Don't bother creating a mobile app - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/inside-birdly/why-you-shouldn-t-bother-creating-a-mobile-app-328af62fe0e5#.1io8bq45r <comment><USER2> This is a productivity app, and productivity apps are a real hard sell on mobile. Think about it, you're asking someone to embed a particular piece of software _directly into their life_. It has to provide so much value over not having any app that they have to remember to use to make using it a no- brainer.

Your app isn't really competing against other productivity apps, it's competing against the fact that an app is not going to be most people's best approach for improving their lives. The process of integrating a tool with life is not fun, it takes work and there's only so much that things like reminders can do for you.

I use two productivity apps on my phone. Reminders and the one I'm building. It's an ongoing experiment in how one can use software to improve life. Right now the only thing I've managed to integrate is spending tracking, and even that took months of back and forth consideration. Do I want to tag individual expenditures? How do I want to categorize them? How do I want to add an expenditure to a category? What should I call the act of spending something and what should I call the category? How do I want my reports to look like? Do I want reports in the database, or should they be generated dynamically? How should I represent common transactions that I do every day in a way that doesn't clutter up the main interface?

The whole exercise has left me unenthused about productivity software as a viable product category. Adding an expenditure now is easy as pie, for me, and only me. All of the work I had to do to figure out how I spend money and how I should build an app to manage it essentially has to be redone for every single person who wants to use software to help them manage their life. The domain seems simple, but it's actually incredibly complicated, because it's different for everyone.

<comment><USER3> You touch another important issue here.

>>> Do I want to tag individual expenditures? How do I want to categorize them?

Friction.

There are a lot of apps that might be useful but the friction is so high (a lot of manual entry, etc) that it might overwhelm the value provided. Ideally, you want the app to 'just work' and that's the hard part.

<comment><USER2> > There are a lot of apps that might be useful but the friction is so high (a > lot of manual entry, etc) that it might overwhelm the value provided.

It was an act of faith for me to structure the app around manual entry of transactions. I thought for sure that I'd wind up abandoning it after a few months. Didn't happen, I'm still using it, but I remember for a few weeks struggling to eliminate the friction, and I still haven't gotten rid of all of it. That would require implementing some kind of custom keyboard, as well as the aforementioned interface to put in common transactions that have the same amount each time.

There needs to be a streamlined interface for adding these common transactions, because I might have to do it a few times a month.

I'm repeating this entire process for a to-do manager, as Reminders just doesn't eliminate enough friction for all use cases. Now I need to figure out how to get transactions to live on the same page as my agenda.

When I'm finally done with this three years from now, I'll need to write a book and do a bunch of YouTube videos to teach people how to use it productively, either that or I'll need to spend just as much time making the interface discoverable.

What other people will need out of a dashboard is bound to be completely different than what I need out of it. I have a list of transactions for this week, broken down by day, someone else might need the whole month, broken down by category. I don't have automatic recurring transactions show up, someone else might want those. Each of these requires significant design work.

I have tried at various points to interest someone else in helping me develop it. Ha. Ha. Ha. Nobody cares.

<comment><USER4> The canonical budgeting advice is to simply track when you pull cash out, and count any cash you withdraw as already "spent".

<comment><USER5> That's hardly 'canonical', and goes directly against many budgeting/tracking philosophies. It definitely doesn't solve the 'where'd it all go' problem, and teaches you nothing about your spending habits and patterns.

Of course if you don't have any money problems, and don't need to break bad spending habits, then go ahead and do it that way - I often do as well.

<comment><USER4> Of course it teaches you stuff about your spending habits and patterns. Cash withdrawals are either earmarked as you withdraw them (for example, hitting an ATM up before visiting a strip club or bar), or they're withdrawn for facilitating impulsive purchases. You know the category of things they go to, because you record it when you withdraw it - you just don't know exactly what you did with it or when.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's always obvious when you are dealing with founders who likely won't make it. Specifically, when they're so so close to their own product that they start to blame anything else for failures rather than take an objective look at their own missteps.

In this case, buried among some semi-coherent arguments, we reach the point where one should ask "Was this product compelling compared to other solutions that tackle this pain point?"

Obviously not, but don't expect the company to smell the coffee. In their opinion, their "few competitor apps" didn't matter, but they lasted longer, so they probably did. Oh, but of course "they weren't doing it as well."

Take a look at the comments rolling in here, some of which note that the product didn't seem like compelling standalone option but that would have done well as part of a larger solution. Others inquire why certain features were left out that would have adequately addressed the entire pain point, but left the product feeling incomplete otherwise.

Of course, these potential customers were all wrong, because "other apps felt heavy and complicated."

Founders considering mobile, don't make the same mistake(s) this company is making. Rather than write some clickbait Mediun post after the fact, remember that a great UIX, onboarding and maybe even a mascot might be necessary for mobile success, but they definitely aren't sufficient. Nothing beats product market fit, and if a mobile app is necessary for said fit, you better not only bother with mobile, you should embrace it...objectively.

<comment><USER7> "the product didn't seem like compelling standalone option but that would have done well as part of a larger solution"

The new approach as a Slack bot addresses that issue precisely. Lots of useful things aren't a compelling standalone solution. Slack bots and other in- messenger apps mean this kind of software can become part of a larger overall experience.

Don't know if Birdly will make it but their argument here is onto something.

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

<comment><USER8> I don't know that a Slack bot is the right type of larger solution though. For instance, I use the ExpenseIt app on my phone because it's paired with Concur. That's got a much more flexible input when it comes time to do the actual expense report, and it's already processed all of those receipts for me. Now I just need to go through and pair it all up with the transactions on the card. Is Concur perfect? No. But the ExpenseIt app works there because it allows me to add data on the fly then toss the receipt.

I don't think I would be compelled to use a Slack bot to do the same thing, even though we use dozens of other Slack integrations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks like someone trying to take the blame of failure out of their shoulders.

The questions are right, the answers are wrong. The app did not (judging by the text, I never heard of it before) add the value they thought. Maybe it did not even work as well as they thought. Actually, I doubt that.

I won't argue too much into it, instead I will give you counterexamples:

1\. I should be on the target audience, and I have never heard of the app before. 2\. Concur seems to be doing really fine, working on the same problem - so they have either a better marketing or a better solution.

Bottomline: don't shy people away of doing anything because you failed.

<comment><AUTHOR> The app was only distributed on the French app stores, which is why you may not have heard about it. We're not trying to prevent anyone from creating mobile apps, but after spending a year doing so (and sure, making many mistakes on the way), we're just sharing our humble piece of advice

<comment><USER10> Wait, what?

Hang on, this should be the number 1 point of your entire blog post. Honestly, if your post was titled the obvious "Don't make mobile apps only for one region" then you'd be getting a lot of comments saying "Well, obviously".

Seriously your problem here is not that you made a mobile app. Your problem is very clearly that you excluded 99% of your user base. Any chance you can explain the reasoning behind this..? I can't even begin to understand it. Outside of government required tax applications, I cannot think of a single successful single-region productivity app ever.

<comment><USER11> I am baffled as well. My brain is hurting trying to understand this decision.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a decision that may seem obvious for many, many product categories.

But I can assure you that regarding anything finance-wise, it's simply impossible to launch an app that that complies with local laws everywhere at the same time, especially without proper funding. Take Quickbooks, it exists for 5-10 years, and they're still postponing their launch in the French market. We've gone global since then, and we've grown in 10 weeks way faster than we did in 1 year.

<comment><USER12> One suggestion: Start thinking about details like foreign laws once you actually start to generate significant profit.

Before that no one on earth will even care about your product enough to sue you.

On top of that it's quite expensive to go to France and sue you there as a foreigner.

<comment><USER13> I'd think they meant the state going after them. Not everyone wants to be a carefree outlaw.

<comment><USER12> I'm not an outlaw because I am ignorant of the laws and regulations of every single state on this planet. I put an app into the store that mainly follows Google/Apple policies/guidelines and does not break any laws in my country and that is sufficient for the start.

These policies are reasonable and by following them you will rarely get into trouble in Western countries.

Of course some other country might object, then the app might be modified by me for this country or removed.

