Do You Have the Right to Plead Not Guilty When Your Lawyer Disagrees? - happy-go-lucky https://www.npr.org/2018/01/17/578479044/do-you-have-the-right-to-plead-not-guilty-when-your-lawyer-disagrees <comment><USER2> I would certainly hope so.

> "This is a very difficult issue," he says. "Obviously most of us would think > that the lawyer should just do what's in the best interest of the client in > the view of the lawyer."

That doesn't seem very "obvious" to me, any more than it seems "obvious" that a doctor should just go ahead and carry out a medical procedure he recommends after I refuse it.

<comment><USER3> If you choose to have your hand cut off because you think it would be awesome, I'd hope your doctor would refuse to do it.

<comment><USER4> It's interesting to think about decisions that involve an action vs decisions that involve stopping an action.

      Doctor: undergo my recommended treatment or you will die
      Patient: no

      Patient: Doctor, please chop off one of my hands for no good reason
      Doctor: no

In the former we respect the rights of the patient, in the latter we do not. Kind of weird isn't it?

<comment><USER5> in the first example the doctor is compelling the patient to do something and the patient exercises her right to refuse. In the second example the patient is compelling to the doctor to do something and the doctor exercises her right to refuse. You never have a 'right' to compel another person to do anything. You may have legal, ethical or moral reasons to compel someone to do something, but you never have a right to.

<comment><USER6> >You never have a 'right' to compel another person to do anything.

There are plenty of instances where you have the right to compel another person to do things.

<comment><USER7> I'm not disagreeing with you, but your case would be stronger if you could provide some examples.

<comment><USER6> You walk into my house. I have the right to compel you to leave. You try to stab me. I have the right to compel you to stop with reasonable force. You arbitrarily try to deny my passport application because you don't like my face. I get a Writ of Mandamus issued against you and compel you to do your job. We enter into an agreement which you breach. I obtain an order mandating specific performance and compel you to personally do what we agreed upon. You're wanted for arrest and I'm a peace officer. I compel you to come down to the station.

I can go on all day.

The poster above you does not understand what a 'right' is and is trying to make a point about positive vs negative rights, but doesn't actually understand the distinction.

<comment><USER5> You just listed a bunch of examples where people are legally compelled to do something, which I mentioned.

> The poster above you does not understand what a 'right' is and is trying to > make a point about positive vs negative rights, but doesn't actually > understand the distinction.

Ok. Nice talking with you. Have a good day.

<comment><USER6> I know you mentioned it - you just weren't correct. Hope the clarification was helpful. Here's some additional reading if you're interested: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> By the sounds of it the circumstances make it quite hard for the state to argue that he was given _effective_ assistance by counsel, since it appears the counsel was not only unwilling to follow the defendant's strategy and unwilling to stand down from the case but also the only argument he _was_ willing to make for his client was ruled legally inadmissible, meaning his only contribution to the case was to render the defendant's preferred line of defence impossible and argue for his conviction.

<comment><USER9> You have a good point. Even if you set aside all the stuff about the client and the lawyer disagreeing, if your only strategy was ruled legally inadmissible then you did a pretty poor job, whether it was your client's idea or yours.

<comment><USER10> Certainly the duty of care ought to be in full force when one is acting against a clients wishes. Ignoring an illegal defense in favor of a legal one might be reasonable; ignoring an unlikely defense in favor of an illegal one looks like a clear absence of assistance of counsel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Plot twist: His lawyer is brilliant and did this on purpose to cause a mistrial years down the line knowing his client had no other alternatives.

<comment><USER12> Arguably happens a lot already

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if there's a problem with the whole "plea" thing, mixed up with the death penalty. What if there were no pleading, every case went to trial, and the penalty was the one assigned to the circumstances of the case at the beginning of the trial. This would get rid of the abuse of plea bargaining, and the need for the defendant to strategize based on trying to manipulate the penalty.

Even if we keep the pleading stage, a guilty plea should require the approval of the judge based on his evaluation of the evidence. It should not be possible for the police to get away with punishing someone without having to present their evidence. The evidence should be submitted to the court before the pleading begins.

<comment><USER14> >What if there were no pleading, every case went to trial, and the penalty was the one assigned to the circumstances of the case at the beginning of the trial.

This is a misunderstanding of how things work and is begging the question. Part of the trial is determining what punishment is appropriate based on the facts and arguments presented in the trial. Indeed, determining the "circumstances of the case" is at the core of what a trial is.

<comment><USER13> That's fair. Perhaps what I'm thinking of is how to prevent abuse of plea bargaining -- allowing the police to bypass examination of the evidence by threatening an extreme punishment.

<comment><USER15> > allowing the police to bypass examination of the evidence by threatening an > extreme punishment

Police can threaten any punishment they want. Police only get to assign punishment for a crime if they choose to end your life on the spot.

The District/State Attorney (and their assistants) are the ones that have to prosecute and are the proxy for the state that choose the opening bid for punishment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> IANAL but yeah. It seems to me that the onus here was on English to withdraw from the case. Once the guy was ruled competent it was the defense lawyer's moral obligation to do the best he could with the version of the facts offered by the defendant, however lacking in credibility that was.

I don't know about ethics standards in the practice of law in Louisiana particularly. Every state is different and Louisiana seems a bit more different than most because of the influence of the French legal tradition.

The lawyer here is (poorly) seeking to preserve his client's rights to as a possibility-mentally-ill person, notwithstanding the earlier competency findings. This is not so uncommon in death penalty trials, and again competence adjudication seems to vary by state. But in seeking to preserve his client's life, he's sacrificing his client's agency, which is a sort of liberty interest most defendants want to retain even if they are in physical custody.

It might seem to the lawyer that his client has a death wish and just can't bring himself to admit it, and suicidal intent is _de facto_ evidence of incompetence in many jurisdictions. Also, it's not unusual for a defendant to turn on the attorney post-conviction; eg if English argued the defendant's version of events, and he was convicted and sentenced to death, the new lawyer might have sued him anyway by arguing 'my client is obviously crazy and yet English helped him to throw his life away in front of the jury instead of getting him the help he needs."

It's yet another reason I think we should get rid of the death penalty.

</comment><comment><USER16> This seems scary. While the guy may be foolish to disregard his attorney's well-considered advice, it should absolutely be his choice on how to defend himself in court. Even if that means an inconvenient rescheduling of his trial.

<comment><USER17> Well-considered advice? The lawyer completely messed up and more or less guaranteed a first degree murder conviction and a very harsh sentence that goes with it:

"Finally, English embarked on a strategy of conceding his client's guilt, in hopes of avoiding the death penalty. Indeed, in his closing argument, he told the jury that not only was his client guilty but that he had taken any burden for this conclusion off of the prosecutor and the jury."

"Directly contradicting his client's instructions, he suggested that McCoy suffered from diminished mental capacity, and should therefore only be convicted of second-degree murder. But as the prosecutor would soon explain to the jury, that defense was legally unavailable to McCoy because Louisiana only allows a diminished capacity argument if the defendant has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. It was one of many mistakes English appears to have made during the trial."

<comment><USER18> Guaranteeing English more years of life, albeit on death row, while appeals continue.

<comment><USER19> Irrelevant side-effect. Or are you arguing that was intentional strategy on the part of the lawyer?

In any case, a lawyer is supposed to act as one's agent, and in this case, it certainly appears that the attorney in question was acting incompetently when not directly contradicting the defendant's desires.

As frequently happens, this will probably turn on what amounts to courtroom etiquette. Should the defendant have fired the lawyer "earlier", given no clear definition of "earlier"?

Edit: was told my irony was too subtle. That last sentence could be rewritten as, "should a defendant whose council is not actually representing the defendant correctly be required to sufficiently understand legal procedure as to accurately intuit undefined deadlines that have emerged through caselaw on their own, from prison, in order to replace the rogue council?" Kafka would only grade this a C, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> To make a long story short: black man in Louisiana.

The defense attorney's decision to relieve the prosecutor and jury of the burden of establishing guilt by unilaterally proclaiming it against the wishes of the defendant and contrary to the "not guilty" plea seems so incredibly irresponsible that I think disbarment should be considered.

Indeed, the judge should have paused the trial at that moment to have a little discussion with all the lawyers about what happens to people that intentionally try to cause a mistrial in their court.

I am not a lawyer, and I am not familiar with how they police their own, but if I were working for someone that wanted me to deploy untested software full of bugs and security holes straight to production, I would restrict my efforts to vigorously attempting to talk them out of it, resigning, or just doing exactly as they asked. I definitely would not independently publish a proof- of-concept malware designed to exploit said bugs and security holes. If someone is aiming a gun at their own foot, you do not stop them from doing it by blowing off their entire leg with a bigger gun, loaded with dum-dums.

<comment><USER21> The defendant was facing the death penalty, and their only defense was that they weren't there, and the whole thing was a setup by cops because he had information on them being drug traffickers. The lawyer was attempting to save his client from the death penalty, which is the best he thought he could do given the circumstances.

<comment><USER20> The venue being Louisiana, I find the defense's claim alleging that corrupt cops framed up a black patsy to be not _entirely_ implausible. But it is more likely that if they _were_ corrupt drug traffickers, and they wanted to discredit or otherwise silence him, they would have just killed him outright and placed a drop weapon next to the body.

