Harvard Crimson article on Facebook the week it was launched - <AUTHOR> http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=357292

<comment><USER2> "Zuckerberg said that the most innovative feature of the site is that people can search for other students in their classes so that they can branch out to form friendships and study groups."

I really miss this feature. (How else can I identify the cute girl from lecture?) Facebook took away Courses, apparently hoping that someone would develop a better one... maybe they didn't realize that everyone would have to add it for it to be useful.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "I'm pretty happy with the amount of people that have been to it so far," he said. "The nature of the site is that each user's experience improves if they can get their friends to join it."

also

"While Zuckerberg promised that thefacebook.com would boast new features by the end of the week, he said that he did not create the website with the intention of generating revenue."

and

"Zuckerberg said that he hoped the privacy options would help to restore his reputation following student outrage over facemash.com, a website he created in the fall semester."

</comment><comment><USER3> Crazy. This article is three and a half years old, and it already looks like something from the early half of "Our Dumb Century," especially when it's sometimes spelled as "face book."

</comment><comment><USER4> I find it amusing how much Zuckerberg's apparent attitude has changed. Like not wanting to add resumes because they'd make the site less fun. I guess the idea of fun changes when you've got a 15 billion valuation to live up to.

</comment><comment><USER5> Excellent find! I really miss the core concepts behind the original facebook. It could have been so much more if Zuckerberg had chosen to expand vertically instead of horizontally.

</comment><comment><USER6> respect.</comment>


Few Cities Could Accommodate Amazon's New Headquarters - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-07/few-cities-could-accommodate-amazon-s-new-headquarters <comment><USER2> I think Philadelphia is a good choice. Center City is a 30 minute drive to Philly international airport. Land is relatively cheap, much cheaper than NYC, Boston, or dc. We have an ivy league school in the city, with another less than an hour away, as well as many other schools in the area. We have a large metro population with a good size technical and business industry already. We also have rail and sea shipping available. and there is also a convenience factor being nearby to NYC and DC both being a hour and a half train ride.

<comment><USER3> I posted this elsewhere but I'll repost here:

The Navy Yard literally ticks every box of their requirements:

30 Mile proximity to population center: It's IN the city.

45 Minute proximity to international airport: It's about 15 minutes drive from the airport, or you can take mass transit.

1-2 Miles from Major highways: It sits basically ON I-95 Close to Major arterial roads: Within 10 minutes of 295, NJ Turnpike, I-76

Access to mass transit at site: Bus routes to site, subway stop a 5 minute shuttle ride from site

500,000 sqft of development space: Currently prepped for 4,000,000 sqft of office development, shovel ready

Up to 8,000,000 Sq Ft of Development space beyond 2027: 13.5 Million square feet of space at full build out.

Literally every box ticked, in a tax haven. The city could justify a BSL expansion to the Navy Yard with this sort of development, so they could throw that in as a deal sweetener.

There is also the Schuylkill Yards district in planning which would involve capping the train yard next to 30th street station. Both Schuylkill Yards and the Navy Yard have master plans in place, and the Navy Yard is ready for this basically day one. Both are Keystone Opportunity Zones and have abatements on almost all state and local taxes.

Philly really is a perfect fit.

<comment><USER2> I was thinking center City. But you're right, navy yard would be a good fit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it interesting how many of these comments are sales pitches for their chosen cities. I don't have any preferences, since I have no desire to work for Amazon nor do I think my current city of SF is a good choice for reasons laid out in the article.

What I'm most interested in, however, is how you get around some of these problems. The article points out a number of issues:

Can even Amazon afford to pay 50,000 people on a New York or SF salary? That's going to be (almost) prohibitively expensive. They certainly can pay for a Michigan salary or an Alabama salary, but is the job market there in those places? The Philadelphia example from the beginning points out that while the city is large enough, the job growth hasn't been there for quite some time, implying that there might not be enough people to fill the needed jobs.

Could a city like Birmingham, AL or Gary, IN or Lincoln, NE support 50,000 new jobs? Are there enough available homes to house all those people? Parking spaces? What about the support jobs? For every N employees, you need M doctors or dentists or accountants or fast food workers or maids or auto mechanics to support the growing population. Are those jobs there? Are there people qualified to take those jobs? Can the new traffic be handled smoothly? I think the answer is "yes" to the above in the long term, but is Amazon going to put their HQ in an up-and-coming town and just deal with the growing pains in the short term? Or would they rather go to a larger city and skip those problems?

What about international airports? That limits it to a dozen or so cities around the country. Can Amazon survive in a place like Nashville, TN? Why or why not? Are there ways to mitigate potential problems of not being able to fly to London or Paris direct?

IMO, the potential cities themselves are much less important and much less interesting than the problems that moving a 50,000 person HQ to almost any city would cause.

<comment><USER5> Houston.

Low Taxes. Low Cost of Living. International Airport. Major Port. Plenty of Housing. Universities.

<comment><USER6> Low-lying land! Surely you must be joking?

<comment><USER7> I think you are getting unfairly downvoted here. Clearly low-lying land is a serious concern for any entity with a long-term planning horizon. Most floodzone land should be left for low development, such as farming.

<comment><USER6> Yup. Why would anyone choose to build headquarters in a place that blatantly disregards dire existential threats to its people and economy with demonstrably catastrophic results?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like Denver would be good choice, considering how alike Seattle and Denver are. There's plenty of hiking, biking, camping, etc in the area, and it's central location is convenient for any travel to both the east and west coast.

Denver also has an excellent craft brewery scene. Denver / Boulder are already tech hubs in their own right as well.

<comment><USER9> Shouldn't Amazon be more interested in the economic conditions, rather than hiking and biking and the brewery scene?

<comment><USER10> Tons of sunbelt and non-coastal cities have spent decades optimizing for cheap land and making themselves "business friendly" over all other concerns.

