Why Personas Fail - <AUTHOR> https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-personas-fail/ <comment><USER3> The criticism that opened my eyes to the issues with Personas was this example from Alan Klement:

> Why did Alan buy the Snickers candy bar?

A. Alan is a thirty-five year old; has a degree in marketing; likes peanuts, chocolate, nougat, and caramel; loves Snickers, eats one every day; has an active lifestyle; drives a Honda; aims to retire from age 55

B. Satisfy his hunger

\---

My other insight was that many UX firms treat artifacts like Personas as the deliverable. It is something concrete to show the value of the time and money spent doing research. But it is a deliverable that has almost no value to improving the product. The point of doing user research is to improve the product, not to produce a beautiful 20 page "research document". But translating user research from interview into fully-realized and delivered features is _hard_ , and emailing a PDF of personas is comparably much easier.

<comment><USER4> "Satisfy his hunger" does not explain why he went for Snickers and not a different candy bar or an apple.

<comment><USER5> I would say that about 20% of the time that I buy a Snicker bar is to "satisfy my hunger". I usually buy it as a treat for myself.

<comment><USER6> I'm amazed that anyone would choose Snickers if they were hungry. It's just sugar -- eat a snickers bar and you'll be hungry again in 20 minutes. Is this not common knowledge?

I myself would only buy a Snickers if I was having a stressful day and needed something to make myself feel better.

<comment><USER7> > I'm amazed that anyone would choose Snickers if they were hungry. It's just > sugar -

No, almost half it's calories are from fat.

<comment><USER8> he meant by weight its over 64% sugar. Fat is a third of calories —36%— not half.

<comment><USER7> The nutritional info I found online has, for a particular size, 215 Cal, and 11 g of fat. 11 g of fat is 99 Cal, which is 46%, not 36%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my former life as a consultant I came to very much dislike personas as implemented by ux designers.

Personas are a magnet for prejudice: they are based on the idea that clusters of people all behave the same (old people, young people, professionals, stay- at-home mothers, what have you).

This very idea is, I think, flawed. If we really need to sort people into groups, then we should use criteria based on what people are trying to achieve _right now_ , not inherent characteristics that are supposed to influence/define their behavior all of the time.

Therefore it would make more sense to have _just one_ typical user, with different attitudes based on her -changing- goals.

<comment><USER10> I'll throw out another (admittedly anecdotal) issue - cost and effort to develop something that - in my experience - isn't all that valuable in the end. In my life as a consultant I've watched a team of UX 'experts' churn for 2 weeks over a set of 5 personas. Jaw dropped every time we would check in - this is what you spent the last 3 days on? Even more stunning was the client's reaction to the 3rd review of those personas. It was the same 1hr convo as the previous 2 reviews, and no one seemed to think this wasn't a massive waste of time and their money. After the personas were done, no one ever referred back to them for the remainder of the project. It was one of the greatest 'value minimization' excersises I've seen in my career.

<comment><USER11> Reminds me of a RACI matrix experience.

<comment><USER12> RACI can at least be useful for defining who should be in what meetings early on, how communications should go out, and even CYA later on in the project. It can be good to have investment levels explicitly defined.

<comment><USER11> There are probably plenty of places it's useful that I've just never been exposed to, but I bet for every one of those, there's two or more others using it who don't need it, but only because they were sold it by management consultants at a lean management training course or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Similarly, I hate it when vendors organize their site according to what they expect their customer's line of business to be, rather than the features that actually distinguish their own product or service lines. For example, AppliedMicro divides its products page into "data center", "carrier", and "embedded". So instead of browsing (or - dare I dream? - <USER2> filtering) the product lines to find something with the features I need, I have to decide which hat I'm supposed to be wearing to be sold the right thing.

<comment><USER14> Yes. I particularly hate when I am in none of the categories yet want the product or service. Makes me feel like they have no interest in selling to me right off the bat.

<comment><USER15> > _when I am in none of the categories_

Or, equally annoying - when you're in more than one at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've done a few sessions using personas and can see little benifit to justify the time expended upon them. If generated out of thin air rather than from actual users it's just an exercise in exploring the teams predudices rather than any external market needs.

<comment><USER17> Point 3 in the article:

>In order for stakeholders to use personas, they have to believe in them, feel invested, and have ownership over them. The most successful personas are created with involvement from their end users. Otherwise, people will have no understanding of the data behind them and the rigor that went into creating them. Coworkers may think that the UX team just went away and played story time for a few weeks, emerging with these fake people and asking everybody to play along. That is NOT the attitude we want to foster.

>To avoid this pitfall, you must include the persona end users in the process of creating personas. Invite stakeholders to sit in on a research session. Send out a daily recap of the activities undertaken to create the personas. Help people see how your research uncovers the customer segments early on, so that when you roll out the personas there is built-in investment in their validity and value.

<comment><USER18> _In order for stakeholders to use personas, they have to believe in them, feel invested, and have ownership over them._

I've done this a few times and no matter how convinced I was it was, in the end, pure fantasy.

 _The most successful personas are created with involvement from their end users._

I don't know what they mean by success: I tried to use personas to understand customers I _didn 't_ have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Important to differentiate between personas as archetypes and those based on stereotypes. The difference? Solid, hard-yards user research that comes from a large enough sample set.

<comment><USER19> "Solid, hard-yards user research that comes from a large enough sample set"

Unfortunately, not so simple in my experience. That's a lot of time and money many companies can't or will not fork over. So, shortcuts and approximations are used as an alternative.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree, unfortunately that is the tricky aspect: evaluating the cost/benefit of undertaking user research (with personas as one aspect, along with diary studies, interviews, observational studies et al - depending upon the nature of the tasks/problem to solve.

What definitely costs companies a huge amount of time and money is launching new products or concepts into markets - especially without some form of pre- qualification i.e. is there a need? does this solve a problem? will customers actually pay for this service? etc.

As the old user experience adage goes: "spend $1 on usability and save $100* down-the-track".

* made up numbers :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting how hardly any of this page is specific to "personas". Anything created without a clear intent to use it, or created in a silo and then imposed on the rest of the organisation, is likely to fail.

<comment><USER21> That's unfortunately how it's often done in orgs.

It's not just large orgs, either. I've lost count of the number of startups I've interacted with that had barely if ever talked to their own users.

<comment><USER22> It's more fun to play what-if with your fellow devs. We like to blame everyone else for feature creep but we add plenty of our own too.

That's a big part of what personas are for. To get out of analysis paralysis, and stop adding features that add combinatirally to the complexity of the app.

<comment><USER21> Heh, marketers play what if games too. The good ones just actually test their hypotheses (just like good devs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Their older article of matching personas with Jobs-to-Be-Done has always been a good one: [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/personas-jobs-be- done/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/personas-jobs-be-done/)

So is Intercom's: [https://blog.intercom.com/when-personas-fail- you/](https://blog.intercom.com/when-personas-fail-you/)

It also depends where you use these. While personas are often low value in product design and UX (where JTBD can shine), in marketing and sales personas can be a big help (although even there, JTBD has strong role).

</comment><comment><USER24> A lot of straw manning in this thread. Personas can be a very useful way to characterize your product's users. There are other ways as well. Each have their pros and cons. Personas are great for deriving a small covering set of concrete user types that can be used to guide and sanity check your design choices. It allows you to gather a bunch of user requirement info once and package it in a reusable way such that you don't have to do new research for every new design choice that pops up.

Have a new new design question about user needs or motivations? Consult your personas.

If the personas don't answer the question? Do some additional research and expand your personas.

Personas not the right fit for the question? No problem, use another tool like classic functional user requirements for this question.

Personas for food ordering apps demonstrate the usefulness nicely. You want to know the preferences that segment your users like restaurant quality, cost, and healthy options as well as demographics like age and income. From this you can derive a few clusters, and ultimately personas. Useful ones like "Jeff, the young workaholic that needs dinner brought to the office each night" or "Tom and Sarah, parents trying to find decently healthy takeout options for their kids". Now you can ask questions like, "do we have enough healthy options that Tom and Sarah's kids will like?" and "do we have an easy way for Jeff to reorder weeknight meals? Do we need a subscription plan?" You can do similar things with other user research tools but personas are very natural and intuitive for many scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER25> Although this article talks about them from the perspective of UX, personae are fundamentally a marketing concept. They are simply a handy abstraction to help non-experts reason consistently about market segments.

This is like using the idea of "selfish genes" to help people reason consistently about natural selection. We don't think that genes are actually selfish, any more than we think that all customers fit into a few neat buckets. It just tricks the mind into adopting a different perspective.

It matters for product UX because your product will only serve the people who experience it, and people will only experience your product if you market it to them. (This is often where developers, who tend to look down on marketing and PR, fall off this wagon. But it is largely true.)

