Ask HN: What are good ways to find startup problems to solve? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> If you're looking for a startup, something that's supposed to start cheap and scale huge in <10 years, then you're probably only looking at problems that can be addressed by software on the internet.

That being said, you don't have to look there. You can start a huge variety of businesses just by gaining modest expertise in something new and then charging people for doing that thing. EX: get a $1K drone, learn to fly it, and charge half of what it would cost a helicopter/plane to get the same shot. It's not a startup, but it's a business, and it might lead to a startup.

Startups seem to be bimodal (no I don't have data for this) in that they're either business-focused or solution-focused. Uber is business-focused. They don't give a damn about anything other than fat stacks of cash. Tesla is solution-focused. Musk just needs the business to last long enough to achieve his goal of shifting the market away from fossil fuels.

It's a lot easier to find a business opportunity than to find a solution you're passionate about AND makes for a good business. Most people who just pursue a solution end up in non-profits or simply realize that there's no way to sustain an organization providing that solution.

If you're just looking for a chewy problem to solve, then PM me because I'm working on a good one.

</comment><comment><USER3> This question has also been in my head for a while.

I suggest maybe we stop looking for problems to solve and start solving problems we have.

A simple problem that I have right now is ,

I am in need of a high quality technical text book that is in my local language (swahili).

First I can't buy anything from amazon or the other online retailers because I don't have a credit card.

Second, even if I am able to order from amazon I wont be able to get a Swahili version of the book ( Due to a myriad of corporate reasons).

Third, I'm broke I can't afford the dollars that also accompany the shipping costs and the tax that my government has just raised.

So, I sit down and think. Maybe it is about time, we start giving some love to the millions os swahili speakers eager to contribute to the recipes of this big cake called internet.

I find static sites cheap, and elegant. I mix the solution with strong security, and use modern tools to bring speed and relevancy. Many people start to use my platform, a new eco system is born and bam there goes a new amazon, solving a real problem and I'm sure as hell I can afford to pay in my local currency.

The company gets acquired by, guess who? Then you zero the clock and start the whole process again.

From the example above, you can notice, I never looked for a problem to solve but I just solved the problem I had.

<comment><USER4> But how would your startup make money, if your customers don't have credit cards and are broke?

How do you make something for the hand-to-mouth working class, who are neither so poor that you can coax the wealthier into donating, nor have any disposable income?

<comment><USER3> The customers are broke because the quotes are in dollars, and the TSH is less valuable than USD. Which again another startup problem waiting to be solved.

The lack of credit card, is another problem that I have. Which is another startup problem waiting to be solved.

People pay if there is value in what you are offering.

<comment><USER5> How is the value of the Tanzanian shilling relative to the dollar a problem to solve with a startup?

<comment><USER3> I admit to over each on that statement. But my point still stands, with context of the example.

Buying things with local quotations might be good for the scenario.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd argue that in finding a subject for a startup, you don't want to find a problem. I mean, why would anyone want _problems_?

What you want for a startup is fertile ground.

\</comment><comment>-

Go to the nearest upper-middle-class person you know (at the 10th percentile of revenues). Ask for their account statement. For each line, try to answer the following:

1) What are the margins? Is the price of the item driven by costs of production, or by what people accepted to pay? You want the latter. Prefer emotional over utility.

2) How did the person came to know the product? What were the drivers of acquiring the product? What did close the sale? What were the alternatives?

3) What is the cost of entering this market? Would you be able to do it?

\- Then you have a list of fertile grounds, out of which you can try to work out:

4) What can be improved over this market? How would you sell differently?

5) What can be improved over this product? What would you modify in the product?

6) Are they buying it? Build only the store front: throw a landing page somewhere, stir some activity, see if you get emails. Interview the leads you got. It's ok to announce to people you won't be doing X.

7) And then, only then, you can work on a problem to exploit the scarcity of being the only one having solved it.

<comment><USER7> Great post. There is no reason to limit this process to the top 10%. Plenty of money over the years has been made focusing on the middle (think Wamart).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I assume you probably tried 'scratching your itch' and it isn't really going anywhere from there.

Not all itches are opportunities. All great, subtle opportunities lying out there may not necessarily happen to be your itches.

That said, if you are looking for problems i.e _your_ problems that you want to solve, but just couldn't find something, then what's wrong is that you aren't _doing_ a lot of things.

Go shopping. Watch out for things that you think could be made better. Accompany a friend to a hospital. See what solvable problems lie in the process of treating a patient in a hospital. Experience a lot of things. I'm sure you'll eventually hit on something that you can solve.

Another good exercise is to look for things that qualify as unsolved problems in different domains/industries. This isn't tough. HN's _Who is hiring_ thread is a great place to start. These threads are a key knowledge base of people working on problems. Go ahead, just do a HN search and you'll realize there's a lot of things waiting to be made better!

"What are good ways to find startup problems to solve?" \- is a deep question. If you do crack things out (and I'm sure you will), please make sure you share it with the community :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Talk to people who you want to help. Try to figure out if you're good at something they're not.

If you start a startup, you're going to spend every waking hour for, like, 2 years thinking about the problems your customers have. (After that, you'll start thinking about building / structuring your company more.) You have to like them. You have to understand them. Your current ideas about what will sell and scale are, at best, poorly specified. Go ask people what their hopes and fears are.

On the other hand, you also have to actually provide something novel. Think about what you believe that's contrarian, or you learned in the last year or two about the current state of things. Write that down, but don't spend a ton of time on it. That's probably going to be at the root of the solution you come up with.

For me, this was marketing analytics. I was working in marketing, and I like marketers. I was a dev for a while, so I knew how to glue together the data sets marketers used. The specific problem/answer took a solid 6 months to really come together, because it took me 6 months to go have a couple dozen really solid conversations with VPs of Marketing. It turns out there's about 3 classes of tools that are vastly underutilized by modern B2B marketers because they're poorly integrated. If you put them together, a 4th tool naturally emerges. So we're building that. It's going to take a while, because it's a lot of functionality, but it certainly wasn't something that we knew we were going to build at the beginning of the journey.

Go talk to people. Empathize, be curious, apply your slant. Your start is going to have your fingerprints all over it, so don't be afraid to get really personal about finding a problem that gets you excited to solve.