I am not familiar with the evidence presented at trial, but I am familiar with several investigative journalism reports that partially reveal some of the tactics and practices used by corrupt cops and prosecutors to secure convictions of apparently innocent people. Of course, the jury would have been made up of people who are not quite so skeptical of the emissaries from justiceland, and I'd wager they are ignorant of such tactics. So it isn't surprising that the defense attorney was desperate.

By the way, it certainly _sounds_ like the guy is guilty, but he does have a right to an adequate defense. On further investigation, the parts of the story where he tried to hang himself with a bedsheet prior to extradition, and where ballistics experts determined conclusively that the recovered bullets were fired from a particular model of weapon seem very suspicious to me. The former is strongly correlated (in my mind) with police beatings and the latter is CSI voodoo, like bite mark evidence.

<comment><USER21> I absolutely do not buy his conspiracy theory, so I'm coming at it from that angle. I've also not seen any evidence that the bullet forensics were tainted, so that's another mark against it being a setup. The idea of presenting that as their defense seems to be incredibly misguided, and seems to be an express ticket to death row. Given that, the actions of the lawyer make a lot of sense if the goal is to minimize the punishment.

<comment><USER20> I approach it from the following angle:

A. He did it; he is guilty. B. The justice system in Louisiana is corrupt and biased against black people and poor people.

Both can be true at once. This results in a situation where he is guilty, everyone knows he is guilty, and then everyone--including the public defenders' office--tramples over his right to due process in a rush to execute him.

<comment><USER21> The public defender had nothing to do with it. This was a lawyer his parents hired. A lawyer that was trying to save him from death row, and who saw that the client's desired strategy was coocoo crazy pants.

Does the attorney have more of an obligation to pursue the desired strategy, or to try and save the client's life?

<comment><USER20> If the public defenders had not somehow turned him against using them, he would have had at least one capital-qualified attorney from that office working his case in conjunction with the private lawyer. We're not privy to the details, but I think the likely scenario is that they were just telling him what they were going to do and ignoring his input. His input may have been cuckoo crazypants, but they still have a professional ethical obligation to take that into account. I.e. when the client says "no guilty plea", the lawyer has to discard all strategies that involve an admission of guilt.

It's probably all because his preferred strategy was 99% likely to result in a guilty verdict, with capital punishment.

As I have learned from movies and television, sometimes the defendant _demands_ that all the obvious winnable strategies are completely off the table, and their attorney then has to be incredibly clever, to not only secure a not guilty verdict, but also uncover the _real_ killer by forcing them to admit guilt on the witness stand. This guy's lawyer _maybe_ watched too many of those shows, and thought admitting guilt was actually the clever courtroom twist that would lead to the happy ending?

The attorney has an obligation to act in the interests of their client. When the client is issuing instructions to the attorney that are apparently contrary to their own interests, does the lawyer do what they _say they want_ or do what _the professional believes they need_?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not only do you have the right, I don't think it's even _legal_ for your lawyer to force you to plead one way or another. They can only suggest.

<comment><USER23> This feels like a freshman law school essay problem, given after the class has just covered the nature of and reasons for our use of an adversarial system. In fact I suspect this will be showing up in such problems in the near future. We chose a system where lawyers are to do their best to defend their client, regardless, for various good historical reasons.

In this situation, I would accept a defense lawyer basically immediately resting their case, if they truly have nothing with which to defend their client. But standing in front of the jury and actively pushing the same content as a guilty plea would contain is going to far. Alas, there is not a law against someone being an idiot in court, it isn't even obvious how one could possibly write that law, and if the client insists on an innocent plea, at the very least the defense is obligated to not actively contradict that plea, even if all that leaves them to do is say nothing.

If you think prosecutors already have too much power, probably a pretty popular opinion around here, we _certainly_ do not also want the _defense_ to get into the prosecution game! Let the prosecution do its job, if it's so obvious what the verdict should be.

<comment><USER22> The thing that should stop a defense lawyer from working against their client is the chance of it harming their business. In this case, maybe this lawyer just doesn't want to be a lawyer anymore.

<comment><USER21> He wasn't working against his client. His client was facing the death penalty, an the lawyer was trying to get him a lesser sentence.

<comment><USER24> Incompetently trying to get him a lesser sentence. He straight out declared that his client was guilty in favor of a defense that legally was not allowed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yes. In fact the Judge is very deliberate in asking that you want to plead guilty and were not coerced into doing so. At least in Federal Courts they have an entire, what appears to be prepared list of questions they ask just to make sure it is your will.

<comment><USER26> If I understand correctly, it's more a script that gets followed than a genuine inquiry [https://www.popehat.com/2017/05/08/the-elaborate- pantomime-o...](https://www.popehat.com/2017/05/08/the-elaborate-pantomime-of- the-federal-guilty-plea/)

<comment><USER25> Might depend on the Judge. I have witnessed Judges ask "You understand what you are doing, this will never go away, etc". Genuine inquiry to make them comfortable that the defendant knows precisely what they are doing. But you are correct, there is also a scripted line of questioning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Fillings from the case make interesting reading:

[http://www.scotusblog.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/09/16-8255...](http://www.scotusblog.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/09/16-8255-opinion-below.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER28> If your lawyer disagrees, simply say the words "you're fired" followed by "Not Guilty, Your Honor"

<comment><USER29> > "Throughout the trial, McCoy kept interrupting his lawyer's concessions of > guilt, even trying to fire him... Because McCoy did not try to fire his > lawyer until just days before the trial, the state contends, he had let the > lawyer dictate legal strategy."

So... either it's not that simple, or something else went wrong here.

<comment><USER30> It's not that simple. You can't go around firing your lawyers every time you feel like it and causing trial delays and mistrials. The state has a right to try you, and you cannot avoid that through shenanigans. Client had already had trouble and fired his Public Defender. Client had hired counsel and retained him without complaint until trial started.

If you allow shenanigans to stop a trial in process, you are essentially giving the Defendant veto power over a trial when it doesn't go his way.

At some point the Judge has to make the case happen. When and how is a tough question I'm pleased I don't have to answer.

<comment><USER28> 'every time you feel like it' and 'when he's trying to get you executed' are maybe different things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If the lawyer believes his client is not compos mentis, to the extent he is damaging his own right to a fair trial, surely he a can file some sort of motion to relieve him of his rights?

This not being possible is, I assume, the only excuse for what the lawyer has done here?

<comment><USER32> Correct. The lawyer in this case asked for permission to withdraw, and the court wouldn't let him. (The court wouldn't agree to reschedule the case, and the defendant neither found another lawyer nor agreed to waive his right to a lawyer.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Offhand, I wonder what the ramifications would be if a Supreme Court would be able to rule that the legislative branch resolve an apparent contradiction in laws.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's really not even surprising anymore. When you don't have a court/justice system that works, any ridiculous situation is possible. And somehow we as citizens are supposed to have faith in a system that leads to this outcome? What's the incentive for the defendant to stick to the rules now? If he had the chance, why wouldn't he bribe or even have witnesses/jurors murdered to advance his defense in a system that does not even respect his plea? The absurdity of our laws and courts is beyond comprehension.

</comment><comment><USER35> The problem is that if the lawyer's gambit had worked, the client would have happily benefitted from the result. Since it didn't work, he's crying foul. Private profits, public losses (or something). If this worked, it would be a novel strategy to try something radical like this, see if you benefit, and if you don't, claim the lawyer was not acting with your consent.

</comment><comment><USER36> _> >Do You Have the Right to Plead Not Guilty When Your Lawyer Disagrees?_

NO, _if_ the lawyer does the time for me. Otherwise, F him, it's my life

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't understand: doesn't any individual counsel serve at the discretion of its client, barring mental incompetence? Title sounds like clickbait. You don't have the right to keep swapping out your county-appointed lawyer for a new one. It's a Hobson's choice.

<comment><USER38> Yes title is deceptive, and contradicts the article.

But your second statement is not accurate. The question is whether the defendant has the right to control his lawyers actions in court. Intuitively, the answer is obviously yes, but the lower courts disagree.

<comment><USER39> I'm having a hard time seeing how anyone could see the answer as "no".

I hate hypotheticals, but let's do one here because the extreme helps frame potential issue.

Let's say the man standing trial disagrees with the strategy of his counsel, he fires them and gets new counsel. Rinse and repeat, no counsel is willing to actually follow the clients wishes and put up a proper defense - <AUTHOR> hypothetical defendant is literally unable to obtain counsel to help defend him in court.

In reality, could he have likely found counsel willing to put up a defense? Likely. But factoring in financial burden or competence of his choice of counsel, it's entirely possible he would either A) be unable to pay for a more expensive lawyer actually willing to defend him and B) a lawyer he could afford is either unwilling to put up a defense or lacks experience to do it properly.

I'm not a lawyer, but from a novice understanding of the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct not abiding by a clients decision to enter a Not Guilty plea (which I would take to include defending that plea) is unethical - likely to prevent the model problem I described above from occurring. Specifically Rule 1.2(a).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> A wealthy defendant wouldn't find themselves in this predicament because expert testimony would've been found to testify the defendant was insane. A plea deal would have been struck so the prosecution could avoid the expense of a lengthy trial and dueling expert witnesses. And, most defense counsel would have gladly argued the defendants innocence assertion to the last penny. Its a 6th Amendment case, but 14th Amendment issues haunt this case and many like it.

<comment><USER41> The insanity defense isn't used nearly as much as you seem to think it is, and never to the defendant's benefit. Do you think mental hospitals are _nice_ places?

