Ask HN: What did I do wrong in my SaaS B2B startup? - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone,
I somehow had 2M USD last year and I started a cyber security company. We developed some cyber security products that are really amazing and extremely effective. I know everyone think that their product is the best, but trust me, just take my word and assume I'm right, our products are on a different level for many reasons and its kinda ground breaking. (I really want to know root cause of my problems, so I'm not going to lie obviously).
So products are top notch (lets assume). I used all the money for extensive development, design and R&D. We created the best product. Now I'm very very low in cash and I didn't think much about the sales/marketing. I thought "product will speak for itself".....Well I was totally wrong. I can't even show the product.
Now I have around 100k left, but hey, we have couple great products.
I tried LinkedIn, but never got anything out of it.
I sent around 1000 emails to directors, got like 10 responses, did demos, they ALL loved it and told us that they will consider us in 2018 budget.
So very very long story short, I don't have any sales and I'm going broke soon. I tried VC firms, but they all need some sales first. I tried couple Angel VCs (Gust), but no one returned to me.
So what do you think I can do to save my company at this point. One of the main things I did wrong was not accounting for marketing/sales, but what else? Please tell me.
I offered free trials in my emails, I told the manager if they think they have something that will protect them against real threats and cyber attacks, I'm willing to do a very quick assessment by sending them sample emails that will bypass all their existing technologies. Still nothing...
Can you guys please give me some advise, some guidance, some tips? Anything would really help at this point.
Thank you <comment><USER2> It seems that you already know the problem: sales and marketing. You've sent 1000 emails and tried LinkedIn and that's it? You have a lot to learn, especially when it comes to corporate sales cycles and B2B sales. But that's water under the bridge now.

My advice: fire everybody that's not essential to your operations. You'd be tempted to think 'if I get one big client I will need the developers/accounting/HR/personal assistant, but 100K in the bank gives you about 2-3 months runway and you're going to need ALL that money to get that client. So: fire everybody, sell everything, start cutting costs everywhere. It's ramen noodles and water for you the coming 2-3 months.

Now make a list of 5 clients that you want to have. They could be some clients that you already demo'd to, or new ones. Don't be overly ambitious with this step, don't aim for the Fortune 500 companies yet because they're not going to bet on non-proven stuff.

Spend all your time, effort and some money on getting these clients. Get to know them, make sure that you understand what it is exactly what they're doing, and how your product can help. Next, think of a way to SHOW them how your product can help. Cyber security is all nice and great, but unless they know the risk of not having your product you're going nowhere.

Maybe you can find a way to have a hacker break into their systems (with their consent, ofcourse!), show them how easy it is to get all client data or erase their client database. Cybersecurity is like fire insurance: you only realize you need it when your house is on fire.

A couple of tips: \- Use the 100k to get a sales person with a proven track record to get sales for you. Sales is a profession just as programming, not something everyone can do \- people who say that your demo looks great is fine for your ego, but doesn't say anything. Most likely the just don't want to make you feel bad \- Sending 1000 emails and trying LinkedIn is not a marketing strategy \- Dont' say 'I'll send you sample emails that will bypass your existing technology'. Why in the world would I want that? I might as well hand over my creditcard data to you as well? Why would I put my company at risk so that you can sell me something?

In short: cut costs to 0, focus on getting your first client. Oh, and some detention-work: write down the line 'Build it and they will come is utter BS' 100x. It's like rule #1 of entrepeneurship 101 and widely documented, there is no reason anyone would fall for this trap. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I will try to hire a person for sales. Unfortunately since cyber security is critical and you can see how companies almost go bankrupt after a single stupid breach, I thought people will have some senses and pay attention to cyber security products and instead of just keep buying and buying and buying same old technology thats proven to do nothing over and over, they would consider AT LEAST trying some newer technologies and products... Seems like I was dead wrong

<comment><USER3> Maybe you need to speak to the right executives - i.e Risk, Compliance, Legal, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From reading your post, I feel like you already know you're problem is sales/marketing.

If I was a betting man, I would imagine you have a great technical product but it maybe needs some adjustments and better market positioning.

If I were you, I would get rid of all your staff if you have any. Cut your costs to zero. Then figure out where your product stands versus competition and put together competitive pricing. Show potential clients how much they can save in X (man hours, downtime, reputation etc.) if they use your product. Focus on selling. Maybe even bring on a sales-focused co-founder.

Failing all of that or if you've had enough try and sell your tech....

EDIT - Also go out and listen to your potential customers. Ask questions. Find out what their problems are and how you can help. Find out what is stopping them from buying your product. Speak face to face or over the phone not email!

<comment><USER4> I forgot to add that B2B sale cycles tend to be longer. Be persistent and read around sales + self-help books.

<comment><AUTHOR> The thing is, its really hard to get rid of my developers at this point. They are constantly making things better, cleaner, faster. Also we have couple more features that we need to add to some products. But I hear you. I will try to cut down at least some of them. As for books, can you recommend some good ones?

<comment><USER3> I love Zig Ziglar's Secrets of Closing the Sale.

Another great one is Little Red Book of Selling ([https://www.amazon.ca/Little-Red-Book-Selling- Principles/dp/...](https://www.amazon.ca/Little-Red-Book-Selling- Principles/dp/1885167601)) but it might not be suitable in your current situation given the time crunch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder, I'm not a customer so you prob shouldn't listen to me, if your problem is that you are selling something customers don't really put a value on. Security is a nice to have and only becomes a must have when a problem has already happened. Kind of like virus scanners are only purchased when someone thinks they have a virus. Is there a subset of your security tools that can help determine problem, a cause, and a possible solution to an existing problem? Maybe package up this smaller toolset with maybe a white glove cleaning/restoration service as a product.

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean considering giant companies who you would think would stick around for another hundred year going bankrupt right after a single breach should tell a lot... No?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You need a repeatable marketing strategy! You can't afford to buy attention, ads are too expensive, so you'll have to earn it by giving away hard work.

1\. Give away knowledge

Write interesting and informative blog posts on topics related to your technology. Post them on HN. See: CloudFlare

2\. Give away code

Upload to GitHub some valuable part(s) of your product, or the entire thing, and then make money by offering Enterprise versions that have long term support, etc. See: Hashicorp

<comment><AUTHOR> I will try the #1. As matter of fact we are writing a whitepaper at the moment. #2 will take a bit time to prepare, but sure, I will consider that as well. But you think CISOs or MD or decision makers would pay attention to those? Would they notice?

<comment><USER6> This is bottom-up marketing, where you hope technical people will recognize your product as useful and pitch it to their boss for you.

"Hey boss, I found this thing called CloudFlare on HN, I think we could use it to help with these DDoS problems"

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, but how effective it is? They are willing to talk about a product to their boss? Bosses listen and accept?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _(FD - Not a marketer, just a coder who 's trying to hack marketing for my own startups. If you want, we can brainstorm together offline.)_

I'd stop spending and reserve the remaining 100k to buy me my first client.

Ads, email, and phone calls are too bloodless. You need to get in front of potential customers, make them engage with you person to person, and make a home in their instant-recall memory queue - if they think security, they should recall _you_.

Even if they never buy from you, if they recommend you to a peer, they've given you a patina of credibility that no online marketing effort can match.

How to find these customers to engage?

1\. Seminars, conferences, lunch and learns, talks, even shareholder meetings(!)

2\. Tell everyone you meet that you are looking to make industry connections

3\. Followup followup followup..and don't forget the "Thank you" note after every meeting.

When you interact with people, listen 2x as much as you talk. Make sure you have an ask from everyone you meet - "I need...", "Is there anyone else...", "Love to hear your specific criticisms of my product..."

a) people love critiquing things. Listen politely and don't try to correct them. If they hate your product and say they'll never buy it, move on. If they find something good in it, start moulding their opinion in favor of the product.

b) make your success their problem but asking "How can I get you to..?", "If you were in my shoes, what would you..?" This gives you a window into their thinking and it makes them your champion with others if they see that you've done what they suggested.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. For conference/seminars, I attend almost all of them. But you can't meet key decision makers there or get to talk to them. They are too closed and not open to talk to "vendors".

If you mean that I organize an event, thats costly, not sure if it will have good ROI.

I always listen to people and learn from them. Honestly probably around 12 features of my products came from potential clients and by listening to them.

<comment><USER7> I'd refer you back to this -

 _> Even if they never buy from you, if they recommend you to a peer, they've given you a patina of credibility that no online marketing effort can match._

Marketers have this rule of thumb that you need between 3-7 touchpoints before your target becomes a customer. So, after one interaction with someone at a seminar, you are about 1/5 the way towards making the sale.

Don't lose heart - marketing and sales is as much, if not more, about the grind as it is about the product itself.

Don't organize events.

Also, there's a difference between listening for features which can usually be asked as "What" questions and questions which are designed to get your counterpart to solve your problem for you. I'd recommend a book called "Never Split the Difference" on how to ask questions to make the other person work for you without them even realizing it. It's by an ex-FBI hostage negotiator. His insights were used to save lives and personally, I found the book useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, i work with startups a lot, and had helped hundreds of them launch their products and get funded, or generate sales, this is my advice to you:

1- You need a video commercial something simple, entertaining and youthful, something that would generate interest in your product, and people will be intrigued by 2- Create a good landing page or a website for your startup if you don't already have one and add the commercial to it. You need a great website, something that screams professional and clean, especially since your product is cybersecurity, and attach free trials along to your website. 3- Now for the next step, you need to spread your website far and wide on social media and web magazines, and try to have the biggest number of people visit and try it, and make sure you collect their reviews. 4- Once you have a big number of people who tried and loved your product, you can approach investors again, but this time with a product that has been tested and widely accepted in the market.

