Founder Ethics - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/founder-ethics <comment><USER2> A code of ethics requires quite a bit more certainty and precision. As written, this is rather vague. It sounds like someone could be somehow kicked out of YC just because they're more or less disliked (who makes the decision? how?).

The recommended behaviours are virtues, not values. Adherence to virtue is the principled pursuit of given values (e.g. honesty -> true to facts, integrity -> true to your beliefs and words, independence -> true to your own judgment).

Here are examples of fairly strong codes of ethics relevant to engineers:

\- IEEE [1]

\- ACM [2]

[1] [http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html](http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html)

[2] [http://www.acm.org/about/se-code](http://www.acm.org/about/se-code)

<comment><USER3> the ethics of business are... way harder than the ethics of Engineering.

Engineers occasionally have conflicts of interest with their employers and clients (e.g. when asked to build something clearly dangerous) but it's very, very rare. And Engineers are almost never asked to conceal relevant information from people they directly work with..

Business people face conflicts of interest with their customers and suppliers every day.

In business? concealing relevant information is standard, in fact, you might be failing in your duty to your shareholders if you reveal relevant information to your customers or suppliers. But, you may be defrauding those customers or suppliers if you don't reveal enough information.

This makes business ethics a lot more complex. Now, I agree that the YC ethics as written are super vague and making them more clear would be very good. In fact, I think YC has a chance to set a standard here. Considering how YC explicitly asks for hustlers, and people who push the line, one could even argue that they have a responsibility to make the line clear.

However, it is an extremely difficult thing to do. When a task is beyond your means, is it better to put up a "better than nothing" attempt that doesn't completely solve the problem, or to put up nothing at all? I don't know.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you entirely on the trickiness of business ethics, but I'd be very skeptical of anything that is more precise. If it's too long to keep in one's head, it will be easily forgotten. And if it's complex enough to cover everything in some detail, there will be a lot of opportunity for hole- finding, rules-hacking, boundary-arguing, and confusion-sowing.

Contrast that with the simplicity, say, of the Golden Rule, or Rawls' Veil of Ignorance [1], or the Eightfold Path [2]. Those are trickier to apply, because you have to do the unpacking yourself. But they're also harder to fool yourself and fool others with.

I think that's true generally, but especially so for YC. If they stick with sufficiently broad principles and heuristics, then they can finish up with, "... and if you aren't sure, ask." YC has a lot of high-touch mentorship, and mentoring is one of the best way to deal with ethical questions. They also have a strong interest in making sure YC startups behave reasonably well.

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

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path)

<comment><USER3> >Contrast that with the simplicity, say, of the Golden Rule, or Rawls' Veil of Ignorance [1], or the Eightfold Path [2]. Those are trickier to apply, because you have to do the unpacking yourself. But they're also harder to fool yourself and fool others with.

I think the golden rule is a perfect example of how overly-simplified rules, well, just don't work very well. And yeah, it's easy to "fool yourself" or justify whatever it is you want to do with the golden rule. It offers no more guidance than the content-free "Don't be an asshole." The golden rule involves a lot of assumptions that the other guy is, well, like you, or if you take the "treat them how _they_ want to be treated" interpretation, then it takes a lot of guessing as to what they want.

For me, leadership means taking responsibility for failures, distributing credit for successes, and listening to the right people when it comes time to make a decision, and taking responsibility, again, for the emotionally difficult parts of that decision. Like firing people. You need to listen to the other people on your team; unless you are a very small team, that should be the largest part of the decision. But on an emotional level, those people you are asking, and those people who are getting fired both need to feel like you, the leader, are actually doing the firing.

For most people, though, that's not a leader, that's a wimp. For most people, the primary characteristics of a leader are decisiveness, dominance and charisma, things that I usually regard in a negative light.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you entirely on leadership.

But I disagree entirely on the golden rule. I hear about people all the time who justify some action with, "Well, it isn't illegal". Because with a legal code as complex as the one in the US, it's easy to lose sight of "it's right". Empathy, though, is a foundation of human moral reasoning, and the golden rule points that out.

You can see this in kids all the time. There's the classic "but I didn't break rule X" defense, wherein the kid hacks the rules. E.g., "You said not to _touch_ him." But "How would you feel in that situation?" and "How do you think they feel?" are much harder to hack. Even if the transgressor is able to self-fool, the flaws are much more obvious to third parties. The apparent lack of content of the golden rule is a benefit; the simplicity leaves less room to hide.

<comment><USER3> I dono. Every time I've gotten fucked in business... I mean, really fucked, it was by a person who was a really nice person. A really empathetic person.

I don't think "nice" and "empathetic" has as much to do with 'ethical' as you think. From what I've seen? good businesspeople and good salespeople are absolute masters of self-justification, and they really believe it in their hearts.

To me? this is one of the ugliest parts of becoming a business person. Not only are you doing something terrible to another human, but you are going on like you are doing them a favor while you are doing it.

Human emotions are weird things. None of them conform to anything like a logical system.

<comment><USER4> That strikes me as sociopathy, not actual kindness. Or at the very least, such an education in bullshit that they literally can no longer tell right from wrong.

People like that are rarely constrained by rules, either, because they can justify that just as well.

Also, I believe that ethics is mainly an elaboration of our moral sense, which appears to be biologically rooted. For more, I recommend the work of de Waal, and his TED talk is a great place to start: [http://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_moral...](http://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals)

<comment><USER3> >That strikes me as sociopathy, not actual kindness. Or at the very least, such an education in bullshit that they literally can no longer tell right from wrong.

No, it's more subtle than that.

Let's go back to my example of what makes business ethics so difficult. You have two groups with mutually opposing interests; your shareholders and your customers/suppliers. You have some responsibility to both groups, right? If you just gut feel it, well, I mean, that's one way to go about it, sure, and if you are far enough from the line, that's okay. But if you are pushing the line, as pg advocates? Gut feeling it is probably a bad idea.

For example, more than once, I've almost gone out of business. Many years ago I hit serious financial issues. I told all my VPS customers, and went through a lot of effort to find my co-lo customers a new home.

This was absolutely the right thing to do for my customers, but it also destroyed the company, when I could have made it

(I ended up re-launching the company very shortly thereafter, using money from my contracting gigs. In fact, I think I had a few customers stick with me the whole time.)

Now, if I had shareholders at the time, I mean, who were not me? From the perspective of the shareholders, I was not acting in their interest. I should have concealed the possibly impending shutdown, and just worked hard to prevent the impending shutdown from occurring. I am pretty sure that if there was money on the line and there were owners who weren't me, I would have gotten sued for acting in what I think was the most ethical manner.

Do you see what I'm getting at? If we remove the ridiculous cases of stuffing cash into your underpants and running, a reasonable person can argue both sides of most business ethics questions. Your gut can argue both sides, too.

<comment><USER4> You make it sound like a situation being ambiguous is bad. I disagree. I think that's exactly the time for discussion, negotiation, collaboration, and reflection. All of which are aided by things like the Golden Rule.

Note that I'm not talking about gut feel. What I'm contrasting is using carefully elaborated, hard and fast rules vs applying simpler guidelines, like the Golden Rule. If the hard-and-fast rules you pick are the US legal system, for example, then the answer is simple: fuck the customers. Bankruptcy protects you. You can dodge all of the complexity.

But if you say, "Hey, how would I want to be treated if I were in their situation?" you have to think about the customers _and_ the shareholders. Unlike rules, guidelines, principles, and heuristics all force you to engage with the complexity. Fairly arguing both sides isn't bad; it's exactly what you should be doing.

Two minor points: using retrospective knowledge is a mistake in judging ethical choices. If at the time you thought you were going out of business, then that's the ethical framework. And as far as getting sued by investors, it varies by state, but generally managers have wide latitude to run the business in the fashion they see fit. You have an obligation to keep investors informed, but if they don't like what you're doing, they can replace you.

<comment><USER3> >You make it sound like a situation being ambiguous is bad. I disagree. I think that's exactly the time for discussion, negotiation, collaboration, and reflection.

The ethical conflicts I've used as examples are "I have information relevant to all parties. If I tell everyone, one party will be damaged. If I tell no one, the other party will be damaged."

Negotiation is... difficult, when you can't reveal what you are negotiating about.

Reflecting on "who do I screw" is incredibly stressful and unpleasant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The curious cat in me is wondering, "Did something in particular prompt this post?"

<comment><USER6> Nothing in particular. But as we grow, I think it's important we're clear about our expectations. Because the amounts are small and we fund so many companies, we don't do much diligence before investing. So occasionally we'll fund someone bad.

We've had problems in the past, but only twice that I know of. We have now funded more than 700 companies, so that seems remarkably low.

<comment><USER7> Sam,

As a former Green Dot VP, you're no doubt familiar with the money transmission legal problem ([http://www.regulations.gov/contentStreamer?objectId=09000064...](http://www.regulations.gov/contentStreamer?objectId=090000648156588b&disposition=attachment&contentType=pdf)). Do you think it is ethical for Y Combinator, its portfolio companies, or its founders to violate state and federal laws simply because they're poorly enforced? Is it ethical for those companies to quietly hire, as contractors or employees, former regulators to "guide" them through the regulatory process? What about overseas tax havens? Does Y Combinator have a policy on the ethics of that issue?

Also, there were more than two Y Combinator portfolio companies named as defendants in the federal lawsuit over money transmission ([http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/t6maunfo/california- norther...](http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/t6maunfo/california-northern- district-court/think-computer-corporation-v-dwolla-inc-et-al/)), so how are you defining "problems?" Are federal lawsuits alleging unlawful and immoral wrongdoing not "problematic?"