</comment><comment><USER10> Paul Graham wrote an essay on this topic which might help you. [http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I love this article. I'm very much inspired by what is written here, but for the most part can't find an 'itch' to scratch.

Right now I'm just building stuff I consider is cool / fun and see how it goes from there.

<comment><USER11> Just curious, what do you find cool / fun?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unprecedented applications mostly enabled by new / disruptive technology. Things that do scratch my itch (even though most of them don't resonate with others)

Right now I'm working on Ethereum dApps as I have a strong feeling that the world will gravitate towards p2p / distributed tech and Ethereum is arguably one of the key technologies that will bring us there

<comment><USER11> I can't wait to see how the Ethereum ecosystem progresses from now up through sharding. Plus the drama is priceless entertainment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://nugget.one](https://nugget.one)

(via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12215184](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12215184) [http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-297-h...](http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-297-how- to-charge-for-startup-ideas-with-guest-ken-wallace) )

</comment><comment><USER13> "Scratch your own itch"

I've built two apps (MDB Viewer and Postico) because the tool I needed for my work didn't exist. It turns out, other people often have similar problems!

<comment><USER14> I was curious about your tools since it's really uncommon nowadays for one-man ventures to build desktop software. I'm assuming your Postico projecto is the postegres viewer. Not looking for exact numbers, but how is it selling? Are you able to make a living out of it, or it's mostly beer money?

<comment><USER13> My current revenue is around 10.000€ per month (mostly from Postico).

I'm not really a one-man venture anymore; I've recently hired a part time employee (I'd like to hire someone full time, but it's harder than I expected to find people)

There are lots of other one-man ventures making desktop apps. From the top of my head I can think of MarsEdit, Base from Menial, SQLPro manager, Acorn (image editor), Dash (documentation browser).... all Mac apps made by a single developer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This startup was created to solve just this problem: [https://nugget.one](https://nugget.one)

One of the founders is the host of the Techzing podcast [http://techzinglive.com](http://techzinglive.com). You can hear some of the background on Nugget if you listen to the more recent episodes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! I was just thinking the problem with finding startup problems might be a good one to solve aha!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> From your follow-on comments I'm not sure whether the challenge for you is finding problems or identifying that it's a problem that is worth working on. Providing a little more information on the sort of problems you have seen and then why you have decided to not work on them would help others be more specific with their guidance.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that problems will obviously need to resonate with enough people for a startup to even exist.

As a recent graduate, honestly I have not experienced many of the industry pain points, and am limited to the really general food delivery, dating apps, edtech tools.

I did work on certain problems before. A group of us worked on a few versions of an MVP for an in-class active learning backchannel that many students & professors thought they needed. It was a complete disaster that ended with both sides realizing it was not a pain enough problem for them.

I also worked on a dating app that tried to solve a problem in my high school days. It allowed someone to anonymously send 'smooches' to their crushes, who would ideally see the email and sign up to do the same to their own crushes, alerting them of a match if they sent one to a person who sent to them. It was fun but didn't really get a lot of attention and traction.

Right now in a bit of an idea drought and don't know what to work on concretely.

<comment><USER16> Thoughts on how to push through

1\. Pick an industry that you are either interested in and/or you believe is going to be more profitable - i.e. financial services pay more than retail therefore more potential.

2\. Take a friend from University who works in that industry and not in technology to dinner, beer, coffee and find out what aspects of their job they find are the biggest PITA.

3\. Read up what the management consultants are talking about. Not they should be considered gospel on problem or solution but if they are trying to sell something they believe there is a) problem that exists in that industry, b) there is a market for a solution and c) the industry is buying that solution.

4\. Read up what your potential competitors are doing about the problem

5\. Go to your thinking space (mines the movies) and noodle.

6\. Compare your idea to the knowledge you've acquired in 2,3 and 4.

You can bail out at any point, you can do 1 through 4 in any order but do them before 5 and 6. You can be running multiple problems in parallel and you'll probably end up with ideas that coalesce. Then when you've got to step 6 make a decision about whether you're still interested in the problem, because now comes the hard work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Solve a problem for yourself! Ideas are in our everyday lives - look closely, those things/services/tools you 'wish' could exist, you just might spot a niche - then build it for 'you', and you'll realise how many people needs this product/tools/services!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's good advice! But I've been trying to do this and I might be too content with my life cause I can't find these frustrating problems / 'itches'.

<comment><USER18> Too content with your life? Think bigger. eg... [http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/](http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/)

...it doesn't have to be climate change per se. The point is that if you don't see things to improve on a given level, look at a higher level. Or a longer time horizon.

A lot of this is going to be hard to solve on the level of software. But not all! And maybe you can team up with people with other skills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Check out the talk Startup Ideas and Validation [1]. The key insights are:

* Innovative ideas are rarely, if ever, eureka moments. They usually evolve after spending a huge amount of time thinking about a specific problem.

* Ideas do not form out of nothing. You are not creating new knowledge so much as finding new ways to connect knowledge that you already have. So the more you know, the more ideas you can have.

* The environment plays a huge role in helping you combine your existing knowledge in novel ways. There are a number of tweaks you can make to your environment that make it easier to come up with great ideas, including keeping an idea journal (write down not only ideas, but problems you encounter on a daily basis), regularly letting your mind wander and relax (fixation can prevent creativity), adding constraints to the problem (constraints breed creativity), playing the "Wayne Gretzky Game" (live in the future and build what's missing), and seeking out pain (where there is pain, there is opportunity).

[1] [http://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2016/02/14/startup-ideas- and...](http://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2016/02/14/startup-ideas-and- validation/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I solved a problem I had writing some simple scripts. I think it solves a problem for no less than 5k people in my country.

I spoke with a couple of friends with the same problem and they were really interested so I integrated all the scripts in a program with a easy to use gui...

The 2 friends never used the program... the website I created got almost no visits from organic search.

It solves a problem that is related to schools but you have to use the software since the start of the school year to be of help so I'm in the process to cold-email some people about the software...

Unfortunately there are no places where the potential users hang...

After all the time spent reading about mvp, startups, releases, growth hacking, I'm proud I could complete the software and release it... also if nobody will never use it.

I had a pain and solved it but it is not enough when it is impossible to reach the audience of possible users...