I probably have a few more good ideas, hit me up and lets chat about it more.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a very good explainer video done by professionals (and paid good amount of $$ for it) I have a great landing page. Professionally designed and it looks great

As for 3-How? That's the main thing.... Can't get people or more importantly, decision makers, managers, MDs, CISOs, CTOs to visit my page

<comment><USER8> What I usually do is pay facebook and twitter pages within the niche to share the link, leave the link on Reddit and Hackernews, and spread it on many newsletters etc. There are other more direct approaches of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's clear that you're aware that your main issue is a sales/marketing problem and it looks like you've got great feedback from the directors you contacted.

Do you know what the timeline is for their 2018 budget? Will you be able to make it till then?

Also, what types of companies are you going after? Larger companies have longer sales cycles due to decision making, planning and implementation time. Is there an opportunity for you to go after smaller companies? What are the objections being raised by your potential customers? Is it strictly due to budgeting or is it because you're an unknown startup - if you're an unknown startup, onboard 1-2 clients for free, get their logo on your website and sell to the other folks.

How big is your current salesforce? Would you be able to align yourself with consulting/implementation firms that might help get your foot in the door? Would you consider hiring a salesforce that is 100% commission-based to try and get you the sales?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! I already offered 100% commission, no one is taking it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Unfortunately B2B sales tend to have a longer sales cycle so you're definitely in trouble. At this point you probably need some financing and you need some sales. Anything else right now is a distraction.

Sales/marketing advice:

Most security companies partner with MSPs/MSSPs to sell/implement their products. It may make sense to work with them and/or sell to them.

You're currently targeting people at random. Instead of just looking at Directors, it probably makes sense to include CISOs (Chief Information Security Officers) and maybe some devops folks at startups/small companies.

Financing: You may need to look at alternatives to VC such as raising money from friends and family, raising money from smaller angels, getting a small business loan. As others have mentioned, you should look at cutting expenses. You may need to layoff some staff or cut some expenses.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice.

I contact CISOs and directors. Only through LinkedIn and email though. Nothing so far.

I will try some small business loans, hopefully they won't be asking about sales.

As for partnering with MSSP companies, I would love that, but how to find those companies and how to approach them? Just email them and ask for partnership?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nothing quite screams b2b tech like, better sales beating better product.

Vendors spend a lot of money on marketing and sales and id argue its a much tougher nut to crack that putting together some great tech. IT sr managers and up are constantly harassed by vendors for a piece.

Security however, sounds like you picked a good space to be in. I'd focus on getting an installed base by whatever means necessary. Your prospects are going to want to see you are out there in production at real companies. Ive heard stories of very small startups getting in that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm trying to get some base... But that's the problem, can't get anyone aboard. They all look for old technologies and existing products. No one takes their time to check the product, check our explainer video, check the datasheet, nothing. They think they are OK with what they have, but all the companies who are being breached had those old / existing technologies and none of them helped. Still can't get people to listen/try demo/check out our site

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this a hypothetical question or is it something that really happened?

If real I think expanding on the first sentence would be relevant. Did you generate that from another startup or raise it?

Spending 95% of your capital on developing the product probably wasn't a good idea. Early launch/beta/iteration/lean would have been a low risk way of determining whether you're making something people want.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is real and it happened. That was from another startup. I agree with spending all on dev, but creating the top quality product with best developers (who are expensive, not 15$/hr devs) costs a lot...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 1\. Cut the cost.

2\. Most companies don't pay until they get hacked. Find any security vulnerability in your client app/backend and explain how it can impact their business and show how your product can protect them from such a security vulnerability.

</comment><comment><USER13> Have a read of segment's story on indie hackers, their whole product changed when they actually got an entreprise sales guy. Otherwise you need to do more evangelism work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have a link to the story? Also I'm really trying to get some enterprise sales guy, I offered share in the company, but can't find the right person. Also finding a real expert in sales is hard for me as I don't know how to tell who's better in sales. Everyone have similar resumes and they all have sales background, but which one is game changer, that I don't know and can't tell. I'm technical person, no skills or knowledge in sales

<comment><USER13> [https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/032-peter-and-calvin- of...](https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/032-peter-and-calvin-of-segment)

Also there was an interesting discussion on sales compensation on HN a few weeks ago - can't find it though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Get somebody who does Enterprise sales and offer them a nice chunk of equity. Seems like you're out of your depth on that side of things.

<comment><AUTHOR> I offered equity and share in the company. No one took it... They all have stable jobs, no one is willing to leave their stable job and take risk

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Create a website about your product, post to HN, reddit, youtube, twitter and any place you can think of.

<comment><AUTHOR> But that's like spamming communities, this is B2B product not for consumer and reddit/HN etc are mostly for consumers I think? Also with what context? In addition to that I think I won't get enough upvote or they will simply delete my post as ad. No?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The quality of this troll is 5/10 but quite amazing it has elicited so many replies.

</comment><comment><USER17> Have you considered asking the directors who love your product to become angel investors?

</comment><comment><USER4> Also how to you manage to spend $2m without getting any sales?! Was it all staffing cost?

<comment><AUTHOR> Developers, designers, explainer videos, website design, product design, .........

<comment><USER18> You should read lean startup before you build a company again :)

Should be getting sales very early in the pipeline. Say after 25k or 50k development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> hi!

have you considered white hat selling?

Take 25 top companies of your prospects list and write to them asking for permission to do a pen test.

It all starts from there...

</comment><comment><USER20> 1000 emails to 10 meetings is really low conversion. It could be an issue of PMF, or who you are reaching out to, or the messaging of the emails, or a combination. I would try to find an experienced seller to partner with who can bankroll themselves in exchange for some generous equity. At this point you need their experience to build things back up. On messaging, I would suggest something along the lines of:

Prospect,

I noticed that (indication that they have the problem you solve). Have you considered (thing you do differently than their existing solution).

(my company) has built a new way to (solve the problem you hypothesize they have). Solving this problem would (allude to the promise land = more money or less costs or easier work or all three). Without our solution (scary things happen). I'd like to connect for 15 minutes and explore how you approach (the problem you solve) now to see if there is a fit.

Are you free (day and time)?

Pain, value, call to action. There are no hard and fast rules, but you should be getting significantly more than 100:1 outreach to meetings. Only ask for 15 minutes. The first call your goal is only to qualify. No tire kickers allowed. Is there budget? Do you actually have this problem? Who else needs to be involved to decide?

Ask 3-5 questions getting to the bottom of 1. How it's done there now and 2. Your synthesis of whether you think there is value. If you don't think there is value, straight up tell them. "It doesn't seem the like the value is there at this point, I appreciate you taking the time". If there is value, push hard. What needs to happen next to understand if this is a fit? Who needs to be involved? DO NOT offer a demo or a free trial. It does not win deals and puts you in a position of weakness.

You should be able to send 100 cold emails in a day if you grind. That should convert into 4-5 15 minute meetings with customers. That should result in 1-2 qualified deals. Most top sellers convert about 33-35% of qualified deals into money. Your sales cycles may be long, in which case I am sorry but it is what it is. If you can generate those 5-10 deals per week, you should be able to convert 2-3 of them. Any worse and the issue is product/market fit and probably not the sales process (probably).

It sounds like you sell to big companies (Directors?). If so, call high. Do not call people who do not sign cheques. Even if they delegate you down (which they often will) it is usually easier to get a response from senior people. Junior people prioritize what their boss tells them where as senior people tend to be more open. If you nail the hypothesis in the email (we call it "the hook") then you will get a response. If you don't, you won't, but at least you can disprove a particular hook.

In terms of cadence, try two emails and one follow-up call a week for three weeks. It seems obscene but it is necessary. You would be amazed how many people reply on the 5th email saying they have been looking for the exact solution you are describing. Of course, only 1/3 of those people actually end up giving you money (because people) but at least your persistence will make an imprint. You would also be amazed, after doing this work for a year or two, how many people come back to the table in six months.

Better engineering and product != success. Seriously, distribution wins almost every time. Stop worrying about product, whether it is amazing or just decent does not matter anymore. The only thing that matters is securing distribution. You have a distribution problem, 100%. If you try the sales route and fail, the best case scenario would be to sell the company to someone who does have distribution. Then they can plug your theoretically superior technology into their distribution.

<comment><AUTHOR> My email is exactly like that. I tell the problem (possible problem), I tell them existing technologies ALL of them fall short because of 2 reasons (I explain), then I say how we solve the problem all together and ask for a quick webex demo of the platform. I reached out to CISOs and MDs and Directors....

Calls are tough, specially since I don't have their phone numbers and when you call some, mostly it goes to voicemail or they dont have time to talk.

I will try with followup, but I'm afraid of spamming their Inbox. How frequently I should send emails?

<comment><USER20> Don't cold call them. Set the calls up in the email and ask for 15-20 minutes. I would say twice a week. Probably 4-5 emails before you just say "It's clear my hypothesis is wrong. If things change I'll get back in touch".</comment></comment></comment>


Spotify Running Automatically Adjusts Tempo to Match Run Pace - <AUTHOR> https://www.spotify.com/us/running/

<comment><AUTHOR> I had this idea a few months ago when training for an Ironman. I'm really excited they implemented this feature.</comment>


Debian XScreenSaver package maintainer responds - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=819703#425 <comment><USER2> It's OK to have your own definition of what 'stable' software is. For some folks, its what's on the master branch of the repo, for others its software that's been tested for years by a large community already.

