get support hell for using forked versions of the libs.

Consider me skeptical that there will be any real improvement from this.

(I am not claiming forks are bad, only that it solves a different problem than support hell)

<comment><USER7> Agreed. There should be a term for "takes problem from one place and puts it in another place yielding no net advantage."

<comment><USER8> "Shuffling the deckchairs on the titanic" comes to mind, but it isn't really a term.

<comment><USER9> I've heard that phrase a few times before, but I don't think it fits the context here. The context is a "solution" that creates more problems than it solves. "Shuffling the deckchairs/polishing the silverware on the Titanic" refers to busying oneself with small problems when there's a honking great problem that's being ignored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The key benefit can be had with monkey patching as well:

\- Publishing a new solution and making it available.

The packaging is not ideal, as setup and configuration of the lib+patch will not be as simple as pulling a modified lib. But think what you would have to do to incorporate 5 separate patches to a given library. It could very well be simpler to run 5 monkey patches than to fork a project and do 5 merges.

</comment><comment><USER11> Monkey patching is bad software engineering, but it happens because it also works in many cases, and because it's fast. The fork and fix approach is a pretty heavy weight solution to an often trivial problem. Just because git (and lets face it, ruby and git go hand in hand) lets you branch to your heart's content, doesn't mean you should.

</comment><comment><USER12> Non-Ruby user here. I thought monkeypatching was replacing members at runtime, not just adding them. Or adding them to an instance of the object instead of the class.

Isn't just adding members like a "type extension" that statically typed languages can safely do? (Not flaming, just trying to understand the differences.)

<comment><USER13> That actually is (sort of) addressed in the article's initial example. Your class extension can turn _someone else's_ class extension into a monkey patch. Worse, your extension may not match calling semantics of the other extension, so you can get some truly ugly behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really don't like this solution. To fork and link to your own version of Rails just to get something like Array#sum is not sustainable. Yes, Bundler makes those first steps easy, but maintenance doesn't seem particularly fun after that (especially for a project as active as Rails).

Pull requests, if done right, are the real way to go. If the pull request isn't accepted (but the maintainer is an active one), maybe you should ask yourself why you need to implement this change in the first place. (Or why you need to implement it this way.)

That said, refinements (aka, monkey-patching without consequences) should show up soon and can solve this problem for anyone who upgrades to Ruby 2.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wish there was more of an emphasis on this being a temporary solution. Usually when you need a patch, you need it now, so pulling the lib from your own git fork is the only immediate solution.

But you should make every effort with your fork to adhere to the project's standards and get your fixes merged back in so the entire ecosystem can benefit.

Get off the custom gem as soon as possible.

</comment><comment><USER16> The title of this post is misleading. This isn't about ending monkeypatching. This is about putting your monkeypatches in a fork.</comment>


On a popular misconception concerning "literally" (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://waste.typepad.com/waste/2014/07/on-a-popular-misconception-concerning-literally.html <comment><USER2> Fuck you very much, figuratively.

People arguing that "literally" is "now accepted" to actually mean figuratively are the whole fucking problem. When stupid people use words this poorly, language ceases to have any fucking meaning.

Try using 'literally' to mean 'figuratively' in a court of law and let me know how it works out.</comment>


Speed running web games with Python - <AUTHOR> http://youtu.be/V7UO53ajBc0

<comment><USER2> tl;dr - Python bot plays online game via point and click. Source code here: [https://github.com/Audionautics/Burrito- Bot/blob/master/Burr...](https://github.com/Audionautics/Burrito- Bot/blob/master/Burrito-bot/bison.py)

Not gonna win any awards for code style, but projects like this are the kind of things that make me glad I know at least one language really well.

The source is just a few hundred lines of extremely readable code that accomplishes something pretty remarkable.

<comment><USER3> New to Python, so the user says on Reddit.

<comment><USER4> And here is the link to the Reddit post. [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/pb63q/speed_run...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/pb63q/speed_running_web_games_with_python/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of Sikuli: <http://sikuli.csail.mit.edu/> If you check out their blog, they have a script which plays Angry Birds.

I've done similar things myself, with boring online/Facebook games. If you can script it, it's not a very interesting game.

edit: Here's my take on the ethics of bots: [http://blog.oarsum.com/post/255516489/cheating-and-game- desi...](http://blog.oarsum.com/post/255516489/cheating-and-game-design)

<comment><USER6> I agree; Chess has so little to make it interesting. :P

<comment><USER5> Heh. I guess chess has been scripted, but it took long enough that I'd probably consider it to still be an interesting game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Man, when I tried to do this with Tower Defense a few years ago I had the devil of a time reading the screen. I did end up managing to do everything but good OCR on the digit status displays, though - then lost interest.

I'll bet everything would work better now...

</comment><comment><USER4> I would define this as a tool assisted speed run (TAS). Check out TASVideos.org if you are interested in reading more. The site is dedicated to TASing console games in emulators using various programming languages.

</comment><comment><USER8> Many times i've wanted to finish a game which requires a succession of boring and repetitive commands to complete. Automating it like i do any other development task seems like the perfect solution!

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there a script for Cow Clicker yet?</comment>


Coveo raises $172M at $1B+ for AI-based enterprise search and personalization - sahin-boydas https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/06/coveo-raises-227m-at-1b-valuation-for-ai-based-enterprise-search-and-personalization/Coveo <comment><AUTHOR> Wrong link btw, this is the good one: [https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/06/coveo- raises-227m-at-1b-va...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/06/coveo- raises-227m-at-1b-valuation-for-ai-based-enterprise-search-and- personalization)</comment>


Ask HN: How much is my domain tiny.chat worth? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Have you resolved the trademark dispute[1]?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11570516](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11570516)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it is resolved now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> While maybe not the answer you're looking for, but the value of your domain is precisely what someone is willing to pay for it.

