Ask HN: What does it take build a product company in India? - <AUTHOR> Trying to gather inputs from folks on what you need to start a successful product company in India?
1. Tech Talent - Major challenge compared to SF Bay Area/ US in general. Good engineering Talent pool is small, still I am hopeful that it will get better in next decade or so.
2. Funding - Most of A-List VC firms are operating in India source: https://www.inventiva.co.in/2017/05/list-150-venture-capital-firms-india/
3. Product idea - It seems most successful startups are replicas on a proven idea (ex. Flipkart, Snapdeal, Ola) tailored to the local market.
4. Exit options - Barring some of the high profile exits like RedBus, there hasn't been lot of M&A deals. Few acqui-hire type deals by FB and Google makes news occasionally. <comment><USER2> Money, Resources and a great innovative idea are needed to product company in india. You also be active on social media like facebook, Instagram and twitter.you just need millions of followers so you must buy instagram likes an followers from [https://buylikesservices.com/](https://buylikesservices.com/)</comment>


Porting my Score4 game to React/TypeScript - <AUTHOR> http://users.softlab.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/react_typescript.html <comment><USER2> For those struggling to beat the AI, Connect Four is a solved game [1] and whoever goes first can force a win by starting in the middle column.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connect_Four](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connect_Four)</comment>


New Facebook Headquarters - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/15/behold-the-new-facebook-headquaters/

<comment><USER2> I honestly cannot imagine a worse place to work. Open space equals no privacy and no place to sit and consider difficult problems. I get a very childish, highschoolish sense from that video.

Also, where are the old people? I can assure you people over 30 have a good amount of experience and knowledge they can contribute to a business like that. It's through old people who say "Oh yes, this problem is exactly the same as they used to have in shipping goods on old trains, look in this book for the optimal answer, Brunel figured it out in 1840" that you can short circuit the learning process and gain an edge.

Or in simpler words, you gain perspective. The very thing that all the dotcoms are shouting about.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. My current place of employ has a similar open work space (granted, it looks less like an airport) and it's notably uncomfortable.

The idea that such a layout encourages "openness" and "communication" often doesn't work out, and instead promotes unsolicited shoulder-staring, frequent casual interruptions, and a generally distracting ambiance of sales calls, verbal outbursts, and coworkers' annoying habits. Headphones are my best friend here.

It's odd that you should mention the highschoolish sense of the space, because I notice the same in my own work environment, not only in aesthetic but in the way people conduct themselves and how the business itself has slowly come to be run. (This part is most likely coincidence, but your comment certainly struck a chord.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The only thing I object to is the lack of privacy. In a cube, I am not distracted by outside motion. At those desks, it would be near impossible to get in the zone in a room that huge.

</comment><comment><USER5> Creepy:

> "Notice: work areas subject to search"

[http://www.techcrunch.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/06/img_408...](http://www.techcrunch.com/wp- content/uploads/2009/06/img_4089.jpg)

<comment><USER6> Someone in the TC comments suggests that it's a joke. Perhaps it's to remind people of a search initiative?

<comment><USER5> I hope so! I thought that at first, but figured since the desks were so pristine -- it may be for serious.

Are the letters on the columns in that photograph used to navigate the office like a parking lot?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Harsh fluorescent lighting, open plan office, every desk looks the same. Who wouldn't want to work there?

</comment><comment><USER8> that office space has zero personality

</comment><comment><USER9> Modern take on the time tested productivity-maximizer: The sweat shop.</comment>


Everything is Incredible: Let's help "The Helicopter Man" - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/everythingisincredible

<comment><USER2> "spent 50 years building a surprisingly advanced helicopter out of re-bar, bicycle parts and wood."

Quite the MVP. I hope this happens for him.</comment>


Self Binding Service (encrypting things to hide them from yourself) - <AUTHOR> http://enthusiasm.cozy.org/archives/2009/11/self-binding-service

<comment><USER2> Is it mathematically possible to accomplish this without another party involved? I can't think of a way, but some mathematicians are pretty clever...

<comment><USER3> In the average case, couldn't you just randomly generate a pretty small key, encrypt the information, then throw the key away? Then you could start the process of randomly guessing at the key, and eventually you'd figure it out again. Just pick a key size based on the amount of computing you're willing to do to decrypt.</comment></comment>


Harvard Statistics 110: Introduction to Probability, on iTunes - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/statistics-110-introduction/id495213607 <comment><USER3> This is a really great addition to iTunes U. Skipping through the videos, the course appears to give a thorough treatment to the theoretical background of probability. I haven't seen too many intro probability courses explore topics such as Beta Distributions and Markov Chains with this much rigor. I hope Harvard does the same for Stat 111 and Stat 171.

Edit: I just skimmed through some of the assignments and tests, and thought they are really good! If its been a few years since you took probability/statistics and feel you may be rusty when it comes to the integration and manipulations, give them a try! Homework 9 and 10, especially.

</comment><comment><USER4> Harvard, don't lock in your content! Other courses in many formats are available on <http://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative> Why should this one be iTunes only?

<comment><USER5> This storm in a teacup fear mongering stuff has to stop. It's silly to suggest this is locking in content, or even bad for anyone, and it's obvious why they use this distribution method over hosting the content themselves.

1\. It's not in a proprietary format, the documents are PDF, the videos are AAC/H264. (I give up the h264 debate for today). Having to run iTunes to access the store is hardly "lock in". You might as well suggest turning on your computer is lock in.

2\. This is on a CDN managed externally, Harvard don't need to invest in data centers.

3\. Harvard don't have to pay for hosting/transmission/upkeep costs.

4\. It enables harvard to provide something for free when normally they'd need to allocate budget. (And with that possibly charge for it.)

5\. It's part of iTunes U, which is _praised_ by universities across the globe for being an excellent enabler of education.

<comment><USER6> 1)

As posted in my other comment - I'm currently at the airport with my android, and no way to get this content. If it's not locked in, how do I access the data?

When I get home I'll have to install itunes. Which will add the apple updater + bonjour to my system as well.

2-4)

I agree completely with your arguments regarding the benefits to Harvard. You're saying the same thing in three different ways though, Harvard has no costs hosting this content, which is true

5)

The big enablers of education that have entered my field of view are MIT opencourseware, khan academy and the recent stanford courses. Perhaps iTunesU is among them, but I haven't seen this _praise_ in my feeds.

<comment><USER5> Your definition of lock-in needs a reality check.

If my pocket calculator can't access the internet, it doesn't make the internet 'lock-in'.

<comment><USER7> Pocket calculator designers can implement internet support. Android developers cannot legally implement an iTunes store (I hastily assume).

<comment><USER8> There's software for desktop Linux that lets you access iTunes U, so I don't think there is anything stopping Android from being able to as well apart from developers' motivations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there any way to watch this without iTunes? I don't use it and have no desire to join Apple's 'ecosystem'.

<comment><USER10> If you are using GNU/Linux then there is an alternative <http://tunesviewer.sourceforge.net/>

<comment><USER11> This works on Ubuntu 11.10. There is a lot of quality content on ITunes and using Ubuntu as my main OS meant I couldn't access it. But this is awesome! I can finally download those lecture videos. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12>
      * in progresss *

itunes fetch the whole playlist as m4v so it must be possible to send audio when fetching's over.

edit :

      Format                           : MPEG-4
      Format profile                   : Base Media / Version 2
      File size                        : 402 MiB
      Duration                         : 46mn 28s
      Overall bit rate                 : 1 209 Kbps

      Format                           : AAC
      Format profile                   : LC
      Stream size                      : 62.6 MiB (16%)
      Duration                         : 46mn 28s
      Bit rate                         : 192 Kbps

full codec info >>> <http://pastebin.com/dCHEmtVg>

</comment><comment><USER13> A great college textbook I had for intermediate probability theory is "A First Course in Probability" by Sheldon Ross, highly recommend it: [http://www.amazon.com/First-Course-Probability-Sheldon- Ross/...](http://www.amazon.com/First-Course-Probability-Sheldon- Ross/dp/013603313X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326733748&sr=1-1)

<comment><USER3> Another good book is "Mathematical statistics with applications" by Wackerly et al. It's focus is more on the application of the toolkit from probability, but about half the book focuses on the background of probability theory. What's great is that by the end of the book you will have a great introductory perspective of both frequentist and bayesian statistics. There are some gaps in the book, but it's a great reference nevertheless.

[http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Statistics- Applications-D...](http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Statistics-Applications- Dennis-Wackerly/dp/0495110817/ref=pd_sim_b_1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't suppose someone could be so awesome as to host the first lecture(s) as an mp3 somewhere?