Debian has a specific documented process of how their stable releases are produced, and though that can cause problems for some developers because they get bug reports for old versions, that specific documented process is part of what makes Debian special to me.

I sympathize with devs for having to put up with those bug reports, but putting messages into the software _to specifically goad the OS package maintainers_ is just poor form. Surely there's a better way to have handled that.

<comment><USER3> I feel like it's possible to be wrong about your definition of stable software though. Software is not like wine. It doesn't become better just from leaving it alone for a few years. In fact, all software has bugs and developers are constantly struggling to fix them. In the case of a screen-locker like XScreenSaver, it's also security-critical software, so the developer(s) are constantly in a race against people who want to exploit the bugs. Using a version from 2014 instead of the latest stable version is not just a opinion/preference, it's a bad idea, and I think jwz is totally right in saying that it's better Debian don't package it at all than package an old version.

<comment><USER4> The Debian maintainers _do_ backport security fixes to the older version they're shipping, though. Eg. for the package in question here we have:

      xscreensaver (5.30-1+deb8u1) jessie-security; urgency=medium

        * Add upstream patch for "xscreensaver aborts when unplugging second
          monitor" security issue (closes: #802914)
          http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2015/10/24/2

       -- Tormod Volden <firstname.lastname@example.com>  Sun, 25 Oct 2015 11:35:52 +0100

Keeping the old version isn't supposed to imply _" it has no bugs"_ \- instead, it's based on the idea that _" if if works for you now, it will continue to work for you"_. In other words, you can be reasonably sure distribution point updates won't break anything that you're relying on.

<comment><USER5> Given that this is a saga that's been going on for years, I wonder why debian hasn't just put it into stable-backports?

<comment><AUTHOR> You might want to read the response, there were no changes worth backporting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The pop-up message may be direct, but is it not attacking any minorities, > genders or sexual preferences.

How is that relevant to _anything_? Something can be bad without attacking minorities, genders, sexual preferences, Packer fans or Packard drivers.

<comment><USER7> Well, for one thing, it's not offensive. Attacking minorities, genders, and/or sexual preferences can be offensive. A popup calling out Debian on their ridiculous version lag is not. So... who cares, really.

<comment><USER8> > So... who cares, really.

People who see an annoying xScreensaver popup each time they boot their machine or when their machine wakes up from screensaver...

Worth noticing that the popup mentions xScreensaver's author's email address, which probably doesn't help him getting less bug reports....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For context, see the author's take[0], who would like debian to stop shipping xscreensaver if they wont update it since the author gets lots of support requests for things fixed in newer versions.

[0] [https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to- stop...](https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop- shipping-xscreensaver/)

<comment><USER10> Please don't link to jwz.org from here, it redirects to a NSFW image when the referrer is HN.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps a link like this is appropriate in this case:

[http://nullrefer.com/?https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-wou...](http://nullrefer.com/?https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would- like-debian-to-stop-shipping-xscreensaver/)

<comment><USER12> Nice, good to know about that.

It would be pretty amusing if HN put in a special case to use this for links to jwz.org.

BTW if you use https, i.e. [https://nullrefer.com/?http://www.xhaus.com/headers](https://nullrefer.com/?http://www.xhaus.com/headers) there won't be any Referer at all, while [http://nullrefer.com/?http://www.xhaus.com/headers](http://nullrefer.com/?http://www.xhaus.com/headers) will show nullrefer.com as the referrer.

<comment><USER13> Open in incognito window works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The whole situation is nuts. And it boils down to how rigid the package management system is on traditional distros. And no, the likes of xdg-app will just rellace one problem with another. As i see it the solution is more likely found in the likes of NixOS/Guix or Gobolinux. There updating a dependency tree piecemeal is straight forwadd, without having the whole tree duplicated a million times over.

<comment><USER15> I think the whole situation is nuts too, but for a different reason: JWZ expects bug reports as emails. It's easy enough to install Bugzilla, Trac, or whatever on his own server. If he doesn't want to make the effort, so many public repo hosts have integrated bug tracking tools. Some of these can mandate entering the version number. People can also check if their bug has been reported already. He could automate replies for bugs reported against older releases. There are so many advantages that it would be tiresome to list them all out here.

Instead, JWZ requires users to send him emails, and he makes his email id prominent. At this point, I'd be OK with stripping off his notice, because he's not making life easier for anyone else either. Not that I'm affected by what Debian does; I run Arch and have the latest software already.

<comment><USER14> I suspect his thinking is that the barrier of entry for reporting is much smaller if all it takes is an email.

Also, i think he got burned on bugtrackers while dealing with Gnome bugs. That lead him to formulate CADT and abandon Linux for OSX.

<comment><USER15> I can sympathize with his issues with Gnome bugs. But corporate-driven software is no different. I too have been subjected to a similar treatment on Google Chrome's bug tracker. I stopped reporting bugs there years ago.

Closed-source software is no different. Had MS and Apple allowed the public to raise bugs against their software, we would have been subjected to a similar treatment there too. For example, the last time I used iTunes on Windows (10+ years ago), it would simply delete all my ID3 comment tags, and write its incomprehensible garbage. _Years_ of hard work, gone in seconds. They did not even have the decency to warn users before they did that. Having lost all my comments, I tried using iTunes for a few months, until more and more bugs made the software simply unusable. I got rid of iTunes, installed Rockbox on the iPod and enjoyed the device for a few more years.

I know I went off on a tangent, but my point was that CADT-like symptoms are endemic to all rapidly-changing software.

Anyway, how he would administer his project's bug tracker has nothing to do with how Gnome runs theirs. I can come up with easy solutions that makes both Debian users and JWZ happy with his current report-bugs-by-email system. But I don't see the point of making the effort. I don't think JWZ reads HN, and even if he does, he comes across as a stubborn and bitter person, at least as far as this topic is concerned.

When I read this on his XScreenSaver FAQ:

> There aren't any FAQs about the MacOS version because, well, unlike Linux, > MacOS just works. Sad but true.

I remembered all the times my Mac-using friends have come to me, asking for help with odd problems on their computers. I turned them all away because I didn't know solutions to any of their problems. If I ever meet JWZ in person, as unlikely as it is, the entire field of software will be on my banned topics list.

<comment><USER14> Heh, he do sometimes seem to have the signs of someone so burned by one "side" that he has gone fanatic for the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> irregardless of the coverage this has gotten.. author's request should honored

how can it be deb stable if the author is getting spammed about issues.

kind of seems to be at odds with the best things about Debian.

<comment><USER14> Debian stable operates under the "better the devil you know" principle.

Thus often various bugs that are not security related will not get patched because that may well disrupt production installs more than leave it be and have the local admin implement a workaround.

JWZ's definition of stable is more akin to what you get out of the kernel devs or FSF's software. A codebase that has been tweaked and fixed over time.

You can see this in how he laments the rewrite(s) of Netscape Communicator after Mozilla was formed, and CADT. Formulated after Gnome devs invalidated long standing bug reports of his, because the relevant Gnome part was to be rewritten from scratch once more.

Stable is in essence one of those context sensitive terms...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> KDE doesn't even support XScreenSaver anymore.

<comment><USER18> What do you mean? That KDE doesn't let users choose from a list of screensavers that includes XScreenSaver?

I just tested out XScreenSaver on KDE. As long as I set up the process and keyboard shortcuts correctly, I can still use it (Yay, standard APIs). (Of course, I am limited to keyboard shortcuts and not the 'Lock Screen' buttons in KDE).

<comment><USER17> Yes, I mean the standard lock screen. Of course you can explicitly run it.</comment></comment></comment>


Even casually smoking marijuana can change your brain, study says - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/04/16/even-casually-smoking-marijuana-can-change-your-brain-study-says/

<comment><USER2> This guy claims it was bad science: [http://www.medpagetoday.com/Neurology/GeneralNeurology/45290](http://www.medpagetoday.com/Neurology/GeneralNeurology/45290)</comment>


AOL's Tim Armstrong Aims to Build Digital-Ad Empire at Verizon – Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/article_email/aols-tim-armstrong-aims-to-build-digital-ad-empire-at-verizon-1459330200-lMyQjAxMTA2NzMxMDMzMzAyWj <comment><AUTHOR> This was always a worse-case scenario to me - Verizon buying core Yahoo! I deleted my Yahoo account awhile back because I figured whoever ended up buying Yahoo would be looking at the purchase through myopic ad-tech vulture eyesight.

Yahoo user data will not have a happily-ever-after ending for anyone who still Yahoo!'s</comment>


Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993 Peak; Public Unaware - <AUTHOR> http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/07/gun-homicide-rate-down-49-since-1993-peak-public-unaware/ <comment><USER2> Doesn't change the fact that there are more mass shootings than ever before. As a gun owner myself I am almost at the point of giving up defending gun rights. This is getting ridiculous.

<comment><USER3> If the overall rate is down, why does it matter if mass shootings are up?

The Wikipedia definition is any multiple shooting, which _can_ include 4 or more casualties. That's the bodycount of like a solid car accident, and yet we're not banning cars yet, now are we?