<comment><USER4> yes good point, a domain might be worth "$500" as a hard valuation, but there might be a client that _needs_ the domain that could be willing to pay 5-6 figures for it. Usually either shorter ones, or really brandable ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You are getting fairly consistent responses across your two posts regarding this domain name. You could follow the advice you've asked for and received or you could try again in a few weeks to see if public sentiment suddenly and unexplainably sways in the direction you are hoping for or you can do your own thing or you can reach out to a lawyer and get an answer.

My recommendation is either the first or the last.

</comment><comment><USER6> Whatever offer the company claiming the trademark is willing to make, or zero.</comment>


Amazon announces plans to make movies for theaters, Prime streaming - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/19/7852513/amazon-studios-making-movies-for-theaters-prime-streaming <comment><AUTHOR> From Amazon corporate blog - [http://phx.corporate- ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-ne...](http://phx.corporate- ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2008551)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is baffling to me.</comment>


The User Experience Guide Book (free ebook) by author of UX Design For Startups - <AUTHOR> http://uxmanual.com/user-experience-for-product-managers.html

<comment><USER2> Great book - THX!</comment>


How to sue Microsoft - and win - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/23/smallbusiness/i4i_microsoft_lawsuit/index.htm

<comment><USER2> This is a great strategy if your lifelong dream is to get rich off a legal settlement. It's not at all instructive for startups.

Note the delay from filing the patent to having it issued: theirs was unusually fast. The last patent filed in my name took over 8 years to issue, and Arbor had very excellent IP lawyers. That's 8 years before you can even file a suit.

Assume you instantly find a deep-pocketed violator of your patent. Add up to a year just to get to the point where you're ready to sue, and several more years to pursue the lawsuit. Spend --- according to this article --- several million dollars just in legal each of those years.

Then flip a coin to see if you get anything back.

Patents are a waste of time for startups. If your company is even around for the entire window of time needed to execute this strategy, you've done something wrong.

<comment><USER3> Excellent points about the article but, in my view, it is too extreme to say that patents are a "waste of time for startups."

Patents can and do help startups with their positioning for funding, among other things, though software patents usually are a waste of time, as is _any_ strategy based on the idea of using patents to take on a large player in the marketplace, unless one wants to become a patent troll.

<comment><USER2> But every hour spent on patents (and babysitting patent lawyers takes many, many hours) is an hour not spent executing on the core business. So you have to ask yourself, what's going to improve my positioning more: the same freeze- dried reconstituted IP PowerPoint strategy used by every other VC-backed company, or N x $50,000 more revenue?

Just to be devil's advocate.

<comment><USER3> Just speaking from considerable experience that a _minority_ of startups can benefit hugely from a good patent strategy (e.g., saw one of my early-stage fiber optics clients get to $400M annual run rate and multi-B valuation, with the dozens of patents filed by its founder proving to be a major factor in valuation at interim funding, at IPO, and at ultimate merger with JDSU).

I find your overall logic compelling, however, as I have seen startups use patents all too often for empty positioning, at considerable cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Two years spent in and out of courts across the U.S. cost i4i $10 million in legal fees._

Ouch.

<comment><USER5> As noted here previously: <http://www.tinaja.com/patnt01.asp>

He says that $14 million or so is the break even point for patents.</comment></comment>


What a Sensory Isolation Tank Taught Me About My Brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/opinion/sunday/whos-in-charge-the-body-or-the-brain.html <comment><USER2> If you are interested, Richard Feynman has written about his experiences (the physicist) in Sensory Depravation Tanks. You can read the entire post at [0], and it forms one chapter of "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman", which I highly recommend.

[0]: [https://www.dmt- nexus.me/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&t=51786](https://www.dmt- nexus.me/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&t=51786)

</comment><comment><USER3> I just did it once and found it underwhelming, like quickstarting meditation, but not much more. After sometime salt started to crystalize at the water line, which was rather worse than lying in bed meditating.

<comment><USER4> > like quickstarting meditation

Meditation is hard, so quick-starting it could be valuable, especially for someone who doesn't know how to meditate well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's interesting the writer didn't get sensory deprivation and, yet, still wrote about it...

<comment><USER6> He can't get his $89 reimbursed by the NYT without at least churning out some clickbait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One related talk that might be of interest.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness](https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness)

Edit: Added Speaker Bio.

[https://www.ted.com/speakers/dan_dennett](https://www.ted.com/speakers/dan_dennett)

</comment><comment><USER8> I've tried it once. It got interesting only after about 45 min, but the session was only 60 minutes. Not enough, in my opinion.

<comment><USER9> I bet if you went second time, you would have even more fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> These have become very trendy.

<comment><USER11> Wow, you gave me a flashback to the 1970's (the good kind :-) when they were (first?) trendy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure about these Sensory Deprivation Tanks, simply because I haven't tried them, but it all seems a bit too much hocus pocus.

Richard Feynman (as one post mentions) tried it, felt good, had some experiences, but once out of it he quickly realized that it was just another perception. We all perceive, if there is no sensory input, the brain will fill in the blanks.

I've been practicing mediation (Vipassna, which is also minfullness meditation) for around 6 months now. I highly recommend it. The mind-body complex is what its mainly about. You have to observe your bodily senses and your thoughts.

As quantum mechanics demonstrates, observing changes the thing being observed. (Like the wave function collapse, I'm no expert). But you can surely change your mind by meditation.

Happy New Year!

<comment><USER13> Isn't Vipassna basically the 10 day meditation retreat? Do they have their own meditation techniques that you can follow post those 10 days?

Also, did you complete the full 10 days? I've been thinking of doing this for some time, read a lot about it but there's a mental block stopping me.

<comment><USER12> Thats how its marketed. But no, Vipassna is a form of meditation practice. There are many others.