How many apps or website would exist today if checking every law everywhere would be the standard procedure? Probably around 100 websites and 25 apps in total would exist because only big corps can afford this.

<comment><USER13> If you choose to sell your app in a particular App Store, you're submitting to the law of the jurisdiction it operates in.

<comment><USER12> No I don't, Google and Apple do. They are distributing the app and are responsible that the content is compliant with all the countries where they sell apps in.

Aside from that I don't understand what point you are trying to make here.

Are you suggesting that a developer should not release apps without first making sure that the app doesn't comply with any laws of any country?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This tells me a lot more about the founders not understanding the market than about mobile apps in general.

> The mobile app was doing something really cool: you only had to take a snap > of a receipt, and tap a button to export all the data into a beautiful Excel > expense report.

That's a feature not a business. That feature already exists in all of the major expense tracking SAAS products that I'm familiar with.

So who is the target market? The sliver of people that have enough of a problem to want to buy a solution but not enough of a problem to buy the major existing solution is just not that big.

<comment><USER15> I was going to say something similar, but I think you put it better. "Had it been done a million times?" They say nope, but I think they were looking in the wrong area. It may have done bad in standalone apps, but that's not where the real competition was. It was a small feature in many apps. I know I keep an app for this exact purpose on my phone all the time, even though I use it once every few months. The problem, for them, is that the app is part of the expense reporting software we use at work. I think there was no real way to sell this app as a standalone thing. It needs to be connected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can't find the app to see exactly how it worked, but did it have any integrations with expense reporting systems? As someone who files expense reports monthly for work, that would be the biggest issue for me - if it doesn't have a hook into QuickBooks or whatever system the company is using, then it's not going to get an enterprise following since users still have to manually enter info, which decreases value a lot.

The other issue is that if, like me, you travel a lot then a large number of your receipts will be in emails or PDFs (I book airfare and hotels online, and take Uber instead of cabs), so taking pictures of paper receipts and tracking driving miles would only get me half-way to completion.

<comment><USER17> They didn't mention this in the article, which makes me wonder if they really understood it. Companies have specific tools they require you to use to file expense reports. You would have to get the entire company to embrace this solution. Although they talk about the CTO trying to get it installed, I wonder if they ever really got the whole company on board. You've got to get the CTO and the CFO in this case.

<comment><USER18> It just doesn't work that way, the best audience for this is big co (because the combination of strict expense rules and big sales force makes it perfect) and yet it is absolutely impossible to get an enterprise signed into something like this.

Yet when the sales guys are putting in their expense reports every month (because it's too much money to ignore it for longer than a month) you could save them time with something like this, and guess what, they can expense the cost too, but only if you give them a report that is ready to send in the format they need it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sorry, but this article is pointless. There are no numbers whatsoever, everything can be squeezed down to "if it's not a messenger or a game¹, people won't use it", and there's not even meaningful comparison to any alternative approaches. Like the users that forgot the app magically won't forget to talk to that Slack bot once in a month.

Literally, this article is nothing but an advertising for a refreshed product, with some wanna-be-viral-marketing attempt at sparking discussion by somewhat controversial statement of "not on app store". (Uh, sorry for being cynical here, but seriously...)

___

[1] Not a full list.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry you feel this way. It would be nice to update the article with actual figures indeed.

And if I had to squeeze down the article, that'd be : "if you app doesn't imply repeated use, doesn't leverage context, takes room in your phone, if you don't have the necessary resources to develop it and update it on all platforms, and if it has to be integrated to a professional workflow for many users at once, don't go for it"

<comment><USER17> Without numbers, however, it reads like you're just making educated guesses.

<comment><USER20> Even with numbers, a whole lot of things in this world are nothing more than educated guesses. Or did you already find the meaning of life?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looks like they replaced the app with a Slack bot. That is more interesting than the article.

There are some services which would be more convenient as a bot on a chat platform than a "portal" site or a mobile app. Some issues with service- specific site / apps:

\- password that's perpetually forgotten (unless the site plays well with the password manager)

\- proprietary, doesn't explicitely support integrations unless the authors implement them

\- yet another set of notifications to deal with.

<comment><USER22> Totally agree - when I saw the pivot to Slack, I thought "That is REALLY interesting, more interesting than their failure at mobile"

<comment><AUTHOR> I suggest you have a look at this article we wrote about Slack as a platform: [https://medium.com/inside-birdly/there-s-no-app-for-that- sla...](https://medium.com/inside-birdly/there-s-no-app-for-that-slack-as-a- platform-for-your-product-feeade7e6737)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It is obvious what people want. A single app that does it all. Seriously.

We need a general purpose application that can be used for 80% of all use cases. When you think about it, all apps pretty much re-introduce the exact same features. Preferences, contacts, notifications, authentication, sharing, etc.

I want to use the exact same interface and language to order a package from China to my house, or to hail a cab to move me from work to home. I want the estimated ETA and cost prediction to be displayed the same. Tracking a package or the real-time location of a cab should be done through the same interface. I want to be notified the same way, whether it's my package or my cab that's late and/or has arrived. I want to pay for the package and cab ride the exact same way. Reviewing the received product and reviewing the cab driver, should be identical processes. I think the same should apply to pretty much any interaction, be it to ask my coffee machine to brew a cup, to be notified that my colleague will be late to a meeting, to pay for a meal, to review a movie, to schedule an appointment, to locate a friend.

My thesis is that all communication problems (which are what apps solve) are difference instances of the same one.

An app is not any tool. It's a language. We need to implement a general purpose language, and then all use it to interact with different agents/services.

<comment><USER24> > It is obvious what people want. A single app that does it all. Seriously.

We need emacs mobile!

<comment><USER23> But text is an evil medium.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you think "build it and they will come" applies in the mobile space, you're completely wrong and about to light a bunch money on fire. I'd be very interested to know if this team talked to 25+ people smack in the middle of their target audience about their expense-tracking pains before starting to think about building the app. It really seems like they thought of a problem (or what they perceived as a problem) and then built the app. If they dove deep on the problem and talked directly to people who they thought would most benefit from the app, they certainly would have uncovered more information about why Birdly would or would not work for them and could make important product choices based on that feedback.

</comment><comment><USER26> I use Expensify to track expenses for work and WaveApps for some consulting I do on the side. I disagree with the thesis of the piece, because I'm perfectly happy to keep installed apps that I use once per month, or even once per quarter.

WaveApps is great for invoicing, but their expense reporting module is ludicrously bad (it does OCR on the receipt images, but then doesn't include them in a nice report, so you have to download the images separately and convert them to a PDF manually).

I would have used Birdly if I had known about it. Anyone know about another Expensify competitor, preferably one who doesn't charge for single users?

As for Birdly, good luck with the Slack pivot, which looks clever.

</comment><comment><USER27> This was a great read, and I was right with the story line.

Yep, you're right. It's hard to get to your target market from the app store. Yep, they forget about your app. Yep, Yep, Yep.

Oh look, there's a link at the bottom to the new Birdly! Let's see what their new approach is!

It's a.....slack bot? Wut?

Just being honest here: I think that's one of the stupidest pivots I've ever seen.

<comment><USER22> It's funny - I had the same reaction at the first parts, but I thought the Slack bot pivot was genius actually. Very different than expensify and the "others".

No UI...is the New UI.

<comment><USER5> Genius? So your new business model is to exclude a huge number of people (despite what you may see here on HN, most people writing expense reports don't use slack), and tie your business to a third party closed platform.

Ok...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am using a mobile app to track the milage of my car and thus pull it up only at the gas station. While a little more specific than general expense tracking, it seems to be similar enough for a comparison. According to the article these apps are a hard sell because they are used so rarely. I can't comment on how the app creator is doing but it's still an app that I would pay for. But maybe the market is too small and the simplicity of the app creates an unsustainable race to the bottom.

<comment><USER29> Me too! It's an Android app called aCar which I did end up spending the $5 on (for no ads and IIRC more advanced backup options). I use it infrequently, but A) it takes less than a minute to enter a new "fill-up" record right after I get gas, and B) I programmed in all the reminders for oil change, tire rotation, etc., so entering the fill-up records (with mileage) means I keep on top of maintenance.

It provides value (B) with no friction (A), so pretty much a no-brainer.