What about shell corporations? Does Y Combinator have any connection to Payments Sub, Inc., the company that Airbnb's CFO formed after being sued to obtain a money transmission license in California?

Regardless, wouldn't the most ethical thing to do in the face of a confusing legal situation involve public lobbying for reform of the laws at issue, rather than exploitation of the chaos? Why has Y Combinator consistently opted for the latter, rather than the former?

Aaron

<comment><USER8> Speaking of ethics, I think you mean:

"Also, there were more than two Y Combinator portfolio companies named as defendants in _my_ federal lawsuit over money transmission"

<comment><USER7> Hi Tom,

What's the ethical problem here exactly? I linked to the lawsuit docket, it's clear that my company filed it, and it doesn't matter either way in the context of my argument.

Furthermore, had I written "my" as you suggest, it would make it sound like there is a potential ethical problem because I say so. But my point isn't that there is a potential ethical problem because I say so. My point is that there is a potential ethical problem when lawsuits in general start getting filed.

Aaron

<comment><USER8> Anyone can file a lawsuit naming anyone they like. You are using the existence of a lawsuit you filed as evidence in your argument. I would call that "circular logic".

<comment><USER7> Actually, no, that's not what I'm doing.

True, the lawsuit exists, and anyone can be named. But this particular lawsuit is backed up with a few hundred pages of evidence. Feel free to read it-- that's why I linked to the docket, so that anyone can. No circular logic involved.

Again, my point is that lawsuits are signaling mechanisms for ethical problems.

<comment><USER9> I also disagree. And I have no dog in this fight -- no affiliation with YC nor Aaron/thinkcomp.

It is false and tendentious to claim that "lawsuits are signaling mechanisms for ethical problems" \-- the law nowadays is sadly well-divorced from ethics. Just look at some of Hollywood's inane copyright lawsuits with Silicon Valley companies as defendants. Or the rise in software "patent" suits. Or Harvey Silverglate's book Three Felonies a Day. Etc.

It would probably be true to say that lawsuits are signaling mechanisms for business _success_. I once interviewed Cypress Semiconductor CEO TJ Rodgers who pointed to the list of complaint cover pages on his office wall. There were dozens. He said something to the effect of: Whenever we get sued, that means that our competitors are unable to win in the marketplace. Bring it on!

If I'm not mistaken Aaron/thinkcomp is suing just about everyone who could possibly be a defendant including Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase, DST Global, Dwolla, Kleiner Perkins, Slide co-founder Max Levchin, Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, Sequoia Capital, Square, and Y Combinator. (If YC principals don't reply in this thread, it's probably because of litigation.)

A uninvolved attorney, commenting on this case, wrote: "Unfortunately for Aaron Greenspan, he has sued enough people to seem litigious at best—his own word choice—and a little crazy at worst (that last word choice is mine)." [http://blog.upcounsel.com/aaron-greenspan-versus-silicon- val...](http://blog.upcounsel.com/aaron-greenspan-versus-silicon-valley/) While I'm expressing no opinion about the merits of this suit, I do wish Aaron/thinkcomp would do less lawyering and more, actual, you know, engineering.

<comment><USER7> I wish I were allowed to.

(Since 2011, I've built PlainSite from scratch, building on Aaron Swartz's PACER data. But I'd rather be working on payments.)

Also, I'd expect a reporter as experienced as yourself to read the complaint and evaluate the evidence on its own merits. There was a long list of defendants in the recent litigation involving Google and Apple and Intuit and eBay, because--guess what--they all broke the law.

I stand by my point that lawsuits are signaling mechanisms for potential ethical problems. Not all of them are legit. Sometimes they're just crazy. But by and large, they point to problems that need resolution.

Also, if you want to selectively quote things from articles, here's what Felix Salmon at Reuters has to say about T.J. Rodgers: "Chrystia Freeland has found a classic example of Silicon Valley hubris in TJ Rodgers."

[http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/06/01/silicon- val...](http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/06/01/silicon-valley- hubris-watch-tj-rodgers-edition/)

Regarding my legal battle with California, the Upcounsel article also said, "He may be right, and it seems obvious that California's MTA is much tougher than comparable laws in other states," as well as "his complaint raises some valid points."

<comment><USER10> Civil suits should definitely not be considered signals of ethical problems. This case is a perfect example where the law is vague, primarily exists to protect some large incumbents and has been used to generate a lawsuit by a legally active gadfly with tenuous standing.

<comment><USER7> If there were standing issues in the case against California it would been tossed out years ago.

In the unfair competition case, after trying and failing to get rid of the case via bogus sanctions, Y Combinator and the other defendants manufactured standing issues to get it thrown out by arguing that one cannot be the victim of "unfair competition" if one is not legally permitted to compete (even when the other parties are "competing" by breaking a law). This leads to the perverse conclusion that § 17200 encourages illegal activity.

Most legal gadflies are not cited by opposing counsel in formal filings before state agencies, invited to submit testimony to Congress, consulted by the GAO on what to tell Congress, cited by academics, or offered fellowships at Stanford Law School. But, you know, whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _Not using misleading, illegal or dishonest sales tactics._

The grey area on this one is so big that I don't even know where to begin...

<comment><USER12> yeh... airbnb is in violation. They illegally spammed people on craig's list.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-harvested- craigslist-t...](http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-harvested-craigslist- to-grow-its-listings-says-competitor-2011-5)

<comment><USER13> And, as much as I love them, their entire business is predicated on wholesale violation of local ordinances restriction hotel and short term stay operations. Those ordinances may themselves be corrupt and unethical but they're still laws.

<comment><USER12> Yeh... Tesla, Uber, airbnb all use illegal sales techniques. I miss PG's more unvarnished advice.

<comment><USER14> Tesla and Uber's defiance are for things that are pretty hard to justify.

As the multitude of airbnb horror stories show, anti-subletting rules and the like are usually there for some pretty valid reasons, and it's in a different category of illegal.

I, for one, am glad that my neighbour isn't inviting a bunch of strangers into his house every other day.

<comment><USER15> Uber in general is violating "things which are hard to justify", but their marketing tactics vs. competitors in NYC were unquestionably wrong, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Beyond just the ethics of the founders in these terms, I'm a big believe in the idea that _the company_ taken as a whole, should have values and principles, and that they should be communicated widely and clearly, and - most importantly - they should _actually_ _really_ be adhered to...

IOW, don't write a "mission and values statement" because it's expected or for marketing purposes. Write that stuff because you know what you want your firm to stand for and represent, now and over the long term.

We did this back when we first started[1], and we recently had a situation come up which tested our resolve, but knowing that we had written down what we believe, and what we are trying to _be_ as a company made it a lot easier to make the right decision.[2] Or, at least, what we find to be the right decision for us.

Note that in our specific case, the decision in question is one that many rational, well-reasoned people could disagree with. But we believe that our principles dictate the decision we reached. We aren't saying people who may have made a different decision would necessarily be wrong.

[1]: [http://www.fogbeam.com/company.html](http://www.fogbeam.com/company.html)

[2]: [http://wraltechwire.com/why-a-triangle-tech-ceo-just-said- no...](http://wraltechwire.com/why-a-triangle-tech-ceo-just-said-no-to-cia- investment-/13607050/)

</comment><comment><USER17> > _We will stand behind you no matter how much your company struggles, as long > as you behave ethically._

I think this can't be re-iterated enough. Most investors would probably just write off a struggling company but YC stands by you

</comment><comment><USER18> > Keeping off-the-record or confidential information (whether about YC itself > or a YC company) private and secret.

If I recall correctly, Paul Graham asks the Summer 2011 class not to share tips on getting into YC at the end of Launch Pad. I wonder if this is in part a response to all the recent YC Applications/interviews going public (or at least showing up here on HN).

<comment><USER15> There are different kinds of tips. Some which I think actually help YC if everyone knows them -- because YC wants to make the most accurate analysis possible in a short interview, it helps if everyone knows to give clear, direct, and succinct answers, be prepared to answer questions, don't depend on being able to show a demo, etc.

The confidential information is more like Off The Record things during YC dinners, information about other companies, etc. There is much more information about other YC companies (especially batchmates), or speakers at YC dinners, which is confidential than there is information about YC itself which is confidential.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Keeping off-the-record or confidential information (whether about YC itself > or a YC company) private and secret.

> Not behaving in a way that damages the reputation of his/her company or of > YC.

This can turn 'unethical' pretty darn fast.

<comment><USER20> Ethics are hard. And the law should be an overriding concern in most instances. I think more examples and more explicit guidelines would help the founders judgment. I fear this could get real ugly when (not if) conflicts arise and the punishment of revocation of founder status is strictly enforced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm really glad to see this. Kudos.

There have been one or two YC companies which have been a bit on the sketchy side, I'm glad to see an actual statement about this kind of thing. I'm thinking specifically of the "We bundle ads with software installers," I don't remember what the company was.

<comment><USER22> That was InstallMonetizer: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711)

Speaking of which, that startup appears to be dead/zombie, so karma may be in play.

<comment><USER23> That was funded a year ago?

It seems like some early 2000s garbage-ware :\

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Keeping off-the-record or confidential information (whether about YC itself or a YC company) private and secret."

VCs are very famous (as a class of investors) for not signing NDAs with anyone except under exigent conditons. Confidentiality and its context-dependent limitations should be adressed more formally if there is any concern here--by both sides.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think you want "exclusively" where you have "uniquely".