And to be honest its not the real stuff. What are 10 days? You are going to learn absolutely nothing. Mediation is a 24 hours a day practice. And it takes a lot of time to just get used to it.

For example, in one form they only tell you to focus your mind on an object (like breathing, or your abdomen). In Vipassna, the idea is focus first, but the next step is to observe your thoughts (mindfullness). Observe, never reject, whatever it is. Happiness, Lust, Greediness, Anxiety. Observe, and let it go. The mind is a crazy machine. More precisely, our chattering monkey mind.

Please read this book if you haven't already. I can't recommend it enough. It has changed my life.

Mindfulness in Plain English - Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

<comment><USER14> Everyone keeps recommending Mindfulness in Plain English, including people I have a deep admiration from. But I went into it thinking it'd be a no-bs exploration of meditation and closed the book once the author mentioned how some meditators experienced "talking to their ancestors".

I'm sure that you can be objective and cut through that type of statement but meh, I couldn't do it. Maybe I'll try again at some point but that one really put me off.

<comment><USER12> I somehow agree with you, but I especially found the book great since it has little or no mention of Religion or gods.

Although spiritual experiences can occur if you think of them as hallucinations due to the state intense meditation can get one into.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How can I get past the paywall?

<comment><USER16> This is not the answer you're looking for but this worked for me: I bought a subscription to the NY Times.

(To answer your question: use the _web_ link next to the article: it takes you to Google; then click on the matching result.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Rather difficult read. Not sure what the author is doing with his language, but even after rereading some of the paragraphs I still fail to grasp the point.

An example:

> "Hardly a week goes by, it seems, without an enthusiastic report in the > popular media about intriguing neuroscience research linking some human > behavior to the function of a particular brain circuit."

These things that he "learned" seem to be quite trivial and shallow. It seems he first came up with the title and then tried to fit his experience into this title.</comment>


Show HN: Robots Are My Passion - <AUTHOR> https://www.personalrobots.biz/?rel=💙 <comment><USER2> Another note: I remember a colleague telling me about a San Francisco Robotics Challenge they were part of (as staff/judging). The challenge was simply to navigate a tiny, tiny maze of plywood walls with one jog in an otherwise straight corridor. Flat floor, good lighting.

I remembered a paper-airplane contest where the winning time-in-air entry was a simple strip of stiff paper with a slight bend - flip it and it 'rolled' in the air descending surprisingly slowly. It was disqualified for 'not looking like an airplane'.

So I naturally asked, what was the criterion for 'robot'? He said two categories, autonomous and fly-by-wire (this was the early 80s).

Was the task complete when the robot was entirely out of the maze, or when any part of the robot passed the finish line? Any part he said.

Good enough for me. I told him I had several entries, and would he let me know if any were suitable for their contest? Sure, he said, what are they?

The first looks like a bucket of confetti and a fan. The fan is sitting on a step ladder. You tip the bucket of confetti by hand, but after that the robot is self-guided.

That's not a robot, he said.

Ok, my next one is simpler. It looks like a bucket of water. You tip it over at the entrance, and it naturally follows the maze using gravity and surface tension.

That's not a robot, he said.

Ok, can it have biological components? Sure, he said, getting excited. What do you have in mind?

Well, my next robot looks like a cat with a propeller beanie (the receiver). Somebody puts it down by the entrance, and I transmit a homing signal (Here Kitty! Kitty!) at the exit.

That's not a robot, he said.

Turns out, none of my robots would suit his criterion. Not even my nanobot - in a glass vial, pull the stopper at the entrance and when my detector went Ding! at the exit (looked like an oven timer) the nano-bot had arrived. Despite all his assurances, all they would actually admit were electromechanical devices with wheels, solenoids etc.

So that put me off robotics for 20 years.

<comment><USER3> You're just being difficult with the judges, it's a small event, they don't have enough money to hire big lawyers to come up with a 1 ton rulebook that would cover every eventuality.

Keep in the spirit of the competition and try not to cheese things too much and everybody would be much happier.

If you still can't understand, well, feel free to set up your own robotics competition and see how many people would sign up.

<comment><USER2> Spirit? Supposed to spur innovation, but turned into a remote-control-car event by dry unimaginative robotics folk.

Nobody was unhappy; folks were smiling. Just pedants on HN that have an issue far as I can see.

<comment><USER3> These sort of low level competitions aren't there to spur innovation - it's just to kindle some interest with kids or the general public. Once you realise that, just smile and move on and let them play fast and loose with words.

If you really want to do innovation, there's DARPA - they've lots of problems that they need solving they can't do with today's robots. Or if you have something against the military, there's always something similar to the Amazon Picking Challenge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's always interesting to meet a fellow Robotics enthusiast! Do you test the robots yourself before you write about them?

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks I'm glad to meet someone with my same passion :) do you have a website?

yes some of them I manage to test, others no but make the reviews on particular parameters like presence of AI, responsiveness ,presence of sdk, functionalities, etc

<comment><USER4> I have a newsletter: [https://weeklyrobotics.com/](https://weeklyrobotics.com/)

and a personal blog that I should update more often: [https://msadowski.github.io/](https://msadowski.github.io/)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stremio cool app for streaming movies and TV shows - <AUTHOR> http://www.strem.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> Similar to PopcornTime but much better user experience. It has more content too. More like media center, coz you get notifications when new TV show episode is available and stuff.</comment>


Show HN: Dompeg – A sometimes-working bookmarklet that saves the page to jpg - <AUTHOR> https://codepen.io/dosy/pen/JrQgMY?editors=1105 <comment><AUTHOR> caveats: no external images, no custom fonts, no other iframes ( but this can be a positive as it removes ads ). Try it on google search result page, github, bloomberg, etc. It produces a 'text only' image of the page -- only inline images included. pages with lots of external stylesheets take a while ( 10 - 15 seconds ). some sites ( youtube, flickr ) just give a mostly blank page.</comment>


Facebook Reports Second Quarter 2014 Results - <AUTHOR> http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=861599 <comment><USER2>
        Mobile MAUs were 1.07 billion as of June 30, 2014,
        an increase of 31% year-over-year.