<comment><USER30> To track car mileage I get out the manual and look up the size of my tank. Every time I fill up I reset the trip odometer in the car. At fill up I calculate the mileage. It's so easy, why is an app needed for this? May be the calculator app but that's all that should be required unless it's doing something else.

<comment><USER29> A) Why would you need to look up the size of your tank? The gas pump tells you quite precisely how much you used since last fill-up

B) Nobody said they _needed_ an app for this

C) I'm not really sure how pulling up the calculator app and punching in numbers is any easier than pulling up the mileage app and punching in numbers

D) If you use your imagination very slightly, you can come up with other obvious features such an app would provide, such as tracking average miles driven per day/month/year, average MPG per day/month/year, gas prices over time, service records (when was the last oil change/tire rotation/brake job), etc.

E) I also explicitly talked about another feature it provides (reminders), so I don't get the impression you actually read my comment before replying

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if they considered breaking the app up into smaller parts that can be sold to different markets:

      * API that accepts the scanned images, parses and returns the receipt data.
      * API (that does the above and) stores the data to allow later exporting of
        receipt data in Quickbooks, Excel, and other formats.
      * IOS and Android Libraries that integrate with the API.
      * Birdly app build on top of the library and API.

Birdly could be used as an end-user application, but also as a showcase for the API usage. Other application developers could license the libraries and API from your service; sure it creates competition, but you'd be getting a slice from a larger pie.

Also if there was a solo API plan, I would probably consider something like this for some personal expense tracking software I've been thinking about writing for myself.

<comment><USER32> I've always been curious how, in this business model, you protect API tokens if the users of the API deploy mobile apps. Embedding them in an app isn't secure: anybody could reverse engineer the app and use the key for themselves free of charge. And there is no way in Android or iOS to know which app makes a request from the server.

<comment><USER33> You can create a sneaky change to the protocol, or something that looks unnecessary, but still works without it temporarily. (or check the order in which the headers are formed, or something.) Then you can detect which clients don't conform exactly to the internal specs. And then you can send those accounts an email telling them they'll be banned if they continue to use external clients.

This strategy only works if you have a single blessed version of a client, and it's really only because of security by obscurity. For the mentioned business model, it would not work unless you created a single authoritative server that acted as a proxy to the other API or consumed data from that API without giving the app a key.

Snapchat may or may not have used this strategy. (The external client emails were real; as for the detection strategy, who knows.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's worth noticing that this is not only an app problem. When it comes to Corporate systems, the fact that a user has to work with different systems is incredibly painful. In fact, it's so painful that having 1 person managing the system and everybody else just sending email requests to this person works wonderfully.

One thing they could have tried is human support. Like let's give them a human who takes care of things or helps out or is always available to give training.

</comment><comment><USER35> Do users actually hate "app clutter"? I have plenty of apps I only use rarely, but when I need them, I need them. Space isn't a concern unless it's a huge game or downloads tons of media. 100MB or less is nothing.

<comment><USER36> Completely anecdotally: if I haven't used an app in a week then I delete it. I can't really justify it, I have 64gb of space on my phone - it's more of an OCD thing than anything else.

<comment><USER37> I'm guessing you're using an iPhone. On iOS all the apps are displayed somewhere on your homescreens. When I tried iOS that bothered me, because coming from Android I was used to being able to choose which app icons are displayed on the homescreens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Really weird to read this being someone who is using the Expensify app on a daily basis. Super simple, I just photo the receipts as I go about during the month and then at the beginning of the next month I create my expense report.

<comment><AUTHOR> If all of our users were like you, we would have kept it I guess, but figures showed batch uses once a month instead

<comment><USER38> In that case you didn't go after the right users. Expensify just did a $17m Series C so must obviously be a lot of people like me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> A productivity app that involves the camera? The slowest workflow on the phone? No thanks.

The right answer is to get those receipts into a digital format some other way, not with the camera.

I would have deleted this app after I tried wasting 30 seconds taking a nice little picture of a $20 receipt the first time.

<comment><USER40> I would beg to differ with that opinion.

I use JotNot Pro on my iPhone to track receipts. As soon as I get a receipt - say at a restaurant - I immediately snap a photo of it. JotNot takes a black and white contrast-enhancing picture of the cropped receipt that's as good as what comes out of a scanner and adds that image to my ongoing collection of receipts for that business trip.

At the end of my trip JotNot allows me to email a PDF of the collected receipts (or upload it to my DropBox).

I never lose receipts. I never have to deal with receipts that have rapidly faded because a little restaurant grease got on them (looking at you, Jimmy Johns). I never have to worry about finding a scanner and how to place each receipt on the scanner bed.

When I show co-travelers my process, they normally immediately download JotNot or find some alternative on Android since JotNot is iPhone only afaik.

I would be really sad if I had to go back to holding on to paper receipts and scanning them in via some other method.

<comment><USER41> Maybe I'll give the "taking photo" thing another try. I always end up finding it too fiddly and go back to sticking the receipt in my wallet but it's probably worth reconsidering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is a good shutdown analysis. But they didn't really mention that their sector has been pretty heavily dominated by traditional accounting software like Quickbooks for quite some time. I'm not sure how long, but I remember using Quicken in the 80's.

</comment><comment><USER43> And what has it been like moving to Slack? Are people using Birdly more?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes they do, and I think it's also because of the "emotional" factors. People talk to a bot and have this feeling they have a personal assistant guiding them through the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Saving four hours a month is great, and if you have a captive audience who is being told to use the mobile app to submit expenses, that will force adoption.

Trying to get individual users to adopt a workflow is going to be much harder.

The target audience for the mobile app might not be the users themselves, but their managers.

Also, your workflow of using Slack to enter expenses, which looks awesome btw, might actually be easier for people to use than stopping midstream to use a mobile app.

<comment><USER45> I cant believe i'm reading this.. How is saving 4 hours per month useful, and how in the world is it worth learning a new app for that.

Maybe this isn't really the right place to say this, but the moment the world will realize how crazy this whole startups thing is getting..

<comment><USER22> I think your place of wonderment is misplaced. If someone can save 4 MINUTES of an activity they HATE to do - it is worth learning an app.

There are all kinds of companies that basically help you save time doing what you hate: Premium Pickup Laundry Services, On-demand Valets, On-demand cars. When was the last time you said "fuck it I'm going to take a taxi because I don't want to learn this new UBER app"?

Companies reimburse BILLIONS of dollars to employees every year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The new service looks really useful but I'm bummed out it's only available as a chat bot?!

<comment><USER22> Would you prefer it to be a mobile app?

<comment><USER46> I'd prefer it to be open sauce self hosted web app

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I, for one, would love to try and use this app daily. I currently use Microsoft Office Lens to snap all my receipts. Unfortunately, it has some very awful ways to store it which is primarily in the Photo Album... Would be lovely to have a generated excel of things.

<comment><USER22> Try Expensify - take a picture of a receipt, it is automatically OCR'd, read and verified - and it becomes a row in an excel spreadsheet you can send to your accountant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I like this article because for anyone who has not tried to sell a product, it can be very easy to become deluded about how hard it is, due to the endless noise from the press and VC community that tends to talk up successes and gloss over the difficulties (the notable exception to this being Ben Horowitz).

I've found this thought experiment to be useful when evaluating new product ideas: People will buy your product for sure if a) there is a law saying they must, otherwise go to jail or b) by doing so they straight away save a significant amount of money vs something they were already doing/buying. If your product isn't close to either of these cases, you are likely to fail.

</comment><comment><USER49> I've tried several receipt tracking apps, and they all failed to overcome the OCR challenges.

If there is even a 20% chance the app cannot recognize the total amount (ignoring taxes and tips), then suddenly I am manually reconciling unrecognizable receipts.

So, if I'm always manually reconciling expense reports, then why bother with an app... I'll just continue taking pictures and forwarding them to my email for manual expense reporting. 100% of the task can be done in one sitting.

That being said, I SINCERELY HOPE somebody WILL develop the machine learning algorithms necessary to get 99% OCR accuracy in this space.

<comment><USER50> There are plenty of companies that just have a human read your receipts. Hell it can even be automated with Mechanical Turk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Is the problem more that this is a feature, not a product? That is, integrated with expense report systems, tax management, any other business tools, this makes sense. But as a standalone, it feels like an island.