</comment><comment><USER21> I think meeting new people is a great way to find startup ideas if you personally don't have any. I am collaborating with two different friends that were complete strangers prior to a couple a months for fun and both the ideas are not mine. I am working hard to make sure both gets good traction.

</comment><comment><USER22> move to a developing nation. i spent 2 yrs on a service mission for mexico. really opened my eyes to how different life is for people outside the US. simple things like mobile phone banking are huge game changers in these countries. go and look around for awhile and you will find some big opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER23> If you are looking for problems, it's very easy: Do stuff.

Not doing anything you don't know any real problems and can only think about the next photo sharing app.

Working with others on actual customer tasks lets you learn to know the customers situation and problems.

</comment><comment><USER24> Have a kid. Everything is broken.

<comment><USER25> I am about to do this and am very interested in seeing this, I have a feeling you are very right. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Work for a Fortune 500 for a year - finding their pain points will be unavoidable.

</comment><comment><USER27> Check out effectuation.org/learn

The idea is to start with who you know, what you know, and who you are. Then through conversations with people you know, ask them their problems that they are ready to pay to solve. Find common things that several of them are ready to pay for..

That's a great way to start, and will give you great problems that very few others might want to solve..

</comment><comment><USER28> I think the only real way is to live in the world outside of only development. There you will find crazy niches that are still far behind and could really benefit from a tech infusion.

Most people who solved a major problem wanted to meet a need of a market, and that need is hard to see unless you're familiar with the market.

</comment><comment><USER29> The satiated man and the hungry man do not see the same thing when they look at a loaf of bread - Rumi.

So be hungry or starve self of necessities. eg: Take public transport instead of a car. Walk few miles if u want to get somewhere instead of car during weekends.

</comment><comment><USER30> 1) think of frustrating situations that you encounter in your daily life 2) determine if that is a situation other people also find frustrating 3) if so, there is probably an underlying problem to the situation, just waiting to be solved.

<comment><AUTHOR> Lots of people talk about this, but do they really occur that often? I don't seem to encounter many such situations that can be solved much better than current offerings. As a fresh graduate there is a lack of domain experience as well for me to understand (or know at all) the pain points in various industries.

Perhaps I'm just not thinking out of the box enough.

<comment><USER31> I tend to notice lots of inefficiencies at small businesses that I frequent. When the front desk person says they're having computer problems; that's a great time to strike up a conversation and see what they think about the software they use every day and how they think it could be better. If you think you could fix that problem, you're on the right track.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Google Trends

</comment><comment><USER33> Bookmarking, some nice ideas here

</comment><comment><USER34> Start a startup.</comment>


Dynamic bike headlight that projects data using Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/bikes/raspberry-pi-diy-dynamic-bike-headlight-projects-useful-data-ground-video.html

<comment><USER2> Some wonder if it's a fake: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5406106>

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a second video that has some 'making-of' images that show the projector working from a different angle. It seems real to me.</comment></comment>


Kill the laws that keep car dealers in business - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2014/10/26/6977315/buy-car-hassle-free <comment><USER3> There are some interesting comments in here about how tough the struggle is for car dealerships, but I don't think that necessarily justifies their existence or mitigates the point of this article.

If what the dealerships do is valuable enough to the customer, they would exist even without the ban on direct sales. But I think we can all intuit that if the ban were lifted, buying a car would be a very different (and better) experience.

<comment><USER4> We often moan about the taxi industry, the hotel industry, or the dealer associations but, in doing so, we miss something very important. The players in that industry often existed for years or decades in a state of government- backed protection _without realizing it_. Taxi drivers didn't necessarily lobby for market restrictions; they took advantage of the oligopoly, sure, but not necessarily consciously.

If you live in a state of believing that the market is actually fair and others have an equal shot at participating in it, then someone else entering the market in defiance of the existing protections _appears_ to be unfair.

It's hard to believe that you didn't enter into a job market and win a wage fairly. That, instead, you were unfairly advantaged by artificial pressures in that market much bigger and more entrenched than you.

Essentially, the incumbents have been lied to for years and, now that new logistical realities are changing the status quo, it is very hard for them to understand _why_ this is happening. They think someone must be cheating.

\---

To expand on joosters' analogy of taking a fence down elsewhere in this thread [1], it's not necessarily bad if we take the fence down, we just need to realize that doing so may have serious consequences in the near-term. Having such a strong, deep-rooted artificial pressure in a market so abruptly removed may result in a painful readjustment of the market that hurts a lot of people.

(My other comments weren't meant as a defense of dealers, only intended to elucidate their operations.)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10463745](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10463745)

<comment><USER5> Some fences need to remain. Take barbers/hairdressers, for instance. It turns out that a barbershop can be a great place for spreading head lice. You want your barber/hairdresser to be trained to prevent that. That's part of what their licensing is about.

So, are there any aspects of being a car dealer that are worthwhile fences? Offhand, I can't think of any, but that doesn't mean there are none.

<comment><USER4> I agree. As an avid "car guy" and a student of regulation, I cannot think of any reason for car dealers, as a whole, to be protected in the long-term. I am, however, perplexed with how we should address the possibility of established manufacturers attempting to cannibalize the sales of their most profitable franchises by building neighboring dealerships with their considerable capital.

I believe the California model actually offers a lot of hope: manufacturers can compete, but they must observe a 10 mile radius from existing franchises.

<comment><USER5> Pick a model - say, Chevrolet. Is there anywhere within the LA basin that isn't already within 10 miles of a Chevy dealership? Does this rule leave the manufacturer any place to be in a place like LA?

<comment><USER4> This is why I am perplexed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I paused my software development career to sell cars for a year. I sold cars at two different Honda dealerships, both owned by Fortune 500 companies in, what I believe is, the densest single market for Hondas in the US (Metro DC). There's a couple things missing from the situation as described by the author.

First, dealerships don't really make that much of a profit on new car sales. At least not Honda dealers. Used cars averaged around $1000 profit, but new cars were around $200. Yes, they really do lose money on some sales. That's not to say that there weren't expenses that were being covered in the price that are exclusive to the dealership, such as the salesperson's commission, but the total profit going to the dealership per new car was low. One of the older, wiser managers, who had come from Toyota told me, "A properly-run dealership pays for everything on Parts & Service. Car sales is just the profit." There are a lot of lean years in car sales. I can attest that no one in management was panicking when gas prices hit $4/gallon and we couldn't give a car away (car managers don't hold back their emotions). Sales stopped, but people kept getting expensive oil changes.