That's crazy. 1/7th of the world's population logs in to Facebook from a mobile device at least once a month.

<comment><USER3> I would think it's fair assumption that a significant percentage of those users are being counted multiple times if they have duplicate accounts.

EDIT: I don't see how the above statement beckons downvotes. Yes. It was an assumption, but not absurd one at that. Here's one such article that talks about fake accounts -- [http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/02/tech/social- media/facebook-fak...](http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/02/tech/social- media/facebook-fake-accounts/)

EDIT2: Last year Facebook said 4.8% of their MAU was duplicate, misclassified, or spam accounts. That's 51+ million today assuming the percentage has remained constant.

<comment><USER4> Who has duplicate accounts on Facebook?

<comment><USER5> Every social media employee? I would guess most have separate personal accounts and accounts used to manage their company's pages.

<comment><USER6> That's not how Facebook Pages work - a Page isn't an account you log into, it's something your main Facebook account can have admin rights to (and a Page can have multiple administrators). I have admin rights on a few Facebook Pages but I only count as a single active user, and I don't have to log out of my Gregor account to administer them.

Historically, some brands did create full Facebook accounts, but Facebook now discourages that and as far as I know most brands are using Pages now. For a while Zuck's dog, Beast, was a notable exception (he had a Facebook account long after that was discouraged) but it looks like he's just got a Page now.

(I used to work at Facebook.)

<comment><USER7> I don't recall Beast ever having anything but a Page - in fact, I remember that Zuck mentioning in a Q&A that he was using Beast to get a better feeling about what it's like to run a Page.

<comment><USER6> Could be - I think my memory of the non-Page account dates to mid-2011, and that's plenty long enough ago for my memory to play tricks on me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These numbers are seriously mind boggling a DAU count of 829 million is close to 1/8th of the worlds population. Even more impressive when you consider the fact that only about 3 billion even have internet access.

~1/3 of the people on the planet with internet access are logging into Facebook every. single. day.

<comment><USER9> Do these DAU/MAU numbers include WhatsApp users?

<comment><USER10> They said the WhatsApp deal would close later this year, implying it hasn't yet finalized, so I would imagine this does not include those numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there a universally agreed metric of what a mobile MAU constitutes?

Is there a generally agreed unit of time spent per instance of log in activity, to qualify as a MAU?

Or just the very act of stumbling into the FB app (somehow), through the myriad ways possible out there, still constitute a MAU?

I understand that this does not count (?) API calls (justifiably).

All these years in, I just want to assure myself that we are still not in the era of sketchy metrics and non-standard parameters.

For example this Nielsen graphic is from 2012 and shows time spent, on social networking broadly, in HH:MM

[http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/files/2012/12/nielsen-...](http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/files/2012/12/nielsen- social-mobile-2.png)

Note: Asked in the other duplicate post, as well.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8077054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8077054)

</comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps someone could explain to me in simple terms why FB's stock has been surging for the past week (and is currently $75 in after-hours). Did people have an "inkling" about the financials?

<comment><USER13> [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy- fin...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-financial- crisis/to-catch-a-trader/preet-bharara-insider-trading-is-rampant-on-wall- street/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 829 million DAU translates to roughly 10k users logging in a second, I can't even imagine how many requests that translates to. Can someone explain how their infrastructure works so they can manage this? I literally cannot fathom a system to handle this that isn't multiple millions of servers.

<comment><USER7> It's hard to answer this easily in a holistic fashion without getting really abstract. Is there a particular part you're wondering about?

<comment><USER14> What's the trend around external vs. eventual consistency at Facebook? I ask this comparing eventual consistency in TOA and Google's shift towards external consistency in Spanner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 62% of advertising revenue for the second quarter of 2014_

Wow, that seems really high. Are other companies monetizing mobile ads like this?

<comment><USER16> Short answer: No(t yet). Longer answer is in this article: [http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Driven-by-Facebook- Google-M...](http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Driven-by-Facebook-Google- Mobile-Ad-Market-Soars-10537-2013/1010690)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The sarcastic side of me would like to say that facebooks success is due to the recent increase in embedded video links in the news feeds. The videos are annoying. But FBs reach is increasingly impressive. Surely that's the driver.

</comment><comment><USER18> Would anyone care to chime in on why Facebook's income tax rate is so high?

"GAAP income tax expense for the second quarter of 2014 was $595 million, representing a 43% effective tax rate. Excluding share-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses, the non-GAAP effective tax rate would have been approximately 36%."

</comment><comment><USER19> Do they measure how many people load a like button on a 3rd party site?

</comment><comment><USER20> Remember when the HN consensus was that fb would never make money or be profitable? (And that mobile was unmonetizable)

:)

</comment><comment><USER21> Quite a good quarter for FB. Shares are high.

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow. They really knocked it out of the park.

829 million DAU - I almost feel shitty for having deactivated my account.

<comment><USER23> why was this downvoted?

<comment><USER24> The part "I almost feel shitty for having deactivated my account." probably came off as irrelevant and poorly worded to some users. I'm actually not sure how to connect personal emotion and not being part of a popular option.

<comment><USER22> I was joking and not trying to be obnoxious, but I suppose it came off that way. I was more commenting on the impressive gravitational pull of something that has a good chunk of the world's population using it. To a very non- trivial percentage of the globe Facebook is a vital utility and communications tool. That's impressive, considering the turn-over rate of other popular social networks that are or nearly are defunct.