<comment><USER2> The concern on my end is that of course there are tons of people out there who will do nothing wrong. I have a couple rifles and handguns. I don't hunt. I go to the range once in a while--that's about it. I don't bother anyone and nobody bothers me. This is likely the majority.

Unfortunately, our current laws are currently not working and with the conversation constantly turning to mental illness after a shooting (while it may have something to do with it of course) we see the anger about what happened die down over time with no changes made regarding gun laws or mental illness and how it relates to background checks. This _cannot_ continue.

I don't care if a solution manifests as more laws around background checks or something else but our current situation is clearly a complete and utter failure.

<comment><USER4> The default reaction from any sane person is always "Something has to be done" \-- but that "something" is not easy to come up with. A knee jerk reaction to do "something" just because "something" needs to be done can have far reaching and dire consequences. We need a plan, and we need to know that this plan will actually have an impact and make a difference, not just take rights away from people. Emotion must be taken out of the equation.

<comment><USER2> I understand that but unfortunately here the longer we don't do anything the more people die.

<comment><USER3> Everyone dies, and the payouts of this are non-obvious if you are also, say, looking at the benefits of self-defense or keeping a .gov honest.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. People are going to die no matter what you do. If you magically were able to get rid of every single gun, mass murders would still happen. So don't think of getting rid of guns as stopping mass murders.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Talking on a mobile phone, you're less likely to notice the unicycling clown - <AUTHOR> http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2010/07/talking-on-mobile-phone-youre-less.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I sometimes wonder how much this relates to listening to music while coding. Sometimes we're banging out code that requires very little planning or thought, and noise or music in the background really doesn't matter.

But sometimes code requires care and craft. In those cases we need not to be distracted by outside noise. Some people achieve this by having known noise/music on their headphones, and they claim they can think and work without a problem.

But are they susceptible to the same kind of inadvertent inattention described here? Can they tell? By definition - no.

I've still not succeeded in tracking down the study referred to in Peopleware where they allegedly tested this. I'd really, _really_ like to see it reproduced.

Or refuted.

<comment><USER2> I hope they distinguish between music and vocals. Coding to techno has subjectively gone pretty well, and it seems reasonable that hearing words should be more of a problem.

<comment><AUTHOR>
      > ... subjectively ...

That's the question. Maybe you would, in fact, code "better" (whatever that means) with complete silence.

I'm interested in the difference between music you're accustomed to and music that's less familiar, words, no words, loud, soft, silence, _etc._ You think you like techno, but maybe, just maybe, objectively something else would be better.</comment></comment></comment>


How Zano Raised Millions on Kickstarter and Left Most Backers with Nothing - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/kickstarter/how-zano-raised-millions-on-kickstarter-and-left-backers-with-nearly-nothing-85c0abe4a6cb#.mru734keu <comment><USER2> It's stories like this that make me very skeptical about any non-trivial electronic devices on crowdfunding sites.

I'm not convinced that the discount and early delivery is worth the risk that you are left with nothing.</comment>


3D on 2D HTML Canvas - <AUTHOR> http://gyu.que.jp/jscloth/touch.html

<comment><USER2> With cloth animations too! (demo 1)

Quite impressive... does use up a fair bit of cpu and is still quite slow.... and doesn't work in IE7.

I think Flash still has many happy days ahead of it, but this is still rather cool.

For the record, it appears to be using a javascript version of Papervision, the fairly widespread 3D library for Flash.

<comment><AUTHOR> FYI -- it's significantly faster in Chrome than FF3, work a look.

<comment><USER3> At least the third demo has better visual quality in FF3 than in Chrome though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's awesome, and a great demo of just how fast Chrome's V8 Javascript VM is! Wow.

<comment><USER5> thank to x86 native code generation, the very smart idea behind V8.

<comment><USER6> V8 has a lot of good ideas in it; compiling to native code is one of them but far from the only important one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's been a dream of mine (currently beyond my hacking capability) to build a really simple 3D CAD app using JS on an HTML canvas (optimized for Chrome, since V8 compiles JS down to bytecode). This, along with several other 3D Canvas implementations, are a good step forward.

<comment><USER8> DirectAnimation was an interesting technology, but Microsoft droped it for Silverlight.

<comment><USER9> Silverlight 3 will have 3D support with hardware acceleration. This is one area where i see Microsoft taking the lead on Adobe.

<comment><USER10> While silverlight fights flash and viceversa over 3d support, google has a fast js virtual machine already implemented and delivered. With it you can do 3d directly from js. I dont know why google dont push a bit more with this killer feature. Are they avoiding 'browser war II'?

<comment><USER11> V8 isn't hardware accelerated, and probably won't ever be. That won't matter in every case, but there will always be situations in which V8 is not a valid substitute for Flash or Silverlight.

<comment><USER12> If V8 gets threading support and auto-vectorization, then if processors- graphics cards ala Intel's Larrabee take off, it may be a non-issue. Developers can just do a 3d engine in pure javascript and get roughly the same order of magnitude of performance as a GPU.

<comment><USER11> All true, but that's a lot of ifs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is very impressive indeed. My own efforts from a few years back (<http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/torus.html>) are very primitive by comparison.

However, you can still see the effects of Canvas's stupid approach to rendering antialiased filled polygons.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think this dude ported papervision from AS3 to javascript. Really awesome!.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. Very cool: <http://gyu.que.jp/jscloth/parpevision.js>

Even on my relatively beefy comp, though, the miku animation was enough to get my fan going full blast. Papervision otoh has the potential to build a real, high-quality, 3d game. I don't see JS getting there any time soon, but nevertheless an interesting proof of concept.

<comment><USER6> What are the problems you see, and why do you think they're hard to solve?

<comment><USER14> I don't see any "hard barriers" but a lot of soft issues that will take time to overcome. As of now, there isn't even a uniform event handling framework in JS. So, first, we'd need a good generic 3d framework. Next, we'd need a significant speedup in performance across the major browsers. If OpenGL is a model, there would probably have to be some graphics-specific optimizations made, which might be difficult to get everyone on board for. Third, I'd either need to buy a new computer or JS would need gpu access, because ATM this site brought my relatively face computer to a grinding halt... and I don't think I'm going to have money for a new comp for at least a year or two :).

<comment><USER6> You could tell people "download Firefox to use my spiffy 3D site" (or download Chrome or whatever) just like people now tell them "download Flash Viewer 9". Does Papervision in Flash take advantage of 3-D acceleration hardware? In those ways I'm not sure there's so much of a difference between JavaScript in browsers and ActionScript in Flash.

Graphics-specific optimizations are probably going to happen, if by that you mean "fixing Canvas so it isn't painfully slow".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> slow as molasses but impressive all the same.

<comment><USER16> It BLAZES on Safari.

<comment><USER4> Hey you're right, I can't notice a difference in speed/responsiveness between Safari on OS X and Chrome on XP inside Parallels, whereas it's painfully slow on Firefox both on OS X and XP+Parallels.

Does this mean Firefox is slow because of its Canvas implementation, and not the Javascript?

<comment><USER17> Firefox has not enabled by default "tracemonkey" yet. If you get one of the beta or nightly builds it should be turned on.

<comment><USER4> But Safari doesn't have its own new, fast JS interpreter (Squirrelfish) yet either - I'm only using v3.2.1 (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)#Mac>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Opera 9 seems to render this much faster than Firefox 3 on Linux, but it's still not nearly as fast as Chrome on Vista.

</comment><comment><USER19> Just WOW. Miku (demo 2) is my fav.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wow. How is that even possible? Is there a Javascript port of openGL in the works?

</comment><comment><USER21> It's a bit slow on firefox 3, but on chrome it's very nice :)

</comment><comment><USER22> Animated ads should be based on canvas or svg, not on flash or gifs.

<comment><USER8> I disagree. Flash might have some optimization on AVM, and some audio processing dark magic using tools like HaXe.

Flash is like GDI+ or Cairo for the Web. And it may extend to many other capabilities such as webcam, microphone, Argumented Reality, etc.

And RIA should get a nice authoring tool like Adobe Flash IDE or Flex.

Flash is not just graphics

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> cool though. But still cheated. Like flash, there is no project transformation here. They use two affine transformation to cheat. Silverlight seems to be the only practical solution for 3d experience in browser.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you need to launch your side project? Anything HN can do to help? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm working on an open source fitness platform. Think Github/Gitlab, but for fitness enthusiasts.

Basically, a training program is kind of like a repository that can be edited and improved by the community. Same with individual exercises.

Now, this ends up being much more difficult to implement than you would think at first glance. I already have the basic application structure laid out in what I believe to be a maintainable and extensible manner.

My mission statement is as follows:

"To create a self-curating community that demystifies physical fitness and makes information on fitness freely available."

One of the use cases I have envisioned is a user being able to declare that they are following a program. The user can then record their numbers for each individual set/session. The user can then view their progress in the form of various graphs and other visualizations. I believe this feature is important because I believe that many fitness beginners have a difficult time taking notice of their progress and become discouraged.

I don't necessarily have any technical questions. I would just like some feedback from fitness beginners and long time fitness enthusiasts. specifically:

\- Have you used a fitness tracking app before? What did you like about it? Where could it have been improved?

\- Does it matter to you if an app is browser only with a good mobile ui? Do you prefer web apps or native apps for tracking fitness/calories/etc?

\- Have you tried to improve your fitness before and failed? If so, what was the reason you became discouraged?

\- What kind of search/filtering functionality do you think would be most helpful for you to find a fitness program that suits your needs?