They still don't have much of a tech scene or high impact industries. And the same calculus that has prevented a mass migration of tech companies to Boise or Waco is the same calculus that will prevent Amazon from moving there either.

My bet is Boulder; the Research Triangle; or Philly.

<comment><USER11> Boulder is too small. The whole city only has a 100,000 now. It's got a greenbelt and height restrictions, so you can't build it out much more. And there's very little regional mass transit to get people into and out of the residential areas beyond the greenbelt. There's nowhere to put another 50,000 families. Plus it is on the wrong side of Denver from the airport.

Denver or one of its suburbs would be a decent choice, but not Boulder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> He needs to add Detroit to his list. Amazon already has two large warehouses and a small developer office there. The only negative on the list is a less than overwhelming public transport system.

But they've got lots of cheap land, and both an international airport and an international border as well as three world class universities within an hours drive. Not to mention a metro area with a population of 4.5 million.

<comment><USER13> Which universities are within an hours drive? Michigan, obviously.

<comment><USER14> People in the Metro Detroit area seem to conflate University of Michigan, Michigan State, and Wayne State as being equals / near equals.

<comment><USER15> The big state colleges are regarded as equals in the state, only in athletic terms. Everyone knows Michigan is the lone standout academically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The Twin Cities are looking at courting Amazon for this. IMO, Minneapolis would be a great location for it. We fit the RFP criteria.

<comment><USER17> Minneapolis would definitely be a great choice.

For those that don't know Minneapolis like the parent commenter and I do:

\- Amazon already has an engineering office in Minneapolis. Check out some of the jobs here.

\- Amazon has a fulfillment center in Shakopee, MN -- a third ring suburb ~30 miles away from Minneapolis.

\- This is mostly anecdotal on my part, but it's pretty typical for top computer science students at the University of Minnesota to go to Amazon / Microsoft in Seattle. Silicon Valley doesn't seem to bother recruiting in Minnesota, but Seattle-based companies seem to have good luck recruiting out of Minnesota -- where the weather is even worse.

\- Minneapolis has the headquarters of some of Amazon's biggest "old retail" competitors -- Target and Best Buy. A large Amazon presence in Minneapolis would go a long way to poaching the top 10% of talent at both companies.

\- Minneapolis also has a small but promising tech community. BuzzFeed and a few other tech companies have an engineering office in Minneapolis.

<comment><USER18> Minneapolis is such a long shot in my opinion, because very ambitious people tend to move to the coasts.

<comment><USER19> That's a common theme parroted by many, and a lot of ambitious people do indeed move to the coast. However, I think you are underestimating the amount of ambitious people in minneapolis and the surrounding area. We have tons of fortune 500 companies here and lots of world class smart ambitious people.

Not everyone is a 20 something who has no family obligations and is willing to go work anywhere in the country. Furthermore, in minneapolis we have very high salaries relative to cost of living. If you make 120k here you're basically rich and can save an enormous amount per month. This kind of salary to cost of living ratio allows an ambitious person to save tons of money each month and invest it how they please.

Anyhow, I don't think minneapolis is a long shot. We have a very good economy and infrastructure and lots of people doing smart/ambitious things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's interesting, because they really need to pick a city that won't have trouble attracting software developers. Some large companies (like Epic) have trouble recruiting and have to pay people way more because they're so far away from normal tech hubs.

<comment><USER21> I think Epic also has trouble recruiting because they work on an outdated stack using an arcane (and often counterintuitive) programming language for an industry that is itself probably a few decades late to any tech (probably for good reason, but the point stands).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Article in typical fashion [1] confuses what something currently is (a city) with what it could be if they won the bid.

One only has to look at Orlando Florida and Walt Disney World as an example of what can happen to a region over time.

[1] By a publication looking for page views.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think Toronto came first in their final list for a reason. It's a way to hedge against US immigration policies and also for Jeff Bezos to thumb his nose at Trump.

</comment><comment><USER24> South of Chicago is suuuuper cheap and has lots of available space.

<comment><USER25> City proper - outside of the lakefront - is not prohibitively expensive either.

But I'm just weirded out by how the article discounts Chicago based on assumptions about, what, tax policy? Where is this coming from? The Rahm is lobbying hard, and he's very pro-bigcorp, as McDonald's new 500,000 sqft world headquarters in West Loop can attest to.

Regardless of where Amazon lands (and I don't really have a horse in that race), Bloomberg's weird hang-up about Chicago are no more than a distraction. It's bad enough that Michael Bloomberg is personally spending $millions on TV ads to support the Cook Cty soda tax in a state where he doesn't even reside. Ugh.

<comment><USER15> Everyone is leaving IL, why would Amazon be the lone exception?

<comment><USER15> LOL the IL homer who down voted.. [https://www.illinoispolicy.org/cook-county- has-largest-popul...](https://www.illinoispolicy.org/cook-county-has-largest- population-loss-of-any-county-in-the-u-s/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> SLC might be too 'small' but it growing, has a super strong university system and tons of software engineers.

<comment><USER27> SLC metro population: 1+ million

Including SLC and Utah counties both: 2+ million

University of Utah, Brigham Young University, Utah Valley University

Substantial tech talent, startup scene. Adobe, EA, Ebay, Microsoft, Oracle all have a presence. And don't forget the NSA.

International airport connects to Canada, France, Mexico, Netherlands, UK... but will take two hops to get anywhere else. [https://www.slcairport.com/assets/pdfDocuments/Flight- Schedu...](https://www.slcairport.com/assets/pdfDocuments/Flight-Schedule- Info/International-Destinations-by-Airline-September-2017.pdf)

Meetingplace of I-15, I-80, I-84

Culture almost the complete opposite of Seattle's.

Mountain Time Zone

Killer cost of living

Government willing to make substantial concessions to tech companies

But... I'm guessing it's just not quite connected enough to be seriously considered.