I'm at the airport and would love to hear this, but only have my android tablet with me :(

</comment><comment><USER14> I really wished to have this class. But iTunes only? seriously? Get some inspiration from Stanford or MIT.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think it is great that Harvard and Stanford open their course material on the internet but can someone explain to me why they would do it? I mean, what is in it for them - a bit of PR and friendly headlines aside? Their name and status alone is enough to stay "in business".

<comment><USER16> Harvard and Stanford (and other big name universities) are in the business of "selling" diplomas, not content. You cannot put on your resume that you "aced" a Harvard iTunes course, but only that you graduated from Harvard. I applaud these institutions for realizing it and allowing others to benefit from the content. Think of it as the public library model -- you can certainly pick up Tocqueville or Newton writing and read it, but it offers no guarantee of your mastery of the material. The diploma (supposedly) gives you that badge.

<comment><USER15> Yes, I understand that but the question then still is... why would they spend time, money and resources to give you all that material for free? Other institutions in the "diploma business" will surely peek and try to keep up and I do not see or understand the benefit for Harvard, Stanford et al. if we are not talking altruistic purposes.

Don't get me wrong, I think it is fantastic they do it and I applaud them - <USER2> is just really surprising and I am wondering about their motives, just my own (economic) curiosity.

<comment><USER17> I think the prestige of a university is tied more to the quality of their research, their legacy as an institution and the reputation of instructors they attract (which need not have anything to do with actual ability to instruct) than the quality of the content or instruction. I don't think the other institutions in the "diploma business" can replicate that as easily.

<comment><USER15> And these are all good points why it does not HURT them to do that.

But my question was... why DID they do it?

<comment><USER16> In one word: reputation. These schools want to be seen as social- responsibility leaders, etc. I don't want to sound so negative about it, but there's some element of publicity these institutions are seeking.

Think of this: how many people criticized Steve Jobs for not getting involved in charity, although he had billions in the bank? Do you think it looks good for Harvard University, with over $15bn in endowment to not do any good will project?

Lastly, some of these schools already offer remote learning via video. Putting the videos on iTunes is a sunk cost.

Disclosure: I went to one of those "big name" institutions as an undergrad, grad student, and I also worked there. Few are the projects that are TRULY out of the goodness of somebody's heart</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Chrome Remote Desktop Service Down? - <AUTHOR> Approximately 2.5 hours ago Chrome Remote Desktop stopped working. There have been reports on twitter, but no acknowledgement from Google. Does anyone know if Google has a status page for the service? Anyone else seeing an issue? <comment><USER2> Yes, I also saw it and a bunch of people are reporting the same problem on this chrome support thread: [https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/28641527?hl=en](https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/28641527?hl=en)</comment>


Rush to Put Death Records Online Lets Anyone be 'Killed' - <AUTHOR> http://www.securityweek.com/rush-put-death-records-online-lets-anyone-be-killed

<comment><USER2> While humorous (getting a death certificate for someone who isn't really dead) the money is in the virtual births. I don't doubt for a minute there are entrepreneurs who use that to create new identities for people or fake dependents (welfare fraud).

<comment><USER3> It's less than humorous. Once bogus data declaring you dead works its way into the system, credit cards get shut off, accounts get closed, and you're liable to have serious problems with your bank.

<comment><USER2> Your correct, it isn't funny, but when the Social Security administration decided my wife's uncle was already dead and he needed to pay back benefits they sent, she had them talk to him on the phone, where they tried to explain to them that because he was dead he needed to payback excess benefits.

<comment><USER4> This is what happens when computer screens turn humans into robots. We need more academic studies of "irregular operations", the term used by the airline industry for any event where unpredictable real-world events intrude on planned schedules. At such times, senior human customer service agents are empowered to override computer models, with later reconciliation.

<comment><USER5> The field is called "Operations Research". I had the pleasure of meeting Dr Cook in the speaker lounge right before he gave this keynote at Velocity 2012:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S0k12uZR14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S0k12uZR14)

<comment><USER6> Thank you for the video. Very informative!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well at least for virtual births, given the trend of fingerprint storage, once the real virtualized baby is of age or otherwise required to submit prints, the other identities are pretty much useless.

<comment><USER8> This pretty much doesn't happen unless you enter a specific licensed/high-risk profession or get arrested and booked for a crime.

<comment><USER9> Or not be American and travel into the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like we're one sweet OS boot screen away from the movie 'Hackers'.

</comment><comment><USER11> Lots of dead and nonexistent people vote in elections all the time. Come to think of it, this could be a reason that it is so easy to do these things.

</comment><comment><USER12> "The Baby Harvest: How virtual babies become the future of terrorist financing and money laundering."

Terrorists are killing and selling our babies! Sounds like over-the-top far- right US political rhetoric.</comment>


Mars Mystery: Here's What We Know - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/government/information-management/mars-mystery-heres-what-we-know/240142491

<comment><USER2> A quote: "'This data is one for the history books,' NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist John Grotzinger recently told National Public Radio, while adding that he could not divulge more until scientists had a better chance to vet the data. Hypotheses have ranged from a discovery of complex organic matter to chemicals indicating the presence of water."

Well, if it's something meriting mention in history books, then it's not "chemicals indicating the presence of water", because we already have many examples of that, from present and past rovers. That leaves something not seen before, and organics are at the top of the list. It's a pretty exciting time -- and from a scientific perspective, a nice follow-up to the Higgs findings from the LHC.</comment>


The $329 iPad could be just the thing for the education market - <AUTHOR> http://www.macworld.com/article/3183270/ipad/the-329-ipad-could-be-just-the-thing-for-the-education-market.html <comment><USER2> Unless there's a solid competitor to Google Docs buried in the next release of iWork/Pages/whatever it's called now, it seems unlikely.

My school district switched to Chromebooks not just because of the slightly cheaper hardware with a keyboard. The students can work everywhere/anywhere with a single login, and collaborate in realtime on documents with their teachers and with others. And it even runs on the desktop PCs sitting around gathering dust, as long as it can run a recent browser.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think this is the first time Apple has sold a $329 iPad for the education market, though? And even if it is, I doubt $70 will make the difference to turn it into a huge success compared to previous attempts.</comment>


Just Build the Product - <AUTHOR> https://davnicwil.com/just-build-the-product/ <comment><USER3> You know, one of these posts pops up on HN every few months, and every time it kind of annoys me.

If I'm building a project for fun at home, then it's typically _specifically_ to learn about a new thing (which I kind of assumed was the case for most people); either a new programming language, or a new editor, or a new library or two. If I short-circuit and "just build the product", then that is sort of negating the purpose of the project.

If I wanted to "just get something done", I probably wouldn't have done any projects in Haskell (back when it _really_ sucked for tooling), I wouldn't have learned category theory, and I wouldn't have gotten any work in research.

<comment><USER4> It annoys me as well, and I think the intent is that "just build the product" is about avoiding shaving the yak.

Some of us poor bastards have to invent the stupid things that let people get things done, and it isn't exactly clear that the stupid thing is even good in the first place.

For instance, right now, I am in the process of inventing my own programming language. I've done this in the past with varying degrees of technical success, but it tends to get deep into the weeds of shaving the yak and polishing it up.

I'm have a hell of time to pull myself from the technically interesting problems to focus on the product that this language enables, and I find myself having to balance between fixing the language idioms and building the product.

Balance will be a key thing to focus on if I make this product a real thing for real customers... very challenging future ahead of myself.

<comment><USER5> > It annoys me as well, and I think the intent is that "just build the > product" is about avoiding shaving the yak.

I think discussions in general on Hacker News, blogposts and Twitter is missing context. Everyone assumes that others context is the same that you yourself has. So posts like this make sense, if you're in "startup - lets find market fit - need growth - just build the damn thing" mode, which is probably the mode the author is, or the context would have been set in the blogpost.

In the comment you're replying to, the context is a "explore an idea and learn something new" with no intention on turning that very thing into a product that sells to people. Maybe that will happen, but it's not the intention.

In the end, two very different contexts, both valid, but they are both talking past each other. All the people using different social networks (HN included), usually miss the vital piece of context and just proclaim "You should do X, because of Y". Then people defend their context, because life is never "Always do X" and will never be.

<comment><USER6> Good point. But isn't it the author's job to establish context? Otherwise what they're saying is typical "thought leader" platitude nonsense.

Here's another way of looking it. Shipping a product involves thousands of decisions and course corrections. Sometimes technical decisions like deciding on a build system or programming language. Other times product decisions like deciding to ship without user login and use an email "magic link" instead. And other times it involves building no product at all and just gathering some user feedback on the idea.

So if you look at it that way, "just build the product" is total nonsense no matter what context you're in. It's the ability to make good decisions that matters. What's a good decision? One that produces the results you're happy with (expected or not).

How do you make good decisions? Well, that's the hard part. The OP doesn't help at all. It's just fluff.