This was similar to TripIt which organized your trip based on parsing confirmations. At the end of the day, it was a great feature, but struggled to grow beyond a certain point as a product.

Love the idea behind Birdly... but I think it belongs in other apps/tools used for more frequent and broader business needs. (i.e., here's hoping for a great acquisition and adoption for you!)

</comment><comment><USER52> This guy's business was "take a photo of a receipt for every single thing you buy, then upload it to us, and (supposedly) save four hours a month." It's hard to imagine it not failing.

</comment><comment><USER53> OneNote & OfficeLens has replaced many apps on my phone. It's true that the other apps were better tailored to the problem, but the effort to install and maintain so many apps with a couple mobile devices (tablet and phone) is just too much: app features and layouts keep changing, credential info needs to be re-entered and then I get to my desktop and there is no application for Windows or Mac. For better or worse, if the requirement can even partially be met with OneNote or Evernote, they will probably just use it.

</comment><comment><USER54> It's not a terrible write-up but I think it may be a little delusional both ways. I'm not totally convinced that they type of app they built could not find a decent audience. The app "makes sense".

And "Don't bother creating a mobile app" is terrible advice. But if you are going to create a mobile app, you have to really try an understand if it makes sense, how people are going to find it, if it's compelling enough, if it takes advantage of "mobile-ness". Etc.

<comment><USER5> Likely would/could have found a bigger audience if it hadn't been limited to the French app store only...

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I'm not that surprised. I would _never_ remember what an app named "Birdly mobile" did, when finding out I installed it last month.

Neither would I find it again, if looking for that "receipt scan app I installed last month".

I tend to forget what apps I have installed, what they do, and their names, and anything else than a really descriptive name, such as "RunKeeper", would not get used much in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER56> Reading the article, all I could think was "sounds like a problem with getting users to form new habits."

Those categories they listed are apps you'd use on a daily basis, or that have some kind of notifications (read: dopamine hits) built in. They build up a habit loop by making the app fun to use, and emitting notifications to keep the users coming back during that formative early usage period.

Monthly expense reporting (or monthly anything, really) seems like a rough road for building habits.

</comment><comment><USER57> From my own patterns, I sort of agree with the conclusion but there's one app that I keep even though I only use it a few times a year and it's a PDF "scanner" app. The difference is it replaces an expensive piece of hardware and it does it better than the hardware. I'm not sure Birdly really solved any problems that couldn't be solved just as easily with built-in apps or even pencil and paper.

</comment><comment><USER58> I think they fell for the myth that "ideas don't matter, execution does"

If you start with a flawed idea there's no saving you, no matter how hard you try.

</comment><comment><USER59> I'd like to use something like this to verify that my credit card statements are accurate. I _don 't_ want to give an app access to my bank logins (as I believe Mint requires). So I envision a workflow where I snap receipts, the app digitizes them and produces a transaction list which it either compares against a monthly statement PDF, or I do the verification by hand.

Anyone have a good, established workflow for this?

</comment><comment><USER60> I imagine it is very hard to make money with the types of apps that fall within those most popular app categories. Mostly free apps with advertising.

I guess I don't really understand the shift of ONLY creating a mobile app for productivity or business type stuff. Seems like these types of apps can more easily be monetized with a web app and "maybe" complimented with a mobile app.

</comment><comment><USER61> i believe that we - as programmers, product managers, ... - often have the wrong ideas about mobile. three examples from my experience:

idea: an app that helps people find shops with offers nearby

how people use it: users look up offers while they are already in the shop (nearly always inside big supermarkets.)

idea: vegan restaurant finder

how people use it: users look up pics of food of that restaurant while they already sat down in the restaurant (but as Instagram has more pics, they always switch to Instagram)

idea: apartments for rent app with awesome "find apartments nearby" feature

how people use it: to look up the newest apartment in the city while in the metro home

i believe it will take a few years more until we get mobile more right than wrong, until then be prepared to question your product hypothesis! (and best do it while you are running around, stressed, on your way to work or during business travel, you know, while you actually are "mobile" / or at home at your couch (also a mobile scenario) ... not while in the office in front of your mac book pro)

</comment><comment><USER38> Really weird to read this being someone who's using Expensify on a daily basis in exactly the use cases they describe.

<comment><USER22> LOL - totally. However, their interface actually looked sexy compared to expensify. But epensify works and I can use it on desktop....that's the killer. The mobile app is awesome for capturing but I like desktop for putting together reports.

Ultimately - I believe in Expensify's VISION - which is to GET RID OF EXPENSE REPORTS!

That's why I'll stick with Expensify - and I'm now at my third company that I am bringing it into....that is how software expands its footprint. By excited users bringing it into new businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Yesterday I put together a guide for making profitable mobile apps that might interest people - [https://medium.com/@PuzzleBoss/actionable-steps-to-make- mone...](https://medium.com/@PuzzleBoss/actionable-steps-to-make-money-on- android-4ada61d127ed)

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands It looks like you made the right pivot, moving away from a native app to a web app.

FYI - your mobile navigation isn't working.

<comment><USER63> I too was expecting a web app but it looks like it's just a slack bot now which is...interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Is the title meant to be linkbait? Cause this is quite the blanket statement.

How do you know what I'm building (if anything) and if it falls in a category that might benefit from being a native app and the distribution that comes with it?

What worked or did not work for you need not apply to every other business.

</comment><comment><USER65> I think this is a good article, but I don't like it when someone uses just one experience to generalize about something as broad as whether someone should or should not build a mobile app.

<comment><USER66> The title was provocative on purpose. As said in the article we believe mobile is very relevant in a lot of cases. We're definitely not trying to prevent anyone from creating mobile apps, but after spending a year doing so (and sure, making many mistakes on the way), we're just sharing our humble piece of advice and lessons learned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> This is a sincere question. Is number of times app is used per week/month/year a good metric to build an app? Wouldn't that be a typical utility for a Uber/Lyft?

</comment><comment><USER68> But do bother to advertise your new product on Medium!

</comment><comment><USER69> Might a monthly reminder notification have helped?

<comment><AUTHOR> Every user received a monthly reminder, and it did help, but having an idle app on your phone for the other 29 days didn't, unfortunately

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> How does Birdly/Bill do the processing of the receipts? Is it OCR software, a person,...?</comment>


How Travis Kalanick Is Building the Ultimate Transportation Machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2016/12/14/how-travis-kalanick-is-building-the-ultimate-transportation-machine/ <comment><AUTHOR> "More people earn a paycheck--or part of one--from Uber than from any other private employer in the world except for Wal-Mart and McDonald's."

<comment><USER2> Walmart and Mcdonalds are public I thought. They also forgot to look at amway and other MLM's that use contractors.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to store and stream private video content - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
What is the best way to create an online video-on-demand service with this requirements:
- Private and secure
- Analytics
- CDN
- Flash
- Low price
What's the best solution(s) for this? I was thinking of using S3 + CloudFront but it doesn't provide any security against malicious users. <comment><USER2> You may want to read: <http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_secure_is_my_data>

The easiest method for security via S3 would be the query string method, which lives for a defined period of time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can you explain why you say "it doesn't provide any security against malicious users"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. Check this link: [http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?t...](http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=40080&start=0&tstart=0)</comment></comment>


Square Roadshow Video - <AUTHOR> https://squareup.com/roadshow <comment><USER2> [https://d1g145x70srn7h.cloudfront.net/images/videos/roadshow...](https://d1g145x70srn7h.cloudfront.net/images/videos/roadshow/roadshow.mp4)

For those of you who would rather deal with a standard video player.

</comment><comment><USER3> The slider doesn't seem to allow going forward in time?

<comment><USER4> I noticed that as well. Pretty bad UX, imho. If you accidentally refresh your browser, you're forced to watch the whole thing over again until you get back to the original position prior to the refresh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Compared to the closest public First Data roadshow video (likely a private one for investors): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRMYeNBuBgU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRMYeNBuBgU)

</comment><comment><USER6> Heads up (squares up?), this video is about 38 minutes.</comment>


How not to treat users  - <AUTHOR> http://www.mp3ify.com/ Aside from the abusive Web 1.0 pelting with adverts, with an added twist of virtually demanding 20 bucks, this site enhances the experience by having custom insults by the owner thrown at users on the left tab message board. Not a way to run a successful, user focused site. Just a reminder to all of us. <comment><USER2> What is the specific problem with how this site treats users? A description of the problem and what should be done would be more constructive.