Second, at least within Honda's North American division, you cannot just _buy_ inventory. A dealership inventory is controlled in such a way that area dealerships are forced to compete heavily with each other. In order to sell a car, you have to have a car on your lot. In order to have a car on your lot, you have to order it from Honda. The number of cars you can order from Honda is restricted to a percentage of _the number of cars you sold last year_ , something around 106-110%. You can't just take a big loan and buy yourself volume. To a dealer, inventory is life and must be protected. As a salesperson, I would lose so many deals to other Honda dealers who would lie through their teeth over the phone to sell. Dealers will cut their own throats to steal a sale from another dealer because each one is a net +2 in the inventory war. In theory, this is great for customers on cost, but terrible for customers on experience.

The owner of the first dealer I worked for had just sold the dealership to a Fortune 500 company. He spent years and years basically giving cars away until he had the largest inventory on the entire East Coast (a big deal for Honda) and then had something very valuable, something that couldn't be bought. Somewhat like how Amazon, in theory, operates.

<comment><USER6> > In order to sell a car, you have to have a car on your lot.

I don't understand the above: you mean people buy new (unused) cars from dealers, "off the shelf"? Aren't most new cars custom? Are US customers more impatient, so that in order to close a sale you need to have the various options pre-built, so that people don't have to wait four months for their new car to be built?

I have rarely seen a new car sitting at a dealer here (Europe), most dealers have one, maybe two, of the latest model, to be used by testing for potential customers.

<comment><USER7> Buying a car but having to wait four months to actually get it sounds like the kind of horror story people used to tell when I was a kid about the terrible economic conditions in the Soviet Union. No, in the US people pretty much just go shopping, pick out a car, buy it, and drive it home. I know one guy who ordered a car custom and had to wait for it, but he is _really_ into cars and is the sort of person who cultivates a specific and unusual aesthetic in everything he owns, so nobody was surprised that he would go to unusual lengths to get a particular vehicle.

<comment><USER6> I think four months (give or take one or two) is pretty much standard manufacturing times for new cars from most manufacturers. The difference in customizing new cars is absolutely astonishing. Let's take a look at a VW Jetta, sold both in the EU and the US. The "regular" one seems to be the Jetta SE so lets look at that.

In the US configurator ([https://www.vw.com/builder/](https://www.vw.com/builder/)) for a new Jetta SE you choose between 1, engine, 1 transmission, 1 type of wheels, 7 colors, 1 interior color, and have 0 optional extras I'm not sure why the damn configurator takes me through page after page with no choices. That gives you SEVEN different models of Jetta SE. A dealer has to have SEVEN Jetta SE in his lot to be able to sell a customer ANY car he could have built on the site. Under those circumstances, I too would find it pretty shocking to _wait_ several months because I wanted the red Jetta and the dealer had only one blue and two silver.

But now look a the UK page: [http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/new/jetta- gp/configure](http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/new/jetta-gp/configure)

We have

7 engines to choose from (cheating, non-cheating etc)

5 wheel options

10 exterior colors

9 interior colors/trims

50 optional extras

So even if we can probably guess that a lot of the extras will be packaged in nearly every car, and some of the options like wheels could be switched by the dealer himself, a dealer couldn't reasonably have less than at least a few thousand Jetta SE's if he wanted to be certain to have the car I want. He isn't going to. So what I do is a configure my car from the several hundred thousand different configurations of Jetta SE I want, then I go to a delaer, haggle a few percent off the price, sign a piece of paper, and wait a couple of months for it to be built. Or I buy a used one in his lot, which is cheaper, but isn't exactly what I want.

As for horror stories: I just learned about "delivery fees" in the US.

<comment><USER8> BMW build is ~2-3 weeks in Germany. ~1.5months to drive it off US dealer. AFAIK BMW options are very similar across countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used to work with a company that worked with dealerships, and I learned some pretty surprising (to me) details.

For example: In most cases, the dealership buys the cars on the lot from the manufacturer via vastly short term loans. When the above article mentions the cost of sitting inventory, I assume that is what is being discussed. This isn't like inventory in a store, where the main concern is that it is losing value with age and occupying floorspace, this is actively costing INTEREST, in addition to deprecating with age and requiring lot space.

I'll also second the other comments that talk about Parts & Service as the primary income. User/Certified Pre-owned come in a distant second, and new cars (aside from certain brands) are at best a thin margin, sometimes a loss- leader.

While my management was very gung-ho about our customers, I saw nothing to convince me that the average dealership offers any value-add to the consumer, and where there is value-add it's destroyed by the laws that discourage competition and encourage industry practices that aren't good for the consumer.

<comment><USER10> IMO, parts & service is significant value-added for consumers. For DIY, having a place to pick up a specific hose or brake rotors is always nice. There are online shops of course, but if you're shopping for OEM parts it seems like online prices aren't too much better.

For those who don't have mechanic skills, knowing that the dealership is trained to _only_ work on your model of car is extra assurance that they'll do it correctly. (EDIT: Not a guarantee of course, but any extra assurance is helpful)

<comment><USER11> * knowing that the dealership is trained to _only_ work on your model of car is extra assurance that they'll do it correctly.*

Semi-tangential: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii8rC6CPCvM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii8rC6CPCvM)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up"

You can't write a balanced article on car dealerships without researching why these laws were enacted in the first place. So many people here just assume "oh, it's because of greed" \- but perhaps you should spend a short time first of all investigating why these laws were created and the problems they were trying to solve.

Likewise, you can't write a convincing article about removing these laws if you don't speak of the reasons why the laws were created. You need to show why these reasons are no longer good.

<comment><USER13> That's very logical. But the en vogue approach today is to disrupt everyone out of business because technology entrepreneurs and capitalists are "good guys".

The argument for this stuff is mostly "OMG Tesla is awesome!". But folks forget/ignore that having to deal with A fortune 50 company as a consumer isn't fun either (recall: AT&T in the old days). Your local car dealer may have annoying commercials, but the folks who allowed a defective $0.50 ignition switch to kill people didn't work for a Chevy dealer... They were GM engineers.

<comment><USER14> You just knocked a strawman down

<comment><USER15> Good thing this isn't a formal debate, or else he might lose points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "the price of the cars that are sold needs to be high enough to cover the costs of building and storing the unsold ones."