If you want a basic concrete example of the value of personae, then compare the bathrooms at an elementary school vs a bar. You're not going to position the fixtures the same way in both. But in order to reason about that, you need to first know who is coming into the respective establishments, and why.

<comment><USER26> As a marketing person, I can confirm that they can often be a useful abstraction, particularly when collaborating with people who need to get the general direction of an audience, but aren't necessarily data nerds who need to be intimately familiar with the detailed demographics, psychographics, technographics, behavioral data, etc.

They absolutely have limitations and can overly simplify things to a fault sometimes, but as long as everyone gets that it is a representation and not the absolute, they can help streamline things.

</comment></comment><comment> pure-awesome This reminds me of a scathing and hilarious blog post about personas from 2013, where I actually first came across the concept:

[https://qntm.org/personas](https://qntm.org/personas)

<comment><USER15> A golden quote by the author, from the comments section:

> In the end, there is only one user story: "As a human being, I wish to > breathe, drink, eat, procreate and accomplish other, more abstract tasks _of > my own choosing_."

(Emphasis mine.)

<comment><USER27> > _of my own choosing_

Billions of marketing dollars are spent influencing people to make them "choose correctly".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Personas are always just a projection of bias whether from the UX team or from stakeholders. They are absolutely a useful tool, but often abused.

Too often I saw tickets written by product owners with stories like "As user type X I want to be able to do Y when I'm in this situation" where there was no empathy in correlating the actual functionality with anything to do with the persona and they literally just wanted that functionality in the system. Which is fine, but at that point admit your persona system is bullshit and you're just doing opinion lead development.

</comment><comment><USER29> While Personas may plausibly work as an aide for marketing program development (a convenient way to abstract audience preferences), it is fundamentally doomed as a useful UX design concept.

Any product or software is a TOOL to get things done. The UI is the exposed interface to allow that work to be done, whether it is the deign of the handle on a hammer, or the menu/button/etc. structure. The good UI makes it obvious and easy to perform the actual task or tasks for which the tool is intended.

A "Persona" is simply too vague a spec to provide guidance on how to design a more usable tool. What is needed is a clear concept of the tasks to be done, not some abstract set of demographic characteristics, motivations and attitudes.

<comment><USER30> UI design is not the same as UX design, important difference and potentially a source of misunderstanding. If you are at the point that you know that a page with a certain purpose needs to be made, then the UI is often not that hard to design and you can make use of best practices, a/b testing, etc.

But for UX design, you also need to figure out the "clear concept of the tasks to be done". Taking the perspective of the persona helps you define the list of tasks to be done. If a hammer is needed, a screwdriver or a phone (to call someone who can build things).

All people in the creation process have an idea about who that user is and what their needs are, by making it explicit you make sure you are all on the same page building the same thing.

<comment><USER30> To add a metaphor; when you design a class, you could say 'all i need is to know the purpose of the class, the API is enough'. But how would you define the API if you don't have a deep understanding of what the higher level purpose is of the class? The architecture used, related classes, etc.

Perhaps the class you want to work doesn't actually needs to be built at all because it will be never called!

Same goes with UX, it's first about the knowing the purpose of the program, architecture, the content, how it's related, etc, then you try to define the classes ('pages') and their API's ('what needs to be done on the page'). Once you know that, often the class ('the UI') is probably easy to build. But you'll probably make a better class if you understand why it exists in the first place.

<comment><USER29> Agree that this is a higher level of design abstraction.

Yet, I still do not think that it is a high enough level of abstraction for a Persona to be useful (you need to get out to marketing, if they're ever useful).

Even at the 'What classes/pages/workflows do I need' stage, what you really need is living users who are domain experts who will actually use the tool to identify both the tasks and the ways they might best be accomplished.

There's a reason that many of the best products are designed by someone who was building them for themselves as Customer#1 -- they internally knew what was needed.

To extend the metaphor a bit - you're trying to design an improved hammer, but how helpful would it be to consider the "Joe Carpenter" Persona and what he'd want, vs talking to a bunch of live carpenters and finding that they really have good hammers, but actually need better nail-pullers? The persona will get you nowhere, but the actual carpenters will get you a new market and product that sells.

<comment><USER30> The best persona's are based on interviewing real people, and I totally agree that you need to keep doing those interviews to validate your design and when the site/app/whatever is live.

it's not always possible to be your own target audience, for instance every time you design something for someone who doesn't care about how technology works :).

To add/stretch the metaphor; I get why (big investments in) personas can feel like a waste of time, in the same way that you can waste a lot of time on software architecture. It only makes sense if the team is going to use it. And even then for simple projects it may be fair to say that common sense is good enough. Still it can't hurt to invest 20 minutes in talking about the architecture/personas just to be sure we're all somewhat on the same page.

<comment><USER29> Of course it's not possible to always be your own target audience, just an ideal example. Yet your counterexample is also interesting. I'd say that you need the best domain expert to design something for someone who doesn't care how tech works. Obviously, this expert canNOT be one of those myopic tech- centered geeks, but the essence of designing for non-tech users is to understand the tasks & goals at a very deep level so that you can effectively simplify the UI & process.

I'm all over architecture, as that can really simplify the dev, maint, upgrade, sysadmin, & running processes.

But it'll take a lot more than these examples to convince me that personas are useful for development.

I could be convinced that Personas are useful for marketing, but that's because I don't know that much about marketing ;-)

<comment><USER30> So you get that best domain expert in the room with (part) of the team and then the team needs to document the knowledge it has learned, to make it easy to reason and discuss design choices for when the domain expert is not around..

"I could be convinced that Personas are useful for marketing, but that's because I don't know that much about marketing ;-)"

I guess the marketing people are right then. Everything is marketing :)

<comment><USER29> They should be documenting the actual _micro-detail_ of the tasks themselves, what are the essential inputs & components of the tasks as well as the signs/outputs/feedback that helps the user do it correctly and efficiently.

Zero of this detail has any significant or useful relationship with broad characteristics of some abstract set of demographic characteristics, motivations and attitudes.

The team should NOT be attempting to abstract the domain expert's knowledge into some silly Persona, which will _lose_ all of the micro-detail about how the person would actually perform the task. It'd be like trying to build a car and talking about the paint color after you just interviewed the suspension expert that told you about the key factors to the performance being how you keep the tire in contact with the road at the proper angles and pressures.

If you are designing a hammer, it doesn't matter if the user is a small high- school girl or an ex-Marine weighlifter, the characteristics you care about are hand size and grip strength, and the range of sizes and types of nails being driven. (The actual roles might be a small guy on the Asperger's spectrum and a Woodsman competing woman -- the persona is irrelevant)

If your app is balancing a checkbook, it doesn't matter if it is a high-school kid with their first account or a middle-aged worker -- the relevant data is the key numbers on the screen, and the degree of background knowledge they have which might influence what relevant data they want to see (e.g., novice vs expert mode). The persona tells you zero about the skill set or assumptions -- you need to know the detailed skill set.

Their age/sex/race/preferred clothing/music/etc. is utterly irrelevant.

I sincerely hope that you are not attempting to build tools of any sort, because with the kind of garbage you promote as input, for the output, I don't expect much...

<comment><USER30> "the characteristics you care about are hand size and grip strength"

"the degree of background knowledge they have which might influence what relevant data they want to see (e.g., novice vs expert mode)"

If your research shows you that those are the relevant perspectives to take, then you will base your personas on these main skill sets.

"Their age/sex/race/preferred clothing/music/etc. is utterly irrelevant."

You only include the qualities that make it a human being, so you can think of this person as a human. So yes you need gender, age, race. If they are not relevant to the task at hand, you can just take the average of your (expected) user base, so no need to spend much time on that.

As for micro-details, you like to have a perfect list of all essential. In the beginning of the process this is often not known. It's the job of the UX designer to figure out what is essential. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's not.

"I sincerely hope that you are not attempting to build tools of any sort, because with the kind of garbage you promote as input, for the output, I don't expect much..."

How sincere.

My goal is not to promote my skills, but to explain how personas are used in the UX process in practice to those who are curious about it. Let's say Jim, 31 year old back-end developer in Boston who want to move into front-end development and is curious about how UI and UX comes about in practice.

Secondary personas is me. I'd like to learn what the thinking is behind the negativity you see in some of these comments towards personas.

My current understanding that the negativity is based on a misunderstanding of what UX design is (it's more than usability and UI design), and bad experiences with personas in the past what wasted a lot of resources on 'irrelevant micro details'.

You seem quite passionate about providing a good user experience. Everybody has the right to be grumpy every once in a while, so I sincerely hope you have a nice day!

<comment><USER30> Can't reply to your comment, so I'll just say over here, thanks for clearing that up.