Example: You're working on a product idea. One of the core features is a DSL/language that the user types in a GUI to make some magical thing happen. Immediately you're faced with choices about your DSL/language. Should it be a subset/superset of another language? Should it be totally custom? Should you write your own parser? Should you use a parser generator? If you use a parser generator, how will you handle lax/incremental parsing?

If it were me I'd spend a couple weeks researching PL theory. In the process I might learn about the tradeoffs of choosing LL/LR/LALR grammars. Maybe I'll learn about state of the art grammar generators that'll save me weeks of coding and months (cumulatively) of debugging. Did I waste my time or did I just greatly improve my _core_ product?

Another week later you're faced with decision of choosing a build system. Since your product will only ever run on AWS somewhere you write a simple Makefile and move forward. No point in diving deep into the likes of CMake/build2/etc if you don't have to. Could it bite you later? Maybe. If it does you'll deal with it.

Where does "just build the product" help here? Building the product _is_ making these decisions thousands of times.

Oh boy, I'm ranting. I'll just press Reply now :P

<comment><USER7> >How do you make good decisions?

Good decisions come from wisdom. Wisdom comes from making bad decisions. Just make the decisions and learn from that. That's my interpretation of the post.

I sometimes do projects to learn new tools, and sometimes just to try to make something I want to play with. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not. But a couple of years later I might come back and revisit it with new knowledge and perspectives.

It's easy to get lost in the labyrinth of second-system syndrome and analysis paralysis and not really do the thing at all. Maybe better to do it with tech debt and sort it out later if it's worth it, and if not then learn from that. But still with a focus on the goals, not the means to get there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Rather facile advice.

As a software engineer, it's your responsibility to build the product according to the requirements. Sometimes that means it needs to be built it quick because it's likely to have a short life, or it needs to land quickly to market. Sometimes, you need to get things right, otherwise you end with an insurmountable amount of technical debt and a business that grinds to a halt.

Given this, you should make the analysis to understand the tools that you need. If that means learning, then so be it. Maybe you can keep going with superficial knowledge. Or, perhaps you need to find an expert, that's fine too.

As for growing in your technical knowledge, that should be agreed upon with your employer or whoever is paying for the work. If you find that you work somewhere that doesn't allow you to learn then perhaps it's not the right place to be.

Think like a professional.

<comment><USER9> The problem is it's extremely hard or often impossible to know what are good choices before you've started building the product. This, combined with the fact that software is highly malleable, should lead one to highly prefer a bias towards action vs analysis. It's not a hard rule, but it's much more common for people to fail due to analysis paralysis than due to poor technology choices. If you are able to get any form of traction, opportunities open up to expand resources and time that will be needed to adjust technologies. It won't necessarily be fun, but when going through such an experience I believe more often than not engineers have hindsight bias, not a true recognition that early choices were made objectively incorrect given the knowledge at the time.

<comment><USER10> I've seen plenty of project grind to a halt from bad decisions and high pain thresholds. I think you'll find and even mix in the overanalysis crowd of white tower thinkers and people exhibiting allergic reactions. If you are seeing more of the latter I have two theories. One, those people gatekeepe projects, so once bitten twice shy (ie they accumulate and add friction) or two, you are looking at more early phase startups than me. A seed phase startup locked in analysis never sees my resume, so I don't see how often that happens.

But the trick is to start with the new Reversible decisions.

We don't always know which are the reversible decisions, but many of the irreversible ones are obvious. For some reason developers always focus on the irreversible one. We reason that we have to get this right, because it's very important. And if it's important, we should do it first.

No. No. No.

If instead you start tackling all the reversible decisions first, you can make those choices quickly (because changing them is cheap, spending a lot of energy on making them is a waste of time and capital). Start building something. Get momentum. Get the team and ideas to gel.

When you start to know what you're doing, then tackle the irreversible decisions one at a time.

But typically, everyone wants to Decide. And they want _you_ to decide on short notice, right now, like some sort of used car salesman. If we don't tolerate this from others, why do we tolerate it from our teammates?

Deciding for the sake of deciding is not productivity. It's painting a floor when you haven't identified a workable plan yet. There are always at least four corners, and rarely more than two doors. The odds are not in your favor.

<comment><USER11> I'm having a hard time following what you mean. Could you give some examples of an irreversible decision that can be deferred in favor of some other specific reversible one(s)?

<comment><USER10> Interesting. You know, I would've sworn I had a pat answer to this question, but it turned out I had to think about a little bit.

They say that some of the most rewarding interactions for teachers are the ones where they learn something, not jus the student. Every once in a while I get an example of that in real life.

So what are some examples? Programming language is often difficult to change. This is sometimes listed as a pro for microservices. Because I get to change my mind for every new area of the app, which makes it cheaper to reverse directions.

The most obvious answers that I have are load balancers and external caches. I shouldn't have a big knockdown drag out argument over haproxy vs nginx. Now, a load balancer is almost a given. It's possible that someday in the future, someone will invent an SMP machine with 256 cores that gets some economy of scale by running a whole website on two machines. It's easier to reduce the number of machines behind a load balancer than it is to add a load balancer to a mature product. So put one in, but don't fight about which one. We don't know if we need haproxy features, or if we want paid support from nginx now. Just flip a coin and move on.

Similarly, external caches are usually easier to turn off than internal ones. With internal caches, people start to pass around IDs instead of objects, assuming object lookup is "free". It becomes integral to the information architecture. A rat's nest of lazy and duplicate lookups. External caches are cheap but never free. Access tends to leave bigger footprints in the code. And there's some small hope that you can get a direct lookup down to a small multiple of the cache lookup time if it really becomes necessary.

Database architecture is another big one, for certain dimensions. Going with Oracle is hard to take back. MySQL vs Postgres is smaller. KV store versus MVCC SQL database is also harder. For a prototype it might make sense to pick one that is obviously a placeholder, like SQLite, until you know what your customer's needs really are. Do they need audit trails? Are they addicted to graphs? Multitenant security? On and on. You can stave off fights with SQLite because it's effectively a promise to revisit this later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I couldn't agree more. For 5 years prior to 2019, I would routinely get excited about building a project. Despite being an experienced Rails developer, I'd spend hours upon hours researching and learning all the latest and greatest tools and languages. I did not even get close to shipping an MVP in all those years. In 2019 I realized enough was enough and started building my ideas with Rails. It has been a joy and I'm close to having my 2nd project up and running.

</comment><comment> rooam-dev Imho it's far from "just". The advice works for short lifespan products and/or single "builder" and/or when requirements don't change much.

Getting the product fast out there is not enough. It's more important to make changes fast, to allow product be shaped and built further.

It should be a balance (see "golden goose" tale). If you have a team of "builders", than tooling becomes even more important, 1 person's extra effort will make others more efficient.

"Just build the product" sound like a consultant motto that ships by specifications, but only that. You could "just" build a product that needs 1 hour to be deployed.

Edit: I would say a better advice to "builders" would be just focus on the scope, it's very easy to get exited and overengineer things.

</comment><comment><USER13> Whenever someone asked me what language or framework they should use to build their project, my default answer is "whatever you are familiar with". The honest truth is that for the vast majority of applications I have seen, the risk is in building the wrong thing or getting wrapped around an axle trying to figure new technology out, not choosing an old boring technology that won't scale.

<comment><USER14> And even then, your odds of handling scaling issues with things you're familiar with are a lot better than with new things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's fun the first 2 times you do it as you like. Then you start thinking about doing it right.

Then you start thinking about building stuff right from the beginning which is basically intelligence you've gathered.

It takes finesse to craft things quickly but with quality.

Bias to do stuff quickly is very hard to let go off. Doing things in an organised way has its value. Basically if you're not going to rewrite something in the next year, do it right now. Otherwise you're just borrowing time from future.

Short term hacks vs long term meaning.

<comment><USER16> After you learn some lessons, it's tempting to check any action against all of them. But that slows you down, the more experience you have, the slower you will be. You don't want to do that either.

Anyway, it is very hard to stay away from both extrema. It requires constant self awareness, and even more learning, of the hardest kind where you are required to feel stupid all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you are interested in going further down the pit, you may want to consider joining an infrastructure team at a bigger company. This way you are able to use your skills at the bottom of the pit to enable many more people to build the product faster.

</comment><comment><USER18> The point isn't "just start coding". The point is to focus on the product(customer development and all) and not the tools/technologies to build the product. I have seen many more focused on the latest and greatest stack instead of using the tools they are already good at.

<comment><USER10> As with most things in our field, the opposite of a bad thing is also a bad thing.

When stuff is new, people have a higher tolerance for repetitive, error prone things. For tedium. For bullshit. But over time a portion of your team will lose patience. Their allergy to bullshit will return. These are many of the same people who pull off productivity gains, hard performance fixes, who fix hard to find bugs. Who prevent whole classes of bugs. If they don't get to fix the things that bother them, they will go somewhere where they can.