We shouldn't be having this problem anymore. It's a massive detriment to the economies of scale model. Most people don't need to buy a car overnight, which ironically is because they are so expensive.

Keeping a small amount of cars for test driving and personal inspection is all that is needed. Then all that needs to be done is to batch up requests for production and shipping. Charge more 2 day shipping. Maybe Amazon can get into selling cars and same day deliveries for free with Amazon Prime.

<comment><USER17> In Europe, only used cars are sold directly off the parking lot or showroom of the dealer.

Normally, you choose the options (color, engine options, leather seats, ..) and the car is built for you. You can pick it up some weeks/months later.

Manufacturers of high-priced cars may invite you to pick up the car at the plant when it comes off the line. They have a special "experience" designed around that.

<comment><USER18> To be honest, should it really take months to produce and ship that one car through europe? Surely assembly lines are faster than that.

<comment><USER17> Assembly lines require a huge investment and cannot scale beyond their maximum capacity. So when a car turns out to be popular, the OEM (the brand that does final assembly) or one of the many suppliers might run into a huge backlog.

That is most pronounced when orders spike after the introduction of a new model.

<comment><USER19> This has nothing to do with the colour and seats though. When "your" car finally rolls of the line to should take ... what? 1 working day to spray it the colour that you want and let the paint dry, an hour to bolt in your choice of seats and Cd/Mp3 player.

<comment><USER20> That is not how car production works. Paint is literally the second thing that occurs after a chassis and body panels are applied. But otherwise, the working time on a car from start to finish, including paint, is somewhere in the 10-20 hour range. Theoretically, your timeline could work but paint takes time to cure, then needs polish and interior features take a while, although CAN-BUS has certainly made the electronics easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Maybe the dealerships and in general physical shops should evolve into paid- for showrooms?

That is, you pay, say, $50, and you get to try a bunch of cars or in general products that they have on loan from various manufacturers and get some guidance from the staff if needed.

Then once you figure out what you want, you buy it online and get it shipped to you.

Then there is no need to "protect" those shops, since the customer is paying precisely for the only value they add, which is the ability to try out things and ask for advice, and in fact the value of the advice would increase since there would be no conflict of interest.

<comment><USER22> If you're selling me something very big and expensive I better get a chance to look at it up close and try it out. If you're going to charge me for that experience then I will go somewhere else.

What should happen is the car manufacturers buy out the best dealerships and simply sell the cars direct. It'll allow them to optimize their distribution and inventory channels and give them a bigger margin overall. It's going to put many dealerships out of business but it's an old business model that no longer works in the world; you can't expect to keep it afloat when there is no good business reason for doing so.

<comment><USER23> The car manufacturers actually lobbied for laws that prevent them from cutting out dealerships, to remove barriers to entrepreneurs investing in building brand-exclusive dealerships. The dealerships wouldn't have been built without these laws protecting them, that's why the manufacturers lobbied for them.

The legal system in place was a precondition for the development existing American car dealership network, and I doubt that the dealerships are going to go down without a breach of contract fight.

<comment><USER24> Sounds like the same kind of nonsense that came with taxis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A long time ago I saw an ad on the back of a magazine, paying tribute to Dell's direct model. It was a Johnnie Walker ad, with a bar napkin. On the napkin was written Dell's business plan; it had "make computer, sell computer" basically crossed out, replaced with "sell computer, make computer."

Make the car -> sell the car

Sell the car -> make the car

This switch should have happened a long time ago. The near total elimination of the vast inventory system. It would make most automakers dramatically more profitable.

Dealerships should be replaced by small automaker-owned sales venues, stocked with one of each model for test driving purposes. Customers order their car, with some limited customizations. They come back in a week and pick up their car, and save 20% off current prices. The automaker never builds a car that hasn't already been sold.

<comment><USER26> That elimination of the inventory system works great for cars produced locally. What of those produced overseas, or even on the opposite side of the US? Consumers can handle waiting a week for a car they ordered, but you can't just throw a car into the UPS cargo hold and deliver it to the buyer's doorstep a day or two later.

<comment><USER25> Just as an example, if you're Toyota, and you know how well your top five models sell in the US, you'd either build two factories strategically located near the west and east coasts, or you'd build one giant plant in eg Texas and ship the cars west or east, splitting the time it would take to ship it across the entire country side to side.

Most of Toyota's profit comes from just a few best selling models (that tend to be their best selling models year after year). That's where you'd start on this type of automation, and you'd invent new manufacturing technology accordingly as necessary.

The criticism I see most often on the concept, is that it'd be challenging because our manufacturing processes are pathetically ancient. I agree: it's time to move manufacturing into the future. It's not a question of if it can be done, it's: who is going to do it first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'll post the same thing I posted in the Bob Lutz on the Tesla thread with some amendments. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10457754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10457754)

According to Bob Lutz having car dealerships is a pro. LOL, I am yet to talk to anybody who actually enjoyed the car dealership experience weather it's buying or servicing the car. The whole car dealer enterprise is a rent seeking business. In many states you cannot have the manufacture sell the cars directly. That's changing slowly -- thanks to Tesla -- the dealer lobby is a big contributor in many local and state wide elections. The pricing for the automobile / features is not clear to begin with. It's to the point that there's many competing business that try to give you true car pricing. And, every step of the way the dealership tries to extract another fee / charge for you via various tactics like destination fees, myriad of financing fees, unneeded insurance (tire insurance, ones that overlap with the manufactures warranty).

Personally, I would love if the dealership model died. The alternative being ordering a car online and having it show up at home at a scheduled time. I imagine the same experience can be replicated the other way when the car needs servicing, schedule it online and have it picked up / drop it off and a point of aggregation of the car maker where they handle volume.

And before you tell me about the test drive and getting a feel for the car. Meh. Your fooling yourself if you think that a 15 minute test ride will tell you much about the cars performance, comfort or even layout. You will only learn that the seats are uncomfortable on a 3 hour trip once you take that 3 hour trip. If a test drive is really important to you, you should really rent the car for a couple days.