"I sincerely hope that you are not attempting to build tools of any sort.."

First, don't insult people like that, it makes you look small minded. Secondly; I'm working on a text command based ux tool :), you might just be my target audience.

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

<comment><USER29> Fair enuf, mostly referring to the handicap you'd be working under w/those abstractions. (should have written "not developing tools under that handicap..." or similar)

Looks like a cool tool -- I'll check it out!

[edit: +descriptive parenthetical]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The article mostly suggests that personas are just done wrong, and that's why they fail. Has this method ever actually been proven to increase success? In my experience, they always end up being hideous stereotypes that nobody takes seriously(for good reason).

</comment><comment><USER32> Personas are primarily a mapping tool for providing the team with a library of potential users, their background and needs with relation to your product and to which the team can design up against. They fail (at being useful) because they often have very little to do with the actual user's situations.

A better way IMO is to use customer support to figure out who your users actually are or go and speak with your users and learn what they actually want.

We never recommend doing them unless a project needs a lot of documentation for a lot of switching hands and you are worried that some of the insights might be lost on new team members.

As a design tool they aren't really that helpful for anything.

</comment><comment><USER33> Funny title that everyone reads and goes on with their comments. The article was saying Personas in their current form fail. Mainly, because the companies that design professionals use them for are not being utilized together with the clients involvement. They aren't being translate throughout the entire design process, they are for understanding design reasoning, instead of always bringing up random things a customer may need, they are compacted into easy to id personas, and that is what they are for. Simple recall, for clients and designers to have a common vocabulary to talk about who we are solving problems for.

</comment><comment><USER34> In my opinion, personas fail because it's literally profiling, which has limited use in identifying real world behavior.

Who you "are" doesn't define what you do, so I think the activity model works better for UX work.

Instead of maximizing a product for "Jim" from Marketing, optimize for what Jim needs to do and get done. Everything else is some sort of weird bias.

</comment><comment><USER35> I feel like I need to point out that in my experience demographic personas like this aren't used by product designers. I've seen marketing use them. Not designers.

Designers often get associated with fluffy exercises so I want to kill that stereotype. I don't think I've ever worked on a product team that used demographic personas like these.

</comment><comment><USER36> Not what I was expecting. I love my personas. Most of them, anyway. Especially Mirimir. Some of them are not so nice. But hey.

</comment><comment><USER37> Why not create profiles of real customer contacts? Use their own words for how they describe themselves and their goals.

<comment><USER38> That would require real effort instead of storytelling during work hours.

Whoch is harsh, but that's the point. You are going to get far more insight from real customers than you are from one relatively homogenous sub- department's imaginary beliefs about who your customers might be.

IMO the latter is pretty much the definition of one of David Graeber's bullshit jobs.

[http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless- jobs-d...](http://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-david- graeber/)

<comment><USER39> There's nothing more valuable than watching customers actually use a product. Almost never will they do it the way you expect, and absolutely never will they want to do it the way that the designer intended. Nothing points out a painful, complicated, broken, confusing UI as quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Here's an interesting counter point: [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/personas-jobs-be- done/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/personas-jobs-be-done/)

</comment><comment><USER41> At best, it's something that arises organically from requirement elicitation without involving a UX team.

At worst, it's completely off the mark.</comment>


My Language Features Are Your Libraries - <AUTHOR> http://hicks-wright.net/blog/my-language-features-are-your-libraries/

<comment><USER2> The author would've sounded less ridiculous if he'd picked some other language than C++ to represent the minimalist language mindset. But it would've been harder for him because most actual minimalist languages have lambda and can eat LINQ for lunch in the same manner as Smalltalk.

Steele and Sussman's lambda papers thirty years ago showed that full lexical closures could be efficiently implemented. Thirty fucking years, folks. That's more than I've been _alive_. Lexical closures are not some kind of fucking _novelty_. There's no fucking _excuse_ for omitting lambda from any language developed today, except if ya got paternalism issues and would also slash developers' tires so they don't crash their car.

<comment><USER3> > _except if ya got paternalism issues and would also slash developers' tires > so they don't crash their car_

Which exactly describes most 'Enterprise' software shops.

(Side note: you make a good point, but would have made it just as clearly without the cursing.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think this comment (by the original post's author), succinctly answers this whole post:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=619320></comment>


Ask HN: Is 'Uber' Silicon Valley's 'Enron'? - <AUTHOR> Just a thought. <comment><USER2> On one level, yes.

Uber very well could go under with associated scandals.

On another level, no.

The severity of Enron was much worse. Enron had crazy derivative positions that it could not possibly close out. Enron also filed fake financial reports with the SEC which is a crime. (Mismanaging a business, in itself, isn't.)

Uber has blown a lot of money on subsidized rides for residents of top global cities; it may be on the hook for car leases and probably has some debt. It can probably be wound up in a straightforward way if it goes down. I could see it folded up in an acquisition.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you break into software consulting? - <AUTHOR> My partner and I have, between us, built stuff for early-stage startups (including YC ones), later stage startups, big tech companies, and academic institutions. We're both going to have a lot of free time in the coming year and would like to start doing consulting work together, but aren't sure where to start - what are the best networks to tap into/things we can do to get the ball rolling? <comment><USER2> You will need to break out your sales skills and tap the network you just mentioned.

On paper, having built stuff for YC startups sounds like you are plugged into an amazing network. So it is a balance of being direct "hey we are taking on new clients!", and a balance of going to events and being more indirect and observant.

Go to events, go to trade shows, be social, make yourself known, write blog articles under the name of your group that they can find you under, and if you can manage it publish some open source code.

All of this sounds way easier and like less time investment than it really is sadly, but it will build your reputation.

But in summary, the consulting gig requires a healthy portion of creative sales skills and other skills, so have fun practicing them all in addition to tech skills.

good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps this helps:

1\. Landing page with your names, contact info, and experience/skillset. Answering the usual questions like what kind of work, etc...

2\. Email everyone you have worked with or talked to, say "hey hope you don't mind this email, we're available for consulting, here is some more info, do you know anyone that might be interested? If so would you mind sending an intro." Also call some people if you know them well, calling will likely work better than emailing. Trick is: don't ask THEM to hire you, ask them who they know that might want to hire you.

That should get the ball rolling.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems you already have the ball rolling.

I started off similar to you, working predominantly with YC and other incubator startups. Tapping into those existing networks is what kept feeding me with new work.

So leverage what you already have and ask your past clients and their friends for work or even just letting them know you're available to give advice/critiques on what they're doing (that will hopefully lead to contracts after you've shown your ability to solve problems).

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't have a magic formula but if you want to talk give me ring. Also, look up past patio11 posts on same topic.</comment>


When can startups be called successful, e.g. reddit, dropbox? - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/when-can-a-startup-be-called-successful-eg-reddit-dropbox-yc.html <comment><USER2> When the startup can effortlessly expense a large shark tank to their office/space without pissing anyone off.

Because to do that, a startup really needs to be successful (roughly according to the points brought up by the article)... otherwise you will be angering your investors who don't have a return or they will regard you as horsing around, your user base will be unsatisfied and regard you as wasting money and time, and money wise you must be pretty profitable, etc.

<comment><USER3> _When the startup can effortlessly expense a large shark tank to their office/space without pissing anyone off._

This reminds me of the _T. rex_ skeleton that lives at the Googleplex.

<comment><USER3> I just found it on Flickr:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/jowens/2330818928/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems that having investors increases the likelihood that your business will be labeled a failure. If you take $10 million, you have to exit with at least that to be labeled a success. If you take nothing, or just a token amount, and reach ramen profitability, you can exit with any amount and be a success.

It is just like making movies. Spend $200 million on a movie, and it needs to gross at least double that to be a success. Make a $1 million indie movie, and it will be a smash hit when it earns $5 million.

<comment><USER5> It's honestly nothing like making movies, because most movies that are considered 'successes' wind up losing money.

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/05/the_friday_podcast_an...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/05/the_friday_podcast_angelina_sh.html)

<comment><USER4> _most movies that are considered 'successes' wind up losing money._

It's actually just like the movies. The movie is set up as a corporation, which is funded by an investment by the studio (read:venture capital). The movie is made by the producer, director, actors, crew (founder, advisors, employees, contractors). The movie is released (public launch), and hopefully after a few months of being in theaters (ramen profitable), the movie leaves theaters (makes an exit). The corporation that was formed to make the movie pays back the studio (its investors), and the producers, directors, and maybe the lead actors get their backend cut (stock options). The corporation always "loses money" because the studio always gets paid back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I posted this over there, but it relates to HN as well:

\--- These are good thoughts, and of course, it seems clear the devil is in the details when it comes to defining 'success.' : ).