The fact that their revenue is growing, and not shrinking, is astonishing given that a couple years ago people were counting down the days until Facebook dropped off the leaderboard.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Who's the Boss? There Isn't One - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303379204577474953586383604.html

<comment><USER2> I'm super sick of these articles patting Valve on the back for its super- innovative business structure.

The fact is, you can afford to have a goofy office like this when you've already achieved a comfortable level of success. Valve has been free and clear ever since Steam became the go-to place for digital game distribution, and Github is pretty comfortable in its place as the top source code host.

Emphasizing these companies kooky structure conflates correlation and causation. It's not that they're profitable or interesting because of their management structure: instead, they can afford to play around because they were early movers in a very profitable space.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious how you think it's possible for a structure like this to emerge after some level of success? You think that any company sets up a traditional management structure, accomplishes success and then fires all the managers and tells everyone to work differently? Or do you think it might be more likely that thinking differently early on about how to treat employees and how to focus creative energy somehow helps to achieve that success?

GitHub has always run this way, since it was 4 people. When we tell people how we operate, they have always responded that it will never scale - people have told us that since we were 4. We're now at nearly 100 employees and it's still working great. Valve is 300 and Gore has several thousand, so we're pretty sure we can keep going this way. We are slightly different than Valve, but their handbook really resonated with the way we do things. The main difference between companies like Valve or GitHub and many other companies is that we don't look at other places and ask ourselves how we can copy their structures, how we can cargo cult their success, instead we look at our problems and ask ourselves how we can address them in the best way possible. It appears that Valve has done the same thing and we've come to some similar conclusions.

I think this is a big reason why we've been successful - that we ask ourselves this when approaching product too. You say we're sitting pretty at the top, but when we started there were tons of source hosts. Valve was just as bad - starting in another industry that was totally saturated. The reason we were able to break through I believe was largely due to the fact that we thought about problem solving differently than the industry leaders that we started up against.

The real point you should take from the article is not that Gore or Valve or GitHub are lucky, but that we approach problem solving in a very different way and that might be an interesting thing to take a look at. If all you read in an article like this is that we're 'goofy' or 'kooky' then you're missing everything that's important and it's a waste of time for you to read the article at all. In fact, if that's what you take and then you try to copy us you will fail horribly in what you do, because you're blindly copying the least important of the many symptoms of this approach.

Approach problems from first principles. Figure out what the best possible experience would be for the person using your product (not just the person buying it). Make that experience a reality. Don't copy anyone. Do that same thing internally. Now what does your company and your product look like? That should be what you take from this article.

<comment><USER4> > The real point you should take from the article is not that Gore or Valve or > GitHub are lucky, but that we approach problem solving in a very different > way and that might be an interesting thing to take a look at. If all you > read in an article like this is that we're 'goofy' or 'kooky' then you're > missing everything that's important and it's a waste of time for you to read > the article at all. In fact, if that's what you take and then you try to > copy us you will fail horribly in what you do, because you're blindly > copying the least important of the many symptoms of this approach.

Well said, sir. Reminded me of this article on cargo cult management [1]

[1] <http://gigaom.com/2009/06/21/cargo-cult-management/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You might not have a manager , but you always have a Boss to a certain extent. There is always someone who is named as the companies MD/CEO , someone who has the authority to legally hire you / fire you. So therefor their opinion will always be more important.

Also the problem with having the team evaluate someones performance is that teams are vulnerable to cliqueness and groupthink and you may therfor often end up with decisions that are based more on popularity than anything else.

In theory at least a good manager should be able to step back from the inter- employee politics and make judgements with some degree of perspective.

<comment><USER6> There's always someone more invested. Management can pay lip service to flat hierarchies and all that, but at the end of the day structure emerges more or less by consensus, the same way everybody realizes the guy who always farts or something. The common-if-not-genetic "desire to be led" causes people to produce hierarchies for themselves, to produce their leaders. This isn't robotic, but it comes naturally to a lot of people, even if only to confer authority upon that person.

<comment><USER7> But the difference is that in a structure like Valves the inertia of those structures is much lower. So institutions don't stagnate into structures concerned with preserving their internal structure. Some unit starts to become irrelevant exactly when the people who are the top producers turn their attention elsewhere. The dead weight doesn't exert power to keep itself afloat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's the question I don't get - how do you fill "support" roles? Like how do admins fit into this structure? Or HR? Are there really people, who given a job at a video game company and no defined role, would choose to set up meetings and answer phones?

Or similarly, how do you determine that some devs build awesome video games while others maintain a corporate intranet or do some much more mundane task?

Clearly, it works. And in a theoretical sense, I can see why when everyone has somewhat similar skillsets. Can someone fill in the blanks for me when there are specialists and support people involved?

<comment><USER9> I imagine you'd advertise for a support specialist in the traditional sense, but once hired, they wouldn't have a job title. Their skills would be in customer support though so that's what they would naturally do. If they tried to work on development, but had no skills, then the group would remove them from the project. They'd then have to go back to support or find something else they can work on with their skill set.

<comment><USER10> OK, so who cleans the toilets and empties the garbage? Contractors, presumably -- easier to get non-employees to do this than to incorporate menial staff into your oh-so-flat structure. Reminds me of the way ancient Rome ensured that all citizens were equal by creating a huge subclass of non-citizens.

What's my point? Just that it's easy to over-fetishize a non-heirarchical structure, but it only works (a) under certain very specialized circumstances and (b) with a little bit of smoke and mirrors.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no argument here - just sarcasm and unsupported claims. You invoke janitors to imply that non-hierarchical organization can't possibly work. But you don't know that; no one does. People have barely begun to experiment with these forms. How much imagination has gone into figuring out ways to accommodate menial labor so far? It takes time.

If we can figure out how to build software without bosses, I'm confident we can figure out how to clean toilets.