<comment><USER28> I did my undergrad at UW and my grad at UU, I would say the cultures between SLC and Seattle aren't far off, in fact, SLC is the only city I ever knew to have 24 hour coffee shops. Not to mention mountains, hiking, and skiing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Most of the internal talk I've seen favors Vancouver. It's geographically close (with excellent transportation), is big but still has room to grow. Canada in general is a good choice because they have more lax limmigration policies.

<comment><USER30> What's the value in having two headquarters a few hours apart?

<comment><USER31> The cities are geographically close, but there is an international border between them. Canada has more open immigration laws opening up Amazon to a much wider talent pool. Considering that major difference, there could be a strong case made for having these major offices close by for in person collaboration.

<comment><USER32> While we are friendly to immigration, Canadian citizens will need to work there too (in order for government incentives to be doled out)... Otherwise, the public will eventually demand those benefits rescinded.

As a ballpark number, if Amazon wants to hire 50k people, I'd imagine they'd need at least 20k Canadians. So I suspect they'll need to convince Canadian programmers to move there.

I can't pretend to speak for all Canadian citizens, but given the choice:

1\. Move to the most expensive real estate market in the country, where the raise in wages wouldn't account for the price difference in housing costs. To work for an employer with Amazon's reputation towards employees... (that's the most polite way I could put that)

2\. Immigrate to SV under a TN visa, with the chance of working on interesting valley projects.

Despite both options having a crazy housing market, #2 is much more attractive. The value proposition can be changed though. I'd move in a heartbeat if the same wages were available in Montreal. Same for any Canadian city other than Vancouver and Toronto.

<comment><USER23> Assuming the TN visa is still around in a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A second tier Midwestern(ish) city could be a good option. Cleveland and Pittsburgh would be good choices, assuming the relocation induces more flight availability from CLE and PIT. Case and CMU produce a lot of tech grads, and Cleveland has been successful attracting medical professionals to relocate with its excellent hospital system. The housing stock, CoL, and cultural amenities are excellent. Pittsburgh already has a few bigtech connections and satellite offices. Columbus and Minneapolis would also fit the bill.

</comment><comment><USER34> I hope they pick Atlanta but I doubt techies want to live in the South.

<comment><USER35> I'd think the massive calamity known as Atlanta traffic would be more off- putting than "living in the South". I know I'd love to find someplace warmer to live.

<comment><USER28> Warmer but more humid. The Deep South is definitely air conditioning country.

<comment><USER36> You don't even have to be in the Deep South to need A/C. I live in North Carolina, which is "South but not Deep South" and I can't imagine living here without A/C.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Atlanta is a great choice for all reasons mentioned by others and such a move would go a long way towards solving tech's diversity problem.

</comment><comment><USER38> Vegas. Land is cheap, the weather is less miserable than Boston although it is indeed miserable in the summer. A couple of hours from LA and a major airport.

</comment><comment><USER39> I know both Nashville and Memphis Tn are making a bid on it. Lots of business moving into Nashville area, and lots of room to expand.

</comment><comment><USER40> Crazy not to add NYC to the list. Huge Google office there now, Facebook growing. Would be a good fit.

<comment><USER11> Cost of living and unwillingness to bend over backwards for tax breaks take NYC out of the running. I think their list -- Toronto, Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Dallas or Denver -- is pretty decent though Washington and Toronto seem less likely than the others (COLA and ex-US respectively).

Except for being unwilling/unable to offer very high tax breaks, Chicago would be right up there too. But I have to imagine that's going to be a very significant factor.

Other long shot, but still plausible, cities are: Las Vegas, Charlotte, Detroit, and Minneapolis.

<comment><USER41> Nobody with half a brain opens an big location in the Boston area. If you don't hate money you go to NH.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I would bet on Canada, so either Toronto or Montreal. The whole continuity reason for the second HQ needs to address possible political and regulatory disruptions as well. They need the option to flip jurisdiction as a leverage.

<comment><USER18> If you are thinking long term, consider a large scale war, if China and the US get into a large scale conflict, Toronto might be spared.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm just hoping San Jose wins its bid, for no other reason than it'd amuse me.

</comment><comment><USER43> Amazon's announcement came right on the heels of Seattle enacting an income tax on higher income people. The city government has done a number of other anti-business initiatives and rhetoric.

Seattle has been taking Amazon for granted, suddenly the Mayor is taking an interest in Amazon:

'"My office will immediately begin conversations with Amazon around their needs with today's announcement and the company's long-term plans for Seattle," Seattle Mayor Ed Murray said in statement Thursday.'

[http://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazons- announce...](http://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazons-announcement- of-hq-outside-of-seattle-sends-ripples-through-states-political-circles/)

</comment><comment><USER36> Amazon should consider the Triangle (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill) area of NC. There's definitely a strong university presence here, as well as an existing workforce of highly skilled / educated folks working at companies like Red Hat, IBM, Cisco, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Glaxo-Smith-Kline, Microsoft, and the like. The Raleigh metro area population was 2.16 million in 2011 and this is one of the fastest growing areas in the country (or was as of 2015)[1].

The Triangle is also in a sweet spot between beaches to the east, within about a 1.5 hour to 2.5 hour drive, and mountains to the west, within about 4-5 hours. And locally we have lots of outdoor green spaces with plenty of trails for running, hiking, mountain biking, etc.

We have major league sports (the NHL Carolina Hurricanes) and minor league baseball (Durham Bulls) and soccer (NC Football Club, formerly the Carolina Railhawks).

The local airport has direct flights to Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Paris, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, DC, and Toronto among others.

There's a nice nightlife scene here with each of the three "points" of the Triangle being a "college town" (Duke, UNC Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State being the major universities). And if you like music, you can get everything from jazz at Beyu Cafe, to the NC Symphony Orchestra at Meymandi Hall in Raleigh, to black metal / death metal / metalcore / etc. at The Maywood in Raleigh, and all sorts of eclectic shit at the Cat's Cradle in Carrboro. And Trans-Siberian Orchestra always has a stop here at PNC Arena on their winter tour. And that's not even mentioning Motorco and the Durham Performing Arts Center in Durham, or Lincoln Theater or Walnut Creek Ampitheatre in Raleigh.