It isn't a "get out of jail free" card. It's a "stay in mental hospital instead, probably longer" card. Insanity pleas exist because the purpose of the justice system is, in principle, to improve society -- not to punish -- and prisons are in any case not equipped to incarcerate the insane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The title is deceptive clickbait. The actual question is how much right the defendant had to block or cancel his lawyers' official actions (both public defenders and his own lawyers) he disagrees with before he fires them.

Thanks lawyer did block a not guilty plea (obviously since the case went to trial); the lawyer told the court the client was guilty during the trial, which was the lawyer's opinion.

I frequently find NPR rather biased in misrepresentation of details in its articles.

<comment><USER42> I'm afraid I don't follow your reasoning here. Can you explain what you mean by NPR showing bias in this article?</comment></comment>


Jacob Appelbaum: Inconsistencies in Rape Allegations - <AUTHOR> http://www.zeit.de/kultur/2016-08/jacob-appelbaum-rape-allegations-contradictions <comment><USER2> The described inconsistency is in the account by the pseudonym 'River', which was one of the "unidentified individuals [who] posted several specific instances on a website in which they anonymously accused Jacob Appelbaum of having sexually, emotionally, physically abused them."

Since then, several of those unidentified persons have identified themselves. According to Wikipedia, three of them are Honeywell, Macrina, and Lovecruft.

The piece characterizes Appelbaum's statement as "the statements from "River" were completely fabricated." Neither he nor Zeit say or imply that the accounts of Honeywell, Macrina, and Lovecruft were incorrect. In fact, the Zeit piece does not mention them at all.

Casting doubt one account does not immediately cast doubt on all accounts. Otherwise it would be easy to set up the proverbial false flag operation.

As a reminder, the reason the Tor project "released" (to quote [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum#Allegations_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum#Allegations_of_sexual_misconduct) ) is because: "many people inside and outside the Tor Project have reported incidents of being humiliated, intimidated, bullied, and frightened" by Jacob Appelbaum, and that "several experienced unwanted sexually aggressive behavior from him." Steele made no mention of rape claims published on the anonymous website.

The decision, at least as publicly given, was not due to any rape allegations. One does not need to be charged by the police before a company can fire a employee who, say, steals from petty cash.

<comment><USER3> Well: a second person who was listed as a "victim" came forward to dispute she ever was victimised in any way, and that the account of her experience was severely manipulated. (It has since been taken down).

So that's at least 2 of the accusations that are somewhere between plain false and maliciously fabricated, with nothing on the veracity or lack thereof of the rest.

I don't know the guy, or what happened, but colour me suspicious, especially when you consider how the allegations were/are being made: not in any legal forum, but in a glossy PR website + campaign.

Doesn't pass the smell test.

<comment><USER2> As a general point of order, one does not need to have a "victim", in scare quotes or otherwise, in order to be in violation of an organization's policies.

For example, a school may prohibit a teacher from engaging in a sexual or emotional relationship with a student, even if both the teacher and the student want the relationship. Similarly, between a supervisor and employee, or between a military officer and a private.

Such behavior may be grounds for dismissal, even though a relationship between consenting adults is _not illegal_ and therefore has no reason to be "in any legal forum".

As I pointed out, even when something _is_ illegal, as when an employee steals from petty cash, the employer does not need to present the case in a legal forum before dismissing the thief. So your strong desire for presenting in a legal forum also does not pass the smell test.

<comment><USER3> The article is not about Applebaum's dismissal from the Tor project, it is about the rape/abuse allegations. Allegations that so far appear to be at best false (1 case apparently completely fabricated and withdrawn on request by the alleged "victim" [and FYI, the scare quotes are entirely appropriate here], 1 other case contradicted by witnesses).

Depending on the organisation and the relationship to that organisation, no reasons are necessary whatsoever to sever a relationship (for example in the US almost all employment relationships are "at will").

So what exactly _is_ your point regarding the content of the article, which, again, is about the rape/abuse allegations?

<comment><USER2> I started "as a point of order" because my followup comment wasn't about the content of the article but about aspects of your reply that do not make for a useful argument. I will address only one.

You say you are suspicious because a legal forum wasn't involved in the accusations. But sexual harassment is a broad topic, and includes many things which are not illegal. There is no reason for a legal forum be involved for harassment which isn't illegal.

For example, you brought up the reports of an observed interaction between Applebaum and Bähring. Nothing in that interaction was illegal. Hence there is no reason to believe it will be discussed in a legal forum.

My point regarding the content of the article is that the author only mentioned the anonymous accusations. Anonymous accusations are generally treated as less reliable than those made by people who identify themselves - which is why I'm surprised you put so much trust in "River"'s story that you're now willing to reject the accusations of Honeywell, Macrina, and Lovecruft. My point is to question why the author didn't mention those named accusers, and remind HN readers about the named accusations.

My other point is to highlight how the author is concerned mostly with the legal topics, when most the issues accusers (I just read jacobappelbaum.net) have with Appelbaum appear to be sexual harassment, bullying, and other activities which are not illegal. I wish to highlight the author's omission, and remind HN readers that the accusations aren't limited to rape accusations or to illegal activities.

(P.S., it's "Appelbaum" not "Applebaum".)

<comment><USER3> This is getting ridiculous.

Once again: serious accusations were made. Where the most serious of those accusations were examined more closely, they did not hold up even one little bit. Of the two that were apparently examined more closely, one turned out to be made up completely, the other was refuted by witnesses.

The other (less serious, AFAIK) accusations were _not_ examined independently. Instead the accusers were asked and action taken. So basically: accusation = conviction.

One of the incidents recounted apparently/reportedly involved a consensual BDSM threesome where he ignored the safeword. Hmm.. To me, this would be a _completely_ private matter that those involved had no business bringing into the public sphere (except consensually), and it certainly has nothing to do with work. Yes, there are people overstepping bounds, but that would be the accusers. What you do is handle the matter privately, or, if the case warrants it, within the legal system.

> But sexual harassment is a broad topic, and includes many things which are > not illegal.

Really?

"At the regional level, both the European Union (EU) and the Council of Europe (COE) address sexual harassment as illegal behavior"[1]

> (P.S., it's "Appelbaum" not "Applebaum".)

> you brought up the reports of an observed interaction between Applebaum and > Bähring.

Hmmmm...nits to pick...

> how the author is concerned mostly with the legal topics

YES. That is the point of the article. The accusations that would have had legal ramifications were false. The others were not examined, so nothing was said about them. You keep criticising the article for things that it isn't about. Do you also criticise articles about Linux filesystems for not mentioning DB2? What is your agenda?

> activities which are not illegal

Well, here directly from the site: "Sex _crimes_ are underreported", he is a "sexual predator". Pray tell me how sex "crimes" are not "illegal"? Them being crimes and such.

This whole campaign, and it certainly looks like a smear campaign, seems to be based on a motte-bailey technique[2]: it shouts and insinuates sexual predator and rapist, to inflict maximum damage, and when challenged retreats to "well, all we're saying is he's not a nice guy". Not being a nice guy does not warrant this type of smear campaign, whereas the type of behaviour insinuated needs legal clarification, otherwise it is slander. You can't have it both ways.

As far as I can see, all this is is anonymous slander, and that makes it clear why it's anonymous: slander is a crime and would have serious repercussions for the accusers. (And since two of the most prominent accusations turned out to be false, it really _is_ slander).

[1] [http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/svaw/harassment/explore/1whatis.htm](http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/svaw/harassment/explore/1whatis.htm)

[2] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another- bric...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the- motte/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> German title is "Severe Doubts about Rape Allegations".

Isn't it weird that all these data privacy/whistleblower activists are being targeted by rape allegations that are more than dubious?

<comment><USER4> Funny, that. Doesn't tend to increase anyone's credibility when they have the scarlet R hung on them, even if it eventually gets crossed out.</comment></comment>


Test Driven Development Actually Works - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jphpsf.com/2012/09/30/OMG-test-driven-development-actually-works/ You often hear people advocate that writing tests (unit, functional, etc.) when building software leads to less bugs in production. In this post, I am trying to demonstrate this statement by analyzing real numbers from my current job. No tests were written originally and once tests were included, I became a strong advocate of the TDD methodology. <comment><USER2> This experiment is not very rigorous. The Q4 2011 change in the proportion of UI bugs could be caused by the addition of back-end code with little UI (such as maintenance tasks), or by an upgrade to the bug tracking software that encouraged grouping multiple UI bugs into one bug report. And the author didn't calculate whether TDD slowed down their work – it is not clear that TDD is better if it avoids defects but also increases development time.

You can find more rigorous studies on whether TDD actually works on Google Scholar: [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=test- driven+development+...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=test- driven+development+effectiveness)

<comment><USER3> My thoughts too. It seems logical to suggest that TDD would reduce the number of bugs in the product that's being tested, at least somewhat. However, the true question may be if the time spent writing those tests (longer that the time spent writing code?) is worth it when looking at the number of problems it prevented.

I believe the practicality of TDD depends on too many factors to make statements about it in general. Is your project well defined (good for TDD) or a cool little idea that changes and morphs every day or two (bad for TDD). Is it large scale and complex (good for TDD) or quite simple (TDD may be a waste of time here). There are more factors of course too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. See my comment to roryokane above about the time spent on testing.