\- The application itself is open source. There is no subscription/membership fee. No monthly subscriptions. Do you think an application like this one could subsist off of donations alone?

\- Any other feedback?

Thanks for reading this, and if anyone wants to help, you can view the repository here: [https://github.com/FFX01/fithub2](https://github.com/FFX01/fithub2)

<comment><USER3> I would love to see this executed well so here are my scrambled thoughts on this. I have been lifting for around 5 years with a powerlifting focus and have used various program specific Excel sheets found online, Strong on iOS, Progression on Android, and thesquatrack.com back when it first entered beta(3 years ago maybe).

\- I hate Excel sheets and using them on mobile has always been a pain.

\- Strong was fine, the UI/UX was incredible. It was just lacking something to tie me to it and I'm not sure if I ever figured out what that was.

\- Progression is the only one I have tried since moving to Android recently. I hated it. The UI was just alright and it forced a timer on me that stuck around even when the app was in the background and I never found a way to turn off that feature so I uninstalled. There wasn't much data analysis as far as I could tell.

\- thesquatrack.com was by far the best I have ever used and seen. I stopped using it because there were a few instances of reliability issues and I just never came back to it. It has not been in active development for at least the last two years. The website was mostly mobile friendly and the UI was nothing fancy but it was good enough. It had a good range of exercises available. Exercise input was simplistic but powerful - having the option to input individual sets or batch them was nice. I really liked the rep max tracking and how it was noted on completing every workout. The graphs were great for analyzing almost everything. It had a decent program feature with maybe 10 programs. It had integration with LoseIt! for nutrition tracking but I use MyFitnessPal and apparently the dev was never able to get access to their API, so I have no input on that feature. It would be a nice integration if done correctly especially if used for graphs and analysis. It had a social media aspect which was cool.

\- I never paid for thesquatrack, there were no paid features at the time I joined but once they were added I think it was for a subscription fee which was quite pricey. I don't think I paid for Progression but I did pay for Strong. I would gladly pay an up front cost for membership to a hosted instance of something like you're describing even if it is open source.

\- I think a web app really limits your discoverability. I don't think I would've ever found thesquatrack.com if I didn't see the few reddit posts about it but Strong and Progression were easy to find as they were on app store charts.

<comment><USER2> This is great info! Definitely gave me some stuff to think about.

I think I'll check out thesquatrack.com for some ideas.

Regarding your point about native vs web apps: I have never built a native app before. That said, I'm sure it can't be all that difficult. I have built my back end to be fully decoupled from the front end and work entirely through an API. Shouldn't be too difficult to get the data onto a mobile device. Something new to learn I guess. I have also heard about "native" apps; where the app is "installed" on the device, but it really just opens up a windowless browser.

Thank you!

<comment><USER3> Yeah feel free to message me if you want to talk some more.

I see you've got a start using Vue which is awesome. React Native might be another option though if you don't want to dive into Swift and Java since obviously you already know JS . I don't know what you have planned as far as features but I can't imagine a reason why it wouldn't be a good platform for you other than the fact that you've already used Vue.

The "native" apps you're talking about are usually called "Progressive Web Apps". I can't really speak much to developing or using them but I know Google is pushing hard for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I need $1 million dollars in seed money.

<comment><USER5> Me too, I have a finished product (Deep Learning Platform), paying customers, but I am struggling to scale it on my own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A Google Forms/Typeform + zapier + Mailchimp to send valuable information to new signups in exchange for their contact information

<comment><USER7> JotForm does the trick as well.</comment></comment>


A guide to starting your business - <AUTHOR> http://particletree.com/features/a-guide-to-starting-your-business/ <comment><USER2> I found this to be a nice read. A lot of it extends beyond what many of us are focused on at the moment (just building a truly meaningful product), though it's probably good to keep this in sights.

Read it and saved it for (near) future reference... ;)</comment>


DNS-On-blockchain, Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and Governance - <AUTHOR> https://www.easydns.com/blog/2017/09/19/dns-on-blockchain-ethereum-name-service-ens-vrm-and-governance-oh-my/ <comment><USER2> I thought the main point of blockchains and other distributed systems was being censorship-resistant. If even that is taken away, why even bother with them?

<comment><AUTHOR> You could probably create your own smart contract (not under the .ETH registrar) that had absolutely zero censorship, but it would probably end up being overrun by scumbags and unusable across the wider network as everybody else builds filters around them...

I've just been reminded that the takeaway at the conference was that the second level filtering was intended as a voluntary layer implemented via filtering. I had my doubts around that, but there you go.</comment></comment>


JK Rowling announces 'Pottermore' collaborative fiction website - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/23/pottermore-website-jk-rowling-harry-potter

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not clear whether it's a game, online book, collaborative reading experience, collaborative writing experience, social network for Potter fans, or all of these things, but there are some image assets from the comments on the Guardian article that give an idea of what the website will look like:

[http://assets.pottermore.com/emcp/downloads/pottermore_gateg...](http://assets.pottermore.com/emcp/downloads/pottermore_gategryffindor_230611.jpg)

[http://assets.pottermore.com/emcp/downloads/pottermore_hogwa...](http://assets.pottermore.com/emcp/downloads/pottermore_hogwartsexpress_230611.jpg)

[http://assets.pottermore.com/emcp/downloads/pottermore_chess...](http://assets.pottermore.com/emcp/downloads/pottermore_chessboardchamber_230611.jpg)

[http://assets.pottermore.com/emcp/downloads/pottermore_xmash...](http://assets.pottermore.com/emcp/downloads/pottermore_xmashogwarts_230611.jpg)</comment>


Young Hackers in Molenbeek Work to Boost Brussels District's Reputation - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2016/05/31/480183232/young-hackers-in-molenbeek-work-to-boost-brussels-districts-reputation <comment><AUTHOR> >When terrorists struck Brussels in March, first responders quickly found their communication systems were overwhelmed. They were forced to share critical information through text messages and services like What's App. A group of hackers has made it their mission to help emergency personnel. And Teri Schultz reports many of these geeky geniuses come from the same Brussels neighborhood as the radical Islamists who launched the attacks.</comment>


Open Letter to Apple - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@davepell/open-letter-to-apple-ed3acc4dbf96#.86dtpxx7g <comment><USER2> You got one. It's called the MacBook. If you need more USB ports or processing power, it's the MacBook Pro - which is lighter and smaller than the MacBook Air.

The fact of the matter is, non USB-C ports are going away on just about everything. Aside from maybe needing an adapter, the current lineup is pretty much better in every way.

Personally the thing that put me off the new MacBook Pro was the ridiculous price. If that, or the lower battery life, is your problem, I can understand. Wait it out. But just saying "There's no MacBook Air" ? Well... the MacBook and the MacBook Pro cover what the Air was.</comment>


Behind The Scenes At Adioso - Part 3: Patience - <AUTHOR> http://tomhoward.co/part-3-patience/

<comment><USER2> I've worked with Tom, Fenn and the team for the past 4 months. While it's been an exciting period with lots of growth and interest, I like reading about the early struggles and the mud they crawled through to get this opportunity. A recent investor emailed the team explaining his decision to get on board. I was struck by one particular sentence, 'You guys just wont give up'.

I enjoy the honest writing style and acute observation on relationships. It's a breath of fresh air in contrast to the abundant startup stories about young gun-slinging silicon valley 'game changers' that built their MVP on a napkin. I understand the miracle flash stories sell, but it's good to hear about the unbeaten track.

<comment><USER3> Or about the tracks that beat the shit out of you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hope these guys become the case study for "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich".

Something that's been hinted at a lot through this series of posts are technical challenges that adioso faced that almost killed them, I'm really looking forward to hearing about those in more depth.

Part 1: <http://tomhoward.co/part-1-reality-check> Part 2: <http://tomhoward.co/part-2-stunts>

</comment><comment><USER5> You know you're a startup person when you read that, remember your own similar experiences in your startup, and then realise how much you miss it all.

</comment><comment><USER6> I love these writeups... I just wish I didn't have to wait so long or the next chapters!

</comment><comment><USER7> All three parts are great reads. Can't wait for part 4 :)</comment>


Art Meets Cartography: The 15,000-Year History of a River in Oregon - <AUTHOR> http://www.oregonlive.com/travel/index.ssf/2013/04/willamette_river_presents_stun.html <comment><USER2>
        > Lidar data is collected by low-, slow-flying aircraft with equipment
        > that shoots millions of laser points to the ground. ... It is
        > possible to strip buildings and vegetation from the images, so that
        > only the ground is shown. In the Willamette River poster, the shades
        > of white and blue show elevations. The purest white color is the
        > baseline, (the zero point, at the lowest point near Independence on
        > the upper part of the image). The darkest blue is 50 feet (or higher)
        > than the baseline.

Very cool, and really a beautiful image. Contour lines on a topographic map show the same data, but mapping the elevation to a color range and clipping out elevations outside the river's effects really make this unlike anything I've seen before.

Edit: The original submission (see dang's post) references a similar set of maps[0] for the Mississippi River, which are equally beautiful and even more impressive.