</comment><comment><USER26> Some of the least defined words in here are:

\- Upstanding

\- Integrity

\- Respect

When I say defined, I mean defined by the document. I wonder what they mean in the YC context.

As an example of why I wonder, I noticed that when YC shared a building with a scrappy, extremely creative robotics company that made a virtual telepresence robot, it surprisingly funded another company that competed with that neighbor with what looked like a knock-off telepresence robot product. This product had an admirably more clever / agile design in that it leveraged the buyer's existing iPad.

The idea that they funded a competitor to their own neighbor is not necessarily a judgement on YC. I frankly don't know enough about the companies and products involved, which is why I couched my statement with "looked like."

It's more of a setup for my real question: where does YC stand with blatant ripoffs, copying, wholesale lifting of ideas, products, business plans, from other companies? Is that considered ethical? If yes, is there anything that's not fair game? Are there any lines beyond which the copying becomes an act that is disrespectful, is considered not upstanding behavior, or shows a lack of integrity?

</comment><comment><USER27> You might want to add something about treating customers ethically, even when not required by law. I think with some of the bitcoin companies out there, there is increased potential for financial shenanigans that could negatively impact YC's reputation. (Frontrunning, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER28> Enron's motto was "Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence." As we all know... it wasn't enough. Read their Code of Ethics, too. It's so ironic.

Perhaps an essay about why ethics are important to the long-term success of a start-up would be much more effective. Why not talk about the start-ups that encountered ethical dilemmas, the thought-processes and the outcomes? That would be super entertaining as well as enlightening. I love the essays by Paul Graham. He inspired me to pursue what I love and to think about problems in the world. To simply be told to do so would not be as motivating.

I think that as a technology start-up accelerator, there should be a greater purpose that is communicated. . . like improving the world with technology.

</comment><comment><USER29> The business world needs more of these kinds of no bullshit, no footnotes, no qualifier statements.

<comment><USER30> It's sad when trust, transparency, and honesty become differentiators instead of expected.

<comment><USER31> You are quite right. But my posting history has led some to label me as naive... I think it's closer to the truth to say:

Truth, Trust, and Transparency are always differentiators but the reality is they are only subjectively quantifiable, and therefore a problem waiting to happen if a majority of shareholders aren't exactly aligned.

Or, simply put, large companies generally are forced into an amoral "objective and quantifiable" position. Thus it has ever been.

As a founder, I have more control over my company's culture, but I have no illusions that I can set it in stone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> YC's generally good reputation has led me to take fewer steps to guarantee prompt payment when doing contract work for companies they've funded than I normally would with new clients. I'm happy to report that it has worked out well so far.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm so psyched to see this. It's incredibly heartening to see YC set a great example because of their visibility and the amount of respect we all have for them in the tech/startup community. As someone who's unsuccessfully worked on getting codes implemented, I think this is absolutely huge and predict others will do the right thing and follow suit.

I agree that this is pretty vague. I don't think the more nitty gritty details (how to make an incident report, who's responsible for handling it, etc.) have to be posted publicly, but hopefully the actual policy is being worked on behind the scenes.

</comment><comment><USER34> Nice, but as they say, actions speak louder than words.

</comment><comment><USER35> How does this apply to AirBnB?

</comment><comment><USER36> That's long overdue. Now that they're in place that sort of thing will hopefully be a thing of the past, too many YC funded companies have been visibly in breach of these at some point in time. Winning is fine but not by any means possible.

</comment><comment><USER37> Kinda sad that we have to explicitly write down the obvious. Things like 'be honest', 'say the truth', 'be polite', 'dont do illegal stuff' should all just go without saying.

<comment><USER38> YC founders are predominantly 'young' so it could be chalked to general mentorship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> "All founders in a company may be held responsible for the unethical actions of a single co-founder or a company employee, depending on the circumstances."

This sounds like a decree issued by the Russian government.

<comment><USER40> I can only assume this is to ensure that if an employee behaves unethically without repercussions, YC can hold the founder responsible for inaction.

<comment><USER39> Yeah I think this clause is about with-holding information about bad things done by others in the team. But this seems to have been covered by other points on the page. Something to be reworded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> In the spirit of being honest as requested, all of these are so vague and context-sensitive, basically they amount to nothing.

You'll have to do a lot more work and be more specific than this generic wishlist, if you want people to really abide by your understanding of ethics.

Oh and this one:

        - Keeping your word, including honoring handshake deals.

... is plain dangerous. Handshake deals are not deals. They're just a problem about to happen. Someone's neurons keeping the memory of a "handshake deal" will start misfiring.

Write it down. Even in an email after the meeting. If it's not written, it didn't happen.

<comment><USER42> I would say it's worse than that. Writing it down won't even be enough in all cases, because communication is a hard problem. It is very easy to come out of a conversation believing you know what the other person said, or believing that you accurately communicated your thoughts, desires, or plans and just be completely wrong on all counts.

There is a reason lawyers write contracts: it reduces the likelihood of a miscommunication about what each party expects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'd like to add a few ethical principles pertaining to employee relationships.

        * Not misleading prospective employees using "bait and switch" tactics regarding
          the position or nature of the work.
        * If an employee requests an introduction, grant it.
        * Not behaving in a way that damages the reputation of an employee or ex-employee.
        * Separating with fair severance relative to the means of the company (possibly
          $0.00 and a good reference, pre-A; cash severance expected once rich).
        * Using open allocation if possible.
        * Not accumulating unreasonable technical debt.
        * Keeping the company engineer-driven as far as possible.

<comment><USER25> Of this list, only item #1 involves ethics of any sort.

Someone on the Internet also wants The Joel Test added to the list of Founder Ethics, but that doesn't make Hallway Usability Tests an ethical issue.

<comment><USER44> #4 seems an ethics question to me. Severance compensation should be done on a fair basis relative to the resources the company has available.

<comment><USER25> Severance is compensation. Compensation is a contracts issue, done at market terms. His first point captures all the ethical concerns required to fairly negotiate contracts. Near as I can tell, formal severance guarantees are also rare, meaning that you're often negotiating for it against other candidates who won't demand it.

Employees aren't intrinsically entitled to severance pay, as some sort of natural law of business.

Another way to rebut the idea that severance is an ethical requirement is to say that the same ethics would demand giving engineers raises, or paying them the maximum amount the business can bear paying. That's sometimes true, but often not, depending on the role of engineering in the company.

<comment><USER44> I take it more to be a point about the size of the severance compensation relative to the company's resources. IE, don't claim poverty (and thus no severance) when you've been funded. Basically a variation on "Don't lie to your employees about money".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I await Social Justice Warrior attacks using this new weapon. It's bound to happen. Let's fill every organization's charter with vague rules which can then be exploited by power-hungry self-righteous pricks. Brilliant idea.

<comment><USER46> What's a "Social Justice Warrior"?

<comment><USER47> A "Social Justice Warrior" is what happens when you take liberalism to an extreme. When you take Conservatism to an extreme you end up with "Religious Patriotic Fanatics" who desperately want to be their own group's hero at the expense of other groups. While Social Justice Warriors desperately want to be someone else's hero at their own group's expense.

Both are extremes, unhealthy, and start out with good intentions. Social Justice Warriors often times fantasize about making bullying, name calling, and stereotyping illegal. They can be found in high concentration at places like Reddit, Vice, & Gawker Media sites constantly talking about race/gender/class while ignoring statistics on race/gender/class. They demand that you are politically correct in everything you say. Their favorite insults are "you're racist" and "you're sexist". Basically "the thought police".

Example; When Paul Graham of Y-Combinator mentioned how strong foreign accents can hinder a founder's ability to communicate with his team (which is common sense) he was attacked by silicon valley news outlets for being anti- immigrant, possibly racist, and xenophobic. When he later gave his opinion on why there's so few women in tech he was again attacked and called sexist. This is the problem with Social Justice Warriors, they are warriors, warriors are willing to go to extremes to achieve hero status.

In moderation social justice isn't bad. Religion or patriotism isn't bad either. Neither is conservatism or liberalism. But when taken to an extreme these ideologies end up becoming illogical, irrational, and causing damage to a society's expressive or civil freedoms.</comment></comment></comment>


A private high school in California makes $24M gain on Snapchat investment - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/03/03/california-high-school-makes-24-million-from-snapchat-ipo.html <comment><USER2> Kind of clickbait title? It's an investor that convinced a local school to invest $15k in a $500k investment that his partners couldn't put down. This time they lucked out... but isn't this in general kind of reckless as there's no guarantee for RoI at all and the school is kind of taking away the money from the kids?

Also how are schools allowed to invest like this at all?

<comment><USER3> I happen to know a lot about this situation, and there wasn't anything sketchy at all:

1) St. Francis is an expensive ($17k a year, which is actually pretty low for the area) private school, not a public school that receives funding from the government.

2) Most private schools have endowments and investment vehicles to manage those endowments. Tuition money generally isn't going into these funds, rather they're for donations and capital campaigns.

3) Many of the parents of the kids at St. Francis are tech executives or VCs, so it's not surprising that they're investing in startups instead of more traditional mutual or index funds.

<comment><USER4> Note to self, send my future kids to St. Francis.

<comment><USER5> Take a look at Bellarmine, Castilleja, and Harker as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So normal people can't get into deals like this?