With the exception of YC, which as you say, has markedly changed the startup landscape without mind-numbing returns (so far), many of the concerns you mention are financial, or sort of finance-expectations outcome oriented.

There's a whole other category of outcomes that businesses traditionally provide: employment, social, civic and cultural improvement. While it's nice to get rich, and nice to have a successful exit, and even nicer to do it in such a way that other investors wish you would do it for them, almost everything you mention above is focused on the outcomes for a really small number of people: founders + investors.

This strikes me as venture capitalist thinking, and makes me think you've spent a lot of time with VCs, and not as much time with people trying to say, invent new water filtration technology, or build out a wind farm with a 50 year ROI, or maybe just make it as farmers in the developing world, .

There can be an element of small-minded profit focus in the VC world, a focus which can choose to ignore the 'but so what?' question -- 'So what if we got our clients 35%, ourselves 2/20, and the entrepreneurs 5x their salary potential for the period?' The billionaires I've met rarely seem to think about money as a measure of success; they are typically extremely engaged with the question of how to put that money to actual and good use, applying the principals they've learned along the way -- not wasting it either in a social sense, or a financial sense. They are typically extremely people focused, whether they live simply or extravagantly.

So, to me, there's a possibility of a sort of higher calling in business and entrepreneurship; moving past the 'make money for our close-knit stakeholders' idea to making a change in the world, in the lives of employees, actually moving job creation numbers, and so on. In a way, whatever floats your boat.

I believe that if, as an entrepreneur, you optimize only for financial success -- e.g. first your own exit value, then investors, you run the risk of hitting that 'so what' question hard -- perhaps when you've gotten rich, perhaps when you failed miserably.

On these terms I would call YC an unqualified success -- PG didn't need the money; he needed to do something useful with the money. He and his team have done that, and helped re-spin tech entrepreneurialism in America. I think that's awesome. But, I think it would be great if the work that's been done on showing young 20-somethings how to launch could be extended on pitching them on 'why' with a long-term view. Most mid-life entrepreneurs spend a lot of time thinking about the why, even while they continue to enhance their skills and ability to deliver good financial results.

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe it should be something like this:

 _Founders_ : 5x the salary they could have expected in a job over the same period they worked at the startup, after taking off any monetary investment they put in (+ interest) and adding any salary earned.

e.g. $60k * 2 years * 5 = $600k for a successful exit per founder.

 _Investors_ : 5x their investment

</comment><comment><USER8> Great post! I'll paraphrase Scott Rafer: "An entrepreneurs success should be measured by the cash he puts in his pockets." By that measure, I think Dropbox is currently a success-- Drew is (or should be) making more money than he could if he'd gotten a job instead of founding Dropbox. For Drew, it'll be MORE successful when it exits. But if it crashed/burned now, it'd still be a success for him.

Of course, every startup has a different objective-- and every stakeholder has an objective.

</comment><comment><USER9> when they are cash flow positive and the point where they are actually profitable is in the foreseeable future and can be calculated.

</comment><comment><USER10> Let's apply this to Diaspora. What if they end up with something that has an active, satisfied user base, which is also small. (Just for the sake of easy calculation, let's say it's 170,000 actual, active users.) Would Diaspora be a success?

<comment><USER11> I don't think so. Their stated objective is to change the world's social networking platform. Not start a lifestyle business or pet project. If they had gone into it with a hobbyist's approach 170,000 users is success.

<comment><USER10> So then success is tied to intention? What if John Doe did a bootstrap startup with the intention to become the next Bezos, but instead ended up making $500k a year? I'd still call that a success.

What if it ended up that Diaspora managed to gain enough users and convert enough of Facebook's user base to gain about 17.5% market share? (Measured in time online, on-site. Probably hard to measure, but this is a hypothetical.) Would they be a success? What percentage would represent the threshold?

<comment><USER12> In your example, I think you would consider it a success, but perhaps John Doe would not, in that he didn't fulfill his goal. If he did consider it a success, then I'd say that's due in large part to the fact that he must have revised his goal somewhere along the way.

Based on that, I would say success is 1) different things to different people, and 2) the fulfillment of each person's goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the core question is, would you have been more satisfied not doing it and going with the next best option. Hopefully the next best option is something stable, so you can make a useful comparison.

</comment><comment><USER14> The investors would call it successful when there's a solid and positive exit.

</comment><comment><USER15> when it has created and captured more value than its consumed and free cash flow is rising. and your mom is bragging about it</comment>


Ask HN: AI on the open web? Really? - <AUTHOR>

My site is https://www.urdesk.net
It is a full-blown OS-in-a-browser.  After 2+ years working on the nuts and bolts of the system and a few silly apps, I have recently gone all-in with the AI concept that initially turned me on to programming.
Using dynamically generated SVG faces, and the Chrome JS APIs for voice recognition and synthesis, I have been able to create a kind of "Hello World" example of AI. To jump right into it with Chrome, see https://www.urdesk.net/desk?intro=bertie
I am currently working on integrating the "Brain" module that parses the natural language input with the terminal, so users will really be able to dig into the internals.
My goal is to move towards full-blown run time configurability so that developers will be able to provide their own SVG faces, response templates, and even entire ontology schemas in order to develop domain-specific AI's.
Right now, the AI obviously only has a lone sense of hearing.  The next sense to work on might be seeing, by way of capturing webcam stills and running them through a machine vision algorithm.  I really doubt that there will be a JS API for vision any time soon... maybe a Native Client module could do the trick (at least for very basic seeing).
Given the AI prototype that I've developed that uses only Web technologies (even if they are non-standard/Chrome-only) what do you think about starting to turn the online world upside down?  For instance, it is pretty simple to connect all of this to the outside world via local node instances that can be talked to very efficiently with websockets, which can then send control signals to real world objects using modules like johnny-five (a JS robotics interface).
All I'm saying is that I am so infinitely sick-and-tired of the lame MVC/Backbone/React/Docker/whatever silliness that just doesn't do anything, if by "do", we mean having some effect on the world above and beyond painting some pixels on a boring LCD!
Who's with me? <comment><USER2> Sounds like an interesting project but not sure it needed a swipe at "MVC/Backbone/React/Docker/whatever silliness that just doesn't do anything"...just because foundations aren't as visible as what sits atop them doesn't mean they're silly pieces of engineering.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you think you think those things seriously qualify as "foundations", well, you're just wrong in my opinion. At least for my purposes, the only important foundational tools are the language (JavaScript) and the runtime environment that supports it (Chrome/V8). Everything else is just so much hot air that only gets in the way.

I am honestly a "foundational" kind of a dude. I was into philosophy before I was ever into technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm with you. I already am developing something similar to this on my own. Would love to chat and see what kind of product we can work on together.

This world can be so much better with an Web based OS. Especially one that's personal and listens to you.

email@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! Although... I don't know how much the _entire_ world can benefit from first-world tech innovation, I do think there is quite a wild frontier out there for people who are serious about pushing forward with the whole AI/robotics/"Internet of Things" meme. If you don't have a good mental mechanism for filtering out the noise related to all the "hot new right now frameworky schemes", then too much effort is spent on issues that are truly not real issues, and real innovation just isn't possible.

Will ping you from my "official" gmail...</comment></comment>


Introducing the Google Ajax language translation API - <AUTHOR> http://googleajaxsearchapi.blogspot.com/2008/03/introducing-ajax-language-api-tools-for.html

<comment><USER2> Very cool :) I just integrated it into a test version of Mibbit (IRC client)...

<http://media.mibbit.com/translate.png>

(Source on the right, auto translation on the left client)

Have to checkout privacy and things like that, but it seems to work pretty well.

Now I can go in a russian language channel and have a clue what's going on :)

<comment><USER3> Wow, you created Mibbit? Props to you, I use it all the time. I don't use a desktop client, and firing up Chatzilla can be annoying as I have a bunch of auto-server and channel joins that take a while to load up (useful for more regular IRC use, but not so much to check a quick channel). I was going to make myself a basic AJAX/Comet web IRC client, but then I found Mibbit, and life became good. :-)

<comment><USER2> hehe thanks :) Glad it's becoming useful for people. Still a ton of work - logging, scripting, open API, skins, etc etc But these things all take time eh

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, I was just working with a client on internationalization, but Google's API was for research purposes only. I'm so excited!</comment>


How we open sourced Instagram  - <AUTHOR> http://backspac.es/r/EtZtSJyJRB

<comment><USER3> Heh.. not very much on the "how" but I appreciate the effort!

I guess we'll be seeing a lot of these filters pop up in other apps now. I don't really mind, a lot of people gave shit to Instagram for being a billion- dollar-app which made photos look worse, but I think I prefer fake-shitty than the weirdly-sharp digital look that most cell phones produce.

Anyway, bravo, and that's for releasing this as free software!