There's plenty of good food to be had here, although admittedly not quite the variety found in Seattle, Chicago, New York or San Francisco, etc. But still you can find a very nice range of options here. Lots of good Thai food in particular.

All in all, despite the embarrassing fuckups by our state government over the past couple of years that have made the national news, this really is a nice place to live and work. And the Triangle metro area is really a different world from the rural parts of NC. Yeah, if you go looking, you can find some pretty backwards, uneducated, ignorant people in NC, but the area here is very diverse, educated, cultured, etc.

[1]: [https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/morning_call/2015/01/fo...](https://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/morning_call/2015/01/forbes- raleigh-is-4th-fastest-growing-city-in-u-s.html)</comment>


What's the next step for my web app? - <AUTHOR>

I am a software developer, experienced primarily in database systems (some internals, some application development). I've made half-hearted attempts to stay current with UI technology but stopped pre-Ajax.
Years ago, my family joined a babysitting coop. Parents who know and trust each other join and babysit each others' kids. There is a ticket system used as currency, and there is a formula for tickets involving number of kids and length of sit. The coop aims to have 30 families. As families leave, new ones are recruited from acquaintances.
The coop had been running for years before I joined, doing everything with phone and email. In one of my efforts to learn UI technology, I built a website to run the coop, using Python, Django, Postgres, and Apache.  Members request and volunteer for babysitting jobs, an administrator select volunteers, a president controls membership. It's plug-ugly but gets the job done. It's a very simple application. The real value in the work is that the features have been designed and fine-tuned by very involved members.
I have no talent or interest in the business side of things, but it occurs to me that this could be turned into a small business. A coop of this sort has a specific set of interests and is in a single zip code. Ads (which are not on the site currently) could be targeted extremely precisely. The coop collects some annual feeds, so its possible that a website like this could charge an annual fee per coop.
The service could easily be generalized in obvious ways, e.g. swapping other kinds of services and goods. There are other coop sites on the web, but they rely on random people signing up, and to my eye they appear to be pretty inactive. One insight from my coop is that you'd need a more active sales approach to find existing coops who could use the automation.
So what do I do with this and how? I know that I'm the wrong person to do sales and business development, so any expansion would involve bringing in people who have such interests. <comment><USER2> E-mail me: email@example.com. I'd be interested in seeing if I can't help you.</comment>


An open source, cross-platform IDE for exploring pixel based graphics on the GPU - <AUTHOR> http://syntopia.github.com/Fragmentarium/

<comment><USER2> This looks awesome. So far, we've been playing with shaders at <http://www.iquilezles.org/apps/shadertoy/> , but this is in a whole different ballpark.

</comment><comment><USER3> This could be useful when trying to whip up some quick & dirty visualisations. Anyone tried it yet?</comment>


Ask HN: Those making $1,000+/month on side projects – what did you make? - <AUTHOR> It can be a SaaS app, a mobile app, or any side project that is netting you recurring revenue. <comment><USER4> Holy crap, I remember seeing these kinds of threads before and being amazed by people making good money from a side-project, I can't believe I'm now one of them!

My project is BugMuncher - [https://www.bugmuncher.com](https://www.bugmuncher.com) \- a website feedback tool I created back in 2011, and it's currently making $1,489 Monthly Recurring Revenue.

Strictly speaking it's not a side project anymore, as in Sept 2015 I fired all my freelance clients to focus on BugMuncher full time, but I've never taken funding, and I'm the only person working on it, so it still feels like a side project :)

If anyone is interested I've been writing a blog series about my mission to go from side project to profit, which starts here - [https://blog.bugmuncher.com/2015/10/22/from-side-project- to-...](https://blog.bugmuncher.com/2015/10/22/from-side-project-to- profitable-start-up-part-1.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> have you considered adding a free tier? Our project has one and we have had success upselling existing free customers a lot, since our free tier is very limited.

Its different from a free trial since if they like your product will use it until they grow enough to upgrade and might eventually start giving you money.

I can think of countless products that I ended up upgrading from free to paid after using their product > a few months on their free tier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://betalyst.com/](http://betalyst.com/) \- A football betting analysis/predictions website.

Offer the whole service for free. Revenue generated through advertising/sponsorship.

Looking to move into a premium model over the coming months to gain some MRR to allow me to develop it furthur..

Currently earns over £75,000 per year in advertising/sponsorship/affiliate revenue.

Work on it for about 2-3 hours a week.

<comment><USER5> I am currently looking into how I can generate more buzz/PR for this site....

If anyone has any tips I am all ears... I like to work on small budgets, as I don't believe you need to spend a lot of money to gain traction online.. I have only spent around £1,000 to get to where I am now...

Share any ideas you have.

<comment><USER6> How do people currently find the site? Searches or do you run ads?

<comment><USER5> There is an app in the Android story that generates leads that I then upsell the site to on a drip email campaign.

Get about 10% of traffic from Organic searches and the majority is direct from email.

I am trying to work out how to get more referral traffic and backlinks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://rebrickable.com](https://rebrickable.com) \- A LEGO database that shows you which sets you can build from your existing collection, also includes thousands of fan-submitted designs. The revenue fluctuates quite a lot though since I suck at that side of things.

<comment><USER8> Revenue is from LEGO and toy-related ads? What is the pricing model for an information-based website such as yours? I'm at work and unfortunately can't browse at the moment.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, ads and affiliate sales. It gets a decent amount of traffic (~130K users/month, 2M pageviews) but I have trouble monetising it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://retailwizard.co.uk](https://retailwizard.co.uk) & [https://propertywizard.io](https://propertywizard.io) (Same product, different marketing)

Automated social media assistant for small businesses in the UK - <USER2> making £750 MRR. If you have any questions I'm happy to answer.