I agree with you about the practicality of TDD. For instance, recently, I was prototyping an upcoming feature involving a new library. The feature was quite different in terms of functionality (compared to the existing features). In this case, I did not use TDD as the prototyping was morphing (to use your words) quite a lot and I was trying to learn more about the library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personally I don't find the idea of 'test first' to be very practical in the kinds of tests that I write. I think the pragmatic programers used the expression 'spike and stabilize' to describe a pattern of development whereby devs get something working then write some tests to support that new feature. They made an analogy of mountain climbers free climbing for a bit then securing everything with the ropes. In order to do 'test first' I would have to decide things like what to call an input field on a web page so that I could write my failing test then code the page. That is too early to make decisions like that. Also, when people say they write a failing test then the impl. are they really writing a single failing test. Often I find I need several tests to cover all the cases. I bring this up because I'm a big fan of TDD but it seems too easy to poke holes in the whole 'write the failing test first' approach.

</comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems like what this post describes isn't so much "test driven development" as "testing". Rigor of the data analysis aside, unless I misread, it seems like a comparison between not testing at all, and testing (I didn't notice any specific mention of TDD methodologies).

Shouldn't the comparison be between full-on TDD (e.g. write tests first, etc etc) and 'old fashioned' testing (for lack of a better term)?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are absolutely right. On one side, the UI is using automated tests (using TDD) and on the other side there is no tests (backend server has no tests and first 2 years of the UI had not tests).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> TDD works for some things, not so much for others. If you know what you want to build, and how it will work, TDD makes it more likely that you will build it correctly, and that the programmatic interfaces will be pleasant to work with. If you don't know how to make the thing you want to build work, TDD is not going to help you. At all.

As an illustration see <http://devgrind.com/2007/04/25/how-to-not-solve-a- sudoku/> for an amusing example of TDD failing horribly for a simple algorithm problem.

<comment><USER7> TDD helps with design problems, not algorithm problems.

<comment><USER8> Yet the luminaries of TDD actually imagined it might be able to _evolve_ good algorithms...

You might undersell it; they oversold it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm afraid the OP is jumping to conclusions.

You can't arrive to the conclusion that TDD reduced the number of bugs based on a percentage ratio between UI/server bugs. You could simply have a bigger share of backend bugs over time.

You need to see it in absolute numbers, using some meaningful metric (bugs vs. LOC maybe?).

<comment><USER10> Bugs vs. changed LOC could be a good one. I believe there have been studies showing that bugs are proportional to LOC, but don't quote me on that.

The nice thing about his data is that it's fairly well controlled (for software, anyway)--we can separate his contribution vs. others' and his code pre- and post-TDD.

I agree that his analysis isn't great, though. Also, it's hard to account for effect of legacy code. The big drop in bug count doesn't happen until 5 quarters after he started TDD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A general note on TDD: I love it.

TDD encourages better APIs and more testable code. I don't use TDD to prevent more bugs. I don't even know if this is really true.

Everytime I think of a new feature I fastly have an API in mind. Starting with a test almost always shows me a better way to provide the functionality (easier, more failsafe). Thats one of my two key features of TDD.

The second key feature is that the tests you write are much more expressive than tests you write afterwards. I observe that everyday in my team and company. Writing tests after the implementation is done leads to a lot of mocks and just a static verification that the implementation works how it works. In the end, it is difficult to change the implementation and easy to break the specification. Writing your test ahead of the implementation means you test the specification and not how you implemented it. Tests become much easier to read as they express the specification instead of a 1000 lines test where every variable assignment of the implementation is checked.

As a last hint: I read here that people complain that TDD does not work with "prototyping". I agree with that - the problem with that statement is that a lot of people use their prototype as productive code later on instead of rebuilding it after the experimental phase. In my opinion that is a misuse of the word "prototype". A prototype is an experimental work to verify or learn some ideas and afterwards designing a better system. Other people may state that testing everything is not possible - that there are situations where it is not possible to write a test. I would bet that in 90% of that cases, this is just wrong and means a lack of testing experience of the writer. I can really recommend the following book: [http://www.amazon.com/Driven- Development-Embedded-Pragmatic-...](http://www.amazon.com/Driven-Development- Embedded-Pragmatic-Programmers/dp/193435662X/) I rarly do embedded system programming. My main focus are languages like Java and Go but this book is worth its money independent of your choice of programming language.

</comment><comment><USER12> My team has been working toward this goal for the last 8 months. We've talked a lot about testing and making it a requirement to have passing tests before a feature can be called "dev complete".

In going back and writing tests for even some recently developed features we have found a few (albeit, minor) bugs. In adding tests to legacy code we found mountains of issues, but it's also very time consuming to do.

We're just starting work on an API and our goal is to have tests written before the code is written, allowing us to essentially write the requirements for each API and write the code to match those requirements. I'm looking forward to the process as I really feel it'll make our code clean, concise, compartmentalized, and much easier to maintain in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting. Thanks for your reply. Out of curiosity, I have 2 questions:

1) Do you measure the defect counts over time? And if so can you share it? 2) What is your platform (web?)?

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It would be nice if it would be true, the graph looks great and props for supplying the data. Correlation does not equal causation though. Are there any scientifics researches on TDD or any programming styles?

<comment><USER14> [http://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/Papers/TDDpaperv8.p...](http://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/Papers/TDDpaperv8.pdf)

<comment><USER13> The research in this paper does not result in any conclusive evidence that says TDD is better, it merely showed that TDD encourages developers to work longer until a higher code quality is attained. If I read it correctly.

<comment><USER15> It's going to be impossible to quantify "better" anyways. It depends on what you're optimizing for. This research is incredibly valuable in helping us understand the results of TDD, particularly if we're optimizing purely for quality:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is TDD supposed to prevent bugs? I thought the main point of TDD was it was suppose to encourage better design.

First write the test. This is supposed to make you think more about the API and how you'd like to use it. Then write the implementation now that you've effectively tried using the API by writing the test. That why it's called Test DRIVEN Development. If all you're doing is writing unit tests that's not really TDD, that's just writing tests.

<comment><USER17> it is supposed to do both, prevent bugs by the fact that you capture behavior in test and improving design by leveraging natural laziness of humans to take less effort to achieve results. Usually less effort approach results in clean better structured code at least that is what I observed

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The author seems to emphasize about practicing TDD and that it will produce LESS bugs which is not what TDD is all about. TDD is about designing your architecture doing your "tests first".

On the other hand, some developers can write code first then unit tests later which can also produce less bugs but this is not TDD.

</comment><comment><USER19> I am a latecomer to TDD and try to increasingly do it in all of my personal projects, no matter how trivial.

I can't say how much it has been objectively beneficial because I haven't taken the time to measure metrics and I willingly submit that I may be just a sloppy programmer overall. But metrics aside, I will say that TDD, when I've done it on a "sure, why not, there's no deadline", has had great benefit to my morale and productivity because of how it builds the habit of programming into me.

Not the habit of TDD, but the habit of programming itself. Just as the cues, triggers, and rewards of a slot machine hooks people into gambling even if those people dislike gambling, TDD helps me break out of the "I really don't feel like programming right now" mentality that I've always had. When all I have to do is solve some small tasks -- with the knowledge that a reward is immediate (the passing of the test), it's easy for me to jump into it...and once in awhile, I'll even have the "just one more test to pass" attitude.

Now obviously, this (like slot machine addiction) is no good if you haven't built a good project plan and/or lack some sense of ingenuity. But even then, writing some a series of menial functions is much preferable over doing nothing...just as running a pathetically slow two-mile run just to meet a running goal even though you feel lazy is way better than descending into self pity/shame after you drop another new Year's resolution.

I could also point out that TDD has really helped me practice orthogonality but I think it's enough to say for now how it has improved my attitude. yMMV

<comment><USER20> I couldn't agree more. I work in robotics, and all of the software folk at our lab try to adhere to a very TDD/BDD based workflow; working here is the first time I've been exposed to it, and it's changed the way that I code not so much by altering the quality (though this has probably improved as a side-effect), but by making me more "productive" in the short term.

I'm a serial procrastinator; not in the cutesy demotivational poster way, but in a way that is legitimately harmful to my productivity and success if I don't find a way to reign it in. It was a big problem years ago. I failed classes in school, missed deadlines at old jobs and internships. I've become a lot better at being responsible, but every now and again I feel the same old apathy set in, and I can go a day or two at around 50% of my normal output. I find that when I need to start writing a new Class or do anything that might be front-loaded in the cognitive effort department, or just suffering from a block in general, it helps to just start writing code, no matter what it is. The process of hitting keys acts a great sort of ignition and warm-up for the diesel engine that is my brain. If I'm going to mindlessly hammer out code, it would help if it's useful. And a well-formed unit test, by its very nature, should be small, simple, and informative of the behavior of the code that it tests but shouldn't actually be all that cognitively taxing to write if you understand the nature of the problem but haven't landed on an implementation. Brain-dumping a behavioral outline that happens to be useful and in code form is much more useful than trying to hack on the problem I'm actually trying to solve and having to go back later and engage in a refactoring marathon.

In this way, practicing TDD has helped me lay out a system to kick-start myself when I start to slump. I realize that this is just one of many possible means to an end, but it's the one that works for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There are 2 major flaws in this experiment - both stem from this assumption

that the first couple of years of working for this company, are equivalent to the next 3 years.

This is obviously NOT correct.