<comment><USER7> You know, I spent a few hours this morning almost fuming at how insanely lucky it is to get a return on $15k like that. I started panting at the possibility that I might somehow get this lucky, but of course, turns out it was $15k of a $500k investment -_-'

<comment><USER6> I had similar thoughts. I realized that these are "get rich quick" thoughts and for most people that never ends well.

<comment><USER8> There was a story on Reddit a while back about a soldier who bought a Rolex in the 1960s for $120, and it was worth $70,000 today. Pretty lucky, right? But then someone pointed out that if he'd invested in the S&P 500 instead, it would be worth $25,000 today (if I remember the figures correctly).

It's pretty hard to outdo investing in the S&P 500, and most anyone can do it.

<comment><USER9> > _There was a story on Reddit a while back about a soldier who bought a Rolex > in the 1960s for $120, and it was worth $70,000 today._ [0]

> _Pretty lucky, right? But then someone pointed out that if he 'd invested in > the S&P 500 instead, it would be worth $25,000 today (if I remember the > figures correctly)._

What's not said is that from 1960 till 1980, you'd only make 200% (10% annualized). Compared to angel investing giving you 250% over 4 years (62.5 annualized).[1]

This is also assuming you know how to time your trades properly and get in at a bottom. If you got in at the floor of the dot com crash you'd make, at most, 180% in the 15 years you held (12% annualized). If you got in at the floor of the 07-09 crash you'd make, at most, 250% in the 9 years you held (28% annualized). These are best case scenarios and it's unlikely for someone that believes in the S&P will know about market timing.

The base of this argument is laden with guilt and regret over not having 20/20 hindsight. "If you got in at X you would have Y." The same is said with BTC, "if you got in at the beginning you would have been an Xillionaire!"

However, this is no longer practical in the ironed-out, risk-adjusted world we live in now. The S&P's risk has been priced in and over-sized returns are no longer possible. You'll start seeing this with startups in the coming years too. As people start understanding them more, risk will be lower, and thus returns will be lower.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li0mRLcGbU8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li0mRLcGbU8)

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/13/angel-investors- make-2-5x-...](https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/13/angel-investors- make-2-5x-returns-overall/)

<comment><USER8> It is not practical to guess at picking the right unicorn investment, collectible, or market timing. It remains practical, however, to invest in broad market indices. You won't become a zillionaire, but with consistent investing and discipline, such boring strategies pay off in the long term.

If you're willing to accept more risk/return than the S&P 500, there are Nasdaq index funds, too.

To play with various scenarios, there's a calculator:

[https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/](https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return- calculator/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope he gets his tuition waved for the next couple years.</comment>


Steve Jobs memorial torn down in Russia after Tim Cook comes out as gay - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/steve-jobs-memorial-torn-down-in-russia-after-current-apple-ceo-tim-cook-comes-out-as-gay-9836630.html

<comment><USER2> That is an impressive feat of stupidity. I mean, the law itself is plenty of stupid already, but removing a monument to someone who is not gay because someone else who later filled the same position is gay? Suppose one tsar turned out to be gay, would discussion of all tsars be banned?

And then there's that quote about Ebola. WTF?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is not true, see [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=y&prev...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fitar- tass.com%2Fobschestvo%2F1549568&edit-text=&act=url)

<comment><USER4> Lol, yes, it is true.Don't you think there are a lot of people who understand Russian on HN?

See the official press-release of the ZEFS(ЗЕФС) company that installed the monument.

Google translate of the relevant press-release part: "Monument to Steve Jobs as a giant iPhone was solemnly placed in January 2013 in the area of direct access for young students. - Said in a statement. - In the Russian legislation prohibits propaganda of homosexuality and other sexual perversions among minors. After Apple CEO Tim Cook has publicly called for sodomy, the monument was dismantled pursuant to Russian federal law on the protection of children from information that promotes the denial of traditional family values. "

source: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=y&prev...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=ru&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.colta.ru%2Fnews%2F5225&edit- text=)</comment></comment>


The Effect of Online and Face-to-Face Feedback on Self-Esteem (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://urbanwomanmag.com/the-effect-of-online-face-to-face-feedback-on-self-esteem/ <comment><USER2> Not to take away from the content, but this article reads like something a freshman wrote for a class project.

<comment><USER3> It's a Nigerian publication and I believe English is used more as business/education language than a conversational language there so it makes sense that the writing comes across a bit more contrived.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The site is down for me, [https://web.archive.org/web/20190219101600/https://urbanwoma...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190219101600/https://urbanwomanmag.com/the- effect-of-online-face-to-face-feedback-on-self-esteem/)</comment>


Low-Cost VPS Testing - <AUTHOR> https://toys.lerdorf.com/low-cost-vps-testing <comment><USER2> BTW author of the article is Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP language ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf))

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't wait for PaaS prices to drop. I know they'll always be relatively expensive, but I'm primarily a dev _(not ops)_ and I don't have the time nor desire to manage my own servers securely.

Heroku lately has seemed a tempting offer, assuming I can run my apps on it _(Rust based)_ , but at $7/m for little side projects it felt.. expensive for a no user side project. They can add up. A $5/m DO box can host quite a few apps in containers, by comparison.

Perhaps Serverless would be a great playground for low/no traffic apps, but I've not gotten into serverless much.

<comment><USER4> Have you tried running Dokku[0] on a VPS?

[0] [https://github.com/dokku/dokku](https://github.com/dokku/dokku)

<comment><USER3> No, but that's mainly because I still have to manage the server running Dokku I believe?

edit: For context what I was already using was manual docker on a DO box. While I recognized that Dokku would make it more seamless and easier, my issue was managing and securing the DO VM itself. I didn't see how Dokku would help that scenario

<comment><USER5> I would suggest reading about Ansible and working on an initial collection of Ansible playbooks that might help on that. Check out [https://www.thecloud.coach/ansible-crash- course](https://www.thecloud.coach/ansible-crash-course). Of course nothing beats a dedicated devops but some playbooks regarding main security compliances might do a great job. Anyone correct me if I am wrong but I am seeing it as a good base practice for these cases.

<comment><USER6> Honestly, I think this is going in the wrong direction for OP's use-case. He definitely should go in the serverless direction.

If he learns any sort of dev-ops infra management he's just wasting his time.

<comment><USER5> Possibly. I use Serverless as well but I prefer to keep my options open when playing with a new project, than trying to force everything into the same tool. If he is lean to learn something, Ansible might be good for setting some servers up, but there are some nice other suggestions in the thread if he doesn't want to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been a Netcup customer for a year and a half or so, and I love them. Locations in Germany only, but for less than $10/mo (5.29EUR), you're not going to do much better than this on price to spec ratio. Performance is fantastic. I have the 8G/300G SAS rootserver for 8.99EUR (rootservers just give you dedicated cores). Note however that (similar to BuyVM), they are also extremely quick to cancel you outright if you don't pay in time.

[https://www.netcup.eu/bestellen/produkt.php?produkt=2006](https://www.netcup.eu/bestellen/produkt.php?produkt=2006)

<comment><USER8> There is (seems to be) no way to quickly spin up an instance for testing for new customers. After completing the order form I received an email stating they will check my address details and only after that complete the order and let me pay.

<comment><USER7> Yes, you go thru the auth process, pay, and then they email you VM details after provisioning. Fairly standard. I don't think they claim to be very "cloudy," so yeah you're not going to get on-demand VM's you can just spin up like DO/Vultr. Perhaps they're hourly billing is confusing or misleading to lead you to think that. And it honestly really isn't hourly billing I don't think, unless they don't bill if you turn the VM off (never tested that).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would recommend staying away from OVH for anything important (e.g., a mail server). While the service is fairly reliable, when things do go wrong (like an IP network that you share with others get blacklisted because one of the IPs is part of a botnet), their support is useless. They do respond and are very polite, but nothing actually gets fixed and you eventually realize they are just wearing you down hoping that you give up.

<comment><USER10> OVH is pretty much useless for anything 'important'.

Worked with a company that had a large spend account with them as part of our VM/VPS offering which was built on top of leased bare metal where OVH was handling all our Roubaix VM/VPS. Without warning they capped every server to 10Mbps. Their explanation was not given to us individually but posted in french on their forums. We only knew what was going on because a francophone customer translated the message for us. We'd gotten lumped in with seedbox hosts and large CDN accounts.

The gist was they didn't want to cater to high bandwidth consumers, something they didn't evaluate as (# servers / BW usage) but by (account / BW usage).

They wouldn't even lift the bandwidth limit to transfer data off the servers. Not even for private traffic. 10Mbps ports for all of them. We had to offer our customers free service in another region or their data.... Choose one.... Just to try and limit the amount of data we moved off.

If they'd given us any warning we'd have been perfectly accepting of them not wanting our business. Whatever they're reasoning, it's a good reason to never consider them for anything mission critical every again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A big caveat not mentioned for Digital Ocean is that they blackhole IPv6 email traffic. It took a while for me to figure out why it wasn't working since it wasn't documented in their documentation and there was no ICMPv6 response indicating this. Moved to Linode after that.

I wonder if the same caveat applies to other providers that have improperly implemented IPv6 by not providing a /64.

<comment><USER12> I don't agree with their policy, but it is difficult these days to run your own outbound mail service and not end up in the spam box.

I gave up and pay for Gsuite as an SMTP smarthost so my outbound email isn't tagged as spam. That allows me to still process the inbound on my server if I want.

Obviously doesn't help the privacy concern if that is your motivation for running your own SMTP.