<comment><USER10> [http://www.TwLng.com](http://www.TwLng.com) has the same goal, however its great that this is hyper-targeted.

<comment><USER9> I took a look at your site and don't see how they have the same goals?

Sorry if I have missed something, it's a cool project anyway and it's 100% solving a pain point many people feel when using Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's a recent discussion on the topic, along with some links to other previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10879529](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10879529)

</comment><comment><USER12> As in the previous thread I made [http://www.watermark- image.com](http://www.watermark-image.com) that makes 3000+ each month.

I am using the money to build [http://timeblock.com](http://timeblock.com) that currently makes around $350 a month.

<comment><USER13> Interesting. There are tons of image watermarkers, how do you differentiate in terms of marketing/promotion (and maybe pricing)?

<comment><USER12> Pricing is more or less the same across all the watermarkers out there - <USER3> lower and it is just not worth the time!

Marketing wise I primarily offer great and fast support also in building additional features, this drives a lot of user reviews and reccomendations on forums.

Email me if you want more insights, I will be happy to help you building something different!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Engineering has a lot of similarities with crafting :) Sooo I just started [http://www.smiles-bags.com/](http://www.smiles-bags.com/) with my wife. I'm doing design of the products and she runs a business :)

</comment><comment><USER15> bentbasket.com

<comment><USER16> Neat idea... Why does it prompt to join mailing list when clicking 'Order one now' and if I close that annoying pop-up nothing happens (still on main page)... Clicking the button again does work though. Latest Chromium if it helps</comment></comment>


Remove unused CSS in your Web Application - <AUTHOR> http://deanhume.com/Home/BlogPost/remove-unused-css-in-your-web-application/5102

<comment><USER2> Well the problem comes up when multiple pages share the same CSS files. How can we find "unused" classes in that case? Is serving css file per page an alternative ? Only if we follow guidelines like SMACSS to structure the CSS, it's possible. Anyone has any other solutions?

<comment><USER3> [https://github.com/operasoftware/ucss/](https://github.com/operasoftware/ucss/)</comment></comment>


How High-Flying Zenefits Fell to Earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/how-high-flying-zenefits-fell-to-earth <comment><USER2> Now I'm wondering whether Zenefits was even a technology startup or more of a hustler operation which went online.

Excerpt:

Zenefits' technology was frustratingly limited. The software is built around a central dashboard and lets small businesses onboard new employees, generate health insurance quotes, and manage 401(k) plans and other benefits. But while this system looked slick and did a fine job with small tasks, much of the important work on the backend was done manually.

"The back office is really heavy in terms of bodies," one former Zenefits employee said. "It's really archaic. It just seems automatic to the customer."

This kind of work is standard practice in the insurance brokerage business, but it's notable for Zenefits, which purports to be an "automated" solution. The lack of true automation behind the scenes led to numerous problems. With one customer, Plated, a food delivery startup in New York, mistakes by Zenefits staff in entering payroll deduction information caused a string of erroneous paychecks to be issued, according to one former employee and an online comment by Plated co-founder Nick Taranto. Zenefits is "not connected well enough with payroll providers," Taranto wrote, "so we're having to cut lots of manual checks."

The first public indication that something was amiss at Zenefits came last summer, when BuzzFeed News reported that customers were complaining of software glitches and seemingly careless errors.

<comment><USER3> Have you ever peeked into how payroll, healthcare, and insurance systems work? This is a genuine question, I'm not trolling. The reason I'm asking is because you can't really have automation and APIs for systems that have literally zero automation to begin with. The entire industry is a combination of fax machines shuttling paper back and forth between the different players. It doesn't matter how much software you throw at this problem if you're just a broker because from the perspective of the other players you're just another fax machine. That is the level of electronic and computer sophistication of the healthcare insurance industry, fax machines.

ADP, Trinet, etc. are just as manual and full of error prone human processes. It's all just heroic human effort on all sides. If anything Zenefits has shown the incumbents and everyone else in the space that you can indeed provide a software solution that integrates well with human processes and in the long run make things much more automated and efficient.

<comment><USER4> [Dunning-Kreuger Warning!]

Maybe Zenefits lacked imagination? You can automate sending things via fax machine. OCR exists. You can use web scraping tech (well that's kinda what got them in trouble with ADP right?)

I feel like it's always possible to automate a bit more (or at least enough to where you don't have staff manually copying numbers onto a piece of paper)

<comment><USER5> > You can automate sending things via fax machine. OCR exists. You can use web > scraping tech

I've spent a fair amount of time working on infrastructure and operations projects for insurance MGAs (a particular kind of broker), and can assure you that these approaches are definitely in use by many players within this space. If Zenefits hasn't implemented these methods, it would be pretty unusual.

Granted, even in spite of heavy automation in the broker space, there's still a ton of very old school paper shuffling and processes that resist automation because of a combination of the following factors:

* lack of standards * process complexity * the sheer number of 'one off' cases that pop up in the insurance world * when you do the cost analysis, it's often cheaper to rely on a manual process with manual controls than it is to automate, thanks to relatively inexpensive clerical labor

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "Zenefits has changed a TON in the past couple weeks, and because of that a > large part of what I fell in love with at the company no longer exists," > this employee, who insisted on anonymity, said in an email. "For Zenefits > employees, it literally feels as if our Zenefamily was overthrown and > replaced with government officials that could care less if we come or go.

> "It's almost as if they want us all to quit so they can start over."

Oh, wow, gee, that's so awful! Wow! I'm so sorry you can't get away with lying to the government and your customers any longer. I'm so sorry you can't get drunk at work and pretend you're still in college! Oh, this is just awful. Won't somebody do something?