[0]: [http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?fisk](http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?fisk)

<comment><USER3> Here's another view I made of the Fisk map a few years ago. It's Google Maps style. [http://somebits.com/fiskmap](http://somebits.com/fiskmap)

This LIDAR map of the Willamette is really beautiful. Electric blue is an odd color for a data visualization, but it sure is striking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the area in question now:

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-123.1041719,11z/dat...](https://email@example.com,-123.1041719,11z/data=!5m1!1e4)

</comment><comment><USER5> Url changed from [http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/11/willamette-river- histo...](http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/11/willamette-river-history-dan- coe/), which points to this.</comment>


Rikers Drove My Innocent Patient to Plead Guilty - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/rikers-island-plea-bargains-213223 <comment><USER2> How is a plea deal not duress? Imagine if a cop pointed a gun at you and said "I'll shoot you unless you confess". We wouldn't accept that confession but we do accept a prosecutor saying "you'll get the death penalty at trial unless you plead guilty now." Same goes for lesser sentences vs threats of physical violence.

<comment><USER3> Because they can't directly give the person a death sentence. If you turn down the plea, you go to a regular trial where a jury determines if you're guilty and the judge & jury determine your sentence.

<comment><USER4> Well, they do, after several years at Rikers ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Plea bargaining should not exist. It makes a mockery of justice, turns the legal system into a marketplace where you bid for relative degrees of guilt and are rewarded for "copping a plea", and occasionally snares the innocent.

The war on drugs has clogged the system, but also our somewhat lawless and rudderless population since the early 1960s, when a generally orderly society gave way to a general contempt for authority. And the population has grown far faster than the number of courts to accommodate it.

I think the only solution is to legalize drugs and build more courts to address the remaining cases more quickly and efficiently, without throwing due process out the window.

Better education would help, too. And instill moral education in our children in the schools and at home. In the end, a more moral society will bring about a more moral justice system.

<comment><USER6> > Plea bargaining should not exist. It makes a mockery of justice, turns the > legal system into a marketplace where you bid for relative degrees of guilt > and are rewarded for "copping a plea", and occasionally snares the innocent.

I confess that I'm somewhat naive regarding the larger context of this. I have dealt with the criminal justice system, and I was very thankful for plea bargaining. I was, without a doubt, very guilty of what I was accused of doing and I knew that the state would have zero issue proving that and convicting me, and my lawyer tended to agree. I did not have the money to post bail (at the time I was very poor, the bail was very reasonable), and my lawyer told me that a jury trial would keep me in jail for far longer than my sentence would be if I pled down. With my plea bargain, I spent 22 days in jail. I likely would have been in jail for at least a month and a half, even if my lawyer pushed as hard as he could for a speedy trial.

With that out of the way, while I understand that the plea bargain process is abused, isn't my case an example of why plea bargaining should exist, at least in a limited context? It saved everyone involved time and money.

<comment><USER7> >" _isn 't my case an example of why plea bargaining should exist, at least in a limited context? It saved everyone involved time and money._"

Other than saving money/time for some people, how was it a net benefit to the victims (if any), or society in general? Care to elaborate as I'm not quite understanding what you're saying?

I don't think I've ever encountered the notion (other than in Law&Order) that the prosecutor is the one that gets to decide leniency in terms of punishment. This is traditionally a power held only by judges come sentencing time[1]. Personally, it's akin to the prosecutors acting as judge and jury. You were not judged by your peers, even though you knew you were guilty (and probably everyone around you). But the prosecutor took the role of jury to essentially "blackmail"[1] you using the power of leniency that a judge would have.

The system is broken, and we shouldn't have to come to a point where we make such comments or interpretations. The expectation is that laws should be obeyed, and punishment of them is applied equally to all. But what we have here boils down to "equally for all", _except_ "more leniently" for those that don't waste money and time of those involved.

[1]. Correct me if I'm wrong historically. [2]. One broad definition of the term blackmail is: "the use of threats or the manipulation of someone's feelings to force them to do something."

<comment><USER8> > Other than saving money/time for some people

Time and money are both limited resources, especially in the case of the Criminal Just system. That alone is an argument _for_ its existence.

> the prosecutor is the one that gets to decide leniency in terms of > punishment.

IANAL, but believe the judge is the one who decides (e.g. you could potentially plea out and _not_ get the deal offered by the prosecutor). Moreover, if you don't like the bargain you can always roll the dice in the courtroom where you'll face the established punishment for your crime (rather than the reduced one being offered).

To be clear, I dont like the system as is either. But I think a speedy trial would probably be impossible without bargaining. Thus I think the only route to a solution (i.e. the one we should perhaps focus on) is: 1. Reduced penalties for various crimes 2. Drug legalization

<comment><USER9> The limited nature of time and money for the criminal justice system is artificial scarcity. We _choose_ not to fund them adequately, and make up for this by making unfair and unjust arrangements with the accused.

The portion of government spending that goes toward courts is not terribly high. If we wanted to and needed to, we could increase it by a huge amount without greatly increasing tax burdens.

There is no practical reason we can't give every single accused person a speedy trial. We just don't feel like putting in the effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It has been known for millennia that confessions obtained under torture are very effective at reducing the workload of the courts. So much so, that a billion-dollar industry can grow its own market at will with a minimum increase in judicial expenses.

What's the next "disruption" in the industry? Automated guilt-finding? Mass surveillance, check. Self-running prisons? Automated jail management, check. Automated lawyers? Watson, check.

The system is turning into a predator that seeks out the slow and weak as prey; unfortunately, unlike a predator in nature, it decreases the health of the entire herd.

To naively take the predator analogy to the extreme, it would be more beneficial for a nation to randomly select poor people and summarily execute them than maintain a justice system that deals almost exclusively in injustice.

</comment><comment><USER11> I guess the suspects should not go to the same place as the convicts. So prisons only for convicts and "safekeeping places" (which are not allowed to be near a prison) for the suspects.

To treat suspects like criminals is not right. You and me could end up being a suspect without the slightest guilt in the matter.

<comment><USER12> > I guess the suspects should not go to the same place as the convicts.

By and large, they don't. Suspects go to county or city jail, not prison, to wait for bail or their court date. Convicted persons go to prison.

The issue is that a large, and growing, percentage of the pre-trial jail population is repeat offenders, people who _have_ been to prison and therefore the jail environment begins to resemble the prison environment. In the county where I work, with a total population of nearly 1 million people, the jail houses about 2300 inmates on a regular basis. Those inmates are classified and housed based on a number of factors, including the type and severity of their current charges, their criminal history, direct observation by medical and psychological staff, age and infirmity, and so on.

Still, even with this sensible approach to keeping the "hardcore" inmates away from those accused of minor crimes, occasionally someone who has never seen the inside of a jail before ends up in a cell or dorm with career criminals. There's no easy solution, but proper classification and staff education go a long way towards keeping pre-trial jails safer for the accused.

As for the subject of this article, I can't help but wonder how high his bond was set for that particular charge, given that most bonding companies typically charge no more than 15% of the total bond amount. Even if his bond was $10,000 (which would be consistent with the charge here in Georgia, but of course NYC may be drastically different), the fee to a professional bondsman would be $1500, something his family and friends could scrape together. Even if his bond was set higher than that, he could have petitioned the judge for a reduced bond or even a ROR (released on his own recognizance) bond, given the non-violent nature of the offense and the fact he's never had a felony conviction.

No, it sounds like a big part of the problem is apathy on the part of the public defender's office in NYC, coupled with district attorneys who care more about conviction rates than actual justice and judges who are nothing more than rubber stamp machines.

<comment><USER13> It's not apathy for public defender's office, it's that each one generally has dozens of cases to try to work on. Governments hate to spend money on public defense and prosecutors are happy to make their lives miserable. I find it amazing that anyone actually wants that job.

<comment><USER14> I was a public defender for a year. When I was interviewed, I was told that I'd normally do about 80-100 cases a year. During that year, I experienced true burnout around my 250th case. I took an unpaid Leave of Absence and ultimately left law because of this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> New York has a legal and constitutional obligation to hire enough judges, public defenders and court staff to provide speedy trials for all of the accused. "Speedy" is legally defined to mean six months. For some reason, they haven't done it, resulting in the crime against humanity that is Rikers Island. This is odd, because I can't imagine they even save money this way; imprisoning people is expensive.

<comment><USER16> New York defines this differently. From an article about Kalief Browder[1] who spent 3 years at Rikers before charges were just dropped (he subsequently committed suicide):

> Many states have so-called speedy-trial laws, which require trials to start > within a certain time frame. New York State's version is slightly different, > and is known as the "ready rule." This rule stipulates that all felony cases > (except homicides) must be ready for trial within six months of arraignment, > or else the charges can be dismissed. In practice, however, this time limit > is subject to technicalities. The clock stops for many reasons—for example, > when defense attorneys submit motions before trial—so that the amount of > time that is officially held to have elapsed can be wildly different from > the amount of time that really has. In 2011, seventy-four per cent of felony > cases in the Bronx were older than six months.

> In order for a trial to start, both the defense attorney and the prosecutor > have to declare that they are ready; the court clerk then searches for a > trial judge who is free and transfers the case, and jury selection can > begin. Not long after Browder was indicted, an assistant district attorney > sent the court a "Notice of Readiness," stating that "the People are ready > for trial." The case was put on the calendar for possible trial on December > 10th, but it did not start that day. On January 28, 2011, Browder's two- > hundred-and-fifty-eighth day in jail, he was brought back to the courthouse > once again. This time, the prosecutor said, "The People are not ready. We > are requesting one week." The next court date set by the judge—March 9th—was > not one week away but six.