1\. The more you work with a codebase, the more you undestand its details and complexities - this alone should help you eliminate more bugs during developement.

2\. You will have improved as a developer - meaning that the last 3 yeras in your life will have more experience and knowledge than the first 2.

As sad as I am at stating this fact... you cannot conclude that TDD actually works, because there are too many other variables involved.

</comment><comment><USER22> The article is not conclusive on whether it was TDD or just plain automated testing that provided the benefits.

I've heard good arguments against TDD, but I haven't heard any good arguments against automated testing. (Other than situations where automating a process is cumbersome, like hardware bugs.)</comment>


DConf 2013: Effective SIMD for modern architectures by Manu Evals - <AUTHOR> http://youtube.com/watch?v=q_39RnxtkgM

<comment><USER2> Abstract: Efficient and portable implementation of SIMD algorithms in D using core.simd and std.simd.

Benefits: Exposure to the language syntax and API's present in D, and also some best practises for writing portable SIMD code.

Speaker Bio: Manu Evans is a senior technology programmer in the video games industry with 10 years commercial experience. He has worked at Remedy Games in Finland, and Krome Studios in Australia, on titles including Alan Wake, Star Wars, Spyro the Dragon, and many, many more. Manu is an expert in hardware abstraction, low level systems and performance optimisation on a wide variety of computer hardware.

</comment><comment><USER2> Slides: [http://dconf.org/talks/evans_2.pdf](http://dconf.org/talks/evans_2.pdf)</comment>


Plone 4.1 - Is it any faster? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hannosch.eu/2011/04/plone-41-is-it-any-faster.html

<comment><USER2> We use Plone at work - not my decision I would like to stress. I can't stand it. I've never understood the reason to use an object database and the performance is absolutely terrible :-(

<comment><USER3> If you're seeing performance issues, please have your sysadmins reach out to the Plone community. There are proven approaches to scaling Plone to support high loads and very fast page delivery. We're often running Plone with various combinations of multiple ZEO instances, Varnish, HAproxy, and Nginx.

At my company we're supporting high-traffic, high-performance Plone sites for organizations including NIH, USAID, and Stanford. It's an excellent technology for large CMS and intranet projects.

Big thanks to Hanno and the other Plone core devs who are constantly looking for ways to make Plone even faster.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for your advice. As far as I am aware our Plone guy is using an approach based on your suggestion. We even have a specialist Plone boutique on retainer to help us but things are still not going so great!</comment></comment></comment>


Github: Speed Matters - <AUTHOR> http://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2009/09/github-speed-matters/

<comment><USER2> I find it weird that GitHub doesn't seem to be mentioning Anchor anywhere in its' blog posts? Is Anchor just helping GitHub move or managing its' hosting on Rackspace servers? I also find it weird that Anchor never mentions Rackspace servers.

<comment><USER3> We have mentioned Anchor:

<http://twitter.com/github/status/4433287458>

We'll talk about them more in the future, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Still really disappointed with GH's performance.</comment>


Musicians Generated Every Possible Melody, Release Them to Public Domain - <AUTHOR> https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/20/02/25/1720216/musicians-algorithmically-generate-every-possible-melody-release-them-to-public-domain <comment><USER2> Though I am not a lawyer, I will jump to a conclusion that this strategy will fail.

First, algorithmically generating all length 12 sequences of 8 notes (2^36 = 64 G results) is just math, not music composition, even if you encode the results in midi format. Thus, not subject to copyright protection (in the U.S. anyway).

Next, a catalog of 64G entries is not human searchable. It is an unreasonable to state a person searched or could have the catalog, and copied an entry. Perhaps a program containing certain search criteria could scan the catalog looking for entries with "musical" attributes. However, such a program would not need the catalog, because it could generate every entry independently.

Since the output of this effort is neither subject to copyright nor human searchable, the effort will not mitigate copyright law suits. It seems a fruitless exercise. I suppose it was worth thinking about, though.

And that is my opinion.

<comment><USER3> Maybe this is the best attack on copyright we have. It at least proves the smartest in this case have good intentions.</comment></comment>


Vscode IntelliCode: AI-Assisted Productivity for Python, JavaScript, Java - <AUTHOR> https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualStudioExptTeam.vscodeintellicode <comment><USER2> That looks great. I never thought I would find better IDEs than the IntelliJ, PyCharm, RubyMine, etc. from Jetbrains, but: in the last year I find myself usually using VSCode because it starts faster and is more responsive.

<comment><USER3> I use it only for HTML/angularjs projects. Is it worth moving from intellij to vscode for Java projects?

<comment><USER4> It's a very basic bare bones editor, whereas IntelliJ was basically built for Java projects initially, so it has a well established logic, behavior, is quite fast, lots of automation and tools. With vscode you'll have to download plugins, write your own build and perhaps even run scripts. Depends on what level of control you need.

<comment><USER3> Thats what I thought. Moved from eclipse to Idea and really love this IDE

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's also support typescript</comment>


Ask HN: What's a good book to give a teenage girl? - <AUTHOR> I am looking to give a good book to my niece who is turning 15. I want to give her a book that will make the most impact on her life in a positive way, and something that she can process at that age. <comment><USER2> What are her interests? Science? Writing fiction? Politics? Sports? I doubt that all 15 year old girls would enjoy the same kinds of books, regardless of their interests.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am actually unsure of her interests.</comment></comment>


Best way learn how to film better videos and improve editing skills? - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52xdrmxJJwc <comment><USER2> These days, I'd say not holding your phone vertically while filming something, immediately raises your 'cinematographic art' way above the level of most people's out there.</comment>


Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed? - <AUTHOR> Four months ago, one of my projects was ready to be posted on "Show HN", and so I did. After a couple of hours it reached the frontpage and traffic was through the roof. A handful dozen of trial users signed up, and with feedback of the community, I thought that if I were to spend a bit more time on it, this would be the side project I could continue working on and make some side-money with.
Long story short, four months later, I am the only user of my service. I hired a brand strategist who looked at the market, with who I forged a marketing plan, and with who I set goals. Needless to say, none of them were met.
What does/can this mean? Should I accept that what I built will only be used by myself, or is this a phase each product/service goes through? If only there were one extra paid user, I would have enough motivation to continue, but with zero conversion the motivation starts to fade.
I think it is irrelevant to re-post a link to the project, but feel free to ask/look it up if you think it's relevant. <comment><USER2> Let's be honest with ourselves. 0 users after 4 months is a failure.

Can you turn it around? Sure, it's definitely a possibility. But all your effort so far is not the way to do it. You need to do things completely differently, because whatever tactics you have used so far haven't even gotten you a single user.

You would have to invest more money and time into it, and it might get more users. You need help, and brand strategist isn't what you need. You need a sales strategy. You need to find customers and sales. You have to call people up and demonstrate it in person, you can't rely on Facebook or Google ads to make a difference.

But bluntly, this isn't such a hot idea like Dropbox or Airbnb that is going to get viral. Even Airbnb needed a lot of hustle to get it off the ground, and you need to figure out your target audience and get sales the old-fashioned way. If you're able to get good sales, then it could possibly be the service that you want it to be, eventually.

<comment><USER3> I don't think generally calling it "failure" is fair. I think you could call it "marketing failure".

<comment><USER2> At what point does it become a failure, if 0 users after 4 months of effort is NOT a failure?

Coddling people, especially in business, is very counterproductive. People could waste years of their lives following bad paths because of bad advice like yours.

Not a single person has decided that the product is worth paying money for. If the purpose of the effort was to get some people to pay money for this, and the outcome is 0, how could you honestly say this isn't a failure?

<comment><USER4> Yes, but how would one feel if one had to admit failure. We must put feelings before data! /s

<comment><USER5> Or maybe, it makes sense to identify _why_ something failed and label it as such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Link to project: [https://qeys.io/](https://qeys.io/)

Link to Show HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17254737](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17254737)

Ask for credit card data while signing up for the trail period. People that are possible customers don't really mind entering their CC. I did a test with my project Simple Analytics when number one on HN and free people did signup like 50 an hour. Than I cancelled those and paid people came in. Guess how many of those 50 did convert? Zero.

So ask for credit card info first, give a trail for x days and charge monthly automatically.

Your design is awesome ;-)

<comment><USER7> Just trying to be honest, sorry it's negative. Assuming I understand the way your product works, it's just JavaScript sending a key to a 3rd party server to check if the domain name is valid for that key. I think most programmers could write that themselves into their own project in a matter of minutes. Yes, the front end is nice and would take some effort, but your target consumers are programmers and don't necessarily need a nice front end to get stuff like that done. Additionally, it's easily defeated, and in your FAQ you're actually recommending that they do additional programming to disguise your code into theirs. So I honestly think the effort of using your service is more than it would take someone to write it themselves.

It looks like you wrote this project mainly for yourself, and are just trying to market it for additional revenue. So it's hard to call it a failure altogether because it seems it's provided the necessary value to you. But I can't imagine something like this being commercially viable.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure rigging copy protection to deny usage is a great strategy. could instead continue to grant access but notify and then use as trigger for a sales conversation. "Hey looks like you're running five instances of random webapp, we're really pleased you are finding more valuable ways to use it then we initially discussed. Looks like the contract is out of date, you're only licenced for two instances, let's get that updated..."

I'm pretty bad at this but you get the general idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since your domain is very niche, you have to do marketing as well as targeted sales. Have you reached out to potential customers and asking them to use your service?