<comment><USER4> Hey Mizza, you read the github page here [https://github.com/gobackspaces/DLCImagePickerController#rea...](https://github.com/gobackspaces/DLCImagePickerController#readme) for more info.

I think open-source obj-C has a long way to go, and I want to help as much as I can.

As for "fake-shitty" I assure you, these are not shitty, nor are they meant to be straight copies. Check out this high res version of the output <http://i.imgur.com/0OncO.jpg>

<comment><USER3> Heh, when I mean 'fake shitty', I mean the filters themselves are meant to make the photos look aged, blurry, etc. "Fake shitty." Wabi-sabi.

<comment><USER4> Ah, completely understand. Valid point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title feels a bit sensationalist. Yes, some open sourced iOS live filters are totally cool, but this really has nothing to do with Instagram.

Instagram is more than some photo filters.

<comment><USER6> Mind, this is the part of Instagram _everyone actually cares about_.

<comment><USER5> I think that's what is commonly picked up on, but I think Instagram's magic actually comes from how frictionless it is to share a photo and use the service. The photo filters are a part of that - the fun and quirky part - <USER2> its actually not what makes it special imo.

<comment><USER7> that's definitely fair. i guess we could have said it's more the initial hook of instagram that we're open sourcing :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Based on Brad Larson's GPUImage, amazing OpenGL based image filters library, very hackable if you learn GLSL :)

<comment><USER4> Yup. I made sure the second line in the repo readme was "The majority of the praise should be directed towards BradLarson for his GPUImage library."

</comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 What was actually released? The github page seems to have a single non-forked repository: <http://github.com/gobackspaces>

<comment><USER9> We released an iOS camera with live filters and blur at <https://github.com/gobackspaces/DLCImagePickerController>

<comment><USER10> The post is a little bit misleading. You didn't open source Instagram but a component used by the app. Am I right?

<comment><USER4> That's fair. if you are looking for full functionality, I suggest you merge Parse's AnyPic (<https://github.com/ParsePlatform/Anypic>) with this camera picker component. IG is much more than just filters, but it is definitely a big reason they are popular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for sharing. I'm more interested in how you created the curve files?

<comment><USER9> I created them using Photoshop, and used GPUImage to parse the files it created. I tested each filter on a sample of iPhone images in different lighting conditions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> i'm one of the founders at backspac.es and i was curious what people thought of the story format that's produced. feedback is most welcome :)

<comment><USER12> I came here to say "how the hell can I get a backspac.es account". Loved it, absolutely loved it.

<comment><USER7> Awesome!

For now you can just sign up on the homepage (<http://www.backspac.es>) and we'll let you know when we're good to go. Should be any day hopefully!

happy to chat more on the emails, twitter etc, cheers!

<comment><USER12> Signed up already!

Great job on it.

By way of exchange, I'll offer what meager observations my usability & QA expertise inform when I start using :-)

<comment><USER7> sweet! we're desperate for UX thoughts and feedback - definitely the piece we're most keen to polish for the first update :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Colgan Air disaster was a milestone in aviation safety - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-12/the-colgan-air-crash-helped-keep-90-million-flights-safe <comment><USER2> One of the biggest changes that came out of the Colgan crash is the so-called "1500 hour rule." Before Colgan, only the captain needed to have an airline transport pilot (ATP) certificate, the highest level of pilot certification. First officers (copilots) could fly with a commercial pilot certificate, a lower grade of license. Now, both pilots are required to hold ATP certificates.

ATP applicants need to have 1500 hours of flight experience—hence "1500 hour rule"—though there are exceptions if you've attended specific approved aeronautical schools or have military experience. Commercial applicants need only 250 hours. (Here too there are exceptions for certain training programs.) The standards on the flight tests are tighter for ATPs and the written exams are worlds apart.

As an instructor I can tell you the difference between a 250-hour pilot and a 1500-hour pilot can be enormous. Not always—some pilots have 1500 hours, and others have the same hour, 1500 times in a row—but there can be a huge difference.

This rule has been controversial though, not least of all because both pilots in the Colgan crash already had more than 1500 hours. And the FAA made so many changes after Colgan that it's been hard to tell which of those changes actually made the difference, and which, if any, were simply no-ops. Critics of the rule have especially focused on how many flight tests the Colgan captain failed, and how the response by the pilots to an aerodynamic stall was completely backwards. Aerodynamic stalls are something you learn in your first ten hours of training as a private pilot and drill constantly throughout your career, so to get that wrong at the air carrier level speaks to an incredible failure in training and evaluation.

<comment><USER3> It also isn't clear (aside from military) how people are meant to fund/attain ATP status.

There's limited jobs with which a commercial licensed pilot can gain hours (e.g. crop dusting, sky jumpers, instructors, etc) but the number of people trying to attain ATP/jobs requiring ATPs well outstrip the number of jobs to support those people getting to 1500 hours.

As you said, previously some airlines would take the pressure off by hiring commercial pilots and getting them hours as copilots. With the new rules they need 1500 before day one, so that has to come from somewhere and it isn't clear where.

This is one reason airlines are struggling to find pilots.

<comment><USER4> > This is one reason airlines are struggling to find pilots.

There isn't really a pilot shortage. Merely a shortage of pilots willing to work for slave wages. There are US pilots flying all over the world because they don't get paid what they're worth in the US.

<comment><USER5> Quick reminder: "slave wages" are exactly $0, and also you can't leave the job due to threat of violence. (And also there's a lot of violence anyway, and also bad housing and bad food and complete lack of personal time or space or privacy or any freedom of choice, etc.)

It sounds like regional airline pilots may have surprisingly low wages given how highly-skilled their jobs are. "Low wages" is a good term for this.

<comment><USER6> It isn't slavery, indeed, but waged can get lower than low. Pilots can be pressurized in accepting very low wages for the right to fly an airplane.

Reason? Pilots have to make flight hours in the plane they're licensed for to keep their license.

So, you are, say, $100,000 in debt to get a license to fly a 737, and you need a few hours in it this month to keep that license. Renting said plane for a few hours is very expensive. That makes an $0 an hour 'job' flying for a few hours look mightily attractive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is an excellent example of how regulation should work as opposed to how it works in regulatory capture situations.

In a prisoners dilemma like set up, if any airline unilaterally changed their rules for pilots and crews, they would "lose out" when they didn't have crews to fly, while other airlines would "win more" by overworking their flight crews. The only "win" was for all airlines to not implement these changes.

But when the changes were forced on everyone, it removed the advantage of not following the guidelines (well it added a criminal or civil prosecution risk) and so all airlines have at least minimally rested crews.

That message seems to get lost sometimes.

<comment><USER8> I would say this is an excellent example of how regulation _shouldn 't_ work.

Even before the Colgan Air crash, it was widely understood that regional airlines' overworking and undertraining of their pilots was risky. But the regulators either weren't able to do anything about it in the face of industry opposition, or didn't care enough to do so. It took a plane actually crashing, 50 people dying and Congress, which was lobbied hard by the families of the victims, passing new legislation ordering them to do something about the problem to get them to take action.

It's great that we have regulations protecting passengers from these problems now. But it would have been _much better_ if it hadn't taken the deaths of those 50 people to create an environment where it was possible for such regulations to be enacted. Good regulators protect people _before_ there's blood on the floor, not after.

<comment><USER9> _> Good regulators protect people before there's blood on the floor, not after._

So to be good regulators, they have to be essentially omniscient?

<comment><USER10> No. Post-mortems of these types of disasters usually reveal that warning signs were visible if anyone cared to look or act.

One example happening now: extreme, pervasive sleep deprivation in the US Navy. We've already had disasters that could've been prevented if someone talked to even a single sailor and realized how dangerous that is.

Another example is self-driving cars. We just had a Tesla crash, and yet Tesla will not be regulated properly and will likely kill someone soon. Arguably, they already have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> On youtube now you can find flight simulator reenactments of most every crash and air incident. They are quite fascinating and much much better than TV style dramatizations.

Here is this incident: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzY- hzxlqig](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzY-hzxlqig)

<comment><USER12> The air traffic control recordings alone are really great. When the guy stole a plane from Seattle airport to take it for a joyride, i got stuck and clicked myself through what felt like half the ATC recordings on youtube. Can only recommend it, the level of international communication is rather astonishing.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuedf_fJVrOppky5gl3U6QQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuedf_fJVrOppky5gl3U6QQ)

</comment></comment><comment> gingerbread-man The most significant regulatory change following the Colgan crash was the added requirement that all airline (Part 21) first officers possess an Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) certificate prior to hiring. Previously, only captains (as pilots-in-command) were required to hold that certificate, which requires a minimum 1500 hours of flight experience. [1]

In practical terms, this wasn't a big change (insurance underwriters already required it), but 1500 hours is a significant hurdle at at time when the US is facing a shortage of pilots.