(/s, as if it were necessary)

The "move fast, break things, grow as much as possible" mindset is not always a good thing. If the product you're making has high potential and low risk, if it's replacing something that isn't critical to people's safety and livelihood or to your customer's day-to-day operations, it's great. If you're making something new the world has never seen before, it's great.

But if you're making sure people are getting paid and have medical coverage? That's not an area where it's an acceptable mentality. I think the issue here is not so much that this ethos is fundamentally flawed (though I guess one could make that case), it's that it is not universal and shouldn't have been treated as if it were.

Also - respect to Buzzfeed for taking what could have been a hit piece and making it fairly comprehensive/thoughtful.

(edit: formatting)

<comment><USER7> Your reply would have been significantly more compelling without the sarcastic rant. Your point afterwards is worthwhile, but the first paragraph made me sad to read.

<comment><USER6> Fair. I was channeling the South Park cable company guys when I wrote it. I'm gonna leave it as is, though, because to be honest the sentiment behind it is important to me. It really cheeses me off to see employees in a toxic (for this kind of work) culture playing the victim for what amounts to getting caught.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm still not catching why selling insurance requires licensing. This is not practicing medicine, this is not giving people haircuts, it's not even preparing food, all of which make sense to be regulated. It's just selecting from a list of plans.

In an ideal world, people/employers should just be able to do it themselves and cut out the middleman.

<comment><USER9> I am not sure why the parent comment is being downvoted, but for one I'd also like to know why selling insurance requires licensing.

<comment><USER10> The consequences of bad actors in insurance issuing are much more severe than bad hairdressers or bad cooks.

<comment><USER8> Only because of incredibly confusing pricing schemes with copays, deductibles, lifetime limits, out-of-pocket limits, in-network limits, and so on and so forth. This should be addressed by making information transparent to all buyers, not through middlemen.

A bad hairdresser can slice off my ear and a bad cook can poison me.

<comment><USER11> It's rare for hairdressers to act in bad faith, because acting in bad faith - slicing off ears for fun - is a bad way to make living.

In finance, it's incredibly easy to make a living by acting in bad faith. You can offer insurance with no serious intention to pay out, and tie up claims in bureaucracy and legal loopholes.

Good regulation should go some way to minimising bad faith actors.

In fact the industry seems quite scammy anyway. But it would be much, much more scammy - to a criminal extent - with no regulation at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm out of the loop with SV startup culture, but banning alcohol in the office is "a step that many in tech would view as crossing a red line"? I hope I'm reading that wrong. If there are restrictions as to time and place, then sure some alcohol in the office might be okay, but as a general rule alcohol + work = problems.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash The typical SV startup attitude is often: "get it done, we don't care how." There are good reasons for this. People - especially in SV - value their freedom. Having that peace of mind allows them to focus, which can be better than the old school, Java-shop, get-20-support-tickets-done-by-Friday style of management.

Another reason: there's a reason startup offices are so "fun": they don't want you to leave. Nerf guns and hard liquor make the office seem like a place to hang out at, so working 10,12,14+ hours a day doesn't seem so bad. You're hanging out with your friends, right? Overtime pay? Never heard of it. We get stock options right? No, our founders wouldn't dilute our shares to favor late stage investors, would they?

So maybe that's the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Note: there is a _lot_ of new information in this article relative to the previous articles this week. (!) Such as the party culture and the influence of a16z.

<comment><AUTHOR> _" there is a lot of new information in this article relative to the previous articles this week"_

Didn't see the previous ones, [0] and lots of them. What did stick out, was this quote:

 _" "Why are you guys so fucking bush league?" Dalgaard said, according to Conrad, who recounted the conversation while on stage at a software conference in February 2015. While Conrad had planned to hire 20 sales reps by the end of 2014, Dalgaard said the target should be five times that. "You guys gotta get your heads out of your asses, start focusing on going big here," Dalgaard said, according to Conrad."_

The expectation from Lars Dalgaard of Andreessen Horowitz to grow big at ^all costs^. VC money egging on the unethical.

[0] [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=zenifits&sort=byPopularity&pre...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=zenifits&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER10> Correct URL: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=zenefits&sort=byDate&prefix=fa...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=zenefits&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><AUTHOR> thx @minimaxir

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > While Conrad had planned to hire 20 sales reps by the end of 2014, Dalgaard > said the target should be five times that. "You guys gotta get your heads > out of your asses, start focusing on going big here," Dalgaard said, > according to Conrad. Conrad and Dalgaard would later clash, with the > investor pushing the CEO to stop hiring altogether in the summer of 2015, a > person familiar with the matter said. Dalgaard also urged Conrad to run > audits, conduct an employee survey, hire more top executives, and expand the > board — all things that Conrad resisted, this person said.

Hmmmm, "a person familiar with the matter" sure makes it sound like Dalgaard was doing everything in his power to encourage Conrad to act responsibly. I wonder who this person could possibly be and whether they have a personal agenda of some sort.

Does it strike anyone else as _maybe a little bit_ irresponsible that a partner at one of the world's preeminent VC firms would pressure a founder-CEO to hire as aggressively as possible and shortly thereafter castigate said founder-CEO for their company exhibiting all the telltale signs of hiring too quickly?

</comment><comment><USER14> Potential customer here. One guy's experience.

As a technical founder of my own company, the founder of Zenefits ( reportedly, they maybe use that line but coming from standard sales reps ) reached out and suggested I take a look at Zenefits.

I looked. I asked two different "startup CFOs" about Zenefits.

I found the following conclusions:

* The market is crowded. Trinet is what everyone in the valley has been using, and no one has serious problems with them. It's not like, you know, fighting the intrenched taxi mafia. Zenefits is not disrupting anything, they're simply competing.

* According to my sources, Zenefits is the hardest company to work with of benefits suppliers. Compared to Trinet, when your CFO-type calls Zenefits, they get long wait times and unprofessional answers. One of my sources was forced to use Zenefits ( by a founder ) and considered them a time sink.