If, however, cost is a consideration, Yandex is an option. They will host SMTP for your domain at no charge. [https://yandex.com/support/connect/add- domain.html](https://yandex.com/support/connect/add-domain.html) (assuming Russian hosting is okay for you)

<comment><USER11> Been running my mail server on Linode for almost 2 years now. Fortunately I've yet to run in any issues. Having setup all the stuff properly from day 1 probably helps (TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS).

<comment><USER12> Do you send a fair amount of email? Where I had trouble was running an ecom site. We set up all the things you mention correctly. We never sent any unsolicited email, but I assume people might occasionally flag a receipt or password reset as spam, and then it was game over for our email getting delivered. No issues since switching to gSuite.

<comment><USER11> Personal email server so I only send a small amount. Sometimes a few emails per day, some weeks only 1.

Did the outgoing emails for the site ramp up fast? Did you only encounter issues with Gmail or with other big providers too?

<comment><USER12> It was a slow ramp. Issues with Gmail, o365, and others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Been using DigitalOcean for a while now with a Dokku setup and running multiple sites/apps on it.

Excellent uptime and very good connectivity, great interface and the pricing is very fair. Even moved a client to them with no real issues.

Would definitely recommend for a developer looking to get themselves online with a limited budget.

<comment><USER14> My only gripe with DO is the stability for some of their regions. Some of them have been solid and only have minor outages, but others like one of the ones in AMS has had intermittent issues. For me their most attractive product is the DO spaces and is a quick drop in for S3.

But in all I like their servers and I go between the guides from DO and Linode to setup services that I'm unfamiliar with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been running some live services on Hetzner Cloud ([https://www.hetzner.com/cloud](https://www.hetzner.com/cloud)) and it's been very reliable. One server blip in ~1 year.

2Gb (20Gb storage, 20Tb transfer) from €2.49 - there are a few different DCs now so you can hedge your bets. The higher spec ones are great for Dockerizing a couple of postgresql backup servers.

Their VPS ('Cloud') offer is relatively new, with the dedicated and server auctions being their historical staple.

P.S. Very Euro centric, so probably not so good for Americas/AsiaPac

</comment><comment><USER16> Huge bunch of fly-by-night VPS shops shut down earlier today:

[https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/161957/psa-a-bunch- of-...](https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/161957/psa-a-bunch-of-leb-hosts- deadpooling-arkahosting-supremevps-umaxhosting-hosting73-hostbrz-ku/p1)

Be careful out there guys

</comment><comment><USER17> For those who want to lease ~anonymously with payment by Bitcoin:

       BitHost     OK cpu and ram   OK uplink     overpriced
       CockBox     OK cpu and ram   slow uplink   OK price
       HostSailor  OK cpu and ram   fast uplink   OK price
       VPS.BG      OK cpu and ram   OK uplink     OK price

BitHost is a Digital Ocean reseller.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've used BuyVM for years and they are quite reliable. Though, I had one VPS terminated (including all data wiped) because I didn't pay the monthly invoice within 1 week of the due date. They have one of the most strict timelines on invoices I've ever seen for a web service:

4,2,4 - Unpaid services will be suspended four days past the due date on the service.

4,2,5 - Unpaid services will be terminated seven days past the due date on the service.

That said, the $15/year package is a super excellent deal for a basic VPS and I've never had any technical issues.

<comment><USER19> Is that $15/year some old offer or is it still available? Not seeing it on the site.

Also, how is that block storage so much cheaper than anyone else's?

<comment><USER16> Their bottom end openvz is 15 bucks. That's probably what he's referring to

[https://buyvm.net/openvz-vps/](https://buyvm.net/openvz-vps/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For those of us in NZ, there are only three providers on the list of "good" or "really good" that have a presence in Sydney: Vultr ([https://www.vultr.com/](https://www.vultr.com/)), Linode ([https://www.linode.com](https://www.linode.com)), and VPS Server ([https://www.vpsserver.com/](https://www.vpsserver.com/)).

<comment><USER21> +1 for Vultr. Not in NZ but we've been using them for various app / database servers for coming on four years now and we have literally only ever had one minor issue. Their support is through ticketing only (AFAIK), but their support team is very fast at responding.

<comment><USER20> I've used Vultr for a few years now and am overall very happy. I just wish they'd bring their block storage offering to Sydney too.

<comment><USER21> Can't +1 this enough!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just switched jacobsparts.com over from ec2 to vultr. Cheaper by the hour than a 3yr reserved instance on aws, none of the nickel and dime billing and the cpu is sooooo much better, cutting ~250ms off the response time. Had an unplanned reboot today. Got an email from support and then it went down for about 20 seconds. Overall there is tremendous value in the smaller hosts, and I loved the article; though doubt some of the hosts reviewed will be around for long.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well, nowadays all of them are just fine when you install OS and run several tests. Problems handling is what really matters.

</comment><comment><USER24> Another important "potential pro" metric is how fast can you reset a server to a blank state without having to flat out destroy + create a new one.

This is super handy for testing configuration management tools.

With DigitalOcean they have a rebuild option where you can take an existing server and rebuild it with a new image. It takes like 10 seconds to wipe your server clean in 1 button press and you always get the same IP address. You also don't get charged for a new server since you're still using the original one.

It makes testing something like Ansible really pleasant because you can iterate so quickly. I know you can always test things in a local VM (and I do for most of it) but there are subtle differences in DO's base image vs a stock or bento vagrant box of ubuntu / debian.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've been using Vultr for almost 3 years now. They had some problems with 1-3 server reboots a year, and I once had some trouble with IPv6 setup. The support was quite helpful, but they ended up moving my instance to a different host node.

They take Bitcoin (verification needed) too.

I received a good amount of credits for finding a security vuln in their CP (not severer), and prices are quite good to begin with. If anyone plans to use them, I recommend the High Freq line. Snapshots are currently free. Additional IPv4 and /64 IPv6 cost $3/mo. Network-level firewall and fast DNS (although NS in same /30, anycasted) is for free.

Block storage is reasonable and is on par with Digital Ocean, and is fast. I have 50GB $0/mo instance as an early customer.

</comment><comment><USER26> If the person who did the testing reads this, thank you for sharing that information. I think it's important to know which providers are good hosting options for smaller companies and personal projects without providing a bad, unreliable or even shady service.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm surprised that smaller companies have not moved away from static pricing yet.

We need to introduce a common way of comparing these say: GHz CPU-core day, MB RAM day, MB SSD WRITE, GB SSD READ / NET?

Like this works now you're always comparing apples and oranges and maybe that is the way Amazon and Google (both on KVM now!) wants it?

Few small operators in Dallas, Kansas and Nuremberg are well placed for latency sensitive activity:

\- vpsdime (7$)

\- 1&1 IONOS (2$)

\- Hetzner (3$) & Contabo (6$)

I'm going to try IONOS because they also have a center in Germany!

None in Asia though? You need it to be in Taiwan to service the region well!

Only found yardvps.com (6$) in Taipei and they limit bandwidth to 100GB (2000GB for same price in Dallas).

<comment><USER28> > I'm surprised that smaller companies have not moved away from static pricing > yet.

The physical server has a fixed set of resources. If you let customers pick what resource they want to buy, you'll run out of one resource before the rest, leaving the server underutilized and increasing your costs. You can't sell KVM instances with no ram, no disk, or no CPU.

If you have enough physical servers and small enough customers, you can mostly solve this by carefully figuring out which customers to put on which machines. However, you've created a complicated jigsaw puzzle. And what happens if you need to shift customers between servers to balance things out?

I think Google is able to offer custom machine types because they're big enough, and because they're able to perform live migrations between physical hosts (most hosting providers can't do this), so the customer likely won't even notice if they need to be migrated.

Instead, most of these providers offer a few different SKUs to satisfy different use-cases, or they just pick one target market (e.g. lots of disk space for backups or lots of CPU resource for compute) and focus on that. A few offer networked block storage, which gives some more flexibility, but at the (potential) cost of reliability and performance.

> None in Asia though? You need it to be in Taiwan to service the region well!

Bandwidth in Asia is significantly more expensive ([https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the- world...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/)), so most budget hosting providers stay away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Happy to see Lunanode rated Really Good. My exact experience during more than three years as a completely happy customer. They don't stock any Alpine Linux, but fetching the install image and setting up is a breeze, and not once, ever, have I had an issue with any of my instances. And highly appreciated: I can clone an instance, download the qcow2 image, fiddle with it locally, upload, and put it back in production. Flexible, easy, clean, no nonsense, reliable, cheap, and absolutely recommended. Don't know about support, though, since so far I have had no cause to call them.

<comment><USER30> LunaNode has been great, I just wish they had even one US location or something that wasn't on OVH's network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have a contabo ssd vps with 8gb ram for ~5eur/month I'm quite happy for bango for buck

</comment><comment><USER32> DD is a terrible way to benchmark disks. You want to use fio like is done here: [https://www.storagereview.com/node/3520](https://www.storagereview.com/node/3520)

</comment><comment><USER33> Regarding Scaleway lack of rDNS for IPv6: it's because they don't support it. Customers (like I was) asked for it many times since 2016 but it seems too hard to implement for them.

<comment><USER34> In my experience Scaleway isn't worth the risk. I had multiple weeks-long periods for different vpses (and both FreeBSD & Linux) over the course of two years where their network-mounted root disks would start throwing errors and then drop offline entirely. Worse, after one of these incidents their control panel usually wouldn't allow a reboot. I went round and round with support and the most they ever did was clear a flag for that and tell me they were experiencing network issues. I've also used Ramnode, Linode, Servercheap, Amazon, Heroku, various small local colo companies over, etc. and Scaleway was the only actively bad one.