What will be left are the status quo people. If you don't have your project in a good shape when that happens, it never will be. You will have achieved mediocrity.

If things are good and the allergic people are still pushing? At some point it's appropriate to move on. Just make sure you know for sure things are good and aren't just listening to feedback from the status quo folks.

<comment><USER19> > If you don't have your project in a good shape when that happens, it never > will be. You will have achieved mediocrity.

But most times the alternative is not mediocrity, but no viable product at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been messing around with notions like radical inclusion and radical transparency, so just want to add that this article resonated with me. I've reached the point where I have all the tools in the world at my disposal and haven't gotten anything done in over 6 months. Most days are a complete loss: nothing accomplished, just treading water till the next day, hoping something will change and I'll get my motivation back.

It's weird to be writing this now, since I started out so ecstatic about tech that I annoyed people with my enthusiasm 20 years ago. But no more, now it's the opposite. A sense of loathing and dread when I think about writing code. My friends say maybe I should get out of programming, at least for a while.

So not really sure what to do now. I want to build things now more than ever. But it's mostly along the lines of building stuff in the real world. Writing code in any form lowers productivity by a factor of 10-100. Sure it's great once it exists, but teasing solutions out of the aether is like trying to sketch with Photoshop. The more advanced it gets, the further it strays from pencil and paper. And I just don't have the stomach to bash my head against the keyboard for hours trying to do the simplest things anymore. I feel the loss of time weighing on my shoulders more than the sense of accomplishment. Without the "aha" feeling, coding loses its luster. Without passion, coding may not even be possible.

The best thing I could do for myself is forget the last 20 years. But I don't know how to do that. Any suggestions?

<comment><USER21> Get a job( even if it's for a few days, evening, weekend or part time) in some completely unrelated field. It's fascinating how much you can discover when you step out of the world where a standard notion is to either automate stuff or to make some smart,yet complex solutions to most problems.

</comment></comment><comment> jagged-chisel I would. And honestly, I can. But I'm not the owner/maintainer of the full pipeline that gets The Product into the hands of the end user. I write the code. Someone else wants it stacked in a specific way that matches the production environment.

But the path from my desk to that environment changes twice a quarter. And each change requires me to change something in the stack of tooling. Why? I honestly don't know. I suspect it's some kind of incompetence: employee turnover means less-experienced folks take over, and they don't know, or can't be bothered to learn, the previous guy's stack. Or the stack is chosen by the new Senior Middle Manager every time that position changes because he's not familiar with that last iteration of technobabble.

Whatever the case, it's really because the company has become too unwieldy, hiring too many technology employees, and far too many business folk. You want me to stop "playing" with tools? Let me get deep knowledge on one set and stop getting new ones. Let me actually build something instead of forcing me to navigate the org structure every time "one inconsequential end user" wants to make a change to a feature.

</comment><comment><USER22> This rings a bell or two. After spending years of creating projects with Webpack and wasting tens of hours on configuration, I just started my new project with parcel, where I just run "parcel index.html" and I'm done. I had fun configuring all the stuff before, but now I just need to get the work done.

</comment><comment><USER23> It saddens me to see people growing a business and having to make tradeoffs due to hosting costs or trying to catch up with new tech.

My (opinionated) take on this if you are just starting a new business:

      0. Lay your foundation on something that is battle tested and well supported.

        Rent/buy a real computer (dedicated/root server), not cloud.
        Use software that is already included in major/stable GNU/Linux distributions.

      1. Build your stuff.
        Get used to writing things.
        Beware tech news.

<comment><USER24> > Rent/buy a real computer (dedicated/root server), not cloud.

What brings you a dedicated server that a VPS running Debian for example doesn't?

<comment><USER23> Better raw performance, low latency, etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There's been a change in sentiment here. Just build the Product is still neat advice that needs to be repeated. Sometimes we get too caught up with the plan, perfectititis, and only ever fantasize about building it.

In contrast, the more experience you get building products, the more your repertoire of problems grows. You start to realize that the code is only one part of the problem. Interacting with people is what makes or breaks your product. So, you plan better, you meet the right people to talk to, you figure out when to outsource and when to do things yourself. You take more time to build stuff.

But, you can't do any of that unless you first build a product.

</comment><comment><USER26> Thanks, just what I needed. Your use of those two paragraphs was very effective.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you - and really glad it was useful

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I love this quote from it:

"Build features, not toolchains."

[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=webpack](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=webpack)

</comment><comment><USER28> The first example I thought of was on the C=64, with assembly language. The second was on MS-DOS with C++ and assembly language.

> Creating something useful using nothing but the raw materials of ideas, with > essentially limitless possibilities, with your own creativity as the only > physical limit on what's possible.

As soon as there's an OS and compiler and runtime in between me and the computer, this all goes out the window. It's an artificial world with pre- built materials, and limitations everywhere you turn, and 99% of the ideas you work with will be someone else's, and how to fit in with that.

My view of a computer in 2020 is all about the tooling, and I spend the most time on that, because everything I touch is someone else's tooling. The "endlessly fascinating process" that hoodwinked young me into software no longer exists.

I didn't pick up the "C=64 Programmer's Reference Guide" because I mistook it for a business manual, or even because I wanted to build Amazon.com and just needed to write the infrastructure first.

<comment><USER29> The CPU's instruction set and machine architecture are just as artificial. Try FPGAs and you can really experiment with non von neumann machines.

But even that is artificially limiting. The tooling makes it nearly impossible to build fully asynchronous designs.

<comment><USER28> That's technically true but I think it misses the point. A CPU (at least an older one) is simple enough that it can be fully understood by one person. It was probably designed by a very small team. If you want to know if something works, you don't have to read thousands of pages of documentation. You can just try it. Nearly any combination of operations you put together is going to do _something_.

None of that is true of the big complex language/library/framework/OS stacks we have today. Most of my effort programming today is on something simple to describe in words, but complex to encode in the language's type system, or the framework's classes, or the OS's security model.

I feel that Lisp is the closest I can get to those early systems I grew up with. It's based on symbols rather than bytes but the flexibility and coherence is the same.

<comment><USER29> Today we have different systems for different needs. You can use an interpreted language like Python to get simplicity or you can use something like Rust where a program essentially doubles as proof of correctness. Strong typing is really about managing complexity as the program grows. This was never an issue on 8-bit micros because there just wasn't that much room to grow anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> At the risk of seening facile, the "just" the title resulted in my being hostile to the article. But, to try to be fair, I read it.

After completing the toughest gig of my professional life to date, "just build the product" as an instruction/conclusion feels both useful and flip.

In my head, I have an idea for a product. Sod all money in it. But as useful tool for something I care about, the "just build it" mentality fits.

However, in the roof-over-head world of making something useful for an enterprise customer "just build it" feels trite.

I went in to as a software consultant/developer to a fairly non IT literate organisation and was tasked to deliver to their specs. The big and costly challenge was to discover the product. To understand and challenge their specs, see the gaps, refine the UX and deliver. In my naivety, I thought the the customer would be receptive to this approach. Turns out they were - <USER2> only because I shouldered the cost of doing so. A massive learning experience for me. The customer got a product that exceeded their expectations - but, for a fixed price gig, commercially a failure for me.

I wouldn't change my willingness to jump in this time around, but I won't repeat it - and would now walk away early from a customer that thought they had the solution all figured out (as opposed to having the problem figured out). In this circumstance "Just build the product" feels trite and self- indulgent. Clarity on what to build is hard earned. And the opportunities that iterative development affords to a a software development organisation are a hard sell to one whose core expertise lies outside IT. Possibly a failure on my part, certainly room for improvement on my part.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've been working this way for thirty years. In fact, I can't remember ever working on something that wasn't designed to ship.

Even my test harnesses are fully-qualified applications.

I remember a manager once saying "The number one feature of this product is 'SHIP.'"

Because of the nature of the companies in which I've worked, we always worked backwards from "SHIP."

</comment><comment><USER32> Sure, if the product is something you don't intend to make a business out of. Otherwise, you should be doing your homework ahead of time, and seeing if this is something people are actually in need of. Most ventures I've worked on have been derived from the immediate needs that I found not being covered in my day to day life from others.

</comment><comment><USER33> Torvalds are great examples to this.

      1st. build linux for the first project.

      2nd. build git to maintain linux.

Build the product that useful !.

exercising and useful is better not just for you. but also to other peoples.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is the right advice if you want to nerd out on technology. But my experience suggests[1] that if you want to build a __business __it 'll be cheaper to validate problem/solution with phone calls and mocks / designs before writing code.