[1] [https://www.flyingmag.com/news/faa-finalizes-atp-rule- first-...](https://www.flyingmag.com/news/faa-finalizes-atp-rule-first- officers)

<comment><USER13> It's not required prior to _hiring_ ; it's prior to _flying your first revenue flight_. The distinction is somewhat important as it's not as easy to get an ATP (any more) with the introduction of the ATP-CTP requirement.

Though I have no need for an ATP, I considered getting one under the old (quite easy) rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Compare this to cars. Every year in the US there are about 6 million car crashes, 3 million injured people, and about 33,000 dead people (so, imagine a city like Dover, Delaware being wiped off the face of the earth every year).

The most typical causes are alcohol, speeding, and reckless driving. In addition, seat belts cut the risk of death by 45%. So, if we wanted to keep people safe the way we do for airlines, we would just attack these four problems.

There are many solutions, but the simplest ones would involve 1) a mandatory breathalyzer, 2) speed limiters, 3) sensors that shut down the car when reckless driving is detected, and 4) shutting down the car if seatbelts are not used. These all exist today, and would save tens of thousands of lives a year, and prevent millions of casualties, lawsuits, traffic jams, etc.

Why don't we do these things? My theory is the illusion of safety. In a car, you're wrapped inside 2 tons of steel and plastic, and you feel safe. Even if you know _other_ people are dying inside, you feel like it won't happen to you. So we don't worry, so we don't care about changing things to save lives, because it'd be an inconvenience. But in an airplane, you're not in control; some pilot is. And you're hurtling along at at 500 miles per hour, 40,000 feet above the sky. That's scary. We better make sure those planes are safe.

<comment><USER15> It's harder to implement on cars.

1) People would (and do) cheat at mandatory breathalyzers.

2) It's not speeding that injures people, it's the speed differences that cause issues. Limiting a car to 70mph won't help when it's icy, and they should be driving 40mph.

3) How exactly would a car detect reckless driving? How would it know that it wasn't warranted (ie swerving to avoid a kid)?

<comment><USER16> > It's not speeding that injures people, it's the speed differences that cause > issues.

When two car are at a speed of 70mph, the maximum speed difference between them is 140mph, when they are at 50mph, it's only 100mph. So the speed of a car has a direct impact on the speed difference between cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I flew into buffalo that night about an hour before the crash. I remember thinking when we were landing that these conditions were some of the worst, and I fly a lot into Buffalo.

</comment><comment><USER18> My brother is a commercial airline pilot who flies world wide and pilot fatigue is real and very common.

Airlines have been making bank for the last few years and all they need to do to prevent pilot fatigue is reduce hours for pilots and increase the number of pilots/flight, especially for international flights.

These simple measures (albeit costly), will overall help reduce commercial flight fatalities across the globe.

<comment><USER19> My father was an airline pilot for years (American, US Airways, and then Etihad) flying domestically and then internationally. I'd guess that if the airlines wanted to reduce pilot hours the pilot unions would have a lot to say about that.

<comment><USER20> Are they paid by the hour? I'd assume that pilots would earn an annual salary.

<comment><USER18> Most pilots do earn an annual salary. I'm not sure what the previous comment meant. Pilots simply have to work minimum number of hours per month, but the issue is that most pilots are now working up to the maximum number of hours therefore there are actually pilot union striking because of overwork!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Based entirely on the headline: doesn't every crash prevent most future crashes that would have had the same cause?

<comment><USER17> Yep, I always loved this line from Antifragile:

> "But recall that this chapter is about layering, units, hierarchies, fractal > structure, and the difference between the interest of a unit and those of > its subunits. So it is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of > us—and, sadly, not them. We saw that stressors are information, in the right > context. For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the > benefits. We are talking about some, not all, errors, of course; those that > do not destroy a system help prevent larger calamities. The engineer and > historian of engineering Henry Petroski presents a very elegant point. Had > the Titanic not had that famous accident, as fatal as it was, we would have > kept building larger and larger ocean liners and the next disaster would > have been even more tragic. So the people who perished were sacrificed for > the greater good; they unarguably saved more lives than were lost. The story > of the Titanic illustrates the difference between gains for the system and > harm to some of its individual parts. The same can be said of the debacle of > Fukushima: one can safely say that it made us aware of the problem with > nuclear reactors (and small probabilities) and prevented larger > catastrophes. (Note that the errors of naive stress testing and reliance on > risk models were quite obvious at the time; as with the economic crisis, > nobody wanted to listen.)"

<comment><USER22> _The engineer and historian of engineering Henry Petroski presents a very elegant point. Had the Titanic not had that famous accident, as fatal as it was, we would have kept building larger and larger ocean liners and the next disaster would have been even more tragic. So the people who perished were sacrificed for the greater good; they unarguably saved more lives than were lost. The story of the Titanic illustrates the difference between gains for the system and harm to some of its individual parts. The same can be said of the debacle of Fukushima: one can safely say that it made us aware of the problem with nuclear reactors (and small probabilities) and prevented larger catastrophes._

Another interesting argument along the same lines is that if we hadn't bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there would have been no reason for Truman to stop MacArthur from using bombs a hundred times worse in the Korean conflict.

It's a sobering thought regardless of one's opinion on the atomic bombings in Japan. The lesson was going to be learned one way or the other, and arguably humanity got off easy.

<comment><USER17> I have never heard that one -- but it makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Meanwhile in Canada regulations are still appalling and some of the worst in the world: [https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/garneau-pilot-safety- airlin...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/garneau-pilot-safety-airline- regulations-1.4942385)

</comment><comment><USER24> How catastrophic must a software disaster be to receive the benefits of such safety regulation?

<comment><USER25> There are software glitches responsible for the deaths of on the order of 100 people, which has resulted in industry-localized development and deployment standards. When we see tragedies where 1000 people die because of a software glitch, or more likely, a systems or security failure, then I think we'll see legislators start coming for the software industry in general. There are already critical systems development and systems requirements; likely legislators will expand and formalize those kinds of programs.

All we need to do is have a public tragedy that can be pinned on "software".

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is real engineering. And this is what I'm most excited about with autonomous cars- black boxes allow the NTSB to get involved and work accidents out of the process.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think something we haven't learned from the Colgan disaster is how regional airlines are configuring these smaller jet and turboprop planes to fit more passengers, in ways they were not designed. That is leading the way towards profit over safety.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wish one could write the same title about software...</comment>


Authy: One token to rule them all - <AUTHOR> http://blog.authy.com/authenticator <comment><USER2> I may be dense but if you back up the tokens and protect that online backup with a password, don't you eliminate the second factor?

Now the attacker just needs to get two passwords (to the backup at Authy and to whatever account) so it's reduced to just something you (may) know.

<comment><USER3> Not at all. The attacker would need to get the encryption key and also access to the Authy Backup. Then they also need the password for your account. That said, backups are optional, you can skip them and your account will remain on your phone only.

<comment><USER4> How are you encrypting the backups? You recommend a passcode of at least 8 characters, which is only 64 bits. Are you at least running it through some sort of key strengthening algorithm like PBKDF2 to generate the actual encryption key?

<comment><USER3> We're not using PBKDF2. Were using AES-256, we pad the extra bits and use a random IV for each account. However you can enter a 32 character encryption key and you will get a full 256 bit key for encryption.

<comment><USER4> Ok, please don't take this the wrong way, but you guys don't seem to know enough about security to be running this kind of service. Being able to access your MFA token from multiple devices defeats the purpose of it being a second factor (since it's must exist only in a single place to be "something you have"), and now you're recommending a backup passcode with less security than WPA2 - a passcode to a backup that _by definition should not be allowed to exist_.

It's bad enough that Google's TOTP keys are too short (80 bits, below the required 128 and recommended 160+), especially given the clarity of the spec and the size of their organization, nevermind being the first large-scale rollout. It's also unfortunate that they half-assed their Authenticator app, which hasn't seen an update in over two years. At least they've had the good sense to improve the workflow of regenerating a token for a new device.

I appreciate the problem you're trying to solve and am aware that there tends to be a lot of headache in additional security, but doing this kind of thing provides a false sense of security if not outright lowering the security of what already existed. If I can get access to my MFA tokens by typing in a password, then it's a knowledge factor and not a possession factor. That's one-factor auth with two passwords, like the "security" questions on many banks.

<comment><AUTHOR> You don't access the token from multiple devices, just one(your phone).

Google's secret keys are weak but Authy's ones are 256 bits.

And finally, Daniel was wrong about the key derivation, we are actually using PBKDF2. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like the someone from Authy is reading this thread so here goes...