* High prices. Because of a small installed base, Zenefits didn't have the ability to create a large insurance pool and have market power with insurers. They claimed low prices, and did have low prices for their service, but the numbers penciled out higher because of higher health insurance prices. If they think prices go down when they get bigger, maybe the would have needed to subsidize prices.

Not a win.

Part of our startup culture these days is "damn the law, make customers happy". I'm not super thrilled about that attitude, but it is what it is.

The zing against Zenefits in this article is poor technology ( uh, chasing MPV is all about poor technology ), and poor legal practices. I honestly didn't care about either - I care about user experience and prices.

My internal recommendation not to use Zenefits was poor user experience, and high prices. I didn't like having a sales person tell me prices were low when I had done my research and prices were higher. I didn't like being told Zenefits was easy to use when my people said it was harder to use.

And, yes, I sent a note outlining all the to the founder, in the interest of helping a brother out. I don't remember what I got back, but it wasn't encouraging.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is beating a dead horse at this point. We get it. Hypergrowth at all costs is not cool.

</comment><comment><USER15> on a side note: Loving the diversity of buzzfeed. FB would be filled with listicles And HN would get the occasional long form article which is a very intersting read

</comment><comment><USER16> > Managers urged new recruits to try to score not much higher than the minimum > passing grade of 60% on the California broker license exam.

I don't get why the passing grade is so low. At the very least, I'd want someone who only scores a 60 (and thus is barely qualified) to be forced to take it again the following year to ensure they're still qualified.

I wonder if you could enforce a graduated system based on scores? If you score a 60-70, you have to re-certify the following year; if you score a 70-80, you have to re-certify in two years, and so on. In that case, scoring as high as possible is in the best interest of companies, because then their employees go as far as possible before having to retake the test.

</comment><comment><USER17> So was Lars Dalgaard from A16Z pushing Zenefits to grow faster, or more methodically? This article makes it seem like he was trying to have it both ways, or maybe it was just Lars trying an after-the-truth comes out CYA?

</comment><comment><USER18> "Pervading the offices in San Francisco and Arizona, meanwhile, was an almost fraternity-like atmosphere, with whiskey shots, kegs, and bottles of champagne."

Sounds like an awesome place to work.

<comment><USER19> Just not a good place to do business with. I can appreciate having fun at work, believe me I can, but as someone who spent nearly a month without insurance because of a screw-up on my insurance company's side (completely unrelated to Zenefits), and the absurd lengths I had to go to to fix their problem, seeing all this shoddy work on Zenefits end makes me really sympathetic to their customers. Medical insurance is heavily regulated for a reason, and I can't imagine the clusterfuck that could happen if Zenefits screwed something up when providing insurance for a company and one of its employees ended up without insurance and then used their (nonexistent) insurance at the hospital.

<comment><USER20> I have to say that your attitude here is more forgiving than is deserved.

Problems such as being without proper health insurance can cost lives.

I myself have been forgiving in the past about such things; but that attitude was born out of an ignorance I had that everything on the back end was being handled as well as possible. After reading this article I am now much more concerned.</comment></comment></comment>


Call Spinner - Phone Based Chatroulette - <AUTHOR> http://www.callspinner.com/

<comment><USER2> looks interesting. how do you deal with numbers that may charge you money?

<comment><AUTHOR> This was a Startup Weekend Omaha project (we won!), so there are a lot of things left to figure out.

It all runs through Twilio, so I assume they would handle that type of thing.

<comment><USER2> great</comment></comment></comment>


Streets of Dreams; When You're Asleep, New York Becomes Another World (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/05/nyregion/streets-of-dreams-when-you-re-asleep-new-york-becomes-another-world.html?pagewanted=all&src=longreads

<comment><AUTHOR> _" Many people interviewed said they dreamed about their childhood homes, especially if they were from neighborhoods that had changed radically over the years. ''It's like a lost civilization,'' said Professor Marcus of Columbia"_

Great quote. My childhood home town can be summed up in one photo taken in 1905 ~ [https://flic.kr/p/s2Frt4](https://flic.kr/p/s2Frt4) School, church, main street, kinder and old home behind the pines.

It's changed, but recognisable.</comment>


Nice book on convex optimization techniques - <AUTHOR> http://www.stanford.edu/~boyd/cvxbook/ Hey all, here's a nice text on the theory and algorithmics of solving problems which can be described as max/minimizing some function subject to some feasibility constraints <comment><USER2> This book is truly wonderful. Probably my favorite math book.

Those of you who may be interested in convex optimization may want to take a look at these "MIT OCW-like" pages:

[http://see.stanford.edu/SEE/courseinfo.aspx?coll=2db7ced4-39...](http://see.stanford.edu/SEE/courseinfo.aspx?coll=2db7ced4-39d1-4fdb-90e8-364129597c87) [http://see.stanford.edu/SEE/courseinfo.aspx?coll=523bbab2-dc...](http://see.stanford.edu/SEE/courseinfo.aspx?coll=523bbab2-dcc1-4b5a-b78f-4c9dc8c7cf7a)

and those who are interested in convex optimization and Python programming, might want to take a look at these:

<http://abel.ee.ucla.edu/cvxopt> <http://cvxmod.net>

<comment><USER3> i second this. this is probably my favorite text book behind Mackay's "Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms".

if you take the time to honestly follow the text you come away with a great understanding of convex optimization... both the theory and the methods.

<comment><USER2> Now that you've reminded me of Mackay's equally wonderful book, I can't decide which of these two is my favorite ;-) All math books should be like these two gems. I never get tired of reading them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know a guy who's using convex optimization as part of a project to sample an ultra-wide range of frequencies looking for a hidden narrowband signal (I leave it up to you to guess who would need that kind of device).

Apparently they use "compressive sampling" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing>) in conjunction with the convex optimization so they can avoid building the superfast A-to-D that you'd normally need to cover such a frequency range.