This is because:

* It's cheaper to make changes before code has been written

* A functioning product isn't the best sign that you're making progress - paying customers are[2]

Don't get me wrong. I like to write code as much as the next guy / gal. But I've made the mistake of writing code first. And I've worked with clients who - despite my best attempts - decided to forego validation to build a product that they spent a lot of dev dollars on to fix once the market met it with a trickle of interest.

1- [https://uncog.com/archive/v2/why-only-fools-write-code- first...](https://uncog.com/archive/v2/why-only-fools-write-code-first/)

2- [https://uncog.com/archive/v2/how-to-get-paying-customers- bef...](https://uncog.com/archive/v2/how-to-get-paying-customers-before-you- start-writing-code/)

<comment><USER35> I read it differently--this is not targeted at founders trying to validate a business plan, it is targeted at engineers whose job it is to build the product, and he's saying to quit fiddling around with your tools and focus on building the product--which is more fun anyway.

"It's important to learn how to use your tools well, but once you have, stop prioritising that. They're good enough now, you know how to use them. Don't get trapped in this local maximum of optimisation. Go and build stuff."

<comment><USER36> 10 years ago, I wanted to learn Ruby on Rails, so I bought my first MacBook Pro. Just grabbed it off the shelf at the store.

I got my first software development job, and everything was great. I thought it was odd that the other guys didn't know much about Macs (and didn't really seem to care), so when they'd upgrade the OS I'd have to fix everything for them, or they'd have issues with gems etc.

I started buying every MacBook as they were relased. Installing beta software, upgrading the RAM and HD just because I could. Spending countless hours reading reviews, posting on forums...

The other guys just wrote code. Eventually I got tired of keeping up with the crap (or maybe I just got older) and now I crank out code on my far-from-the- latest MacBook, running Mojave. _shrug_

It was fun stuff, but I could have spent that time (and money) more productively.

<comment><USER11> It's really funny to me that someone could get excessively sucked into tinkering with and "nerding out" over Macs, the desktop/laptop platform that's by far the _least_ inclined toward that. Usually stories like this start on Windows or Linux and end up on Macs precisely to minimize time & brain space lost to tinkering and esoteric platform knowledge just to keep things basically working OK, as the appeal of that sort of thing wears off.

I don't mean that in a bad way! It's just one of those "huh, so many different experiences out there, who'da thunk it" things.

<comment><USER37> I've used Windows, Linux/FreeBSD, and MacOS (and heck, even Solaris) extensively as desktop OSs. Windows is _only_ better than for MacOS for tinkering if you're not comfortable using the command line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Yes and no.

I'd say if you have a set of features and a toolchain which enables you to build them then ofc go for it.

However that's not my usual experience with any of my projects even personal ones.

The thing is I don't know what I'm going to build, in the contrary, I am aware it will take several iterations to figure it out. Because of that I have to check out what is "out there" in the ecosystem to make sure I can change directions sometimes if I want to. I want to maximize my freedom in that niche. Because of that every time I have some additional information about the whole project (in which features come and go) it's an option to step back and reevulate existing possible solutions in my mind and go do some further research when necessary.

My experience is when parts are not thought out in a project then they will slow the entire workflow down over and over again.

Just build or just not to build: I think this is a wrong question. When start to build & how/what to research are much better I think - and with real examples its much more useful I think.

Eg.: I'm totally done with relational and document databases. To me it seems both suck hard so lately I am investigating graph dbs. No, I won't start a new project until stupid rigid schemas / migration problems / schemaless weaknesses (dupe) won't just go away.

Maintaining old shit is enough for me I really don't want a new broken system as technical/real life debt.

Ofc you can go out and build pages with jquery which do generate tons of money for you, but others will be able to do the same when they've figured stuff out. What then?

</comment><comment><USER39> A lot of discussion of best language, etc, is just bikeshedding. (See Parkinson's Law of Triviality) We talk about technologies we use because it's easier and safer than talking about the actual _product_.

</comment><comment><USER40> Yar, funny those people who comment "no never build the product first, do marketing and find if there are customers for it", don't read the page.

"davnicwil" is, guess what -> "Open source" "Freelancing" "Consulting"-> motto "I turn ideas into products"

He is just trying to sell his services to people who want to build the product, and guess what he advises them to do that, and that is his page. This is not some holy grail advice, get some context and step back people.

Ok I know everyone is reading only headlines here anyway...

</comment><comment><USER41> This is exactly the opposite advice I would give to anyone starting a company - avoid building software at all costs.

<comment><USER42> I don't think the article is saying "just start coding", it's saying "when you code, use what you know instead of working on the tooling".

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It is great if it succeeds and useful, but if not, it's usually a great learning experience.

</comment><comment><USER44> Thank you! I needed this!

</comment><comment><USER45> AAbundant past examples have shown if a business "just build the product", it will soon does not need to build any product any longer ... since it will be belly up :-(

<comment><USER46> Yes: Just research the market first.</comment></comment>


4 Years Trying to Get Approval to Turn SF Laundromat into Apartment Building - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/blog/2018/02/21/san-francisco-man-has-spent-4-years-1-mi <comment><USER2> This is par for the course in trying to develop in many western cities, and it's almost as though a system has been designed to exclude smaller developers in favour of vast multi-billion-dollar-portfolio landlords.

Whether deliberate or not, it's sick to the core - as an example, in Bath in the UK, I've had a several year battle to simply carry out like-for-like repairs on a subterranean vault on my property - it's going to collapse soon, and it's directly under a major road - but even using 200 year old techniques with no external disruption they keep denying it. At this point I'm just going to let the arterial road through the city disappear into a hole.

Meanwhile, a neighbouring property owned by a large multinational landlord got planning permission to build an external lift on a Georgian property, and the same landlord recently won an application to evict 600 people (owners) from perfectly serviceable housing to build fewer, more expensive houses.

<comment><USER3> How can you evict owners? Are 600 people behind with their payments?

<comment><USER4> Does UK have an analogue to the "eminent domain"?

<comment><USER5> It does.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_purchase_order?wp...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_purchase_order?wprov=sfla1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stories like these are why I am led to believe that more and more regulations actually hurt the little guy. Big corporations do not fear more regulations. They can afford the lobbyists to influence politicians to write loopholes, the consultants to jump through the right hoops, and the lawyers to get them off the hook. What can little startups do? Hope that they can raise millions in series A, I suppose.

Big corps don't fear regulations, they fear competition. Big corps (I have read elsewhere) /want/ more regulations, because it raises the barrier of entry for the little guys to compete with them. They can afford a tightly- regulated world but little guys cannot.

Google this: Corporations love regulations. Lots of examples.

<comment><USER7> SF is notoriously anti-chain though, so even corporations can't seem to open or build new stores in SF. I'm sure many construction companies/apartment complex owners would love to build more in SF as well and can't do it either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of another struggle in SF to get an ice-cream parlor approved.

"The NYT's Scott James recounts the insane red-tape endured by Juliet Pries, an entrepreneur who decided to open an ice-cream parlour in San Francisco's Cole Valley. She had to pay rent on an empty storefront for over two years while the necessary permits were processed, and tens of thousands of dollars in fees (including the cost of producing a detailed map of nearby businesses, which the city itself seemed not to have)."

[https://boingboing.net/2012/02/04/on-the-horrors-of- getting-...](https://boingboing.net/2012/02/04/on-the-horrors-of-getting- appr.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> San Francisco certainly has its share of self-righteous, self-important, holier-than-thou types.

I grew up and live in Indianapolis. It's only happened a handful of times, but while visiting San Francisco someone would say, "I'm sorry," after hearing that I live in a "flyover state." Of course, these folks weren't from San Francisco either. (I think I've only met one or two actual natives of San Francisco.) This has also happened in New York City.

I don't mean to tarnish the people of San Francisco, though, because I love visiting SF and the people there are the nicest I've ever met, anywhere.

I also understand that people want to preserve what good they have going on there, though, but I often wonder if this is because they're thinking about the greater good; or, some other self-satisfying motive.

<comment><USER10> The coasts are like that. Growing up in D.C., if you had told high-school me that Chicago was far larger than D.C. I would've been floored. Illinois is just a "flyover state" right?

<comment><USER11> Chicago is the major interior city of the US, and has been for well over a hundred years. I also grew up in the DC area, and I was never under any illusion that Chicago wasn't a small city (visiting Chicago every Christmas may have helped).

Of course, if you go by CSA, DC's CSA will become larger than Chicago's in the next few years, if it hasn't already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, obviously people who already own apartments nearby don't want values of their own ones - mostly purchased on mortgage - to fall, because it could ruin their retirement.

Within the democratic society, there is no fix for this problem.

<comment><USER13> The other democratic societies who have solved this problem seem to belie your claim. The issue here is that the unit of democracy for this problem is too local.

<comment><USER12> Simple fix: even MORE strict zoning and ban of private ownership on individual apartments. They all will be owner by the city itself and rented out.