<comment><USER3> It looks like the poster is taking exception to this(see the left side of the page):

[katerina kastana]

error traffic!donate!we want money!sick of it katerina kastana 3/13 [MP3IFY CREATOR, DAVID]

dont let the door hit u on the way out. and for everyone else we're getting slammed. enjoy the serv... More »

<comment><USER2> I figured it was something like. I just thought maybe the original poster would like to come back and contribute something more educational for everyone than their rather unhelpful post title.</comment></comment></comment>


'Don't panic': One-tonne satellite falling to Earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24879140

<comment><USER2> Realtime track: [http://www.foxnews.com/science/interactive/2013/11/08/track-...](http://www.foxnews.com/science/interactive/2013/11/08/track- europe-falling-2000-pound-satellite-in-real-time/)

<comment><USER3> __Direct link: __[http://www.n2yo.com/?s=34602](http://www.n2yo.com/?s=34602)

 __More information: __[https://earth.esa.int/web/guest/missions/esa- operational-eo-...](https://earth.esa.int/web/guest/missions/esa-operational- eo-missions/goce)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The European Space Agency says it cannot predict exactly where, or when, but > that it is highly unlikely to cause any casualties.

So they cannot exclude that it crashes into a major city.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've got a towel.</comment>


Google already working on Yahoo Messenger integration or has been for a while? - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/06/21/google-already-working-on-yahoo-messenger-integration-and-have-been-for-a-while/ <comment><USER2> With ejabberd's (what they use for GTalk) cross-protocol modules (specifically, YIM), this should be relatively straightforward work on GOOG's part on the backend. I guess they must be really working hard to get the frontend interaction and design right.</comment>


Ask HN: Hacker News RSS feed for stories over a certain score threshold? - <AUTHOR>

Is there any way to get an RSS feed for Hacker News to only post stories that have a score over a certain threshold? I found one for Reddit that was created with Yahoo Pipes, but haven't found one for HN. The default RSS feed posts way to many stories for my liking.<p>Here's the Reddit feed for posts with a score of 2000+ http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=4a3af06dcba612424a858ea79dd263db&_render=rss&subreddit=all&threshold=2000 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/rss](https://news.ycombinator.com/rss)

Those are stories that pass muster. The reason why you shouldn't rely on score-based is that someone will game the system and it will become worthless. PG helps choose the main feed/main page.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://twitter.com/newsyc20](https://twitter.com/newsyc20)

Enjoy.</comment>


Can contributing to Open Source lead to Consulting gigs? - <AUTHOR> Say I contribute to one of the popular frameworks or libraries out there (like Django or React). Does it lead to consulting work? As in companies reaching out based on contributions demonstrating a certain level of skills with respect to the framework or library?
Same question for creating a popular library or framework that gets adopted by a decent number of people. People reaching out to get consultation or paying you to build more (where new work might or might not be Open Source).
Context: Setting up my consulting practice, figuring out how to get good quality projects and create a steady source of revenue <comment><USER2> No. I should clarify. A guitar player busking on the street _CAN_ get discovered by a record producer walking by... but the odds... Incredibly high.

</comment><comment><USER3> No. The hack that is better at advertising himself will get the higher paid consulting gigs.</comment>


33c3: Talking Behind Your Back [video] - <AUTHOR> https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8336-talking_behind_your_back <comment><USER2> I really enjoyed this talk. It relies on your smart phone being able to pick up the ultrasonic beacon and return it to the server to tell them you're there. And it feels a lot like the IMEI sniffing trash bins[1]. I guess there will be a market for a small ultrasonic 'fuzzer' device which degrades the beacons.

[1] [http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/new...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/news/updated-londons-bins-are-tracking-your-smartphone-8754924.html)

<comment><USER3> Or just a lowpass filter in the signal path ( assuming you can get access to this ).

<comment><USER4> Makes me wonder, how much data one could fit in the audible spectrum without humans being able to hear it, using ultrashort pulses and/or some clever algorithms?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is why you want capability-based security. If there's loads of speakers which are freely used by applications (lacking capability-based security), you can just use capability-based security on the microphones. That'd only work if you can control the devices though; so only on your own home.

On Android you can check which applications want access to microphone since 5.0 or 5.1 and the capability-based design during runtime works since 6.0. On macOS, it also works, and there's Micro Snitch which notifies the user when the microphone is active. Its from the same makers as Little Snitch. Its pretty basic; e.g. if you use Siri the log won't really tell much about which applications did use it.

<comment> dorian-graph There's Oversight [1] and Little Flocker [2] from Objective-See which can tell you if something is attempting to user the microphone or webcam, and allow you to block it if you'd like.

[1] [https://objective-see.com/products/oversight.html](https://objective- see.com/products/oversight.html)

[2] [https://www.littleflocker.com/](https://www.littleflocker.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290378](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290378)

3 comments, 3 days ago, 19 points.

<comment><AUTHOR> Damn, I did a search but I missed it. Sorry.

<comment><USER6> It's not criticism! As far as I know it's not against the rules to re-post. I just remembered seeing it before and thought I'd link to other comments people previously made.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do social sites with karma need a decay function? - <AUTHOR>

If karma in a social site is a reward for good behavior, it seems like it always becomes harder and harder for new users to "get ahead" compared to those who have been around forever.  Perhaps this lessens the incentive to good behavior over time?<p>Do such sites need to implement some kind of "karma decay" system, to prevent the leader-board from becoming more static over time and encourage new users to behave themselves? <comment><USER3> No.

I have been here since fairly close to the beginning (for the public anyway), and have moved around in the rankings quite a bit. Since I quit my job in May, I have sunk from 64 to 100. (I don't spend several hours every morning reading HN with my coffee, since I'm rarely up in the mornings now. ;) I can assure you that newer people are able to push ahead of older people if the older people stop participating.

For instance, I have been on here five times as long as qhoxie, but he has three times the karma I do. The reason the leaderboard might look stagnant is that the people in the top 10 are there for a reason... they are consistently more productive (in the karma sense) over the long run. If they started resting on their laurels, people like qhoxie would rapidly overtake them.

Also, as the site grows, it gets much easier to rack up tons of karma. At one time a story was really hot if it had 20 votes. Nowdays it's common to see things go well over 100. I was once really surprised to get 26 karma for a comment I made. Nowdays there are gems on here that regularly go over 50. More people voting means the new users actually can catch up faster.

(Of course, this also assumes that karma actually matters, which I debate. It's nice to know people appreciate what you said/posted, but you shouldn't just be saying/posting it to win a karma video game.)

<comment><USER4> I agree. As people join, karma becomes easier to get. The longer I've been on here, the faster I've gained karma. New users with a lot to say will rise quickly.

And the karma shouldn't be such a big deal! When I see somebody with low karma, I assume it's because they've been less active. The trend is always that the more you post the higher you'll get karma, because high-rated things have more visibility and therefore are more likely to get voted higher, and because fewer users can downvote. Karma's really fun, but people get _way_ too worked up over these rankings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> To be honest, I think the up/down notion of karma is the problem.

I'd prefer to see words being attached to comments instead of numbers. "Funny", "Insightful", "Accurate", and their opposites could be the method of rating, with "leader boards" showing the funniest, most insightful etc.

The notion of me as a user being "worth" #### points would vanish, and it would be replaced with a general "run4yourlives: slightly funny, not often accurate" descriptor based on the ratings of my peers.

Slashdot tried this, but they kept linking it back to numbers, which I think is where it failed. The idea should be to remove the notion of a numerical worth altogether.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like this idea a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is only a problem if there are very strong mechanisms in place that encourage/force people to actively compete for karma so that they don't risk losing their status. For instance, if high karma people are given more exposure or special benefits (early access to content; free stuff, etc.), you can bet this will lead to an increase in active karma manipulation. People will simply act accordingly to get better karma, which might not always be preferably depending on the type of community you run.