One could also make the argument that dealerships should go away based on their general discriminatory tendencies. Here's a recentish paper quantifying it: [http://islandia.law.yale.edu/ayres/Ayres%20Siegelman%20Race%...](http://islandia.law.yale.edu/ayres/Ayres%20Siegelman%20Race%20and%20Gender%20Discrimination%20In%20Bargaining%20%20for%20a%20New%20Car.pdf) . The quantify how much more dealerships by different gender / race. The recent book named Phishing for Phools dedicates some time to this topic as well.

<comment><USER28> mtanski "you should really rent the car for a couple days." Exactly!

This what we do when we are car shopping. Normal cycle is to start looking when the existing car hits the 8% mark in unscheduled maintenance (or 150K miles) (your percentage may vary). Once we close in on the model we like we find a rental and drive it for a week. If it passes we find a dealer, get the model and what we want on it and then shop that info around between multiple dealers in the area.

We never use the existing car to trade in since most are 10 years old and have lots of mileage on them. When we pick up the new car we will offer it to the dealer as a trade and decide at that point if we want to sell it to them. Last cycle the dealer said he would give us another $200 off the deal if he didn't need to take the trade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The only real consumer benefit that this article describes for factory-direct sales is cost savings from no longer carrying inventory. But that's a completely separate issue: there's no reason an indy dealer can't have a low inventory and custom-order new cars for all their customers.

Dealers carry a large inventory because it _works_. People (for the most part) want to pick out their specific car and drive it off the lot. They form an emotional connection with the car before they own it, and the dealer needs that emotional connection to close the deal. Going factory-direct with a wait time of several days would snap buyers back into logical reality, and car companies _do not want that_.

<comment><USER30> If car companies "do not want" to sell direct, why did the dealers in so many states lobby for laws which guarantee that the manufacturers cannot sell directly to consumers?

<comment><USER29> The laws are typically guaranteeing that manufacturers cannot sell directly _in places where they also have dealers_.

Because a regional car dealer with $X0 million of revenue cannot compete with a multinational car manufacturer with $X0 _billion_ of revenue. Any time a manufacturer didn't want a particular dealer around anymore, they could simply drop their prices and drive them out of business. That's not a healthy dynamic for a business relationship.

One could argue - and I agree - that the best way to handle this is via the free market, and let manufacturers who do this sort of thing gradually lose their distribution network due to lack of trust. But the short-term collateral damage is high-profile bankruptcies, unemployment, and high auto prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I love this article. I've only spent a year working in the automotive industry between detail/lot attending, not even any sales. I've noticed some real big problems with the way dealers do business. It needs a serious overhaul. I've been working very part time on some of my ideas to reshape the industry. It definitely needs some shaking up.

</comment><comment><USER32> The situation with car dealerships is a quagmire. I'd suggest a broader, simpler, and probably more politically viable solution would be a law requiring _truth in advertised prices_ :

If you advertise something as $X then that is the _maximum_ total amount you pay (tax-inclusive, all fees, etc.) Almost every other developed country does this (except for hotel stays and some large ticket items, like houses and -- ironically -- cars, but we can do better, right?)

Now, I can imagine a sudden wave of protest -- but wait, what about state-wide or nation-wide advertising campaigns -- this happy meal for only $2.99? Sales tax varies from county to county, and then there are crazy exemptions, tax holidays, etc.

EXACTLY. If you believe in markets then you should, at minimum, believe in price transparency. (Free markets assume perfect information -- how perfect can your information be if you can't even figure out the true price?) If this puts pressure on states and counties to simplify their tax rates (under pressure from businesses) then GOOD.

If the prices that get advertised have to be _real prices_ you get a huge improvement in market behavior -- from real estate to healthcare to cars to food -- immediately. And it will effectively demolish most of the issues with car dealers since they'll need to quote _actual_ prices.

</comment><comment><USER33> Old but good related article on life as a car salesman:

[http://www.edmunds.com/car-buying/confessions-of-a-car- sales...](http://www.edmunds.com/car-buying/confessions-of-a-car- salesman.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> From time to time, I think the concept of car dealers has a lot in common with the RIAA model of the music industry.

The RIAA has a vested interest in keeping "direct to consumer" models sidelined, or, once enough critical mass is achieved, to bring that artist/group into the fold. In reality, the RIAA system spends a lot of money on behalf of artists/groups, in a similar notion that car dealerships are at the forefront for manufacturers and brand stability. Sometimes dealerships go bust, sometimes labels go bust...sometimes dealerships do so well they become multi-million dollar enterprises (Don Huffines in Texas...now State Senator Don Huffines), and same goes for record labels (Big Machine).

Both the dealership association and the RIAA push very hard in lobbying for their own ends. As can be seen in the music industry, fans nor artists haven't exactly jumped ship away from the RIAA system. There may be some similarities in the dealership scenario, but time will tell.

</comment><comment><USER35> In the Netherlands, you go to the dealer and order a car. The car gets built to order, unless it's in inventory at a nearby dealer. The way it works in the US sounds needlessly complicated to me.

<comment><USER36> Here in the US, we just bought a car and because they didn't have the model on lot anywhere, we just ordered through Toyota the exact model we wanted with all the features we wanted in preferred colors/finish. The dealership still got a cut but they helped us select the car are made the process very easy.

<comment><USER35> That's good to hear, I was under the impression that this wasn't possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> If anyone hasn't heard it, there's a fantastic This American Life that follows around a bunch of employees in a car dealership for a month. It's fascinating and sad: [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/513/1...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/513/129-cars)

Abstract: "We spend a month at a Jeep dealership on Long Island as they try to make their monthly sales goal: 129 cars. If they make it, they'll get a huge bonus from the manufacturer, possibly as high as $85,000 — enough to put them in the black for the month. If they don't make it, it'll be the second month in a row. So they pull out all the stops."

</comment><comment><USER38> This is the reason I like TrueCar. It's not a total solution, but it definitely starts down the road of leveling the playing field.

<comment><USER39> I used www.roadster.com to buy a new car online for my father in law. It gives you a great price up front, and its experts do all the work of negotiating, handle your trade-in, and deliver the car to you, so you don't have to step into a dealership at all. Roadster's available in California so far. Check out their reviews [http://yelp.com/biz/roadster-san- francisco](http://yelp.com/biz/roadster-san-francisco)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Steve Rattner's book about the auto industry bankruptcies and restructuring in 2009 ([http://www.worldcat.org/title/overhaul-an-insiders- account-o...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/overhaul-an-insiders-account-of- the-obama-administrations-emergency-rescue-of-the-auto- industry/oclc/515468255)) makes one thing clear: a major win for the US manufacturers from their bankruptcies was getting out from under the onerous terms of some long-term contracts with dealers. Also, the last holdouts to getting the deal done were certain politically connected dealers.