Basically, back to Soviet Union.

<comment><USER13> That is a bad idea. The Soviet Union was a shitty place to live, and its economic policies were disastrous. As I pointed out in the comment you're replying to, this problem has already been well-solved by simply expanding the locus of control for zoning so that the interests served by it are more global.

<comment><USER12> That's what i meant. Sacking democracy and market economy to fix these things is an overkill and there is hardly a better way.

European cities try to fix it in a half-Commie way: try to keep as many apartment buildings in public property and lease them subsidized, with rental contracts dating from early post-WWII days and passed as inheritance. Same thing: keep the place to incumbents - only with no ability to cash out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's surprising that San Francisco isn't doing a laundry assessment evaluating whether anyone became dependent on the historic launderette.

</comment><comment><USER15> This sounds so ridiculous I have a hard time believing the issue isn't being misrepresented. Does anyone have the other side on this?

<comment><USER16> It's axiomatically true to a broad and well-organized segment of the San Francisco polity that multifamily residential development is an unqualified evil: accelerations gentrification, ruins the aesthetics, worsens traffic, tightens the parking situation, etc. The reasons they give are sometimes absurd because the particular reasons to oppose a project don't matter. It's development - in particular, residential development in the Mission - therefore it must be stopped by any means necessary.</comment></comment>


This week's dead Google product is Google Trips - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/06/this-weeks-dead-google-product-is-google-trips-may-it-rest-in-peace/ <comment><USER2> > _The death of Google Trips is part of Google 's big travel revamp. The > company recently launched the Google Travel website, which in addition to > most of the Trips information, also serves as (wait for it...) a search > engine for hotels, flights, and travel agency-style combo bookings... > Google's message notes that "many"—not "all"—of Trips' features will "live > on in other Google products." Apparently those two features are Google Maps > and Google Search._

So... they've just reorganized most of the features to different websites, instead of keeping them locked in an app you have to download.

Doesn't seem that bad. I don't think this really counts as a noteworthy "dead" product, just a refactoring of features across properties.

<comment><USER3> The offline content component of Google Trips is the best part though.

<comment><USER4> That's true... but any Google product that focuses on being "good offline" is fighting against the momentum of every other part of Google.

<comment><USER5> Not true, Google Maps has added offline storage over the years that is quite helpful, and the feature has gotten better.

Google Docs for Chrome can be used offline as well.

<comment><USER6> Somewhat better, maybe. It now allows me to download an area large enough to fit my entire home town. Still doesn't allow an entire country or even more, probably cause of bigger file size / more detail than the competitor i use.

But most importantly: It still requires me to sign into a google account to download an area.

<comment><USER5> Wow I missed that it requires you to sign in. I retract my statement that it has gotten better. Google can go to hell with requiring a sign in for everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In a way Google creating and then killing all these applications is great for other developers looking for a product to create. They don't have to do their now market research, just check how many and how bitterly people complain about Google killing the product.

If people loved Google Trips now is a great time to create your own Trips application and cash in on the people disappointed by Google.

<comment><USER8> How much would people pay for a trips app? I was looking at starting something like that out of college but my market would have been other college students and grads. My impression of the trips market is that you upsell boomers on travel packages (no in-depth market analysis though).

I did keep up some docs around the project, though I'd probably do a full rewrite it's been three years: [https://yingw787.github.io/traveltile_docs/](https://yingw787.github.io/traveltile_docs/)

<comment><USER9> >How much would people pay for a trips app?

TripIt Pro is the standard and costs $49 per year. It's not really for leisure travel but for business/productivity.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure why you say it's for business. I do a lot of business and personal travel and it's great for both. Organizing trips with friends and family is much easier to coordinate with tripit and my boss couldn't care less which hotel/flight I'm on.

The pro features specifically is mostly just alerting, not tied to personal/business.

<comment><USER9> I have never used the sharing features much. I say business but perhaps what I mean is frequent travel. I.e. having enough flights and hotels on your calendar that they're hard (or at least a bear) to keep track of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wait, seriously? First they killed Inbox, which helpfully aggregated trip emails into one place, upon which a bunch of folks told me to try Trips; now they kill Trips in quick succession? I had dozens of trips organized very nicely in Inbox...

Ugh. And I'm still rather unwilling to hand over my email to a third party. Is there any nice way to organize trips anymore?

<comment><USER12> They are ending Trips because the functionality has been rolled into Google Travel. You can access your trips at [https://google.com/travel](https://google.com/travel).

<comment><USER13> Well, I can't:

      To see your trips and travel research, turn on these settings

      Web & app activity Off

Google Trips worked fine. The fact that Google adds more and more services to try and convince me to turn this on[1] makes sure that I won't do so.

[1] Google Maps won't even let me store my _home address_ without also opting- in; it worked fine without it for years.

<comment><USER14> I'm in your boat too. This is a completely dead and useless service to me if it wants me to enable these settings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Since a lot of Googlers read HN, a question for you: How do you all feel about Google's Launch 'n Kill culture?

I did use Trips for travel once and liked it, but hesitated to get invested in it lest it dies one day (today). I approach most new Google products with the same trepidation. On the other hand, I like Google's start-uppy environment and desire to experiment with anything because it could lead to great products like Gmail.

My question is about that circular dependency of a Google product only lasting if it gets popular and a product not getting popular because we think it won't last. If launching is just for annual reviews, and you don't care about the result, I get that but am just curious if any Googlers think the Google Product Stigma needs fixing.

Answer as throwaway if needed.

<comment><USER16> [google engineer, not a lot of insight into product decisions]

Option one: every product Google makes it supports forever regardless of whether it succeeds or not, where "success" for Google is defined as "billions of users". (Ref all the people laughing at why G+ was still going despite not being popular. [Note: I've read the 'unpopular' thing was disputed; I don't know the actual numbers.]) In this world Google can never attempt a product unless they've verified ahead of time it will become a category-defining product (Chrome, Android, Gmail).

Option two: occasionally some products will test the waters and fail.

I think it's easy to say at the time of a product failure (or even at launch: see the people who scoffed at iPod and Dropbox) to say that it was destined to fail -- it's pretty much guaranteed to happen on HN because people love to shit on and watch other people shit on others' work, for some sad human nature reason -- but difficult to see which of those guaranteed-to-fail products will actually eventually succeed. So option one mostly means you never launch new products.

Big companies faced with this dilemma (the Ciscos or Microsofts or even Facebooks) deal with it by waiting for startups to succeed then buying the result (Whatsapp, Instagram, Github). Famously at Microsoft if you had a good idea the correct way to implement it was to leave, implement as new company, get reacquired. That may become the case at Google too.

Instead Google tries to do option two. I think you could argue about the rate of launch/fail in category two but it doesn't bother me too much. I recall a comment from the Netflix founder about how they had too many successful shows and how that is a _problem_ , that they were playing it too safe.

I also use emacs as my editor because I know it's old enough that it's not gonna change out from under me. When I care about reliability in this way I choose accordingly. Nothing in life in permanent; I evaluate new Google products like I evaluate random startup products, which is to say they may randomly disappear in a year and I factor that in. For example Keep seems like a nice product and I sometimes use it for grocery lists but I'm not gonna put anything important in it (disclaimer: I have absolutely no insider facts about Keep, that is just my feeling about it based on the previous reasoning).

<comment><USER17> I think we have to question what "success" means here - all the complaints come from people who were satisfied customers of something with a user base that many startups would be happy to have. Is there no room for "not a world takeover but still fundamentally OK" products?

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure Google has yet figured out how or why it wants to make such products. I don't understand how apps like Trips or Reader get launched given that they seemed destined for at most mild success, but one possibility is that the people behind them at the time promised some sort of larger success to motivate their funding.

True story: I worked on a small Google product where at one point our sales team got a customer interested in a $1m contract, which was a decent amount of money for the scale of our product. But the customer wanted some adjustment in some of the wording. We couldn't get a Google lawyer to even look at the result -- it wasn't worth their time for such a small amount of money -- and I believe lost the customer as a result.

To your specific question, I think there is lots of room in the world for fundamentally OK products -- but outside of Google. I love Pinboard for example (well, I don't use it, but I'm rooting for him).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The title is sensationalist. The _product_ is not dead but rebranded and redesigned. It's the _app_ that is dead. Google Travel (which is a web site) replaces Google Trips (which is an application) and is pretty much the same product.

Abundance of ads (or rather partners' offerings) on Google Flight is a fair point, however it's a bit ironic to see this shaming coming from ArsTechnica that itself relies heavily on ad revenue.

<comment><USER19> > Abundance of ads (or rather partners' offerings) on Google Flight is a fair > point, however it's a bit ironic to see this shaming coming from ArsTechnica > that itself relies heavily on ad revenue.