Feedback:

* Registration is a bit complex; all texts to my phone (with the exception of the registration code) are completely useless as the _real_ info is sent to my email address

* Why is my backup encryption key in plain text? A dual-password field with sameness-checks would be better.

* Restoring from backup is... painful.

\- I cannot just reregister my phone, I have to go through a reset process online. Ok, fine. I got texts to my phone instantly but the reset email took almost 15 minutes to reach me.

\- The app crashes tapping any "GA" item other than the first one.

\- I have to type in my encryption key for each "GA" item and the app crashes each and every time.

\- The _first_ time I tried to restore authy, after typing in my encryption key to recover the first "GA" item, the app crashed and wouldn't let me recover any of the other items... I had to do the whole process all over again.

* Aside from the above, the app _looks and works_ so much better than Google Authenticator on my iPhone (5). Especially considering I'll be able to recover my tokens when switching phones -- Google Authenticator completely screws this up (broken phone? Get a replacement phone from Apple? Upgrade? All your tokens in Google Authenticator are lost, even if you recover from backup).

<comment><USER6>
        All your tokens in Google Authenticator are lost, even
        if you recover from backup

So restoring from an iCloud back-up won't save my bacon in this case?

<comment><USER3> If you use Google Authenticator App this is true. If you use Authy App without backups, this is also true. But if you enable Authy Backups then you will always be able to get your accounts back, no matter what.

<comment><USER7> This isn't true on Android - if you've done a full backup, you can restore Google Authenticator without disabling and re-enabling the service.

<comment><USER5> I wish it worked that way on iOS; I'm not sure what Google is doing with the app that prevents it ... other apps+accounts work just fine after restoring from backup.

<comment> X-Istence It works without issues for me when doing it locally using iTunes, not sure what would be different about iCloud based backups ...

<comment><USER8> iCloud backups don't include all keychain items, while iTunes encrypted backups do: [https://ssl.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_May12....](https://ssl.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_May12.pdf) page 12.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You better replace your development error pages with proper 404 Take a look at <http://blog.authy.com/feed>

<comment><USER3> Thanks!. We're using Blossome, a blog engine I wrote for developers:

<https://github.com/danpal/blossome>

I've been meaning to add lots of features, I jsut haven't had the time. This holiday vacations I am going to the beach, so I'll be hacking on Blossome there a lot.

<comment><USER10> Bottom of the error page says "You're seeing this error because you have enabled the show_exceptions setting."

Might want to just turn that off now and hack around with Blossome in-depth later ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is interesting, I've never considered using an alternative app for google 2fa tokens.. mostly because the app Just Works. It's literally one tap and it shows the token I need to type into the website, I'm not sure how it could get any simpler.

Since the authy guys seem to be around, if the only 2fa I have is on my Google accounts, what is the advantage of using Authy over the standard Google Authenticator app (on Android, fwiw)?

</comment><comment><USER12> Is this "condoned" by Google or does Authy just emulate the algorithm that Google uses? If they are just implementing their own version, then what secret info do they need for the algorithm?

<comment><USER3> Both Authy and Google are based on open standards:

Specifically: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6238>

So you can add support as long as you support the standard.

When you scan the QR Code with you camera we read a secret key and store it inside your phone securely.

<comment><USER13> I'm reading RFC 6238 and it looks like it's based on a single shared secret:

> Basically, the output of the HMAC-SHA-1 calculation is truncated to > obtain > user-friendly values: > > HOTP(K,C) = Truncate(HMAC-SHA-1(K,C)) > > where > Truncate represents the function that can convert an HMAC-SHA-1 > value into > an HOTP value. K and C represent the shared secret and > counter value;

Does that mean it's formally/theoretically equivalent to simply having two separate passwords?

<comment><USER3> Absolutly not. It's one secret seed but you use the time to generate different One Time Passwords every 10 seconds, which means you never reuse passwords.

This would be the equivalent of having 2 passwords, one of which you change every-time you use it and it's fully random.

<comment><USER13> So just to rephrase it to make sure I understand, it's more secure because even if the OTP is compromised, the entire system is not compromised, is that correct?

However, if the original secret is compromised (K), then could an attacker easily generate OTPs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is only one semi-reliable auth method: deep body scan + DNA + mitochondrial RNA + retina scan fuzzy match. Passwords and 2 factor auth suck. And so will embedded/mark IDs, which I will never, ever use.

This is a good idea- everyone worth their salt wants a third-party single auth service, perhaps one that we pay an annual fee for, however this ain't it yet. You should not piggyback. Don't.

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks like the back button is broken on the Android app. I can't hit the back button and leave the app from the registration Activity.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't know if likening yourselves to Sauron will assuage our caution to adopt your tool. :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Just FYI, the images look terribly stretched on my iPhone

<comment><USER3> Hm, which iPhone do you have? Is it a 3GS? We use very detailed images etc that just don't look great on non-retina display. Retina images will look great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> <Insert XKCD cartoon about new standards here>

<comment><USER18> Authy, Google, and Dropbox all adhere to the same pre-existing open standard. This just lets you generate different auth keys for different tokens from the same app, instead of having to have multiple native apps (Dropbox, Google Authenticator, etc) to each generate their own key using the same algorithm.

<comment><USER19> Not to discredit Authy here, given they're admirably embracing the open standard, but Google Authenticator happily takes any OTP code.

<comment><USER20> But their iOS app is 1000x uglier. Swapped my Google Auth credentials into Authy as soon as I realized I had the option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Seems like a complicated way to turn two factor off while leaking information to yet another 3rd party.

</comment><comment><USER22> Now if it can import all my RSA key fobs...

</comment><comment><USER23> What could possibly go wrong when using a device that is connected to the Internet as a 2nd form factor?

That's not just a criticism of this app: all the apps that advertize a device that is connected to the Internet as a "2nd form factor" is using deception to lure people in.

There's no way this is "Two-Factor" in the same way that a physical RSA token is "Two-Factor".

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure what you mean here. Everything is stored locally, so it's not like it's going off to a website to get your token.

Are you saying that because the device is networked it is by definition vulnerable to hackers and so cannot be a high quality 2FA device?

If so I completely agree, except to point out that if I use a couple of banks (some are better for cards, some are better for savings), and Google and I play WoW and I (insert other service that uses 2FA here) then that's going to be a _lot_ of physical doo-dads I have to keep track of. It's an unfortunate reality, but having all these things attached to one 'smart' device is the only real way of making them viable after you get more than one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can someone put a moratorium on startup names that end in "-y" or "-ly"? After a few of these it gets irritating. Maybe the next one will be called "obnoxiously".

<comment><USER25> Feel free to get started on that. You already have.

<comment><USER24> Got some downvotes pretty quick. Didn't expect such a negative reaction so fast. I'm relatively new on this site; now I have some idea of how well the HN community takes this kind of humor. So thanks.

<comment><USER26> Hmmm, I wonder if "downvotely.com" is available ...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Build your on linux distro - <AUTHOR> http://www.openembedded.org/wiki/Documentation <comment><USER2> You probably want to check out Yocto instead: [https://www.yoctoproject.org/](https://www.yoctoproject.org/) There's a lot more info on OpenEmbedded and the Yocto project there. This is really interesting stuff for embedded Linux in particular. You could build a desktop distro with it if you wanted, but that's not really the point of the project. It's more for rolling your own Linux distro to run on small board computers (Pi, BeagleBone Black, etc.), set top boxes, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> You may also be interested in [http://linuxfromscratch.org](http://linuxfromscratch.org)</comment>


Black Beekeepers Are Transforming Detroit's Vacant Lots into Bee Farms (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/detroit-hives-honeybees_n_5a6cfc9ee4b0ddb658c7019c <comment><USER2> Detroit is an interesting case of how a shrinking city becomes useful for some investors.

IIRC, I was looking up the prices of various lots, and many homes were $1000! Now, I don't live anywhere close to Detroit, but the idea of spending maybe $10,000 to $100,000 for dozens or even hundreds of houses is interesting.

Developing for humans may be a problem: Hundreds-of-thousands of people have left Detroit, leaving the city in the state that it is in today. But the houses and infrastructure (roads, water, electricity) may be useful for some niches, even in a "ghost town" situation (Or perhaps: more of a "ghost suburb" situation. Neighborhoods with shrinking populations will naturally have weaker schools, causing more people to leave, causing taxes to go up on the remaining people, causing more people to leave, etc. etc. Its a bad death-spiral effect).

I think I recall an article about how one writers group was buying up neighborhoods to station writers-circles, effectively creating a community of writers imported from around the country to one location, so that the writer- circle can leverage each other as an author support group.

I haven't heard of this Bee Farm thing, but I would have expected that sort of thing to be better in a more rural community.

In any case: redeveloping all of that land and making it useful (as opposed to broken down neighborhoods with crumbling infrastructure) is a big question for Detroit... and investors / businessmen. There's probably a lot of opportunity there.