Karma is very important to people online and fooling around with it can cause hurt feelings. After all, Karma is often the only explicit reward that community members receive and is a way of being recognized for being a productive, helpful, nice and ultimately _good_ member.

Regards, WarTheatr

<comment><USER7> What he said. If there was some benefit to having more karma than "the other guy", then maybe.

That said, I'd still be in favor of one, only because "news" is temporal so "old" karma shouldn't be worth as much as recent. But, I'm shooting from the hip here and there are probably unintended side-effects I'm probably not seeing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think a good idea would be to treat karma the same way that tennis rankings are counted: Only the past 52 weeks are counted. So if you gain 1000 karma in a year, then don't participate, your karma will be 0.

That will encourage continual good behavior.

<comment><USER9> I think rankings in other sports might be more fun if they worked more like HN rankings. Baseball fans do a lot of that. It's kind of what baseball statistics are all about: The player in front of you is not just competing with himself, and the other players on the field, and the other players in the league. In a sense, he's competing with Lou Gehrig.

Of course, the reason to avoid putting dead players in the rankings is that the people who prefer watching competitions between living players -- i.e. the majority of fans -- don't want the dead ones cluttering up their leaderboard. But this is the web, not TV, so the solution is simple: Multiple leaderboards. Create a version of the HN leaderboard that only counts the past 52 weeks. Put it up at some URL or other. Then people can decide to use the alternative leaderboard if they want.

Heck, if we want, we can allow every reader to create his or her own leaderboard algorithm. Then we can have big chair-throwing debates about which leaderboard best represents the True State of Play on HN. That is _exactly_ how the world of baseball statistics works. ;)

<comment><USER10> I don't think we actually want to have chair-throwing debates over who the karma leaders are...while the leaderboard is a slight concession in the general direction of caring about karma, this site has always been set-up to stress the content of a comment over the nature of the author precisely because the accumulation of karma should be mostly irrelevant. Every comment that is posted about karma or some other meta-aspect of the community (including this one) is another comment that isn't actually content itself, and we should be trying to minimize such things when it is possible to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't think that the karma decay function would work or be helpful. Most people on the leader board, got there from hard work and dedication to make this site a really cool place.

I know that my participation in this board was a deliberate exercise in community building. I worked my tail off in trying to find interesting material that my fellow hackers would enjoy reading. It's pretty common for me to spend 20-40 minutes crafting a response to a comment.

A number of us were upset at the downfall of Reddit, and we were determined to make this a better place. I was one of those. And, while I still use a highly curated form of Reddit for news. I never participate in discussion there.

So the leader' karma scores reflect how much we've invested in this site. I don't think that's a bad thing. People on the leader board have made this site what it is. And, they're still the backbone of the site. Can you imagine what it would be like if nickb or edw519 stopped submitting? It would dramatically change the tone of the site, since their contributions to it are so substantial.

I know that I haven't been as active the past few months, but that's because school's done for now, and I've been building product. With any luck, I'll be launching by January. We'll see.

But adding a decay function to a site like this would only punish people who have contributed lots.

Maybe a better answer would be to increase the size of the leader board to the top 200-300 karma. That would give some recognition to the people that are putting in more work on the site, gut their karma isn't on the top 100. Just a thought.

<comment><USER12> > Most people on the leader board, got there from hard work and dedication to > make this site a really cool place.

Try posting every tc, mashable or rww article you come across for say a week. I predict your karma will go way up and this site will be less interesting because of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Given that I have fairly high karma, it's hard for me to claim that I'm unbiased...

... but this is a bad idea. For one thing, decaying karma is devalued karma. Why should people work so hard to gain something that is crumbling into dust all around us?

But the bigger problem is that absolute value of karma is not that important. The important social signal is in the first derivative. If you make a post that people like, your karma goes up. If your flaming instinct gets out of control, your karma stays constant or goes down. If karma is constantly going down _anyway_ it will confuse the issue. Either you're going to have to do some complicated mental arithmetic to figure out whether or not you suck ("let's see, I don't think I've looked at my karma total since Tuesday, so my karma should have fallen by 10 by now, but OMG I think it's fallen by 14, so I must suck!")... or, more likely, everyone on the site will subconsciously interpret the ever-falling number as a sign that they suck 100% of the time, so everyone will feel like crap at all times.

<comment><USER13> > Why should people work so hard to gain something that is crumbling into dust > all around us?

Like money which will decay with inflation, or perhaps the regard of people who will be dust in a few decades?

> If karma is constantly going down anyway it will confuse the issue

If that's a problem, the site can provide the 1st derivative (ignoring decay). A bit like music charts ("at number 10, up 5, it's...").

Some sites (perlmonks) already give you an xp (karma) delta whenever you reload the page. A last 24-hours delta would be more useful (again ignoring decay).

Then again, I don't see what the utility of decaying karma is personally. It smacks of "what have you done for me lately". I think it's OK to respect people for past glories.

<comment><USER14> _Then again, I don't see what the utility of decaying karma is personally. It smacks of "what have you done for me lately". I think it's OK to respect people for past glories._

Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why I don't participate on Perlmonks. There are a lot of people there that have "been around forever" and answer questions as though it's 1999. I really enjoy reading the "don't use Moose, it's bloat" threads from people I've never heard of.

Anyway, karma decay would be good for Perlmonks, IMHO.

<comment><USER13> Interesting. Perhaps that's perl's main problem. Ruby (or python) snatched up that generation of hackers since they could make more of a splash. Someone commented on reddit a few weeks back "perl used to have a really cool culture"

OK - I can now see a benefit of favouring recent contributors. It helps stop ossificiation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm just thinking out loud.

Elders a.k.a old people in a normal society are respected because they have been in the 'system' longer, irrespective of their accomplishments. That to me is one form of karma (Age)

Also, ppl who have accomplished a lot irrespective of age are looked up as role models in the society : the form of karma that most social sites capture - contribution.

Similarly bad acts reduce one's karma - independent of the good he has done - Hans Reiser comes to mind.

The total karma could be a function of (age, +ve contribution, -ves). The age can be based on some condition like page views/logins done etc. - <USER2> contribution OR can be unconditional too (today - creation date).

Active contributions can be also be classified into major and minor. Say a particular post generated > 1000+ points. It has to be given importance irrespective of age. Smaller events can be dampened - just like in the real world - no big deal. Same goes for -ves too. murder != pickpocket.

my view, karma = function (age, major +ve, minor +ve, major -ve, minor -ve)

and only the minors need to be decayed.

</comment><comment><USER16> One thing I've thought about in the past is should an upvote/downvote result in a percentage gain/loss instead of absolute.

The thing is, if you've only got 3 karma, and someone downvotes you, that's a big deal. But if you've got 3000 karma and someone downvotes you, it's not. Maybe a vote should result in a 1% gain/loss.

On the other hand, it probably doesn't matter _that_ much :)

</comment><comment><USER17> I would just hide (not remove) karma entirely. Submissions, comments, and users. That removes the incentive to game for karma and mitigates against the bandwagon effect, while the karma system still determines placement of submissions and comments within their respective threads. And I'd argue that high placement is reward enough in itself to promote meaningful contributions. Obviously, people can still try to game for placement, but it's less interesting when it doesn't contribute to an overall user score.

Anything having to do with a leader board, in contrast, simply encourages people to game for karma.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not if they're growing.

</comment><comment><USER19> It would seem that the Slashdot system of capping karma at "Excellent" is s means to this end, but Slashdot isn't a better place for it.

I'd say, that if anything, down-voting should count proportionally to your karma. If you've got 5k karma, you could go on a flaming-spree for days, and still have more karma than the best newcomers.

That said, I don't think it's that big of a problem. When I (and it's seldom) look at a users karma, I always look at it in relation to created-days-ago. Karma 100, created one month ago > karma 200 created a year ago.

</comment><comment><USER20> While you can probably improve a karma system with decay or a more complicated algorithm, there's something to be said for having a system simple that your users understand. I'd make a wild guess that karma wouldn't be as interesting to users if they can't figure out how their actions directly affect their score.

</comment><comment><USER21> The answer depends on what problem you think the karma-delay function is intended to solve and whether or not there is evidence that this problem is real.