Unexpected outages, disk corruption, and usually not even a credit when I'd been up and down for days. If you have problems like that with your infrastructure and they crop up on and off for years, you need to bring in new people and invest in infrastructure. They aren't going to.

<comment><USER35> I have similar experience with Scaleway for the disks. I have been running a few cheap dedicated ARM/Atom servers there for many years. It seems be a tied to a specific host or model, I have one of the first arm's which has been dead stable, but I have seen disk issues with both my new Atom's and newer ARM's.

I still use them for some non-critical stuff because their cheap dedicated ARM and Atom's give you isolation like a dedicated machine. In combination with a LUKS mount I like to think it's safer against any Meltdown/Rowhammer-like attacks than a shared instance.

But if you want a stable VPS you might have better luck elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Two related questions not answered in this article:

\- Where can I find good low-cost KVM with decent monthly bandwidth in Australia? Primarily want a remote fast Linux/VNC desktop (which will chew a lot of bandwidth), and want bandwidth left over to actually do things with.

\- There's no mention of Oracle's always-free cloud offerings (100GB disk, 1GB RAM, 10TB bandwidth). Interested to hear what people think of this.

<comment><USER37> I'm quite happy with their free tier. I have two Ubuntu machines hosting various docker images.

Network bandwidth seems capped at around 50mbps, but that is perfectly adequate for my needs.

CPU is quite strong, it's two AMD Zen vCPUs. The compile times for a few of my containers was acceptable.

Three downsides:

-No reverse DNS (at least I couldn't get it to work)

-No IPv6

-It's Oracle, I made sure I only used personal info and would never consider it for work purposes.

<comment><USER7> Free public (static?) IP too?

<comment><USER37> Yes. Instances keep their public IPs for the instance lifecycle. The IP is not reserved though, it is attached to that instance. So if you destroy that instance and spin up a new one, you won't have that IP anymore.

<comment><USER7> Cool, you also said appears to be capped at 50Mbps, however if you use the LB, might be more like 10Mbps ?

(according to the free tier description at [https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#free-cloud- trial](https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/#free-cloud-trial))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> My preferred remote desktop tool is TeamViewer. Almost no VPS actually supports this, because TeamViewer needs a virtual graphics card (that's what I'm calling it, but I actually don't know what to call it).

Linode used to provide one at 1024x768, but I think they no longer do so. Vultr however does support one, at 1280x1024.

Anybody else have this preference for TeamViewer?

<comment><USER39> Apparently TeamViewer supports headless Linux servers: [https://www.teamviewer.com/en/remote-access-headless- linux/](https://www.teamviewer.com/en/remote-access-headless-linux/)

I'm guessing what you're getting at here though is that you want to manage the server through a desktop interface, complete with windows and menus and the like. Most people don't do that on Linux servers because most of the things you need to interact with to administrate one are only accessible through a command line interface.

That said, if you really want to manage a Linux server graphically, you might be able to make it work with something like Xvfb.

<comment><USER38> Yeah, I want a desktop. I manage my server via ssh of course, any extra graphical cruft is a liability there.

> Xvfb

I might, but I've tried a zillion things, and they all suck when you compare it to the ease of use that TeamViewer offers. What I also left out, is that I've already got the TeamViewer client running, because I remote into macOS and Windows.

<comment><USER39> Xvfb would give you the virtual desktop that the TeamViewer Server gives you access to. You'd still use the TeamViewer client to connect to it.

Xvfb is just a way of running a graphical environment on a machine that doesn't otherwise have one.

<comment><USER38> That is... interesting. Is it maintained and packaged by the distros? It doesn't look like it. Duckduckgo gives me a bunch of old 2012-2013 results.

<comment><USER39> You should search your package manager, not Duckduckgo. On Debian-based distros it's simply called xvfb, on Arch Linux it's xorg-server-xvfb, in the RHEL ecosystem it's xorg-x11-server-Xvfb but might require enabling extra reporitories.

<comment><USER38> That's a good tip, thanks. This is quite an interesting approach!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> fake-name This is one of those areas where if the company selling this sort of product _isn 't_ maintaining modules for their service in ansible/puppet/saltstack/etc...., they're really doing theirselves a disservice.

I've had to fix the saltstack vultr integration multiple times when they break it. it's really annoying.

</comment><comment><USER40> I may have messed it up, but last time I tried Lightsail (being a loooong time user of Digital Ocean), I set up a CPU-intensive workload and it stalled within a short period of time. Then I found out the Lightsail instances are t-based ones, so I ran out of credits?

So I guess it depends on the workload as well.

</comment><comment><USER41> I didn't see time4vps on here. They are the only provider I've seen with large storage vps's for a reasonable price. I use one to do all my cloud backups and I can still run afew services on top.

<comment><USER42> Hmm... their largest storage VPS, 8TB, is $1437 USD/yr, which works out to around $15/mo/TB. This is 3x more expensive than Backblaze B2 @ $5/TB/mo. It seems like you'd do better using something like B2 for cloud backups and getting a $5/mo Linode VPS or $2.50/mo Vultr VPS for your other services. I use both Linode and Vultr and like them both.

<comment><USER41> I'm on 1tb, so it's a break even to use b2 and add another cheap vps. Plus I can use Borg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you're willing to take a chance on smaller operations you can get significantly more powerful stuff.

e.g. I purchased a VPS with 3vcore and 4gig RAM at 6 USD a month during black friday

</comment><comment><USER43> lowendbox has a lot of good options.

<comment><USER44> LowEndBox indeed has great deals once in a while, but it's impossible to navigate. You can't search by specs. If you want a cheap VPS/dedicated server with certain specs, try

[https://www.serverhunter.com/](https://www.serverhunter.com/)

And if you don't mind dealing with the russian UI, try

[https://poiskvps.ru/](https://poiskvps.ru/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> For UpCloud referral, you still need to deposit 10USD to get on top of 25USD free (non-expiry date), it's overall a better deal.

</comment><comment><USER46> Why was Rasmus so concerned about reverse DNS? That's not something I'm very familiar with. Can anyone help explain?

<comment><USER12> Reverse DNS is what maps an IP address to a host name. A PTR-record type is used to store reverse DNS entries. The name of the PTR-record is the IP address with the segments in reverse order followed by ".in-addr.arpa". For example the reverse DNS entry for IP 18.104.22.168 would be stored as a PTR-record for "220.127.116.11.in-addr.arpa". That then points to "somehost.yourdomain.tld".

It's important for things like email, where the receiver can do a reverse DNS lookup to make sure your host is supposed to be sending email from "example.domain". Lacking proper reverse DNS, your outgoing email could be marked as spam. Or rejected outright for one not existing. It's also used for some forms of SPF entries (though that's discouraged).

Last, it's somewhat useful for logs if you have hosts in your domain that connect to each other. Though, usually, you're encouraged NOT to configure apache, syslogd, etc, to do reverse DNS lookups...for performance reasons.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Monetizing game websites? - <AUTHOR>

So I just took over hosting a family member's website -- a wiki for a smallish online game. After migration, I am able to access the logs and I discover they are getting 50-100k hits/day.<p>Is this sort of traffic worth monetizing? If so, how? <comment><USER2> Sure is - what type of online game? If you want an affiliate (CPA) partnership with a skill gaming community, we can get a campaign rolling if the demographics are a fit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Champions Online. I have no idea what kind of game that is. I play different stuff.

<comment><USER2> Hmm, wait first a question - are they getting 100k hits per day or are they getting 100k visitors/uniques per day :P

<comment><AUTHOR> no, the uniques is much lower, sorry.

      $ wc -l 20110330-access.log
      254162 20110330-access.log
      $ awk '{print $1}' 20110330-access.log | uniq | sort | uniq -c | wc -l
      3349

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Use ads on your website, like Google AdSense and it will pay off.</comment>


XKCD "Time" Wins Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.thehugoawards.org/2014/08/2014-hugo-award-winners/ <comment><USER2> For those wondering just what makes this such a neat comic series, there was a memorable thread a year ago on it: [Spoiler warning!] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6113636](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6113636)

Check it out, the story of figuring out the story is pretty great!

Edit: added afterburner's spoiler warning.

<comment><USER3> Careful, there are spoilers, right at the top. I'm glad I didn't read it before seeing the comic. (Heck, even revealing there's something to spoil is kind of a spoiler.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm torn about this.

On one hand, "Time" managed to engage in real time a very large audience, spawned it's own micro-culture, and kept everyone interested for weeks. It was truly an innovative use of the medium.

On the other hand, the story doesn't read well in retrospective. Check all the comments here complaining - trolling aside, it doesn't translate very well into any other medium. I doubt even its fans would watch it again in real time and feel half the interest they did at first. Contrast with "Saga" (the 2nd place), which you can re-read several times and still enjoy it.

"Time" was a one-time work - if you didn't catch it back then, now it's too late. The story (IMHO) is average at best, but the delivery was incredible. I think the judges favored medium and delivery over content, and I'm not decided on whether I agree with that.

<comment><USER5> Any work of literature includes the medium and delivery as well as the literal content (words and drawings). There is no such thing as disembodied content, no matter how much we might like to think of a webcomic merely as a collection of timeless propositions and vector graphics.

If a musician had performed a marvelous work in a unique context that can never be repeated by any other performer nor even by the artist himself (e.g. the cellist of Sarajevo), should that make his work any less valuable? You also mentioned translating into other media. If the best novel of the year happens to be extremely difficult to turn into a feature film or Broadway musical, is that a fault of the novel? (e.g. Lovecraft's novels have often been considered "unfilmable".)