<comment><USER11> Some developers already know how to clean toilets. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. One possibility (though I'm sure there are many others) is to divide the work that no one wants to do. There's even a handy word for that: chores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> To me, setups like this -- along with employee owned models like the one at the Mondragon Group -- are the future. It's always struck me as strange that we value democracy so much in our government, but not in our businesses.

If you're interested, here's some info on Mondragon <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation>

</comment><comment><USER13> _To help decide pay, employees rank their peers—but not themselves—voting on who they think creates the most value._

Considering how larger society often 'ranks' and rewards people (e.g. celebrities, local politicians), I wonder if these schemes could be a breeding ground for contempt or cronyism.. or, more likely, people who are happy to work at such companies rank compensation as a high priority and mismatches aren't that important?

The idea of worker autonomy is implied a lot here. Should that go hand in hand with workers having a direct influence and role in determining their compensation with whoever holds the pursestrings?

<comment><USER14> While I don't disagree with your thesis, politicians and celebrities are usually unknown, or at least only known through small appearances in the media. You work with your colleagues so I would expect a fairly different dynamic when it comes to making these judgements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I applaud Valve's visionary business organization. As a developer I'm sick of having to work under liars and frauds who have misrepresented their technical ability and knowledge to get into an 'engineering management position' they are not fit for. The costs of job changes is very high to me, and if there were more companies like valve, tech would be a much better place to work.

<comment><USER16> This is fairly common (liars and frauds...), though there are some great managers out there: they're just as rare as great developers, and worth their weight in gold when you find them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Firings, while relatively rare, work the same way: teams decide together if someone isn't working out."

Wonder if that kind of 'firing' ends up in court?

<comment><USER18> Why would it?

The reasons for firing someone can be documented just as well by a team as by an individual.

And remember, these are US companies, so employment is at-will.

<comment><USER17> Yes, I'm in the UK. Forget about mob sackings, would not last a second at a tribunal.

But, in the US are there not even civil remedies? Could someone claim 'mob rule' or 'whispering campaign'?

<comment><USER19> In the US, you have protections if you have a union contract. Otherwise, you pretty much need to be considered a protected class (varies by state), and your sacking was related to your class status.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So this is why Episode 3 is taking forever...

<comment><USER21> I get the sarcasm, but Gaben said that is exactly why. Nobody came forward with some great idea to make the game really good, so they never started it, and instead worked on things like Portal 2.

<comment><USER10> So isn't this a fairly huge flaw showing up in this management style, if the cats can't even herd themselves well enough to produce a long-promised sequel to the company's biggest franchise?

It doesn't matter _that_ much, of course, if Valve never finishes the Half Life series; they'll no doubt continue to make other projects which rake in the bucks. But for most companies you can't just abandon a cash-cow project like that. What would happen to Toyota if all the engineers decided they really wanted to work on sports cars and nobody could be bothered to work on the next iteration of the Camry? What happens if all the employees for the water company decide to design a new dam and nobody stays on the maintenance team to stop the existing dam from bursting?

<comment><USER22> It is definitely a flaw for the customers.

But as long as Valve is making enough money, the employees can work on whatever they want and Gabe won't care.

This is why many of the "unsexy" parts of Valve are in utter disarray. The Steam chat network and steamcommunity.com goes down at least once a week. And their security isn't very good. They lost credit card information earlier this year and they think encrypting your password with Javascript RSA ontop of SSL is going to help.

<comment><USER23> They lost credit card info? I thought the database itself was breached but not the servers with the decryption keys for the credit card info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I just switched from a horrible boss/manager to a not that small private software company where the developers are very respected and don't have any managers.

And... while it is a lot better than a bad boss, no management is not ideal in my experience. Ideally what you want is a _good_ manager.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'd like to see someone look at the mechanics of how boring, menial, repetitive grunt work is performed under this model. No doubt Valve/Gore/etc has a lot of that to do, just like any other business. And obviously it gets done. But I'm interested in how that looks up close. Does this kind of work tend to find its way to those in the company who don't have a problem rolling up their sleeves and gutting it out? And if so, do they ever end up resenting it?

In my current (traditional) workplace, you're responsible for your own grunt work, there's no pushing it off on someone else. That is enforced by management, however, and if that traditional management disappeared, I imagine the distribution of grunt work is one of the first things that would change.

</comment><comment><USER26> Also see this: <http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/45814/27304>

</comment><comment><USER27> I think a flat-as-possible structure is a good plan, but no boss doesn't exist. There is always a bunch of bosses. Guided by ego or investments.

</comment><comment><USER28> I assume everyone has the same amount of equity then?

<comment><USER29> This is the only true way a boss-less organization can work. And I assume you mean voting equity. Vesting requirements would be OK, but stuff like options or Google's non-voting shares wouldn't be.</comment></comment>


Use Tor, Get Targeted By the NSA - <AUTHOR> http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/06/21/1443204/use-tor-get-targeted-by-the-nsa

<comment><USER2> Given that now we are all suspects in waiting, use of anything to protect privacy is going to be evidence of, well... something. Governments, for some weirdo reason, think that no one should have need for privacy, if they are decent lawful people. Despite individuals in government insisting on personal privacy for them selves.

What bothers me is that the more we use systems to protect our selves, the more governments will become paranoid because they may not be able to monitor us to reassure them selves that we are not up to no good. This could well make them react by telling the mass population that "terrorists" and "criminals", might as well bung "pedophiles" in there too, are communicating "securely". We will prove their paranoia, give them the evidence they can twist and use. It will become more and more twisted, with the whole thing artificially ratcheting up. This seems to be how governments do things these days.