Also please consider making this a B2B enterprise product. To do that the main thing you need to do is hide the price or put insanely high prices. like $999 per year per license and above. If you are hiding prices, put a button to contact the sales team, which could be your phone number to start with.

Also put some white papers and add a lengthy demo with your own voice with an actual project, like Wordpress being protected and ask them to contact your sales if they need to enable the protection in their software as well. The demo could be put behind a sales form to collect contact details.

And hide your technology details. They don't need to know how you do it. Just give instructions on how to put enable your validation. Since you don't have a free tier it's very easy for you to validate your project's success. Just reach out to X potential customers (it's very easy for you to figure out potential customers too) and ask them to try your product. Give a 6 months money back. I

p.s. A great sales article I found on HN this week: [https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/ama-steli- efti](https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/ama-steli-efti)

<comment><USER9> Overall the idea looks good, but the product looks too cheap, javascript validation? oh perhaps I could do it on my own.

Just hide the details and put some jargons (AI/ML to detect behaviour etc :) and give an enterprise look and feel.

<comment><USER10> Obfuscating what your product does is a terrible idea. Don't do this.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately this is exactly what he recommends in his FAQ:

"Besides, we strongly recommend to let our JavaScript file blend in with the rest of your application's JavaScript. Webpack, compress and uglify the best you can, to make the code responsible for validation as difficult as possible to find and break."

<comment><USER10> Wasn't talking about code obfuscation :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Handful dozen of trial users... 0 paying users"

Don't forget that, for many successful SaaS:

-Landing page to trial conversion is in 5-10% range, and

-Trial to paying customer is 3-10%!

Also don't forget the statistical variance.

Source: [https://medium.com/point-nine-news/monitoring-an-early- stage...](https://medium.com/point-nine-news/monitoring-an-early-stage-saas- business-at-the-b2b-rocks-conference-in-paris-985018d20fdf)

<comment><USER12> this is a great comment, do you have more links about other metrics relevant to SAAS ?

<comment><USER11> Well, more and more VCs firms are being transparent and provide reports about their portfolio startups.

Just look at famous VC blogs :)

You could also look at Saastr blog, it's really interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are two reasons why you may have 0 users:

1\. Users don't want the product you are offering

2\. Users don't know about the product you are offering

Your first job should be to distinguish which issue you have. You can probably Duckduckgo some basic benchmarks to figure out what the conversion is _if you are talking to the right people_.

For instance, if you are advertising in first class lounges to pay off student loans, that is just a waste. You have to look at your where you are placing the ads, or how you are reaching customers first.

If you know that is right, then you should talk to a few customers to see if you are offering the right thing.

The second is fixable, the first _might_ be. It is only a failure if the first point (can you iterate the product to something people actually want in a reasonable time at a reasonable cost) is not fixable.

</comment><comment><USER14> Looking over it, I think you may be chasing the wrong market. The only companies I know selling on prem software are large enterprises to other enterprises. It's fine to have a self serve product, but the people who are going to actually want this have a completely different sales pipeline.

Some other notes:

\- Name makes sense after you think about it, but is hard to read at first glance.

\- Your FAQ's answer on removing the validation code didn't inspire confidence. Give me an out of the box solution to obfuscating the tracking code.

</comment><comment><USER15> I looked up the project from your submission history. It seems like you're marketing it to developers who are making single page apps as freelancers? It seems like that person would be ideally positioned to just hack their own thing together (or at least think that they could) and not need your product. And since it's cheap, it kind of signals that it won't be hard to do.

The comment on "go for enterprise" is a great one IMO. A big company wouldn't mind spending $thousands plus $250/mo to "make sure they aren't stealing our IP" even if that's an extremely low-probability event.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hey,

I have been working on y own startups since 2013. My first startup failed. The second one, it was really hard to find how to get users, but after a few months discover a hack which drove a lot of traffic. 2 years later, I sold it.

Now I am working on a crypto company which we started with a game for the World Cup which was pretty good in terms of users. But now, launched NFL and we are fighting again.

It is not easy at all build stuff and then get users. It takes time and work to find the best alternatives to get them. Actually, Show HN, I was never able to get a lot of upvotes. So congrats on that and keep the hard work!

<comment><AUTHOR> You got me interested in the hack as well. Obviously, it will most likely not be a hack we can all copy, but I'm curious to what methods got you to finding out about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So, this is a perfectly good product, and your pricing isn't bad, but I'd have gone for a bigger spread - make the basic tier free, make the top tier $499 or so.

I'd also consider what would drive agencies and freelancers to do this, and market accordingly. This is one of those where many (i.e. those who've never experienced an infringement) would regard as an unnecessary cost.

Set up saved searches on twitter for "my work got ripped off!" type posts and reach out with "that sucks, I'm sorry that happened - I have a product that might help next time". Optimise SEO for terms like "website was copied" and "how can a freelancer enforce IP right?". Those who have just been stung will buy this in a heartbeat, and a free tier would capture a large and vocal market. Most B2B purchases come from distress.

Finally, consider reworking your copy. It's too much steak, not enough sizzle (you talk a lot about features and the tech, but not enough about how much better (trouble free, worry-free, easy, relax, no stress, get paid, boost revenue through easy licensing) it'll make their lives).

Also,

"In a very bad scenario where our service is slow, the worst thing that happens is a user being able to use the web app for a couple of seconds before it is denied access."

What? I think I know what you mean, but that reads like "if our servers are down, you will be too".

Finally finally, consider a positive sell too - "license your work with ease, monitor subscriptions", rather than the purely negative (protect yourself against infringers!) you have currently.

<comment><AUTHOR> "if our servers are down, you will be too": I can definitely see how you interpreted that. Luckily that's not the case, though. If our servers are down, all license validation passes. The "very bad scenario" with slow service is in the case of a invalid copy which may need a couple of seconds before it is detected as invalid. I am definitely going to change the copy, seems a lot of work to be done there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> When I google "web app licensing" I don't see you at all. I would look at this and other methods of slowly accumulating traffic and let organic growth happen while you mostly work on other things.

And don't hire more consultants, just commit yourself to learning what you need to learn.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hi,

I'm in a similar situation myself and in the process of figuring out why. I would recommend reading the book "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg.

I think it is relevant for you to share your project - there could be many different factors why traffic isn't converting. Trial users from a Show HN are great but I've multiple websites that had traffic but 0 converted. This tells me that the traffic audience may not be my target customers.

I'm doing things that don't scale now .. so actually going out to acquire users manually. What I've found is that the value proposition might actually be a better fit for folks outside of the HN community.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely think that you're right about that, that the HN community is not the target audience but more of a board of critics taking a look. That's why after launch, I spent time (and money) into finding out what the target audience actually was and where to find them. I thought the brand strategist had a pretty good idea of the market, but no target users found so far.

What exactly do you mean with "going out to acquire users manually"?

Project: [https://qeys.io](https://qeys.io)

<comment><USER19> > What exactly do you mean with "going out to acquire users manually"?

Figure out who my target customer is, where do they work, where do they hang out (online/offline) and figure out ways to go and interact with them (phone/coffee/conferences/etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is an awesome product, but you are going to have to spend a lot of advertising money to reach the right customers. Reason being, most companies either go the PaaS/SaaS route, or go full open source with paid support. My guess is most of your potential customers have already had to pivot to one or the other. Your only shot is people who are still in the early stages of developing their product and people who are looking to pivot to a different monetization model. You have to sell to your users the idea that in 2018 it is possible to police and track license keys and go with that sort of business model (obviously it is possible, but it's still a sell). Remember, most of your customers were pirating software left and right and using keygens 10 years ago when they were in high school / college, which creates a subconscious bias against license keys in general among the current generation of techies. That's why almost no products use them these days.

I would also suggest offering the product completely for free, and then charging over a certain number of keys. Maybe for 100-1000 installs you charge $5/month, then $25/month for 1000-10000, $50/month for 10000-100000, etc. You could also go with the $5/month gets you 0-1000 keys model, and then scale from there. That option will cash in more on the (large number) of people launching failed apps that get under 1000 users.

</comment><comment><USER21> I see a few issues here.

1\. $10 for GET request and ten license-domain pairs. For one project. $50 for ten projects and 100 licenses per project. Too pricey for small amount.

2\. Nothing stops user from simply removing qeys.js from a page.

3\. Functions in your js file are called "v" for validation, "iv" for invalid license error and "vv" for setting validation cookie. They can conflict with other similarly name functions from other parts of your customers's JS.

4\. You set validation cookies on the client side. You literally have a code to bypass your system in your system.

5\. User interface may be much better. There's too much hassle in setting up multiple keys. I need to switch between pages to do it.

Conclusion: your software isn't good, your prices are high. Something like that can be accomplished in one day with a couple PHP scripts tied to MySQL database with lifetime control over it. Everybody who needs it most likely are able to implement it themselves. You need to put more effort in it and polish it more to make it really attractive for others. It's a nice job for "Intro to Webdev" course project, but not for actual product someone will pay for. I don't want to offend you, but that's what I actually think as a guy with some teaching experience.

Shameless plug: I can develop similar (or better) webapps and now looking for projects. You can hire me. You may find me in Telegram with the same username I use on HN.