I think the only place a decay function makes sense is in providing historic views of the leaderboard.

</comment><comment><USER22> well reddit haa a daily/weekly top 10 growers list on top of all time <http://www.reddit.com/stats/>

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't participate for the karma points. It's more of a measure how much non- conformists agree with me. Which sounds kind of ironic, doesn't it?

</comment><comment><USER24> A better option would be giving/removing non constant karma point (not always 1).

So something like +- 1/(1 + karma/2500).

</comment><comment><USER25> YES</comment>


Spotify's Revenue Is Growing, but So Are Its Losses - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/business/media/as-spotify-expands-revenue-rises-and-losses-deepen.html

<comment><USER2> Is it due to high operating cost?</comment>


Ask HN: Looking to create a plugin marketplace for my webapp. Any advice - <AUTHOR> We have a fairly popular SaaS platform that operates within the marketing industry (think Mailchimp).
We are wanting to setup an app/plugin marketplace and allow third-party developers to build extensions and integrations. These would then be submitted into the marketplace and our customers can then choose to enable them in their accounts.
Before we scope this project and build it, I thought I would post to see if anyone has worked on this project previously and if there were any docs worth reading. As well, are there any third-party platforms that can be used to make the process more easier and efficient. <comment><USER2> I've spent a lot of time thinking through the requirements, implications and tradeoffs of using a system like this as a growth engine. Feel free to email me or connect on LinkedIn (see profile) if you want to chat in depth.

</comment><comment><USER3> I personally don't have any experience with this, but I know Statamic just recently launched marketplace for their CMS that's been around for a while.

The guy who runs is Jack McDade @jackmcdade

Maybe ping him?

</comment><comment><USER4> Is it Mautic by any chance? ;)

<comment><USER5> [https://www.mautic.org/marketplace](https://www.mautic.org/marketplace)</comment></comment>


Why Android is ahead of iOS contextually - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+Scobleizer/posts/XbUx8R5Ywda

<comment><USER2> Can you remove the "I'm sitting with..." part?</comment>


Ask HN: Idea 5080 - <AUTHOR>

I have had a recurring idea pop up in the back of my mind over the last year or so, and was wondering if anyone would be interested in the service.
Here is the muse:  Every so often, there is a low point in my week where I am twiddling my thumbs.  I always think to myself, I'd love to pack in a 1 day freelance project, or 4-5 hours of work on something else for a while.
So I began thinking of a groupon for freelancing. Say you are in-between projects for a month and would like to still produce income.  You'd sign up, upload or link gallery, put a number of hours or days available, and clients would make offers.
Just trying to get a bit of validations before i design it up.  Thanks all! <comment><USER2> How would it be different than Odesk, elance, guru, etc?</comment>


Show HN: Babydook – digital journal for keeping photos and info about your baby - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/pk/app/babydook/id961189700?mt=8

<comment><USER2> The name reminds me of The Babadook, a critically acclaimed movie from last fall about postpartum depression / the horrors of childrearing. Not the greatest association, I'd think.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting idea, but how is it different from note keeping apps ( like evernote ) ? Infact now that i think i can actually do stuff like this using a private instagram account. The UI from the photos looks really nice though, i presume this isn't your first app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Evernote is a great app for keeping notes, but it is more oriented towards professional use. This, on the other hand, is a memory book for babies where stories are organised into albums. The easy-to-use UI is focused on pictures and rich text information about babies' firsts, thus creating memories that last forever.</comment></comment>


Computer Scientists Created the Parallel Programming Crisis - <AUTHOR> http://rebelscience.blogspot.com/2010/02/computer-scientists-created-parallel.html

<comment><USER2> Oh, its not so bad as the article makes it out to be. As a concurrent/parallel programming enthusiast (but by no means expert), I've been following the developments in this area pretty closely (blogs, articles, books, SIGPLAN papers, etc) .

IMHO the problem is that most programmers are so ingrained in their technologies of choice that they get overwhelmed and discouraged when trying fundamentally different paradigms and languages, so they get stuck with their C's and their Javas and whatever other languages are popular, but not terribly good at parallel programming. [1]

For example, I hear that Haskell, Erlang and Clojure do a fairly good job and managing the complexities of concurrent and parallel programming - why aren't more people using these languages then? [2]

The real win over the complexity of programming parallel software, IMHO, comes from the dataflow paradigm, which can provide auto-parallelism at a much larger scale than even functional languages (which can only do this when they do not modify state). For some reason dataflow doesn't seem to get much attention though, yet available research suggests that it can, indeed, solve the parallelism problem - or at least, a lot more than other languages have so far. [3]

For what its worth, the programming language used by Airbus and the Eurocopter is a dataflow language - though I don't know if it automatically parallelizes or not.

[1] Disclaimer: this happens to me too.

[2] Disclaimer 2: I have, so far, only tried one of the mentioned languages.

[3] Actually, the author agrees with me on this - Project COSA is, essentially, a dataflow system and was actually a big influence for me, though I'm not sure that it (modeling a nervous system, of sorts) is the way I'd handle it, but then again, hes probably more qualified than I am.

<comment><USER3> @[2] I think there's 6 or 7 leading families of functional lang's right now:

\- you mention Haskell, Erlang , Clojure,

\- plus scala, F#, ML family(ocaml), scheme family, common lisp family

\- lots of complaints on tooling: clojure's emacs and vim plugins engender a lot of questions on IRC and the google gropu, same for scala's eclipse, netBeans and intellij plugins (many folk say, or said netBeans caused the least anguish for both languages, or emacs /ELPA, swank-clojure)

\- books: Erlang, scala and haskell have excellent, up-to-date books, clojure they have several in preparation (the Fogus/Houser Manning EAP beta book looks really promising).

\- open source/freely available content:

<http://www.realworldhaskell.org/blog/>

<http://www.freetechbooks.com/functional-programming-f34.html>

<http://programmingscala.com/>

<http://books.couchdb.org/></comment></comment>


Mathematical marketing: a piece of calculus to change the way you advertise - <AUTHOR> https://mackgrenfell.com/blog/mathematical-marketing-one-piece-of-calculus-that-can-change-the-way-you-advertise <comment><AUTHOR> Hi folks, I'm the author of the post — I wrote it because I think a lot of brands tend to pluck numbers out of thin air when they're talking about marketing targets, without knowing how they're affecting their bottom line.

This might seem like econ 101 as zwaps mentioned, but there are a lot of brands who don't take anything like this approach still.

Keen to hear people's thoughts :)

<comment><USER2> Interesting post. "All models are wrong, some models are useful" \- Box. This one seems useful and is simple to explain.

It started me thinking about the distribution of customers who convert, viewed as a function of ad spend. I am not sure there is any reason this distribution need have a particularly simple shape, or even be continuous. E.g. maybe some customers can be addressed and convert at a modest ad spend, while if you double the ad spend you don't get any more conversions, then if you double ad spend again maybe suddenly you're out bidding a competitor and the number of conversions shoots up, perhaps giving you a better overall net profit than if you stopped earlier with a modest budget.

This might mean that the curve we're trying to maximise (net profit) has more than one local maxima, or might not even be continuous.

There's probably also an explore/exploit tradeoff here as well: how much of the total budget should you spend sampling to try out different ad spends across the whole range of plausible values (from 0 up to the long term value of a conversion, I guess) to get enough data to start optimising.

<comment><USER3> That is a fascinating line of reasoning. I wonder if there is some way to leverage historical data (for other brands, maybe?) to figure out potential local optima.

I original thought this was a nice "set it and forget it" marketing scheme, but your comment makes me think otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really, you're going to use a logarithm because it fits one data point better?

Besides you might as well just use all your datapoints directly. There's no real need to interpolate between them (and if you really want to optimize your ad costs that finely, don't use a function that predicts -infinty gross profit if you don't use ads).

<comment><USER2> From the article

> The graph above features a linear line of best fit. Clearly we can see above > that the data isn't linear, and a linear line of best fit doesn't make sense

I think the reason for not using a linear fit was that it "doesn't make sense", but the reasoning is not given. It would be interesting if the article explicitly said why it doesn't make sense, and why the somewhat arbitrary choice of the log function does. As you point out, gross profit will not be massively negative when there is 0 ad spend.