"Time" was more like a musical performance than a typical webcomic, despite the fact that it was delivered in the form of a webcomic. You had to be in the virtual concert hall at the right time in order to get the most intellectual stimulation out of it. Once it's over, it's over, and playing an MP3 recording of the concert just doesn't compare to the real thing. Moreover, the next time you hear the same orchestra play the same song, it just won't feel the same. It happens all the time in the performing arts.

We who live in a world where anything can be easily mass-produced tend to under-appreciate things that cannot be reproduced. Somehow we're supposed to multiply the value of a thing by the number of times it can be used as well as the number of people who can use it. This is OK for most goods and services, but I'm not sure if it's an appropriate way to judge works of art. After all, reproducible works of fiction are a relatively recent invention. Before the printing press gave rise to the modern novel, almost all good stories used to be performances of one kind or another.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can browse through all the panels here:

[http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/](http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/)

<comment><USER6> Clicked through the whole goddamn thing.

Summary: Stick figures talk about the sea going up. They run through identical landscape for about 2000 panels, with dialogue that would be embarrassing in "Troll 2". Then, the reader/clicker is rewarded with a character whose lines are smudged up, which is presumably the visual equivalent of a thick accent. Being already sick to death of this crap, the reader doesn't hurt his eyeballs squinting at it. Perhaps it contained some hidden wisdom. Perhaps not.

Then the characters run around some more, and talk to each other like the idiots they are. The end.

<comment><USER7> Hi mynameishere; I'd like to offer you a job. I'm sure you will enjoy it. There is a lot of tedious work and absolutely no pay.

I gather that, having clicked through the "whole goddamn thing", continuing despite not enjoying it one bit, your time is completely worthless and you simply delight in pointless, boring, menial tasks. I think we will be a good fit for each other.

Let me know if you're interested.

<comment><USER8> mynameishere didn't like the comic and you feel this is necessary?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> xkcd link: [http://www.xkcd.com/1190/](http://www.xkcd.com/1190/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Well, I don't like to say I told you so, but: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6148415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6148415)

(No, I didn't actually nominate it; I'm too lazy. But I'm delighted it won, even though it beat Saga to do so.)

</comment><comment><USER11> Woops. Forgot to put spoilers warning. Sorry. I don't see much comments so I thought I could give most of the interesting points. Better delete it.

Without giving much, TL;DR It's not just a comic, it's a deep story with lots of very interesting and well-thought clues that give many more dimensions to a stick-figure comic.

</comment><comment><USER12> Explanation of the story: [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190:_Time](http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190:_Time)

</comment><comment><USER13> That was wonderful! The characters, their dialog, the story, everything was just perfect. I don't know how I never saw this XKCD before, but thank you for bringing it to my attention.

<comment><USER14> You probably did see it, but didn't realize that the image would update every hour. You would have had to watch for months to see the whole story as it was released.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When talking about "Time" its hard to ignore the wonderful thread on it on the xkcd forum. If you can't understand what they are saying its not your fault. They have such a detailed culture and so many customs that they are no longer speaking English. Link: [http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=101043&start=8284...](http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=101043&start=82840)

</comment><comment><USER16> Wonder if there's ever been interest in adapting it as a game? Bit like Limbo without the same menace.

</comment><comment><USER17> I always wandered if someone would make that into a movie. Maybe something for a kickstarter campaign?

</comment><comment><USER18> Best novel for 'Ancillary Justice'? Neat. I finished it two days ago, quite enjoyed it.

</comment><comment><USER19> I want my hour back.

</comment><comment><USER20> Really boring. Switched off after five minutes.</comment>


Reddit Reminds Everyone That the Site Only Has a Handful of Rules  - <AUTHOR> http://www.webpronews.com/reddit-reminds-everyone-that-the-site-only-has-a-handful-of-rules-so-follow-them-2012-07

<comment><USER2> Reddit still decided to be judge and jury regarding certain subreddits in order to counter the negative publicity they were feeling from the general public. There are far more worse subreddits, in my opinion, that still are online / that weren't removed. It's fairly disingenuous to state their stance as is when in fact it's not that way at all.</comment>


Do Great Writers Really Steal? - <AUTHOR> https://lithub.com/do-great-writers-really-steal-on-plagiarism-and-publishing/ <comment><USER3> There is also the fact that ideas are easy and thus cheap - good execution is hard and thus expensive. Look at grand successes that are essentially formulaic and others which take interesting concepts and squander them.

I have found some B-movies have 'moments of potential' or shockingly intelligent concepts hinted at that are quickly lost or go nowhere. One can often dig up obscure precursors to a concept - and find that there is a good reason that it remained obscure that they weren't very good even when released.

<comment><USER4> I heard a story that Jim Butcher wrote Codex Alera to prove that a good author can write a good book from a bad idea.

<comment><USER5> [http://www.fantasyliterature.com/author-interviews/jim- butch...](http://www.fantasyliterature.com/author-interviews/jim-butcher/)

technically two bad ideas.

<comment><USER3> Adding bad ideas together ironically can create good concepts. Realistic bueracracy story centered on a bueracrat and say story set in heaven both would be boring separately. A harried angelic bueracrat trying to keep up with an endless stream of weird requests from "good people" throughout history, deal with people wanting to meet their ancestors, descendants, and famed figures and keeping them happy when they would get along terribly from differing values or finding out they were condemned to hell? Already a comedy with surprising depth in an elevator pitch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think great art develops through a sort of evolutionary process. Everyone is influenced by the writer's they admire and so the good ideas get replicated. But good ideas by themselves aren't enough to attract an audience, so authors have to creatively combine and mutate those ideas. Harold Bloom called this the "anxiety of influence". The ideas they copy might be stolen, but the ways they combine those ideas might not be.

<comment><USER7> This gets into what Picasso meant by "Good artists copy, great artists steal".

I take that as meaning that a great artist _makes the material wholly their own_ through transformation, while a good artist merely alters the original which remains identifiable.

<comment><USER8> Fun fact: Picasso never said that.

[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists- steal/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/)

<comment><USER7> Ah. Looks like the closest real statement came from Eliot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Then again, sometimes ideas simply stick with you and resurface unknowingly. I have no doubt that every author has inadvertently thought of an idea that was actually something they read about years ago"

This. Especially on topics where the work is based predominently on a concise/small core idea, such a tune in music. I once had musician friends psyched that they were writing a song based on a really cool riff, only to discover later that said riff was in a track they had heard a decade ago, and that had stuck in a corner of someone's head. They had copied by accident. And they found that out by accident, too, and might very well have ended up pushing a track that would have had them getting called plagiarists.

<comment><USER9> This happened perhaps most famously in 1971:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord#Copyright_infrin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sweet_Lord#Copyright_infringement_suit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >Agents and editors do not hold onto manuscripts to pillage for ideas (and if they did they would do so with a proven commodity like James Patterson and not an untested debut author.)

I would guess that big name authors would have the reputation to fight back against that kind of thing. Whereas no one is going to believe the little guy.

</comment><comment><USER11> For those interested in the court's opinion, which includes summaries of the works in question, you can find it here[0].

[0] [https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new- yor...](https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new- york/nysdce/1:2017cv06984/480492/26/)

</comment><comment><USER12> " _Creativity is the art of concealing your sources_ "

<comment><USER13> And I might add ...

 _" Creativity is the art of forgetting your sources"_

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Green thinks this scenario is so unlikely to occur twice that he hired a > sports analytics firm to determine the odds were a mere "1-in-8 sextillion."

The fact this plaintiff implicitly argued the probability of fictional and non-fictional events are equal, made me realise that perhaps the seemingly moronic arguments we hear about from litigation in the technical world aren't all down to incompetence in reasoning about technology - just incompetence in reasoning about reality in general, but I guess people will say anything when they believe the opposition is wrong regardless of the implications of their insane reasoning.

<comment><USER15> Lawyers don't argue for the truth they fight for their clients. It has to be that way because court is an adversarial situation, so if one lawyer was arguing for the truth like a scientist and the other was being underhanded the underhanded one would have an advantage.

<comment><USER14> > if one lawyer was arguing for the truth like a scientist and the other was > being underhanded the underhanded one would have an advantage.

It's not about truth, trying to shill clearly flawed reasoning like this shows they really think very little of the ability of the system, you don't need facts or "truth" to see how their argument is broken by abstractly reasoning about it yourself.

Putting forward arguments where the opposition disproves them by revealing something that gives a more complete picture is one thing because the original argument without extended context was valid... but throwing complete - <USER2> packaged fallacies at the wall until one sticks because those evaluating it are stupid enough to miss it is really quite low.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We should be able to ponder on the same ideas in different ways. That's how literature and culture flourished. We think that copyright and patents helped that because we confound the actual natural progress of technology and society with the appearance of these concepts during that progress and end up thinking that it was these concessions that fueled such progress. Instead, they just popped up when things started to gain vast momentum worldwide.

</comment><comment><USER17> A few thoughts without having read the linked essay, which does not interest me.

Writers all write and work differently. Great writers develop their own, good style or take time to craft it carefully into their works, "lesser" writers are satisfied with perfecting their skills and a certain artistic base level. Most of those "lesser" writers could probably write works of much higher quality if they wanted to, because the literary quality of a work depends to a large extent on the amount of time and care devoted to it. (There are bad habits, though.) Writing is mostly handcraft. It also depends on the genre, if you don't intend to write a work of high literary quality - for which there is a very small market and not much income -, then it's unlikely that the end result will have that quality.