It's a news site that has an paid option for an ad-free and tracking-free subscription. I'm not sure how it could be _less_ ironic unless it came from a public news service that has a blanket ban on advertisements. (Do any of those exist?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems like as good a time as any to Show HN (or shamelessly plug my side- hustle, depending on how you look at it):

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

It's a trip organizer/sharing platform that aims to be the place for you to collect all the various bits of information & reservations & such for your trip. Currently web-only but mobile on the roadmap as well as offline/export functionality which was one of the nice features of Google Trips.

Feedback welcome. I know it's still a little rough around the edges. Hoping to have things buttoned up nicely in another week or two and then start advertising it more officially to everyday folks.

<comment><USER21> Sign up was a bit rough. Had to copy-paste a code from email (no link to click), then it just said I was confirmed and I could log in. Seems like it's pretty common for all of that to just be done through a single click on an email link. But do you even care if folks use a bogus email?

<comment><USER20> It's all done through AWS Cognito so it's something I got working with the default code-based method and then moved on to other things. I'll look at reprioritizing a confirmation link to smooth that process.

I do care somewhat about confirming accounts in general just because it cuts down on spam/abuse, and it ensures someone didn't fat-finger their email and then can't regain access when they forget their password in a month. Also, I have on the roadmap a feature for configurable reminders/notifications, and services like AWS SES track bounces. Too many invalid recipients and you run the risk of getting throttled or suspended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think Google's endgame is for everyone to live entirely in Gmail, Maps and maybe Search - as a fallback for when they haven't predicted exactly what it is you want at that precise moment in time.

<comment><USER23> I only got the Trips app because Inbox was shutdown and I was going to miss that functionality. If they could move trips into Gmail then I'd be happy with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This was a good product by Google, and I really wished it was available as a web app to make trip planning easier, but i don't see why we can't have both a web version as well as an offline app.

<comment><USER17> I tried it and thought the big benefit was supposed to be that it was offline - so you can use it without expensive roaming data, or while on a plane, in a tunnel etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Brilliant! Google are shutting down the Trips app on August 5th, right in the middle of the heaviest summer travel season.

For those using it heavily, one could hardly pick a more inconvenient date. Sometime in October or November, between the summer and holiday/new year travel surges would be more appropriate.

But, obviously less convenient for Google.

Google are becoming like their own version of Murphy's Law:

The app you rely on will be shut down at a random time, and at the most inconvenient possible time.

</comment><comment><USER26> Honest question: Why does Google's experimentation with products get termed "killing" products vs Amazon/etc.'s gets framed as "experimentation"

<comment><USER27> What high profile product has Amazon killed - besides the Fire phone.

<comment><USER28> Is trips a high-profile product?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> one google Trips feature that I really loved, was it's curated day plans. Basically, each major city in the world had a nice list of day plans per city- district. I followed this guide in Barcelona, Montpellier, Nice, Marseille, New York City, Cannes and it always gave excellent recommendations. Sure it was only the very touristy spots, but it was nice to have a curated day plan for each day I was travelling. If anyone knows of anything similar please comment :)

<comment><USER30> Have you tried the Google Travel explore page? There's a "Suggested day plans" section you may enjoy.

For example, Barcelona: [https://www.google.com/destination?q=barcelona+city&output=s...](https://www.google.com/destination?q=barcelona+city&output=search&dest_mid=/m/01f62&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjHnbqZ6tXiAhUun- AKHaIrCuoQ6tEBKAQwAHoECAoQBw#dest_mid=/m/01f62&tcfs=EhUKCC9tLzAxZjYyEglCYXJjZWxvbmE)

Disclaimer: I work on a different travel-related product at Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Oh no, I loved that app! It was so easy to create lists of stuff to visit, as it was basically a "special view" for Google Maps.

</comment><comment><USER32> I have stopped investing time in cool/interesting Google consumer products that does not have a legit chance to reach at least 50%+ user penetration a long time ago. They are always doomed.

</comment><comment><USER33> > "its good advice bt im Not sure uve had a startup before." [sic] > And this > is spot on.

Is it though? Amazon's Free tier is more than enough to run a small early/proof-of-concept startup. Even ignoring Docker etc, Elastic Beanstalk is literally set and forget platform. There's very little excuse for not running something fault tolerant and modern.

At least, that's how I've stood up the last three startups i've lead engineering at.

<comment><USER34> Hoping this reply comes across neither offensive nor fawning, but... this comment seems like a pretty spot on example of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge)

<comment><USER33> It doesn't :) I understand your point, but with that level of technical detail in a post, claiming that "we're just a small startup so we built it ourself" and "you don't know because you've never worked in a startup" feels like .. I don't know .. an excuse?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is there a "Google Deathwatch" website? Not one that can be easily googled, as of this moment.

<comment><USER36> Like this?

[https://gcemetery.co/](https://gcemetery.co/)

<comment><USER35> They killed Nest!? Nest did make some egregious mistakes, but still. The way Google is killing off stuff reminds me of Microsoft in the 90's touting, then killing APIs.

<comment><USER28> Google did not kill off nest. They killed the "works with nest" API and replaced it with "works with Google Assistant".

<comment><USER35> So then they are literally touting, then killing off APIs.

<comment><USER28> Your comment said they killed nest. That was incorrect.

<comment><USER35> Yes. I based that off of one of the tombstones I saw on one of the sites, but that was hyperbolic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I honestly thought Trips was a nice product. Hopefully the usefulness of the application lives on somewhere in Google. When I went to Shanghai the fist time it was incredibly useful to have downloaded reservations as my Google Fi SIM wasn't working well the first few days.

</comment><comment><USER38> I used this app. Google is infuriating. Like many here, I've been migrating off of as many Google products as possible. I just don't trust them for anything related to privacy or reliability. Gmail is the tough one for me. Looking at moving everything to my Outlook.com address or paying for additional iCloud storage and using my iCloud.com email.

My end goal is to limit my exposure to Google to an as-needed basis, using only Youtube and Maps. For Google Maps, I'll likely start using Apple Maps more and Tesla's service when I get my Model 3, leaving Youtube as the only Google product I use with any frequency.

"Google it" has become a pejorative to eff something up.

Trips, you've been Googled.

</comment><comment><USER39> Ouch, I loved this product. Especially storing all the data for a particular trip offline. It made planning a breeze, and helped when changing plans on the fly as well.

</comment><comment><USER40> Google is becoming the new Yahoo!

I don't get why they don't realize that by making people rely on all these experiments (see Inbox) and then shutting them down their brand suffers immensely.

I've migrated all my photo collection to Photos--although I back it up regularly--and I'm seriously considering going back to Apple Photos.

You just cannot trust Google to keep products working anymore.

<comment><USER41> > I've migrated all my photo collection to Photos--although I back it up > regularly--and I'm seriously considering going back to Apple Photos

I hope you either pay for storage or backup before you upload, or you may be disappointed to discover your photos are lower quality than they were when they were shot.

<comment><USER40> Yes, I pay. Good point, though.

Although, I'm not sure my pictures would get downsized since their limits are pretty generous.

The worst is videos. My phone shoots them at 4K and they would get resized at 1080p.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Tangential: What has people's experience been with Google Flights? It's quick and I like the calendar view for seeing different price options, but the results don't always correspond with the reality when I click through to the airline's website.

<comment><USER43> It's still the only site I've found which allows me to do searches of "show me cheapest flights to this part of the world in next 6 months" type.

It's pretty amazing for planning vacations because of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> And this is happening the same day they show off their brand new Stadia product? Oops.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is so eerily similar to killing of Picasa. They killed a great functional popular app and forced everyone to mediocre half assed website. Not sure what is going on at Google. Is there anyone in charge here?

</comment><comment><USER46> I noticed that Google has revamped Google Voice yet again after nearly killing it off entirely for Hangouts. Now it looks like they are planning on moving away from Hangouts for Google Voice interactions. Any news here?

</comment><comment><USER47> I actually really enjoyed this product! Are there good alternatives?

</comment><comment><USER48> Doesn't look dead to me??? [https://www.google.com/travel](https://www.google.com/travel)

<comment><USER49> It will expire in August.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Does TripIt provide a similar function?

<comment><USER51> TripIt basically died after acquisition. Hasn't done anything new or interesting in years.

<comment><USER52> The other way of looking at it is that TripIt still provide a reliable service, that works the same way it worked 5 years ago, but still work perfectly fine for the use case it was built.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> The best part is the title!

</comment><comment><USER54> it would be awesome if google travel would allow me to also see photos of each of my past trips in addition to all the travel details. They already live in Google Photos.

</comment><comment><USER55> just bring back the RSS Reader again FFS.

</comment><comment><USER56> That's a shame about Google Trips.