By my eye, the gross profit as a function of ad spend looks approximately linear in the region where data was sampled: say gross profit = 400 + 0.5*ad spend . If you plug that in & then optimise for total profit the most profitable non negative choice of ad spend is of course zero!

So in this case a structural modelling assumption that isn't well explained or justified (log vs linear vs any other function) has a very large impact on the answer. It seems like we're trying to maximise a function in a region where we don't have observed data.

Since the problem as given is data poor and modelled in a way that is trivial to compute, perhaps it is a reasonable candidate for: running some more experiments to get more data points ; or using a statistical method that can express the uncertainty of our structural modelling decisions & parameter estimation (e.g. a Bayesian analysis starting with a prior distribution of possible fits over a richer class of functions with plausible behaviour near zero) since we don't have a physical theory that justifies a particular functional form of the assumed shape of the relationship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fun reading for a university class, but the real world doesn't work this way. Optimizing for a target cpa is never a possibility because at an agency or in house marketing team your given x budget and expected to spend it.

I've never seen someone underspend a budget and be thanked for it.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. I would like to see further reading on the methodology of adjusting your spend to maintain adequate levels of conversion while hitting your budget.

Of course, many agencies can quite quickly find places to spend money beyond AdSense :)

<comment><USER7> Exactly, this appears effective projecting the fixed budget for one specific tactic, on a product with geo or demo targeting limitations.

The blog post failed to mention that when scaled up there is much more in play than strictly consumer acquisition (e.g. brand awareness) that is just as important when marketing in most B2C verticals.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right that there's more than just last-click cost per conversion, but that doesn't mean this approach is incompatible with these extra complexities.

You might run conversion lift tests as a way to calculate the impact of increased brand awareness, and you could plug the data from these into the method outlined in the post. There you'd be looking for the optimal cost per incremental conversion rather than just optimal cost per conversion.

This is just one idea, hopefully shows that the post's method doesn't have to just use last-click conversion data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Contrary to the dominant narrative of this _Hacker News_ post's comment thread, I find this mathematical modeling exercise to be rather informative and inspiring. Life sustaining. It can be considered practice that keeps the vital muscles active.

</comment><comment><USER9> How more convoluted can this explanation be? The question is equivalent to just "Find the maximum of nb_conversion × (cost_per_conversion - margin_per_conversion)", and the only interesting question is the relationship between the cost per conversion and the number of conversions, which is not a matter of math but of practical statistics.

</comment><comment><USER10> Much more easily, instead of plotting profit versus ad spend, plot (profit - ad spend) vs ad spend. Choose the highest point. If it looks like there might be a higher point not covered by your points, like how in OP it looks like the cheapest ad spend is the best, try going even lower. Instead of extrapolating, test. Extrapolating is much harder than interpolating and often requires some causal or structural understanding.

</comment><comment><USER11> So marginal revenue = marginal costs, aka Econ 101 lecture 1?</comment>


Docker Security Scanning - <AUTHOR> https://blog.docker.com/2016/05/docker-security-scanning <comment><AUTHOR> It looks like all major images lag behind on security updates. For instance, RHEL/CentOS has had a patch for the latest openssl vulnerability out (CVE-2016-2108) but the official image is still missing it after 2 days. Debian and Ubuntu images aren't much better.</comment>


Challenging Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2543012 <comment><USER2> It is probably worth noting the financial relationship George Mason University has with the Koch brothers.

[https://www.desmogblog.com/koch-and-george-mason- university](https://www.desmogblog.com/koch-and-george-mason-university)

<comment><AUTHOR> Where did that effect the numbers?</comment></comment>


Science backed parenting - <AUTHOR> Hi fellow parents!
We recently launched www.bestparents.club, the first research-backed parenting resource. This FREE service will send text based recommendations and activities to help you interact in the best way with your kids.
Sign up today at www.bestparents.club. Any feedback you can give us will be very appreciated.
Martin <comment><USER2> looks like no way user can unsubscribe. can you add link for unsubscribtion too??

<comment><USER3> It's at the bottom of the email.</comment></comment>


All we will ever have - <AUTHOR> http://al3x.net/2011/03/23/all-we-will-ever-have.html

<comment><USER2> "I found out that someone very close to me was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer"

I'm sorry. This part of life sucks. I'm going to shoot from the hip and give some insight. My apologies if it hurts.

Make sure you go see them, and show them some affection and share some laughs.

If they have a loving family and friends, someone or a few people will be physically supporting them throughout their illness. Be mindful of those who are giving them this support. They will experience their loved one decline quickly. Give THEM support. Be wary of the person who holds it all together, does the right thing, and then falls apart when their loved one dies. They need company and friendship after it all.

Good luck, and may the sun shine on your backs.

\---

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome." — Isaac Asimov

<comment><USER3> > Good luck, and may the sun shine on your backs.

But wear sunscreen

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Or to quote a crazy English band, 'All you touch and all you see, is all your life will ever be.'

</comment><comment><USER5> If you change "will" to "may" I'd agree wholeheartedly.</comment>


How to Build a Metaphor to Change People's Minds - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-build-a-metaphor-to-change-people-s-minds <comment><AUTHOR> I've been a huge fan of metaphors for years (own and have read 6-7 books on the subject) and this article was pretty insightful.

Stumbled across it today, when I was struggling for a conceptual metaphor of how a new project we're developing works.

Had to share it as I've found metaphors to be the power tools of great marketing copy.</comment>


Ask HN: How many of you use .slugignore? - <AUTHOR>

I recently learned about .slugignore, but it seems to be very obscure judging by the scarcity of information about it via Google.
It basically as a .gitignore-esque filter that serves to prevent files from getting compiled into a compressed slug and pushed with your deploys.
In other words, you can put all the files your Heroku app doesn't need to save the push time, bandwidth, and storage space, while the files still remain in your repo, unignored.
http://matthodan.com/2010/08/20/exclude-static-assets-from-heroku-slug.html
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/slug-compiler <comment><USER2> I use it for a project that is static generated via stasis. Stasis creates a public/ folder with duplicates of JS and CSS files, so I slugignore the originals.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had problems with .slugignore not working recursively in folders. Otherwise I would use it alot more.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm also struggling with making it work properly without workarounds. It feels like it's been abandoned as a feature.

Shame, because it's more relevant than ever with PaaS.</comment></comment>


Wozniak: Apple now 'somewhat behind' in smartphone features - <AUTHOR> http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/02/07/wozniak-apple-now-somewhat-behind-in-smartphone-features <comment><USER2> I prefer my Android to my iPhone (and Windows above those two, can't wait for Ubuntu!), but it isn't because of features, it's the way they are implemented.

I think it is more that apple is behind in the way features are implemented more than the feature itself.

One of my examples was that I got a text from somebody and wanted to call them. I can't do that in iOS. Even in iOS 6 (or at least it wasn't obvious). In Windows, I tap the persons name, and go to their entry in my people hub where I can see their tweets, facebook, call, e-mail, etc. etc. In Android, their is a (too small) button next to the persons name, and I can click that and go to their entry in my contacts.

This isn't a feature, this is basic functionality and UX design. How this could have been mixed over 6 iterations of the OS from the company that everybody says is so great at design is beyond me. Though, to me, in some ways it proves that Apple is better at telling everybody how great they are at design, rather than actually being that, while Microsoft is crap at telling people anything good about their products, while actually designing some pretty awesome stuff.

<comment><USER3> > One of my examples was that I got a text from somebody and wanted to call > them. I can't do that in iOS.

You can. Scroll to the top (or top the top bar to scroll up instantly) and click "Call"

<comment><USER2> What if I want to e-mail them? or do something else with that contact?

I don't have a SIM in my iPhone right now, so maybe that is why I'm not seeing the 'call' option, but I remember at the time trying to figure out how to get the persons contact details and I couldn't find it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wozniak has been a constant naysayer since the original iPhone came out.

<comment><USER5> I think it's more that he's been surprisingly honest about Apple at times when most people expect someone in his position to be an uncritical fanboy.

I'm always impressed when Woz criticizes Apple or praises one of its competitors.

It makes me more likely to listen to him.</comment></comment>