However, perhaps the severe danger government face is that privacy may catch on. Imagine if people begin to default to the most secure methods they can get. Simple add-ons that enforce using HTTPS where available, browsers that block tracking, more secure email, and so on. Might not be robust and perfect, but the internet would see more and more traffic definable as "secure". As this goes on, these secure services will become faster, easier, and more secure, enabling more and more people to be easily secure. Worse still, the software would become independent and open sourced for verification. In the end, even the NSA should have difficulty keeping up and cracking the security. The more data that is encrypted, the more data they will feel they have to keep.

Dunno quite where I am going with this, but I reckon that by aggressively spying on mass population government is making their own job much harder in the long run. It could force the internet and communications in general to become secure beyond their capabilities to crack. Then all that is left is blackmailing people to give up keys with threats of prison, or worse.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cipher punks used to urge everyone to run encryption software as often as possible. This was to make sure that privacy and anonymity because the default, and that people wanting to breach that privacy had to justify it. Those people couldn't just say "only the bad guys try to hide what they're doing".

It feels a bit like TV crime shows. In reality you never talk without a lawyer present. On TV it's only the bad guys who lawyer up.

<comment><USER4> > _It feels a bit like TV crime shows. In reality you never talk without a > lawyer present. On TV it 's only the bad guys who lawyer up._

Maybe that's what they want the masses to think…

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So it seems that NSA analysts are guided to assume you're not a US citizen—and act like corresponding privacy laws don't apply—when you mask your location in an attempt to preserve anonymity online.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is where saturation flooding of meaningless garbage can play a role in anonymization. In addition to making timing attacks more difficult, bulk garbage data provides a cheap smokescreen for the anonymized traffic and participants, increasing the burden for storage and analysis.

I'm pretty sure even the NSA would have a hard time storing and sorting through the collective output of everyone's /dev/random or /dev/urandom.

It's also a very low-risk thing to do - less so than even routing. If routing, one can just top up a channel with garbage to whatever rate both sides agree upon. It needn't affect speeds for others.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this some kind of campaign to scare off people using privacy protection techniques? What's next, to force people to use credit cards instead of cash so that their spending habits could be easier to track?

<comment><USER8> "Don't be a square fumbling for your cash or writing a check, simply wave your magic card over the pad and be on your way like a cool dude cause other people are behind you waiting to consume. Chicks don't dig squares."

That's the actual subtext of more than one commercial in the US.

Here's one for example:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuMgRN2Atvk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuMgRN2Atvk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "In light of the recent leaks about the NSA's illegal spying, I've decided to go back to using M-x spook output in my email signatures."

[http://lwn.net/Articles/554941/](http://lwn.net/Articles/554941/)

</comment><comment><USER10> That is what we all should do. Imagine when lot of internet users globally used Tor and encrypted all their messages. Just because. NSA would go nuts trying to target them all.

<comment><USER11> I am Spartacus!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Come, use Tor and join the fun then. If we all do we will all be labeled terrorists, which is so trendy these days.

And lets get all cool EFF stickers for our laptops!

[https://supporters.eff.org/shop](https://supporters.eff.org/shop)</comment>


Microsoft becomes first 2015 Gold contributor to openBSD Foundation - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/article/2946814/open-source-tools/microsoft-becomes-first-2015-gold-contributor-to-openbsd-foundation.html?google_editors_picks=true

<comment><USER2> previous discussion of the topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9851512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9851512)</comment>


HackerRank in Swift – STDIN - <AUTHOR> http://mgrebenets.github.io/hackerrank/2015/03/15/hackerrank-in-swift---io/

<comment><USER2> That's great. Now with that Swift 2.0 is quite stable it makes sense.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you do a database connection in an iphone app? - <AUTHOR>

I am trying to develop an iphone application that needs to connect to a database.  After about an hour of googleing I found that there a lot of ways to go about doing this(SQLite database locally on the iphone, MYSQL wrapper class to connect to a database, and many other).  What is the best method or convention most developers use?  Does the iphone SDK have any built in NS objects to connect to a database? <comment><USER2> Local Data: Core Data hooked into a sqlite.db is the way to go. Some say it's a little heavy but I have had a lot of luck with it. It's going to give you everything you need to persist and query data locally on the device.

Remote Data: You pretty much have to go with a web service layer. The standard now-a-days is RESTful JSON. Directly connecting to a remote DB is too unreliable for the mobile world.

ASIHTTPRequest: A wrapper around network level API's for connecting to web servers. Use this.

<http://allseeing-i.com/ASIHTTPRequest/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends on the app but generally speaking I would use CoreData to map the object and store it in SQLite database.

I can't think of any reason you would use a MySQL wrapper. If I wanted to get something from a MySQL database I would set up a REST api on my server.

</comment><comment><USER4> We use a web service with JSON. On the iPhone, we use HTTPRiot to talk to the web service using JSON.</comment>


What Problem Does Google Wave Solve? - <AUTHOR> http://www.steverubel.com/google-wave-rss-the-sequel-in-other-words-doa <comment><USER2> _You can't spend any time on Twitter without geeks lusting after Google Wave. Here's my quick take...it has as much chance catching on as RSS did._

So you mean, fantastically? (He doesn't)

What problem does Wave solve? What problem did email solve? You could already send letters to people; so why would you need to do it electronically? In fact, why send a letter to someone? You could just go to wherever they are and tell them your message.</comment>


I don't have a FB account and have lost interest in Techcrunch. - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious as to whether I am alone in this. I was traveling when TC made the switch from using Disqus to Facebook comments.
There's no chance that I'll get a FB account just to comment on blogs. But, I've found that I am not visiting TC as much as I used to. I'd love to share my thoughts on TC about this, but can't. :)
Am I in the minority here? I'd hate to see this trend continue, as I don't want to use one account for all my internet interactions. <comment><USER2> I've looked at TC comments on a handful of recent articles and didn't find any profanity/trolling/etc. Maybe I just got lucky, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't like that before. That's definitely a plus.