But on the plus side... oh.</comment>


Emacsy, an embeddable Emacs - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/568774734/emacsy-an-embeddable-emacs <comment><USER2> So basically, this will be a library that you can use to add keyboard shortcuts, a command-line (minibuffer) interface, and extensions/plugins to your application, and they can all can be reconfigured, mixed, matched, and extended, all on the fly without recompiling or even restarting your app.

Currently most of the apps I use don't have all that and I'm getting along fine, but dang, it would be fun to see what could be done with that kind of power added to them.

<comment><USER3> Yep, you got it exactly right. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> An alternative: use an embedded Common Lisp and connect to it via SLIME from Emacs. Thus you could build an environment in Emacs for controlling the App and download/executing Lisp code inside the App.

<comment><USER3> This is a fine way to work. I, for one, love SLIME. However, the main goal of Emacsy is not to load code at runtime; it's to be able to modify the UI of your application at runtime while providing some Emacs-like facilities.

Certainly, the normal way of embracing an application with Emacs is to turn Emacs into your frontend as you suggest. That works well for a number of applications, but it's not something you can distribute as a complete application, instead you might include your-app.el and hope for the best. Emacsy provides a way for you to improve your actual applications UI. Moreover, it allows your users to modify the UI to suit themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the idea, but I'd like to better understand how the money is going to be used on the Kickstarter page. Is it basically to spend, say, a month of focused work to get the major girders of emacsy ready to go so the rest can be iterated upon and crystalized? It's clearly not enough to fund the entire effort to the point of having something usable, stable, and with adoption (which would require working with the requirements of other projects), but I get the sense that wasn't really the idea.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. You have sections 'Introduction', 'Vision', 'Motivation', 'Goals', 'Anti-Goals', 'Emacsy Features' and 'How you can help?'. You're missing 'Plan'.

Tell me what you'll do with my $50 and I'm in.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. My plan is to work out in the open on github, part-time this Summer. I'll report noteworthy builds and solicit feedback. I believe that by the deadline I can produce a usable and documented Emacsy library that includes all the features mentioned above, and maybe even some features I haven't mentioned. That should provide an excellent foundation for this project to thrive after the deadline, and I expect to maintain it for sometime after that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> ok - there are now definitely too many kickstarter posts appearing here. furthermore, why don't all those people on kickstarter not just write their app/programm, without seeking funding. wasn't the whole open source community a product of a lot of people using their spare time to create new software and give it away for free (linus torvalds, etc.). that spirit is somehow lost on kickstarter...

<comment><USER8> I agree that all the Kickstarters on here are starting to wear a bit thin, but strongly disagree with the rest of what you said. Listen to yourself: You're complaining that this person _doesn't want to work for you for free_. How can you possibly feel entitled to that? Remember that old free software mantra: It's like "free speech," not "free beer."

<comment><USER9> No, that's not what parent is doing. For example, he may prefer they didn't do the work at all. And "for you"? Where does that come from?

Personally, I have no problem with this - in fact, I'm paid to write FOSS - but some people feel uneasy with the commercialization of the work that traditionally belongs to communities of volunteers, and in certain situations I feel the same.

<comment><USER8> > _No, that's not what parent is doing. For example, he may prefer they didn't > do the work at all._

He specifically complained about them taking money to do it. I genuinely don't see how you could read that as "I would prefer it if you did not create an embeddable emacs at all." His comment very strongly suggests that he was fine with them doing the work, but he didn't want them to be paid for it.

> _Personally, I have no problem with this - in fact, I'm paid to write FOSS - > but some people feel uneasy with the commercialization of the work that > traditionally belongs to communities of volunteers_

I agree, and that's the attitude I'm arguing against. Free software has never been about demanding that people not take money for their troubles. It has often worked out that way for the vast majority of contributors, but I don't see how the unprofitability of OSS development is a good thing. More money going into free software means more free software and quite possibly higher quality free software (since they don't need to be distracted by other work that puts bread on the table), which is good for everyone. I have no problem with somebody like you or the OP taking money in return for making useful software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like something I wanted to make, got close with lispworks, but then that's not very cheap. Now I'm doing it with lua, mainly due to luajit, but lua is a bit harder to use in repl style, where only a function has changed (it would work only if the function is global)

Nonetheless seems promising, and not futuristic (as in bells and whistles, but nothing more)

</comment><comment><USER11> This looks like it would be very useful for anyone who wants to develop C applications with an embedded guile interpreter. However I think the pitch would be more clear if it was sold as a Guile library for enhanced interactive interfaces rather than as an Emacs derivative.

<comment><USER12> Guile is nice embeddable scheme, and seems to have a lot of momentum, cool new developments. If this project is about making it a bit easier to integrate it in your app, that would be great. It's not /too/ hard to embed guile, but I certainly think there's room for making it easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I had reason to believe that programs I want to use would be written with this code, I would be happy to back it. I don't have a lot of hope for that though.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why not just run emacs through emscripten?

<comment><USER15> Can you explain why it accomplish the same goal as emacsy?

<comment><USER14> It wouldn't. It was more of a realization that I had while I was reading through the kickstarter.

<comment><USER16> Because, it's not as simple as that. A huge amount of the C code is interfacing with platform libs, emscripten doesn't just fix that.

<comment><USER14> Fuck, I hate to "actually..." you, but emscripten actually does do a tremendous amount of work with platform libs.

Examples: [http://syntensity.blogspot.com/2011/05/emscripten-12-doom- on...](http://syntensity.blogspot.com/2011/05/emscripten-12-doom-on-web.html) <https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/issues/331> <https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki/Filesystem-Guide>

Why I know this: I spent a fair portion of winter break trying to port the R-project into Javascript. It went nowhere (damn fortan), but I learned a ton about emscripten and compiling.

<comment><USER16> I suspect however, that it doesn't support X11 and many of the other required libraries that are required by Emacs.

Also, don't feel bad about "actually..." ing me, I'd prefer to know the truth, than to think a falsehood.

<comment><USER16> The links you reference are mosly for OpenGL, SDL, and File I/O, which is a small part of what Emacs actually needs.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


FireTune - speed optimizer for Mozilla Firefox. - <AUTHOR> http://firyfriends.blogspot.com/2009/10/firetune-speed-optimizer-for-mozilla.html FireTune is freeware utility from TotalIdea software to improve the speed of MozillaFirefox.Browsing speed can be rapidly increased with other many options within the browser.
But rather this is One click Optimization with FireTune.This not only tweaks the values of delay,pipelining but also some innermost configurations to improve it's peek performance.
FireTune supports Firefox v1.x,2.x,3.x.This not only optimizes but also synchronize Firefox performance with Computer speed so as to prevent the browser from sudden crash that can be due to over processor speed or memory utilized by the browser.
It has 6 options ranges from Fast/Slow Computer with Faster/Slower connections so as to suitable for all low as well as high performance computers.Just select your Browser profile and Click Tune it button to optimize <comment><AUTHOR> FireTune is freeware utility from TotalIdea software to improve the speed of Mozilla Firefox.Browsing speed can be rapidly increased with other many options within the browser.

But rather this is One click Optimization with FireTune.This not only tweaks the values of delay,pipelining but also some innermost configurations to improve it's peek performance.

FireTune supports Firefox v1.x,2.x,3.x.This not only optimizes but also synchronize Firefox performance with Computer speed so as to prevent the browser from sudden crash that can be due to over processor speed or memory utilized by the browser.

It has 6 options ranges from Fast/Slow Computer with Faster/Slower connections so as to suitable for all low as well as high performance computers.Just select your Browser profile and Click Tune it button to optimize</comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup, Frugalytics - <AUTHOR>

I'm interested on hearing some feedback for http://touch.frugalytics.com. This is a mobile comparison shopping site I developed a year ago but haven't had any time recently to work on.  Not sure what I should do with it - if I should try to sell or keep slowly working at it.  The plan was to get into historical pricing analytics and data visualization for comparison shopping. <comment><AUTHOR> *on = in</comment>


The Google-Military-Surveillance Complex - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2014/03/07/the-google-military-surveillance-complex/

<comment><USER2> This guy's other posts: [http://pando.com/author/ylevine/](http://pando.com/author/ylevine/)</comment>


The idea of creating a new universe in the lab is no joke - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/ideas/the-idea-of-creating-a-new-universe-in-the-lab-is-no-joke <comment><USER2> I'm curious if they could alter the hydrogen/stupidity balance to favor hydrogen.</comment>


Finland implements "housing as a right" as a solution to homelessness - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/12/finland-homelessness-rough-sleepers-britain <comment><USER2> Pre-2000 housing solution from Helsinki: [https://photos.app.goo.gl/MqwRWdgkN0oynyTw1](https://photos.app.goo.gl/MqwRWdgkN0oynyTw1)</comment>