... and so it continued. He went to court 31 times. None of those times for the actual trial. Yet most of the 3 years he spent at Rikers, the "clock was stopped" and so it was not counted by the court as more than 6 months.

[1] [http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kalief- browder-1993-...](http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kalief- browder-1993-2015)

<comment><USER17> This is both enlightening and depressing.

We need to redefine "speedy trial" with a more common-sense definition. Six months, even without the technicalities of clock-stoppages, is in no way, shape or form a "speedy" trial.

I'd argue something like 30 days is the upper limit of "speedy". If our courts are too backed up to support this, then we ought to readjust our spending to prioritize "justice for all".

New York State's courts have a budget of about $2 Billion/year[1]. In comparison, the state's annual budget is almost $153 Billion/year[2]

[1]: [https://www.nycourts.gov/admin/financialops/BGT15-16/2015-16...](https://www.nycourts.gov/admin/financialops/BGT15-16/2015-16-UCS- BUDGET.pdf) [2]: [http://openbudget.ny.gov/spendingForm.html](http://openbudget.ny.gov/spendingForm.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Many stories like this around and I still do not understand it; how does it happen in a western country (not to mention the richest country)? A judge would have to glance over the evidence for 5 seconds and another jail spot would be free. Sure the conditions in those jails are really insane for a western country, however for hardcore convicted criminals I guess there are some (...) people who think that's ok, but what's up with the having people wait for trials in trivial cases?

<comment><USER19> The story avoids mentioning the ethnicity of the accused in this case, but the US system's brutality cannot be disentangled from its racism.

I'd be very surprised if this kind of treatment was given to the average white guy who hits someone with a car. But a nonwhite guy on a motorbike? Much more plausible.

<comment><USER20> >I'd be very surprised if this kind of treatment //

That's just blunt discrimination unless it's based on data/stats you trust.

Basically what you appear to be using the "I'd be surprised" phrase to avoid really saying is that 'white people are racists and so the system, which they control, must be tailored to let them off more cheaply'; that's fine with strong trustworthy data IMO, without you're just being racist.

<comment><USER19> Racial disparity in the system is like global warming: there's lots of evidence which you have to work hard not to see.

You could start with, eg [http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=349...](http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3499&context=flr) and its references and footnotes. Footnote 4 contains the surprising sentence:

"Very few whites were charged with crimes in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. I was a public defender for twelve years and carried a full caseload for six years. I represented only two white defendants during those years. The exper- iences of my colleagues were very similar"

<comment><USER20> It a sensitive area and there are many compounding causes that can give similar effects - different races could have different rates of criminal activity for example - so you need good data that goes beyond anecdotes and can look widely across the system. Indeed I'd go so far as to say you probably need to assess the system in question against other systems - perhaps places where biases of different kinds are expected _a priori_.

Presumably public defender are in court pretty much every day? So even assuming a caseload of one a day for 300 days of those 12 years we have a ratio of 1:1800 of "whites" to others. Is this really anything like how it is? Wikipedia figures (link below) suggest about 6-7 times the incarceration rate per head of population for "adult black non-Hispanic males" and ~3 times the level of "whites" for Hispanic males.

Interestingly the example case in footnote 4 is a report of a Vietnamese male being killed and the killer being aided by the prosecution in preparing a case for self-defence. Despite this being referenced as a case of racism - which I can't determine the truth of but seems quite possible - Wikipedia tells me that "Asians" have the lowest incarceration rate of all ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States#Race)) which following through with the logic of "non-whites are biased against, this can be seen by proportionally less whites being convicted" means that Asians are getting the most bias in their favour of all. But of course there are other explanations, like Asians committing less crimes, or Asians being less often caught committing crimes.

You appear to have looked at this in depth, I have not, do you know of comparative studies: It strikes me that in a situation where a "black" police officer arrests someone, they have a black public defending attorney, or a black judge then if there is racism based on the controlling forces being light-skinned ("white") that those cases would have a significant difference in profile of arrest, prosecution and incarceration respectively. This must be pretty easy to demonstrate with the available statistics - I think that would convince me ( _) that there wasn 't a misinterpretation of results; that for example it wasn't primarily the influence of poverty.

What I found quite interesting in your citation was it seemed not to be concerned at all - eg when looking at traffic stops - with whether those arrested had committed a crime or not, similarly when looking at drug use and dealing.

_ \- I don't understand racism at all which makes it difficult to imagine that it's possible to be having the massive effects claimed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. It seems he really did kill someone with his bike. But it's not clear to me why this would be considered a homicide? Is this standard practice in USA?

2\. For some reason, it seems common practice in USA to assume that if someone decided not to go to trial, that this means they admitted their guilt. This seems .... bizarre somehow. Perhaps 'pleading guilty' should be changed semantically to 'chose not to go to trial'?

3\. It seems odd that if you are convicted of a felony that this means that you'll basically be unable to get a job for the rest of your life. How is this going to help rehabilitate people? Might as well just execute them. At least its quick. (At least, it is quick in China, which is where I live).

<comment><USER21> 1\. Someone died. Most DAs (district attorneys) sees this as a reason to charge people. They will charge even if it is not the case so that the shirt- storm that might come from the media does not fall into his hands - it is like district attorneys think: "It will not decide, let the jury decide and I have my hands clean: If the person was found guilty, it was the jury who did it. If not found guilty, it was also the jury - so do not blame me for the situation"

2\. You really need to watch a documentary called "The Plea" ([http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plea/](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plea/)) to get an insight on how FUCKED UP the "justice" in the USA is.

3\. The media and politicians have much to blame here. If you are ever convicted of a crime (even like in the case of a plea bargain) you life is likely over because no one wants to take a chance by hiring a "convict" \- Business do not want to take this kind of risk.

<comment><USER22> Huh? No, the majority of people who kill others using a vehicle of sorts are not ever charged (certainly not in NY), not even given as much as a ticket. If you remain at the scene and are not drunk, you can drive tomorrow.

(This applies even if your license is suspended or you were otherwise reckless.)

Now, the mistake you can not make is to choose the wrong mode of transport in your killing. Apparently this kid used a motorcycle. Any other transport but the good ol' car is an out group; you drastically increase your chances of being charged by using it.

(Not that I want to take the stance of this article that this is all "an accident"; too many reckless crashes are written off as "accidents". If you take a high-powered machine into the public, you should accept criminal responsibility regardless of your fault in a matter simply because of the excess risk you have brought into the equation.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's not "twisted" justice system.

It's totalitarian.

Using scare tactics like this is brainwashing the person in question to be in state in saying, feeling, showing something he wouldn't in the lack of these circumstances in a democratic country.

</comment><comment><USER24> Many people seem to think that human rights abuses is something that only happens in dictatorships, and not democracies. I wonder, though, if you compare say the US with China, is China any worse? Or the US compared to the old monarchies in Europe, on a per capita basis?

<comment><USER16> China certainly imprisons a much smaller proportion of its population, so that's a good question.

"Worse" probably depends on who you ask. China is decidedly un-free for everyone in that everyone knows that certain things puts you at risk, and so e.g. in terms of free speech China is clearly worse.

But if you're sufficiently poor in the US, your odds of spending a substantial proportion of your life in prison is vastly higher than in China, and I frankly don't know if your chance of getting a reasonably fair trial in the US in that situation is all that much better than China.

Personally, if I in some parallel universe found myself on a US jury (which I won't - I'n not US), I would vote to acquit in all but the most atrocious cases, as I would not in good conscience find it moral to contribute to subjecting anyone to the US prison system. But as we see in the article, in most cases, it's not up to a jury.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Since clearly Rikers has over 400 violations of the 6th Amendment (since by no sane person's definition can over two years in jail be considered speedy), how about releasing these people on their own recognizance until trial?

</comment><comment><USER26> At least he got a trial.

/sarc

<comment><USER26> Just to put this into context, this is of course a terrible injustice, but even worse was Kalief Browder, the teen who killed himself after being imprisoned in Rikers for three years without a trial.

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the- law](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Makes A Great Admin Interface? - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious what you all think are the finest admin interfaces in web applications.<p>If you can, please post why you admire a particular interface. <comment><USER2> Drupal's - drupal.org - for being incredibly logical and for accommodating more features in one CMS than I've seen in any other app. The admin panel is superb and user-friendly.

Symphony - <http://demo.symphony21.com/symphony/> \- which does less, but does it beautifully.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I will throw in one that I like.

RadiantCMS - <http://radiantcms.org/>

It is clean, quick, and simple. The design is really basic with only the items needed and nothing more. This simplicity does not come at the sacrifice of functionality; it still does everything you need it to.</comment>


Entr – A utility for running arbitrary commands when files change - <AUTHOR> http://entrproject.org/ <comment><USER2> Very nice utility to have. Thank you.</comment>


Stirling engine - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine <comment><USER2> A stirling engine is used in the modern swedish submarines (Gotland class). They are known to be extremely quiet, and have taken part in military exercises with the US Navy where they submerged and weren't noticed even when they were in visual range of the US destroyers.</comment>


Oh no -- no IPOs - <AUTHOR> http://howtosplitanatom.com/startup-reactor/startup-reactor-oh-no-no-ipos-week-four/

<comment><USER2> Perhaps I'm just sadistic, but I actually like the fact that it's taking startups years to reach an IPO. As someone who has witnessed a startup die slowly over the past year as the C-levels chased the impossible dream of an IPO, I wish that more people would realize that it's the creation of solid products by great people that get your company bought or IPO'd.