You can apparently prove that it'll always find the narrowband signal, as long as it's narrow enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> I take it that this is referring to a (listening) bug detector?

<comment><USER4> It sounded like a broad-spectrum communications monitor.

If you want to know who's broadcasting anywhere in the range from 1MHz to 10GHz (example only -- I don't know the real range for this device), that's a bandwidth of 9.999 GHz.

You could scan freqencies sequentially, but it's slow and you might miss something. You can't afford to build a 20 GHz A-to-D converter, and even if you could, you don't want to build a computer big enough to process the resulting 80 GB/s data stream (assuming a 40 GHz sample rate with 16-bit samples).

The compressive sampling process is what allows you to sample at a lower rate (as long as you can assume that the signal you're looking for doesn't use too much of the total bandwidth). The convex optimization is apparently used to decide how to do the sampling in a way that's guaranteed to recover your signal.

<comment><USER5> The convex optimization is used to reconstruct the original signal.

The underlying compressive sensing theory says that if you do a measurement of a sparse signal, then convex optimization should allow you to recover that signal with high to overwhelming probability. The reason compressive sensing is interesting is that: \- the process of taking measurement is linear (no iteration a la JPEG), thereby allowing one to foresee very low powered sensors. \- the number of measurements is expected to be much smaller than what the Nyquist-Shannon theorem says (Nyquist is just a sufficient condition, not a necessary one), thereby realizing a de-facto compression of the signal with no a priori on the shape of that signal (except the knowledge that it is sparse) \- the measurements are automatically encrypted.

In the case of the broad-spectrum communications monitor, the message is known to be sparsely located all over the frequencies.

Igor.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the clarification, Igor -- my knowledge of this is second-hand, from a friend's description of an interesting project he's working on. I had never heard of compressive sampling or convex optimization before that, and it was eye-opening to see what's possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Do any folks on HN have any interesting optimization stories or unusual application domains?

<comment><USER6> I did a MIQP package for the DeBeers Trading Company to help them decide who to sell to. A very odd project in many ways!

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you elaborate on the modeling that needs that machinery?

<comment><USER6> I don't think it's of general interest, but I can drop you an email with a precis if you like.

<comment><AUTHOR> sure, that'd be dandy

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One more thing, Stephen Boyd's class on convex optimization (he is one of the co-author of the book) can be found on Youtube:

[http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query...](http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=stephen+boyd+optimiization&aq=f)

a person has pit all the videos in notes and put the said notes on a blog:

[http://minhva.blogspot.com/2009/02/convexoptimizationii- lect...](http://minhva.blogspot.com/2009/02/convexoptimizationii- lecture01.html)

so you can watch the video and read the text of the video at the same time.

Igor.

</comment><comment><USER7> Could someone give a very simple example of a problem to solve with this?

<comment><USER5> As it turns out, convex optimization is being seen by a few folks as the new least square. As wwalker mentioned, convex optimization is currently being used in solving for measurements taken with hardware implementing compressive sensing (or compressed sensing or compressive sampling). The A/D converter is just one of the application of compressive sensing. One of the most well known example is that of the single pixel camera at rice but there are many others. I have listed most of the known hardware implementing compressive sensing here:

<http://igorcarron.googlepages.com/compressedsensinghardware>

One should note that while convex optimization has given some real impetus to the field (by providing theoretical bounds), signal reconstruction is also using speedier techniques nowadays even though linear programming techniques remains some sort of gold standard. For those of you interested in the subject, I write a small blog on the subject of CS:

<http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com/search/label/CS>

and have written a page trying to summarize our current understanding in this page(it is a bit technical):

<http://igorcarron.googlepages.com/cs>

Cheers,

Igor.</comment></comment>


Gecko-Inspired Window Washing Robot is Powered Entirely by Water - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/geckoinspired-window-washing-robot-is-powered-entirely-by-water

<comment><USER2> (Sorry: too late to be read, noprocrast and comment posting timeout conspired against me.)

I think the interesting part of this is the gait mechanism which is unaddressed in the article.

A little experimentation with my fingers on the desktop confirms a single actuator to move the legs between two geometries, and the ability to turn suction on and off to the pads is sufficient to climb walls. (Turning probably requires that you can individually activate the pad suctions and have some flex available.)

        time ====>	     	      	      	      	 repeat

                                        -      O       O
                                         \      \       \
                                          x      x       x
                                          |\     |\      |\
                    -       O       O     | O    | O     | -
                   /       /       /      |      |       |
                  x       x       x       | -    | O     | O
                 /|      /|      /|       |/     |/      |/
        O       O |     O |     - |       x      x       x
         \        |       |       |      /      /       /
          x     - |     O |     O |     O      O       -
          |\     \|      \|      \|
          | -     x       x       x
          |        \       \       \
          | O       O       O       -
          |/
          x
         /
        -

       odd     toggle   all     even   toggle   all    odd
       only    position suck    only   position suck   only
       suck    actuator         suck   actuator        suck

</comment><comment><USER3> ...and it has a battery. To power the electronics and wireless - is it remote- operated? So no brains either.

Its not a robot at all then. Its a servo.

</comment><comment><USER4> if battery weight is a problem, can't they attach a external power cord to it ? I mean it's not like the water pressure is coming from inside the robot.

</comment><comment><USER5> powered by "water pressure"

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I was disappointed that we hadn't discovered a way to extract energy from water...

<comment><USER7> Extract the deuterium from your water and we've been able to extract lots of energy from it for a long time (50+ years).

Doing it in a nice controlled and easy to start fashion is the catch...</comment></comment></comment>


Cross-Browser Debugging CSS - <AUTHOR> http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2012/05/02/cross-browser-debugging-css/ <comment><AUTHOR> My process is a little simpler: Never float anything without specifying a width, and just avoid margins altogether.</comment>