<comment><AUTHOR> That definitely is an upside. However, although the trolling an profanity may have been reduced, it's possible that people don't express controversial opinions they might have, as they are now linked to their facebook network.

-That's part of the reason I don't have a FB account, I don't really want to have conversations with an audience that includes my aunt, my friends, and my coworkers. That just doesn't interest me. For example, there are many opinions and ideas I could quickly share with my childhood friend, that I could only share with my aunt with the inclusion of considerable context, so that I wouldn't be misunderstood. As a result, my conversations would probably by shallow and trivial, so as not to waste time, but then be ultimately uninteresting.

I used MySpace some time ago, but dropped it for similar reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I do have a FB account, but even I have stopped frequenting Techcrunch since they made the switch. For some reason, I just don't want to comment using my FB account. And no, I'm not a comment troll.

</comment><comment><USER4> With 600+ Million users, its safe to say you're a minority on this one. Sorry.

<comment><USER5> 600 million users can't be wrong? Do you really want every comment you make on every blog ever to be permanently attached to your name ... and searchable by employers, wives, girlfriends, family, the police ...

Ah ... its like that bit in Hitchhikers where they have the cow that slaughters itself.

<comment><USER6> It's not really focal to the discussion at hand, but yes, I would like for everything everybody says in a public forum attached to them.

I'm an AVID defender of free speech, and have run a number of 'safe haven' forums in the past which naturally drew a number of trolls. I don't have a problem with trolling, even when it gets sadistic, personal and crosses every line that it can -- most people do.

The general cure for that is the lack of anonymity. It won't happen to the roguish young in many cases, but for many people, knowing that it CAN be tracked back to them eventually is enough to keep the really bad attacks out of play.

<comment><USER7> What about gays, atheists and others who could possibly damage far more than their own reputation?

I live in a country where I have absolutely no problem admitting to anyone that I don't believe in any gods, but it seems that in America this can and often has ripped families apart. Should those people be excluded from any public discourse regarding their beliefs?

The price which has to be paid in this dystopian future of yours is far too high, especially when the "trolls" you are trying to vanquish could just as easily be moderated out of existence wherever they became a problem.

How many other parts of our lives should we be forced to expose in order to take part in a community? HIV status? Voting history? Race? Whatever you feel the limit should be, I feel that peoples real names, races and locations is far more than anyone should ever have to share.

On a more mundane note, what about losing a job at Apple e because a search for your name brought up a few very negative, but non-trollish, comments you made about the iPhone, or perhaps Apple as a company.

These examples are generalised and unlikely... But not outside the realm of possibility.

<comment><USER6> I suspect that you read too much into my wish. I wasn't actually sayingn that we get rid of anonymous free speech -- honestly, because I know that isn't the answer, and there are times (admittely, that I cannot relate to) where people may have fear of persecution for their beliefs.

Also, I'm not looking to eliminate the trolls in the world -- forced anonymity wouldn't CURE it, but would almost certainly lessen its presence considerably. However, having seen first hand how entirely unnecessarily negative attacks can destroy a community.

You bring up an interesting point though, in that speech can be 'moderated into existence' -- which in my opinion, is even more oppressive than public identifiability. You would institute censorship to restore anonymity? I consider that the worst of the two ideas.

<comment><USER7> I think the best solution is to allow everyone to keep their anonymity if they want, and just repeat the mantra: "Don't Feed The Trolls!"

Where necessary, implement some form of community moderation, much like here, unpopular comments are greyed out, on other sites, like Reddit, they are hidden until requested.

Forced anonymity will forever be a pipe-dream anyway I think.

<comment><USER6> Well, as I alluded to, I'm not sanctioning forced identity disclosure everywhere, but I do believe that if a site owner wants to keep their site from being a cesspool without resorting to censorship, it's a better compromise to me than moderation.

It's a tricky subject, I agree, and it's clear we lie on different sides of what we consider to be acceptable, but ultimately, it's quite hard to have a community drive site the doesn't devolve -- HN, Reddit, Digg, and every other online community is a testament to that.

The fact that it's technically non-trivial to identify a person absolutely makes it harder to keep trolls away, as they're always free to get a new IP address and re-register as another username, which makes it harder to enforce standards in the community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a facebook account, I had to make it to do development for a former employer. I rarely login, and given a choice I'd much rather use my Twitter or Github login. If facebook is my only option, I just don't login.

My time is much better spent face-to-face in the real world that the time-suck that is facebook.</comment>


Ask HN: Who's Coming to YC Startup School? - <AUTHOR> Invitations now seem to have gone out.<p>Who else is coming? Care to share what you're working on, and what you're hoping to get out of the conference? <comment><USER2> I'll be there. I'm working on customer feedback and data triage automation[1]. Customers install our tool and it handles collecting customer feedback then creates relevant "buckets" to drop feedback into. Those buckets can automatically forward the feedback to relevant parties within the company, follow up with the customer in a customized way and of course the analytics are often use to drive product backlogs. We're fairly early stage, getting rolling on marketing and trying to find our first non-affiliated customers.

Excited to attend a YC event. I've been aware of the PG/YC/HN scene since Paul's initial visit to MIT that spawned YC but this is my first time attending something in person.

1\. [https://www.askinline.com](https://www.askinline.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you haven't already, share your info at the link below! We're compiling info that will help each person get a (targeted) jumpstart on networking before the event.

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_XBluxMxSbl4h6vY3qa7...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_XBluxMxSbl4h6vY3qa7cU9xnFEe4IvkMWHiTopV_xk/edit?usp=sharing)

</comment><comment><USER4> I will be there. We are working on Cloudron. It is a platform for self-hosting web apps [1]. I am hoping to network with people who have similar interests (i.e self-hosting). It's my first Startup School, so I am quite excited.

1\. [https://cloudron.io](https://cloudron.io)</comment>