</comment><comment><USER3> "So much so, that you are seeing public companies withdraw and go private to save the average half a million a year in costs."

A public company that goes private to save $500k/year has much, much bigger problems. I'm guessing that it'd take >10 years to amortize the legal costs of going private if that is all they're saving!</comment>


The Origins of Objective-C [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386332 <comment><USER2> I am guessing Hell?</comment>


Show HN: Eventbrite Event Change Notifer - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/paulshi/EventbriteEventChangeNotifier

<comment><AUTHOR> Simple script to notifies you if event is modified. I originally used it to notify me when a disrupt hackathon ticket was available. I probably should wrap it into a webapp, if people are interested.</comment>


Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breaking Point - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/social-movements-are-pushing-google-sheets-to-the-breaking-point-28bb86b76043 <comment><USER2> Sheets seems like a good way to get to a MVP quickly to prove the concept. If Sheets starts falling over due to demand, you know you've got a winner and its time to invest in something more reliable.

<comment><USER3> Not everything is a MVP ready to disrupt. Sometimes all you have is a spreadsheet with data that lots of people have a fleeting interest in.

<comment><USER4> A spreadsheet is a database you haven't yet performed a migration on yet. I think the argument is less around better spreadsheets and more around migrating that data into real datastores once constraints are encountered (whether that's a desire to support large amounts of contributors, not run on Google, the dataset has grown too large, etc).

It's hard to go from Google Sheets to a web frontend to Postgresql and a snappy shared frontend. That is the problem statement to solve for imho (interface, schema, data portability).

<comment><USER5> No one has really solved the "Spreadsheet —> Database" migration painpoint. We don't have anything that is universally easy-to-use. The equivalent of a Hypercard or a Filemaker for the Web. (And no, I'm not talking about MongoDB or other NoSQL; I'm talking about the kind of thing you can hand over to a typical office worker.)

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I have a hunch that any solution to this problem will look similar to [https://github.com/simonw/datasette](https://github.com/simonw/datasette) if it develops. Tied together with [https://supabase.io/](https://supabase.io/) and you've built a versatile, powerful, open data collaboration engine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> With FindTheMasks, we found that tooling written around Sheets may also confront the 5 million cell limit.

As you tack on extra tabs and handle more fields, it isn't too hard to approach that limit.

If we do trip that threshold, we will be forced to degrade some functionality.

As a bonus, I don't believe that Sheets allows anyone to see exactly how many cells are in use, so one lives with a probabilistic risk of lockup.

If we were continuing to handle large volumes of intake, a switch to Airtable would be in the works. Fortunately, the PPE situation is at least somewhat better than it was in March, so we are simply keeping the lights on and wheels turning.

<comment><USER7> Airtable has a hard limit of 50,000 records across all tables in a base though.

<comment><USER8> That seems like a crazy low limit compared to the traditional spreadsheets I'm used to.

Is there some special meaning of "record" in their vernacular?

<comment><USER7> Airtable is closer to a database than a spreadsheet. Records are represented as rows in their default grid view, but there are other views available. They can also be retrieved as JSON objects through the API that Airtable automatically generate for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not just social movements; I sat in a free career webinar and they posted a Google Sheet link in the chat for all the participants to share LinkedIn profile links. It crashed quickly and for the rest of the meeting the chat had a steady stream of comments like "it's working now", "I'm locked out, please help", "can anyone share the link to the sheet", "here's a link to another sheet we can use", etc.

I sat there thinking "I can't believe there isn't a better option for this sort of thing." Kind of surprised Zoom does not have a native feature for meeting participants to share contact info with each other during the meeting.

<comment><USER10> The main problem with Google Sheets for that use case IIUC is that it's designed to be prepared for any of the users to edit arbitrary cells which can cause recomputations of other arbitrary cells, and it wants to give real-time feedback to all the other users about every edit (and cursor movement). That makes it harder to scale up to many simultaneous editors without compromises in the backend (due to the graph of recalculations) and UI (clutter, contention to claim the first blank line).

A custom web app for this purpose can scale better by being designed with the knowledge each user only edits their own row and nothing else needs to be recalculated. And of course it can have a tailored UI.

Unfortunately I don't know of any way for a non-developer to match that. There's no fundamental reason IMHO that there couldn't be a nice rapid, code- optional CRUD app generator, like Microsoft Access for the 21st century. Maybe this is what Microsoft Lists will do? AirTable is a general-purpose web-based RDBMS frontend, but I don't know if it scales well to many simultaneous editors either, I don't think you can tailor the UI as much as I'd like, and I hear folks complaining about database size limits.

You can get Google Sheets to scale better, but it's a bit awkward:

* Give folks a Google Forms link to edit their own information. This atomically claims and populates the row.

* Give folks a publish link (see File | Publish To the Web) to view everyone else's information. This link scales well because it doesn't let them update anything and (more annoyingly) it doesn't show changes until they hit refresh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "A Google support page states that "up to 100 people with view, edit, or comment permissions can work on a Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides file at the same time" and has a section devoted to troubleshooting files that become unresponsive after being shared with many people, recognizing the common pitfall."

That's a big number, but it's not as big as I'd expect from something from Google. I'd assume the average number of people working on any Sheet is 1 or 2, but I'm surprised that haven't been able to scale it up to 1000 or more by now.

<comment><USER12> Also in the piece, "Jonathan Rochelle, the lead product manager for Google's suite of collaborative tools from 2005 to 2013, said that he and his team found that having more than 25 to 50 editors on a single document made it hard for people to collaborate effectively."

The technical limitation is 2-4 times what the former product manager believed was a human limitation already. Scaling beyond that doesn't seem like a priority.

<comment><USER13> "View" was in that list though; is there a way to let more than 100 people view a sheet?

<comment><USER14> Yes, published mode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been using Docs (and a bit of sheets) for stuff like this and haven't noticed too much issues, though I usually keep under 10 people. Honestly I hope Google _doesn 't_ try to address any of the complaints in this thread.

Google Docs/Sheets/Drive function a lot like Stardew Valley multiplayer, in that pretty much anyone can do anything, and this allows really fluid communication but it simply won't work with 100 people.

Sheets supports 100s of people to an extent (even more) but I wouldn't want them to optimize for this. I think if I were in charge of it I would be exploring ways that they can find UI paradigms that allow more seamless interaction and realize the dreams that I think Google had when they built Wave.

* What if you could embed live video/audio in a Doc?

* Sheets comments kind of suck.

* Is there a way to use comments that makes them more visible without ruining the sheet view? (Maybe not.)

* As this article says, people are often using a Sheet as a very hacky app dev platform. Is there a way to embed the sheet data in a Doc (or something Wave-like) that has a more seamless communication pattern?

* Is there a way to build small apps on the fly without messing with a bunch of macros?

Though I think a lot of this is about communication. I don't think Google should be thinking about scaling, they should be thinking about those use cases where you're talking to a small group of people and you need a little custom app that can't take more than 30 seconds to put together or just talking would be more efficient.

</comment><comment><USER16> Let's say they fix Google Sheets to be arbitrarily scalable. Now you have another problem: how can that many people edit the Sheet simultaneousy and still have it make sense?

</comment><comment><USER17> The technologically maximum number of concurrent editors that Google Sheets supports is perhaps the least important constraint when trying to crowdsource an information-base. At a certain point (well below the point where Google Sheets crashes) you run into community constraints around permissions, validation, how you organize the data, how you record changes, how you discuss changes.

That being said, this article seems to completely ignore the fact that there are already well-established solutions to this problem. Off the top of my head, wikis and GitHub/Lab pages offer very nice solutions to creating a scale-able information-base with built-in features to help address some of the challenges I raised above....

</comment><comment><USER18> This is the second story on the front page about the weakness of modern spreadsheet software. It could be cool if someone stepped forward and showed us how to do spreadsheets using everything we now know, like what git did with source control back in the mid 2000s.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you link to the other story? I'm not seeing it.

<comment><USER19> there you go

[https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes- renam...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename- microsoft-excel-misreading-dates)

edit: HN link

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24070385)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I feel like Sheets should gracefully fail much better than it does under load, especially for supposedly being Google-scale. With more users, instead of not loading at all, or starting then failing to load, it would be nice to see the most recent change in read-only mode, and show an edit timeline like the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine UI shows archive occurrences on a calendar. Just a couple ideas for how Sheets could break down gracefully while retaining usability.

<comment><USER21> _With more users, instead of not loading at all, or starting then failing to load, it would be nice to see the most recent change in read-only mode_

I wonder if that's why the new version of macOS Numbers defaults to a read- only mode — to ease the burden when the sheets are in collaboration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> that means there is an opportunity for opensoirce, lightweight, self-hosted Sheets. A product opportunity for Zoom/Slack/Github.

I would love to see Elixir based solution just to see how much performance can be squeezed out of it, whatsapp seems to handle huge load just fine

</comment><comment><USER23> This reads to me big infrastructural problems in internet.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Twitter link that bypasses paywall: [https://t.co/WJHwemmfVl?amp=1](https://t.co/WJHwemmfVl?amp=1)

Archve.is link: [https://archive.is/N00i5](https://archive.is/N00i5)

This got me thinking what would it take to build a decent collaborative editor that would work for hundreds of people.

<comment><USER24> It's more likely that a real time editor for spreadsheets just doesn't make sense for more than a few people.

The low hanging fruit would be adding a read-only view of a static copy, because that's what people actually needed.</comment></comment>