</comment><comment><USER41> How do you plan to buy out all the existing investment these dealerships have? You certainly cannot legislate away their property without compensation. What about the jobs? That is no small number. With those go all the local taxes, benefits, and such as well.

Dealer direct, sounds good. Until you find out that car you really want has a demonstration center that is too far away, in a place you don't want to go. Until you find out repairs are done at an authorized shop that handles so many brands they cannot get it right. Until you have serious problems with your car and that manufacturer is so far away they can ignore you for a good amount of time... and so on.

While not everyone has a good experience at a dealer I have never had a bad one and considering the number of vehicles I have gone through, well. Dealers aren't there just to sell cars. They they maintain them, they work to keep you happy so you come back. This means they act as go between consumer and manufacturer and can often push the manufacturer to fix things they might just overlook.

Tesla is fine as it is now simply because they don't sell enough cars to matter, let alone to the majority of people their cars are not affordable and the customers who do buy have the time to go anywhere they need to to buy a car or even have someone go get it. When, and it is a very big when, Tesla has any real volume let us watch how they handle problems

<comment><USER42> The author isn't arguing to ban traditional dealerships; he's trying to remove state laws that mandate the bundling of sales, service, delivery, etc. together. If the traditional model makes sense in some places, it will continue. But given that no other consumer good is sold that way, it is likely that both producers and consumers will prefer an unbundled experience.

<comment><USER43> The state has other constituents besides the individual citizens. These laws have very sound reasoning and prevent very real and very big problems. Blindly running around, finding things to "disrupt" is not admirable. In fact, it's the opposite.

<comment><USER42> In fact it does not. Governments exist solely to provide for people. Everything else you've heard about -- companies, organizations, interest groups, etc. -- are fictions that exist to help or hurt the interests of individual people.

What you have in car dealerships is a classic example of regulatory capture [0], where most people don't buy a car that often, so they're not particularly focused on dealer laws. But dealers have all the incentive in the world to lobby for restrictive rules. And, since dealers are by their nature distributed, and often have the proceeds to be "good community citizens" (e.g., sponsor a little league team), their views have even more weight.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture)

<comment><USER43> Nevertheless, they do exist and are constituents whether you like it or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Is the savings from direct sales the reason for companies like BMW offering sponsored visit to German factory for a buyer in the states?

</comment><comment><USER45> If your business model is so terrible that you need protectionist laws to survive, maybe you just deserve to go bankrupt.

</comment><comment> Digit-Al I am English, not American, so I may be misunderstanding this - but I believe sales tax might prove an incentive for some states to oppose any changes to their existing laws on this.

As I understand it, local sales taxes are paid to the state where the sale is made. I assume every state has lots of car dealerships, but only a few states have car manufacturers. This would mean that if everyone started buying their cars online direct from the manufacturers then the taxes would go from being distributed around the country to being concentrated to a few states. Surely those states without manufacturers would lose a lot of sales tax if this happened, so would have a strong incentive to oppose such a change.

<comment><USER46> In the US, you're _supposed_ to claim the sales taxes for all of your out-of- state online purposes every year. There's a supplement to your tax forms where you can itemize all of the online purchases you made and how much sales tax you owe. Since this form is voluntary and results in higher taxes, you can guess how many people actually go through this step.

However, like TrisMcC says, most states assess Sales Tax when you register the car in the state. So if you bought a car for $50k in Oregon (no Sales Tax), but then registered it in California (7.5%+ Sales Tax), your registration fees would be the standard fee + $3,750. If you bought your car more than 1 year ago (in California at least), you don't owe any sales tax and if you bought it in a state with lower tax, you just owe the difference.

For big online companies, we've started mandating that they collect sales tax on behalf of the customers, so for instance, Amazon now automatically collects sales tax based on where your billing address is. If direct sales were allowed, there'd surely be legislation to ensure that the manufacturers collect the tax for their customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This seems like an opportunity for an Uber/AirBnB move.

Find a jurisdiction anywhere in the USA where direct manufacturer sales are legal. Negotiate with the manufacturers to handle direct-to-consumer sales for them. Write your "app" so that customers can build their car online and have the order go straight to the factory. Charge the customer a "delivery fee" to get their heavily discounted car to them, from which you make your profits.

Seems like a lot of work, and a lot of fighting with a lot of bureaucracy, but that's what all these "disrupt the industry" startups like to spend their billions doing. I'm surprised that nobody is doing it today.

<comment><USER48> > Negotiate with the manufacturers to handle direct-to-consumer sales for > them.

As in, found a startup and then negotiate with Ford, GM, Toyota, Volkswagen etc about a deal that's _guaranteed_ to piss off the existing dealer networks that make ~100% of their revenue and will view this as an existential threat? Good luck with that!

Above all, this seems to assume car companies are stupid. Ford, GM & co would sell their grandmothers to get an extra 6% margin on their cars, the reason they're not selling directly already (in the US) because they figure it's not worth the risk -- and if they _do_ decide to try, they're certainly not going to give the opportunity to a random startup trying to form a new monopsony that would leave them even worse off than before.

<comment><USER47> Thus the billions of dollars of VC and fighting mentioned above.

In the context of what you've written, though, can you explain why Tesla chooses to sell directly to consumers?

They have the ability to sell through dealers, just like the established automakers. And it would cost them a lot less money and hassle to do so.

Why then would they choose to sell direct if not that it actually made good business sense to do so.

<comment><USER48> Because Tesla is starting from scratch and doesn't have an established dealership network to worry about disrupting. The PR angle and having full control over the experience also helps (see also: Apple Store).