<comment><USER22> (2) practically invalidates the purpose of this tool. User will spend a small fee and just hire another developer who removes qeys.js

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think this looks like a great tool. But I think the HN community is way to broad to be your target market. I would start by brainstorming who out there is losing money from people using their product outside of their intended use. Then you need to contact them one on one and talk to them about the problem. Is it really that big of a deal, why haven't they solved it themselves already, would they be interested in your product? Why or why not? If yes, who else in the industry could they connect you with?

What immediately came to mind for me was design templates. You are supposed to buy one for $20 and only use it for one site. I will say I have bought those templates for clients, but on small personal projects, I will just load their demo page and save it to my computer and voila. I have their design template. And I'm sure I've used one more than once after it enters my template library. Plus, those designers probably don't have a way to protect themselves. So in this case, I would go to themeforest or something similar. Look up 50 or so designers. Message them and see if you can get a phone call or if they would be willing to talk over email. Figure out what it's worth to them and go from there.

<comment><USER24> Good observation. Paid plugins for cart software like Magento, OpenCart, and Prestashop might be good candidates as well. Well, at least the ones with a UI. Similar for Wordpress plugins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> You should try to sell it on flippa or similar, at least get something for your efforts. If you can't, shut it down and move on.

Also, your domain name is terrible.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Needless to say, none of them were met.

Why?

What marketing did you do? Did you do enough? Did you target the right people? Was your marketing message relevant? What did the people you where marketing too think of it? Did you test it was working? Did you market in multiple channels? Did you sell the benefits of your product or its features? Did you ask your customers what they thought?

You have said very little about how you tried to fix the problem, did you even try?

You didn't bother to post a link to your project and I can't be bothered finding it. Did you do the work for your customers or did you leave them guessing like me?

~Edit~ Some one else posted your link for you, and the link to the hacker news post, its filled with feedback, which I can see hasn't been tried. You are not doing your work. Their feedback might not make sense to you, but your not selling to you, and your not selling to them because your not addressing their concerns. Do the work for the customer.

</comment><comment><USER27> If HN was the only path to find users you may want to look at building a more robust and realistic sales / user acquisition strategy.

</comment><comment><USER28> Relink it again man, I for example just missed it and never seen your project.

I looked it up, and it seems pretty cool and well made. Kudos on keeping releasing new products.

Maybe people want a slightly different version of the product ?

I for example just never use such things in my professional/personal life. Maybe your target crowd isn't on HN ? Maybe submit towards a more subject related news site ?

</comment><comment><USER29> Maybe I don't understand your product accurately, but it seems that the concept is that you allow people who write server side JS code to protect their code: lock it down somehow and subject it to software-enforced licensing of some sort.

Now, I'm going to assume that without your solution or something like it, such code isn't protected. (Assume, correctly, that I don't know anything about server-side Javascript.)

The first question is: what is the competition? Is there a way of doing this that doesn't require your solution? If so, how are you convincing users to migrate to your way of doing it.

Secondly, suppose there is no competition. In that case, people who write server-side JS code do not expect to be able to do that kind of licensing, even before they have written any line of code. They deploy their server-side JS code in scenarios in which licensing that code isn't the bread and butter of their business; they lock in their bread and butter in some other way and take it _for granted_ that people can easily reverse-engineer their server side JS code, and muck around with it, steal snippets and whatever.

In this scenario is where you are in trouble because you face the prospect of convincing the people who are doing server-side-JavaScript development world to do that kind of node-locked deployment model. Only if they are seriously on-board with developing and deploying something like that do they then become potential customers for your licensing scheme. By the time they get serious, they might even roll their own.

You might be better off developing a superior licensing alternative for for some toolchain whose users already do that kind of licensing, stealing those users from whatever they are using now. And then work the JavaScript story into that: "hey, existing users: if you want to branch into JavaScript work, under your existing licensing model, we have you covered".

Lastly consider that if node-license-locked server side JS development suddenly became immensely fashionable, how likely would it be for numerous solutions to appear, many of them FOSS?

</comment><comment><USER30> I think you need to make the starter pack to free or create a very tiny pack for free starting. If the project really valuable to customer trust it they will buy more. But if it is not it didn't money anyway, no need to be sad. This will happen to anybody.

</comment><comment><USER31> It is very possible that you are not solving a real problem for the intended target audiences.

That is, the perception of your target audiences is either that they do not need the product or that it adds a layer of complexity they are not comfortable with (trust, potential source of other kind of support issues).

I suggest trying to find other audiences/use cases for this technology.

Sometimes it is the timing of the solution. If I remember well, in the pre- dotcom burst, Google was pitching Yahoo how efficient their algorithms for optimizing ad pricing with the idea of licensing technology, but at the time that optimization was a non-issue for Yahoo because they were essentially selling ads at any price they wanted.

</comment><comment><USER32> Besides all good suggestions that you received here already.

You are also missing some plug-and-play features.

Make it effortless for a client to pick your product. Also make it easier for him to reason about it. If I'm interested to your product, I should be able to defend against my co-worker who believe we can built it our selves.

Add integration/plugin/component/package built for popular web frameworks and CMSs and put their logos there.

Yes, your JS snippet works everywhere, but you need something more elegant. Your marketer is going to approach a dumb manager that believes his developers are only trained to use Wordpress plugins.

Use something like user-voice to collect user feedbacks. Don't make assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER33> You might want to look at targeting Wordpress Plugin developers with this. That's a good niche where this might be a good fit. There is already some competition there so you'd need to rework your offering some.

With web applications usually I'm either developing them for the client so it is their code or I'm licensing them as a SaaS app from my server so I don't really need anything like this.

This doesn't feel like a good product market fit, I'd keep using it and work on targeting WordPress developers.

WordPress isn't the greatest ecosystem but there is money to be made there.

</comment><comment><USER34> Early adoption can be very slow. Sometimes you have to physically visit your customers office and manually install the software on their computer, then show them how to use, it, then come back a week later, and show them again, until they actually start to use it. The feedback you get from these sessions can be very valuable, as a self user, you know everything there is to know about the software, but for someone who has never used it, even simple stuff can be overwhelming, or has enough friction that they won't bother as they have one thousand other things to do.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think the market is simply not there for such a tool. Your target audience are freelance web developers or rather a small subset of these. Add to that, that many of them are code monkeys that prefer to cook up something like this on their own and secondly the average freelance web developer doesn't really have terribly much money to spend to begin with.

I think you need a product that you can license to enterprise customers because they have plenty of money and often don't have a clue whether your product really is worth all the money or not.

</comment><comment><USER36> Selling to developers is hard slog. Try another non-technical domain.

</comment><comment><USER37> "What happens when I use your service? When you use your project specific Javascript file and add the license key meta tag to your project's HTML, we'll validate the use of your product on pageload with a GET request to our server. We'll check our records to see if a valid license is used and that the license is used on an allowed domain. If not, we'll show the user an Access Denied page (which you can customize) and notify you about the breach."

I don't know what problem you are solving.

</comment><comment><USER12> Have you consider removing the trial and replace it with FREE plan ? After you get a high volume of users you could find something very specific they would be willing to pay for.

</comment><comment><USER38> If you are a saas product, the thing that really matter is your conversion ratio. If after 4 months you can convert any inbound traffic, then by saas definitions, probably has failed.

But if that is the case, use it as an opportunity to tweak and reiterate your idea until you get a paying customer. Until then, you are working on assumptions on what the market wants.

</comment><comment><USER39> I think this would most appeal to paranoid managerial types. Probably should identify products you think might be wanting to use it and then contact them directly.

</comment><comment><USER40> Check this out - [http://www.licenseengine.com/](http://www.licenseengine.com/)

I'm using this product from last 1 year for my software. You can definitely make a sell if you try to sell your software to internet marketers. You can find them on platforms like jvzoo.com

</comment><comment><USER41> Did you learn something from this that could be relevant to a future endeavour? If so, then you can at least call that a win.

</comment><comment><USER42> Let it provide a certain reasonable (enough to license a humble number of themes, not enough for a big business to run for a long time) amount of service free forever, not for a 7-day trial period, 7-day trial periods are almost useless.

And/or add a killer-feature everybody would quickly realize they can't live without and spread the word.

</comment><comment><USER43> Lovely design. I feel this could provide value for a lot of indie developers. However, the copy could use some work..

For example, the following tag line could be much more concise.. "The instant solution to worrying less about your work being copied by the clients you developed them for."

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting (and comforting) to see the different points of views, where some would target indie developers (just as I did) and others would target massive enterprises. Good to see this isn't a black and white kind of problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> There is likely a sizable number of your trial users from HN who signed up merely to better understand it and see if it actually works. It crossed my mind to do it, so presumably others too. The initial spike could be largely driven by technical curiosity instead of real need.

</comment><comment><USER45> Hi, I think you product has not failed just because isn't on the spot right now. Maybe you have to try hard to make your product be known. Maybe trying in other sites like product hunt or indie hackers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Posted on all of the better known and even the less known platforms. Some of them did indeed drive some traffic, but somehow none of them even lead to trial users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Have you considered blogging and posting your articles on social media to drive traffic?

Have posted to ProductHunt? There are a ton of things you can try to get some eyes in front of your project.

</comment><comment><USER47> Learn about B2B SAAS, sales, and customer development. As it stands, it is a failure. But it also seems like your approach has been totally, stereotypically, incorrect.

</comment><comment><USER48> If you built out a project to the level of maturity I'm seeing, with 0 customers, you absolutely are doing it wrong.