I don't believe that any writer consciously steals from anyone, not even the crappiest pulp fiction novelist would want do that, because it takes all the fun out of the writing.

Writing is always about humans and there are only so many themes, so at a coarse look it might seem as if there is some stealing, but that is only a coarse and superficial look.

</comment><comment><USER18> There are no 'great' anything. Short of royalty and inherited wealth, there is just hustle, hard work and plain luck. Every great was just a regular guy or girl who persevered and got better at his craft, until chance or connections pulled him out of that pool of 'good' and into the rarefied, socially defined and self-fulfilling category of 'great'. Outright stealing might or might not be part of that journey - it's a risky individual choice driven by morals and desperation, not a recipe.

<comment><USER19> I can't help but suspect that the difference between, for example, good sprinters and great sprinters is not simply that Usain Bolt knew a guy who could get him some solid publicity to get his name out there as a great sprinter.

<comment><USER20> Well, the difference is a few hundredths of a second. Ever heard of Tyson Gay? Second fastest man in history.

<comment><USER19> So he's another great sprinter? He's a great sprinter, without the publicity. Second fastest man in history certainly sounds like a great sprinter. If that's just "good", then I think we're working on different definitions of "good" and "great".

<comment><USER20> My point is that nobody knows who he is. So he's not considered to be one of the greats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Since story ideas are not copyrightable, why was Harlan Ellison so successful suing people for supposedly stealing his ideas?

<comment><USER22> He was patent trolling before it was cool.

You can sue anybody for anything. There are ways to win even a bullshit case.

<comment><USER23> Harlan Ellison also had the right mix of "successful enough that he actually worked on a lot of projects and had scripts and proposals taken seriously" and "difficult enough to work with that he occasionally walked away from or was kicked off of projects".

That's not to say anything about whether any or all of his complaints had merit, but the baseline plausibility that they did is just orders of magnitude higher than if _I_ made such a claim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "The ugly fact is books are made out of books, the novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written."

(Cormac McCarthy)

</comment><comment><USER21> Romeo and Juliet was cribbed from a number of older tales.

</comment><comment><USER25> you write like what you read</comment>


Surviving Your First Junior Developer Job [Guide] - <AUTHOR> https://univjobs.ca/blog/developer-guides/ultimate-guide-for-first-junior-developer-job-success/ <comment><USER2> Don't accidentally delete the entire table because you left off a WHERE clause.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what nightmares are made of</comment></comment>


MyPost.io: My Post, My Content - <AUTHOR> http://mypost.io/ <comment><USER2> For me, it worked as advertised: [http://mypost.io/post/a-simple- page](http://mypost.io/post/a-simple-page)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thank you brudgers! it was meant for the very basic/simple and the advanced! if you want a basic post, you can put one up! But you can get even more creative with it and design your own templates. it was meant to be a skeleton.</comment>


Climate Risk in the Housing Market Has Echoes of Subprime Crisis - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/climate/mortgage-climate-risk.html <comment><USER2> This article doesn't contain the word "insurance" once. As mortgages require home insurance, why do the banks suddenly feel uncomfortable lending to coastal areas? The article does not address this.

<comment><USER3> If the risk goes up as the science says it will, insurance rates will either have to rise substantially, or the insurer will lose lots of money to claims and potentially fail.

Insurance will also not protect banks from stranded assets if the perceived value of coastal real estate plummets and people abandon them as we saw in the housing crisis.</comment></comment>


Why a Personal Brand Is Necessary for Today's Developer - <AUTHOR> https://builttoadapt.io/why-a-personal-brand-is-necessary-for-todays-developer-f0f18bfaa033 <comment><USER2> It's hateful trends like this that make want me to leave tech for ever.</comment>


Formlabs Form 2 Teardown - <AUTHOR> http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4641 <comment><USER2> Nice. You see engineering like this in better laser printers. This is what it takes to get consistent results from a stereolithography machine. 3D printing needs to Just Work, and this is doing it right.

</comment><comment><USER3> May be the single best teardown of a product ever written (and a great product starring in it)

</comment><comment><USER4> A very interesting and informative post, as to be expected from someone like bunnie.</comment>


Zynga's S-1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1439404/000119312511180285/ds1.htm <comment><USER2> From the risks section:

 _We rely on a small percentage of our players for nearly all of our revenue.

A small percentage of our players account for nearly all of our revenue. We lose paying players in the ordinary course of business. In order to sustain our revenue levels, we must attract new paying players or increase the amount our players pay. To retain paying players, we must devote significant resources so that the games they play retain their interest and attract them to our other games. If we fail to grow or sustain the number of our paying players, or if the rate at which we add paying players declines or if the average amount our paying players pay declines, our business may not grow, our financial results will suffer, and our stock price may decline._

Is this normal in the social games industry?

<comment><USER3> Yes. It is the dirty not-so-secret that convinced me not to go into them. It is also true of nearly all "Free 2 Play" games, including ones off FB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems night and day to GroupOn's S-1. A solid sustainable business, plenty of cash on hand which is growing every quarter, and a clear path forward to continue their phenomenal growth.

There are plenty of risks of course, not the least of which is Facebook turning off the lights, but that is something that seems like it could be baked into the IPO price for a 1 billion dollar company with these financials.

Not saying I will invest in few months after the IPO, generally it takes time for investor hype to cool down and heat back up again (see LinkedIn, the only people who made any money so far were the investment banks) - but it might be a good post-IPO lull buy.

<comment><USER5> The funniest part is that Zynga has made a solid business selling virtual goods, while Groupon has built a crap business selling the real thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks like the most promising IPO yet. They are sitting on a pile of cash, they have a healthy profit margin, and it seems like they are the undisputed market leader in a growing industry segment.

Question, how does the IPO price get set? Is it in the S-1 and I just missed it, or does that come out later?

<comment><USER7> It comes later, in the weeks leading up to the actual offering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My concern about Zynga is that they're going to burn through users.

People will pay for things in a game and have fun doing it. Then they'll get sick of that game and move on to the next one. And they'll buy more things there, and then they'll get sick of that game and look at the next one and realize that, hey, this one is pretty similar. And maybe it isn't worth investing hours upon hours tending to some sprites. Or forking over real money.

I'm not saying this is guaranteed, but as someone who has played a lot of games growing up, I had it happen plenty of times. Zynga needs to release some games that feel totally different from Farm/City/Frontierville.

<comment><USER9> I know they're famous for Farm/City/Frontierville, but they seem to have done a good job acquiring popular games/studios (i.e. Words with Friends..)

And while I haven't played it yet, I've heard that "Hanging with Friends" is a lot of fun as well (which is the result of them acquiring NewToy when they got Words...)

Personally, It's nice to see Zynga attempting to keep "fresh" and not sticking with just the *villes. However, I do think that increased competition (for instance, on the iPhone Zynga Poker pales compared to Pokerist.com's Texas Poker) will make it interesting for Zynga.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I found this tidbit amazing:

 _"As of March 31, 2011, approximately 64% of our employees had been with us for less than one year and approximately 92% for less than two years."_

For a company with hundreds of employees, that's a crazy growth rate.

<comment><USER11> A lot of their growth is through acquisitions, so it's a little bit less crazy (the teams are intact and probably worked together for a bit before), but still crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a question which could seem very amateurish but: how do I buy Zinga when it's out ? Is there a way to actually place orders before the opening?

</comment><comment><USER13> Not really an important question, but why didn't they specify a symbol?

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, how did Brad Feld acquire 30 million shares?</comment>


Robotic thread is designed to slip through the brain's blood vessels - <AUTHOR> https://techxplore.com/news/2019-08-robotic-thread-brain-blood-vessels.html <comment><USER2> It's not exactly robotic. It's a flexible magnetically manipulatable wire. Robots require some kind of sensing and reacting loop.

<comment><USER3> " _Some college guys move coated wire with magnets_ " doesn't drum up admissions and donations and buff the reputation, but " _MIT Engineers develop magnetic soft-continuum thread-like robot with lubricating hydrogel skin_ " does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not gonna lie. The idea of doctors steering a thin cable through my brain is one of nightmares.

But the fact that they're able to do so and save lives is a remarkable feat. I can only hope that we can eventually make most strokes much less debilitating.

<comment><USER5> Doctors just inserted a less-thin cable through… well, my copy of most men's favorite organ in order to get rid of a few kidney stones.

I walked out under my own power with some super-duper Ibuprofen. After 5 days I was back to normal, no pain at all.

I'm not going to lie, if I have a choice between invasive brain surgery and the thin cable, I'll take the cable.

<comment><USER6> Your experience sounds much better. I had a stuck 6mm kidney stone removed with laser under anaesthetic which after I had to walk around with a tube in my ureter for 6 weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had a friend who recently suffered a heat stroke and had a ruptured vein in his brain.

When I heard the doctors closed off the leak without opening his head I was amazed.

<comment><USER8> Wow that is cool, how did they do it? Did they use a machine similar to that in the article?

<comment><USER7> I think this was the mechanism:

[https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/neurology_neurosurgery/cente...](https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/neurology_neurosurgery/centers_clinics/aneurysm/treatment/aneurysm_endovascular_coiling.html)

They guide the wire by giving you a kind of "live" x-ray.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like an interesting way to potentially deploy (nano) tech - through the hollow tube - to targeted brain locations.

Maybe useful for future BMI development/integration.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can I upload by brain yet?</comment>