<comment><USER3> Many of the homes came with a caveat that you have to bring it up to code. The home was only a $1,000 but the renovation costs were 10s of thousands.

<comment><USER4> You also become responsible for any unpaid property taxes, because they are attached to the property rather than to the person who owned it when the debt was incurred.

<comment><USER5> what the hell

<comment><USER6> That's why they are so cheap.

<comment><USER7> Shitty that an accountant policy is hurting a city.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Meanwhile in Berlin, concerns that excessive urban beekeeping might be putting too much competetive pressure on wild bee species made minor national news. (probably not so much because the situation is actually dramatic but more because the story is both surprising and confirming of "clueless Berlin hipster sustainability" stereotypes)

Did not find a good source in English, just a German article: [https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/kritik-an- bienenkaesten-a...](https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/kritik-an- bienenkaesten-auf-hochhaeusern-experte-wirft-berliner-imkern-tierquaelerei- vor/24304670.html) and a terrible translation thereof: [https://www.archysport.com/2019/05/criticism-of-bee-boxes- on...](https://www.archysport.com/2019/05/criticism-of-bee-boxes-on- skyscrapers-expert-accuses-berlin-beekeepers-animal-cruelty-berlin/)

<comment><USER9> Came here to post similar. I don't think there are enough and/or large scale studies already, but there are 'local' studies showing negative effects of honeybees on wild bees (and all other pollinators, not to forget). It depends on a number of factors of course, but the general idea is pretty logical: suddenly there's a thousand extra eaters in your area but the amount of food didn't change. Meaning unless you have enough food for all, some are going to suffer. So most people I know with a job in nature conservation and similar think it's really about time this gets studied properly and then possibly regulated; not just Berlin has problems. There are places in the Netherlands and Belgium for instance where beekeepers drive the hives to the border of nature reserves to have their bees have a go at them. If that happens to be a place with only a small population of an endangered pollinating species left, it's not unlikely they will be effected negatively. At the same time there seems to be a rise in people interested in 'amateur' beekeeping, at least around here. And from experience they either simply don't realize that might be a problem, or they just ignore it / don't want to believe it because they think they're doing a good thing, taking care for bees (even though it is debatable whether it's really ok to just take their honey), solving the global bee decline, etc. tldr; the initiative sounds good but there might be unwanted and unknown side effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Detroit is such an amazing opportunity for anyone with money.

Buy up a shit ton of property for extremely low prices - it already has city infra, power, water, etc.

Install solar on lots. Bui;d a fucking datacenter for pennies on the dollar compared to other places.

Install municipal wifi with UBNT equipment

and transform the abandoned parts of the city for extremely cheap and reap the benefits both socially and financially in ten years.

If you have money to speculatively invest in real-estate -- buy everything you can in detroit.

Then get celeb detroiters to join and help back you.

Detroit is just ripe for innovation and can become a tech hub with LOW COST housing ASAP.

FUCKING CANNABIS is legal in MI now -- build a huge extraction lab there easily and cheaper than ANY other state in the nation.

<comment><USER11> I've forgotten which movie now, but there's a big scene in a blockbuster where they destroy a building for real. The studio made a deal with the town to take a dilapidated building, destroy it, then build the town a new building to replace it.

When I used to watch the Walking Dead I kept thinking there was a missed opportunity to do something similar in Detroit with any post-apocalyptic show and some abandoned neighborhoods. Even razing the properties afterward and paying for disposal would be an improvement in safety.

<comment><USER12> In RoboCop, crime-ridden "Old Detroit" was to be transformed by OCP Corporation into "Delta City"[1]. One can imagine a newer version of the story, with OCP replaced by "The FAANG Group".

[1] [https://robocop.fandom.com/wiki/Delta_City](https://robocop.fandom.com/wiki/Delta_City)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A lot of 1960s and 1970s scifi has concept of "disaster recovery zone" lifestyle, where people go and live as they think they want, without huge government buy-in. John Brunner, Philip Dick, Rudy Rucker. It sometimes feels like Detroit is a semi-hemi-mandated version: You want to try and fix dystopia? Sure. try not to kill anyone, try not to over-succeed because we need taxes and you will become a source, but in the meantime, pick a house: we have thousands.

</comment><comment><USER14> I guess I don't understand - the mead for the honey has to come from somewhere. So there must be flowers near the nests - a lot of them.

So one must also create meadows.

If they are on polluted ground (common in cities), probably the mead and thus the honey will also contain poisons.

</comment><comment><USER15> Are there any dangerous substances in an urban environment that are picked up by bees and that would end up in the honey?

<comment><USER16> No more than the dangerous shit that all of us are taking in constantly living in the same environments.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure that logic holds - swimming in the ocean isn't the same as eating swordfish with respect to mercury, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sidenote: That Oath GDPR / data collection management popup is pretty much unusable. I can't figure out how to make sure that tracking through their "partners" is disabled and judging by how hard to navigate this tool is I guess I can't rely on the assumption that all of those unnecessary, sketchy options are opt-in.

And since I refuse to blindly accept those opaque terms Oath popups basically have become an automated call to close the tab for me these days.

</comment><comment><USER19> Fantastic. Didn't get why the skin color was relevant though.

<comment><USER20> Detroit is 83% black.

<comment><USER21> Making it even less relevant, surely?

<comment><USER20> I don't think so, it means this isn't just gentrification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Two points:

1\. the color of the beekeepers' skin is irrelevant and appears to have been an addition made by the poster

2\. "The duo bought their first vacant space on Detroit's East Side for $340 with the help of the Detroit Land Bank Authority, an agency that works to redevelop abandoned properties."

That is a redevelopment effort designed to get action.

Can anyone comment on how this program and zoning requirements interact?

<comment><USER23> Ok, we've shortened the title. Please let's all step away from the flamebait now.

Edit: since some people are arguing that it's an essential element of the story, I'm happy to put it back. The issue here is trying to get the content of the article the most interesting, substantial discussion the community can give it. That requires minimizing the things that push discussions in nasty, stupid directions, which we do routinely on this site all day.

<comment><USER24> Really? No offense Dang but don't you think that is patently ridiculous if a mere mention of skin color for a relatively benign story invites trolling and racism?

Why is mentioning the fact that they're black somehow flamebait here on HN? This is a story written by a black man, under 'Black Voices' about Black beekeepers with their race explicitly mentioned in the title of the article.

<comment><USER25> The question is, would they ever write a headline that starts like this: "White Beekeepers..."?

<comment><USER26> Not when 99% of beekeepers are white, no.

<comment><USER27> Yes and no. Yes this article is notable. But we don't always need to editorialize the notable.

I'm all for highlighting achievements. It makes sense to highlight the achievements of those who for varying reasons haven't had the opportunity.

Yet do don't always need to do it of course. When you do it's detrimental to the people you're trying to highlight.

"Oh, look, Johnny did his homework today, everyone give Johnny a hand". I'm exaggerating for effect but that's an undercurrent.

<comment><USER26> I agree that it depends on the circumstance. Particularly, it feels more like patronizing if we highlight an accomplishment for a particular reason that the party in question finds embarrassing. Maybe Johnny doesn't want to be applauded for doing his homework. But if he doesn't mind, then there is no harm to Johnny.

But there may be another, unintentional harm: the harm to the ego of everyone who isn't Johnny. They may feel hurt that their own accomplishments weren't highlighted. They may even try to defend this hurt feeling, by saying something like "So? We did our homework too. Johnny's not special. Don't you care about us?" But the point of the accolade was never to down-play everyone else's achievements; it was merely to recognize Johnny's. But the ego gets in the way, and prevents us from letting someone else have the spotlight. We see ourselves as smaller when our peers are raised higher than us, and this makes us defensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Article from 2018

<comment><USER23> Good catch! Added.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> 1) Disappointing HN thread - all about race and little about article?

2) Disappointing article. No depth at all. How is the money spent? How many bees are there? Where does one get bees? Are there flowers around for the bees? How did this person get into beekeeping? Why beekeeping and not, say, an organic garden?

3) Disappointing site - tons of flashing banners and ads everywhere.

What sounds like an awesome, uplifting story that may be replicate-able across the country was turned into an overall disappointing puff piece.

<comment><USER30> I had the same thought, I read the article to see if that was a thing, like black hat hackers. Turns out in the US, they find amazing that black people can be beekeeepers like white people. And yes, I checked who wrote the article, but it is probably a way of thinking that is shared nationwide.

<comment><USER29> Right? People raise bees. The people may be black. They may be white. They may be yellow. Or Brown. The people might me muslim, or jewish, or atheist. The bees don't care, and neither do I. I have no idea why it matters.</comment></comment></comment>