I've had a couple of market successes, mostly in the B2B2C/LeadGen space and every time it has been built with a primary customer who is basically getting the product at reduced cost with the caveat that I understand the business impact I'm making with my software to be able to derive true value. They have the benefit of the product growing up around their needs before their competitors get their hands on it.

You built a solution to a problem without an anchor customer using it from prototype stage on up. This is really risky, in that you don't have a solid insight into the intrinsic business value of your product.

It seems too that you didn't take distribution into account and assumed that word of mouth would carry your cost of acquisition. For me the formula would be something roughly like:

Estimated LifeTimeValue (LTV) over 1 year * .3 == Avail Cost Per Aquisition in Marketing / Bizdev / TradeBooth / Etc.

(this formula will create an initial deficit, but most products are fighting against media buys of entrenched companies so you have to expect this)

So if you make $300/yr per customer, you might expect to spend $120 in marketing expenses to acquire a single customer. If you have a 10% signup rate for a free trial, with a 15% stick rate from that (For every 100 people you buy targeted media on, you might expect 1.5 paying customers)... that means if you're spending $1/CPC on google, you would be spending $75 per new customer (beating your $150 budget). Organic reach and word of mouth might help this formula reduce in cost, but what you're wanting to build is a sustainable machine that can be driven by marketing expense, not by gimmicky front-page listings on HN You optimize on those metrics as your marketing continues to spend more and you have more data to work with.

Obviously, the above example is hyper-simplistic, but you have an advantage of not needing to hire devs. Now take the time to figure out the digital marketing piece or find a partner who knows it and can help you with it in exchange for equity if you're trying to bootstrap this.

You'd have to play with your pricing structure to make that work, as you increase your price, Cost Per Aquisition possibly goes up but you hopefully can find a balance that works in your market. This is why most people for their first product need investors to pony up spends to discover this, but in my experience, you can hit very low cost-per-acquisition numbers if you're careful, just not at scale. (Last part is important)

Feel free to shoot me a PM if you have any questions or want any advice, you're getting a LOT of great input from people here but this is my $.02 :)

<comment><USER49> Very accurate, I agree with markab21

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> If it has 0 users, who did you make it for?

<comment><AUTHOR> It was something I built for myself in the first place (and I do still actively use it). Showed it to one of my dev-friends, he said it looked cool so I thought: "why not work a little bit more on it and share it with the world?".

<comment><USER51> I'd say that was the right thought process. Whether it works or not, most money making side projects start this way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Adding another request to a 3rd party server that could be down is a very bad idea</comment>


Favorite Bands by State - <AUTHOR> http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/02/25/here-is-a-map-of-every-states-favorite-band/#ixzz2uNGOSGVa

<comment><AUTHOR> You have to give credit to Texas for sticking to their guns with George Strait.</comment>


Deeper or wider - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/deeper-or-wider.html <comment><USER3> He's talking about a very special case were a group of people need to agree to buy your product (that is, where everyone has "veto power"); but it's not acceptable to one of them.

He says one way is to make the product acceptable to more people - ensure it has something that each of them wants ("a bit wider"). Another way is to make it so compellingly wonderful for one particular person that they will "bully" their colleagues into getting it ("much deeper").

I'm not sure how applicable this is to software. Often, it's just one party that needs to be satisfied. But... it can also be an organizational purchase, where the users have to be happy, the tech support guys have to be happy, accounting has to be happy, management has to be happy, etc. Each party has sufficient power to veto a purchase (this isn't always the case!). Seth is saying you can sweeten the deal slightly, to try to please the hold-outs a little more (just one of: easier to use, easier to support, easier to pay for, easier to justify ROI). Or, the other approach, is to make one attribute so astoundingly amazingly good, that it's so far more than "acceptable" to one party that you galvanize them into action, to champion your product, calling in favours, making sacrifices, doing deals to get the other players to agree (like a senate, right).

He didn't _say_ this, but I think he's implying it's easier to identify the hold-outs and just please them enough for the purchase to be unenthusiastically acceptable to them ( _Oh well, I guess we can get it_ ), instead of exciting one party so much that they move heaven and earth for you.

I reiterate that the starting point is the very special case where several people have veto power, and the product is not acceptable to one of them.

<comment><USER4> I suspect that to build a very large software business you have to build a product that can be agreed on by a consensus of people in a company (it may not be a huge decision-making group, but it does take a couple of people signing off on most major decisions). I'm having a hard time coming up with any software product that would be explosively successful without a group of people being able to agree on it. Office software, CRM, anything on the server, chat or other interactive tool, pretty much anything someone would pay for, would likely be chosen more often if the people that person works with or communicates with also choose the product.

Even games, these days, are often decided on because people can play with their friends or at least share and trade games amongst their social circle.

Actually, it just struck me how much less solitary computing is than it was even five or ten years ago. So much of what we do now is interacting with and sharing with others. Funny how that snuck up on me.

<comment><USER3> Some of these factors are network effects. I conjecture that every product has _some_ kind of network effect; it's a question of degree. A telephone 100% network effect; a USB drive might seem to have no network effects, but most people are biased towards the most popular one.

I think your criteria of "explosively successful" might _require_ very strong network effects - it certainly requires some way to reach lots of people, and network effects are one way of doing so (the de.li.ci.ous guy mentioned 3 needed factors, and this was one - he also put a new-to-me twist on it. I'll try to find the post). If you relax it to modest, steady growth, it might not require strong network effects (and possibly might be more stable - <USER2> resistant to explosively growing competitors...).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like Godin is going deeper–focusing on gullible startup founders who think he's saying something revolutionary because he wraps it in a catch- phrase like _"buffet dilemma"_

Its called vertical/niche market vs. horizontal market. Pick one, build a great product, and provide great service. Nuff said.

<comment><USER6> Indeed, and it would be better if everyone just read Peter Drucker's Innovation & Entrepreneurship: [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0887306187/squeakland...](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0887306187/squeakland-20)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> i thought we were supposed to avoid feature creep seth. shouldn't we avoid brown rice if it isn't part of our core competency? aren't we diluting the brand?

this is the problem I have with posts like this, they reduce to not very useful rules of thumb and often wind up contradicting each other.

<comment><USER8> Sort of like French proverbs or Zen koans, I suppose. The fact that they are often too general and contradictory doesn't seem to stop older, wiser folk from repeating them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "So, there are two ways to go. Much deeper, or a bit wider."

Ah, there's only one way to go. Whatever the market is telling you. If you're not listening to that, all the little hacks in the world won't help you.

<comment><USER10> Market makers would likely disagree with you, but I digress... so very, very few startups ever reach that level. :)

<comment><USER11> Market makers frequently do neither, they often go off on some tangent that satisfies desires no one had realized existed before. As long as people are recommending books, Clayton's "Innovator's Dilemma" is interesting and fairly useful (the sequels much less so).</comment></comment></comment>


Building Interactive HTML5 Videos - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/08/building-interactive-html5-videos/ <comment><USER2> Extending HTML5 video is actually really interesting. For an old project I wrote a subtitle player for HTML5 videos as a plugin. [1] You pass in a standard SRT file and it automatically parses out the times and changes the subtitle text.

[1] [https://github.com/Accentivize/srt- player](https://github.com/Accentivize/srt-player)

</comment><comment><USER3> This doesnt seem to work for me in Chrome 36.0.1985.143!

But I opened up FireFox and it looks really cool. I love the search ability. That could be awesome for video tutorials. "Ok I already know how to do X, Y, Z, but I want to jump to Step C"

<comment><USER4> Works for me in Chrome 36.0.1985.143. Does NOT work in IE 11.0.9600.17207, even though the <track> tag seems to be supported [http://caniuse.com/#search=track](http://caniuse.com/#search=track)

I'm also having trouble in FireFox 28.0, but that _seems_ to be an SSL issue being caused by my Fiddler install.

UPDATE: I've hacked at their demo and replaced the search button with some jquery that executes the search on every keypress - works really well. I've already applied it to one of the software-engineer training videos here at my office.

<comment><USER4> UPDATE: Looks like it not working is Mozilla's mistake, not your browser's. Using fiddler shows that the mime type Mozilla is using is binary/octet- stream, but it looks like the correct mime-type should be text/vtt. This is documented on Mozilla's page at [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Video_T...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Video_Text_Tracks_Format)

Also look at [http://dev.w3.org/html5/webvtt/#refsRFC3629](http://dev.w3.org/html5/webvtt/#refsRFC3629) and search "mime"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's kind of sad that web in some areas is catching up with... windows 95.

I'm building simple web-based tool for editing or replacing music in a movie. Simple player for preview the video with new music is really complicated. You have to build all processing infrastructure to convert avi, mpg etc. to, say, webm. Other option would be to leverage youtube for converting, but it's against terms of service.

<comment><USER6> I don't remember some of the features being described here present in windows 95 video players... but OK.

Though, your comment is a bit at odds with the article. it's about client side viewing, not server side processing.

<comment><USER5> I have to do server side processing to be able to view it on the client side

<comment><USER6> wouldn't you have to do that with most of the older solutions as well? flv, mp4, quicktime, ect ect ect. These are not development formats.

Well... actually I have seen quicktime being used in the effects industry from time to time, though you wouldn't actually serve quicktime videos with those settings.

<comment><USER5> Not really. Desktop players like VLC and play most stuff that you throw at it. Web solutions only supports webm well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>