And like Apple -- on second thought, much more so than Apple -- they're a niche producer and can cover a good chunk of their potential customers with only a few stores. For example, here in Australia, they've got two (2) stores for a market of 20+ million, consisting of one each in Sydney and Melbourne, while (eg.) Toyota has 36 dealerships in Melbourne alone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Yep, buying a car sucks. But this is one of the largest supply-chain operations in the world. The dealer franchise system and its legal framework have evolved over 100 years and are balanced pretty delicately. It can't just be refactored by waving a regulatory wand at it and hoping for the best. Cars will still have to be warehoused, delivered, serviced, and resold. Somebody has to buy your old junky trade-in. Somebody has to run the showroom, if you want to actually like see the car before you buy it. So we're going to do a regulatory taking of the franchise, worth millions of dollars per dealership, and then have the manufacturer open a showroom and warehousing lot and service center in every town and city that has a dealership? Or just open a direct sales channel to compete with dealers, but make the existing dealers perform service and deliver inventory? And take your trade-in?

Manufacturers hate dealers. It's mutual. The only reason consumers don't hate the manufacturers so much is that they have never had to deal with them directly. Dealer protection laws are there because manufacturers have a long history of trying to steal from dealers, cheat them, and put them out of business at whim. Those are the manufacturers that consumers are asking to deal with directly. I'm sure they'll treat consumers better than they treat their business partners!

<comment><USER50> > Dealer protection laws are there because manufacturers have a long history > of trying to steal from dealers, cheat them, and put them out of business at > whim.

That doesn't justify them. I thought the US is supposed to be anti-regulatory? Why didn't dealers handle this by becoming primarily multiple-manufacturer and thus able to switch to or favor a different manufacturer at whim?

<comment><USER25> The US is quite regulated overall and is anything but anti-regulation at this point. It has more laws governing its economy than any other nation, and adds thousands to that tally annually. It's not an exaggeration to say that nobody can keep up with it all, and that's before getting to the insane tax code. It hasn't been a classic free market of very low regulation, in nearly a century.

George McGovern - politician turned entrepreneur - wrote one of my favorite articles on the subject in 1992:

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702034064045780705...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203406404578070543545022704)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Related CollegeHumor/truTV info-tainment spin-off: Adam Ruins Everything - <USER2> Real Reason Car Dealerships Are the Worst

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMWmYJOa- BM&list=PLZxWJ6CTr6...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMWmYJOa- BM&list=PLZxWJ6CTr63Z4OYR3gdMEEog5Zju5ihyu&index=6)

</comment><comment><USER52> I recently bought a new car and I bought it just like my last one. I contacted the fleet managers at nearby dealers and asked for a price for the model and options I wanted. Then I just accepted the best offer that didn't require too much travel.

Oh, this time I tried Truecar first, but the fleet manager price was lower.

</comment><comment><USER53> Kill the laws that unfairly protects X business.

</comment><comment><USER54> Is it just me or did this problem fly completely under the radar during the govt bailout?

<comment><USER55> They wouldn't have touched it at that time anyway. The point of bailouts is to increase (or at least maintain) employment and the economy. Dismantling a sprawling industry which provides many jobs that are available without degrees or other credentials would have defeated the purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> This is why Apple will take over the car industry.

Integrate the best supply chain management, best logistics, best customization processes, best personalization processes, best servicing processes, best retail sales force, best legal compliance/adherence processes.

Then look at how to make a giant iPod on wheels then deploy.

<comment><USER46> It's interesting that everyone assumes Apple's supply chain is superior to all of the auto companies. When looking at a Cost of Goods Sold basis, all of the big auto companies spend far more money on their products than Apple does (GM's COGS is several tens of billions higher than Apple's) -- and their margins are much smaller, so managing their suppliers and logistics matters much more to the auto companies' bottom line.

A single car has ~30,000 parts.. an iPhone has, what, a few hundred?

Why is it a given that Apple is going to be successful at doing something that they've shown no skill in actually doing?

<comment><USER56> You assume that a car will always have 30k parts and that Apple doesn't know how to manage more 1k parts.

Remove the combustion engine and its related systems, don't get beholden to legacy, and how many parts will a battery operated car really have?

To an ambitious team backed with plenty of money and expertise this is their dream come true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Digit-Al What about used car dealerships?

</comment><comment><USER57> ITT:

>Let's take money out of local communities and place even more wealth and power in the hands of wealthy megacorporations!

HN truly disgusts me sometimes.

<comment><USER58> Local labour is inefficient, expensive and highly variable in quality. "Protecting local jobs" works against economies of scale and results in more expensive - and often worse - service.

People vote with their wallet against the local corner store and pro Trader Joe/WholeFoods, against the local radio shack and pro Amazon/Newegg, against the local carpenter and pro IKEA. Their lives are better and they are wealthier for not having to spend $50 on a HDMI cable or $800 on a kitchen table.

<comment><USER57> Removing protections for dealerships isn't about increasing efficiency: automakers simply want a larger share of the profit. These corporations wouldn't be clamoring to kill dealerships if they were going to take the profit out of selling cars.

This is just going to result in capital flight from local areas, directly making them poorer. Unless you're a major shareholder in one of these automakers, by advocating for the deprecation of locally owned dealerships, you're advocating for making yourself poorer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I was nodding along until that last part, where it indicated that our best answer was to have the federal government extort states into behaving as they ought.

<comment><USER60> That's what had to happen with FCC repealing local monopoly protectionist laws which ban ISP competition. How is this any different?</comment></comment>


Introducing Database.Com from Salesforce - <AUTHOR> http://www.securityweek.com/salesforcecom-announces-databasecom-enterprise-database-built-cloud

<comment><USER2> Sorry, but design looks so ugly and unproffesional. It's not encouraging to try the service.

<comment><AUTHOR> And you'd think that with the resources they have they could come up with a better logo too! Pretty lame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks really promising but, does $10/100,000 records and $10/150,000 transactions seem high to anyone else?

On the plus side, it is meant to work really well with Ruby's ActiveRecord library.

I need to try it out :-)</comment>


Show HN: Silicon Valley inspired SWOT board - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexgreene/swotboard <comment><USER2> cool work, would have liked it more if you had hosted it somewhere and provided a link here to try it out instantly. Also, are you planning to show the items as actual cards instead of list items?

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry, here's a link to test it out: [http://alexgreene.me/swotboard/swot.html](http://alexgreene.me/swotboard/swot.html)

Yeah, I'd like to have them shown on cards that you can drag around and position anywhere you like. Implementing HTML5 local storage is another idea.</comment></comment>


ADHD doesn't exist and drugs do more harm than good - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2577814/The-eminent-doctor-convinced-ad-hd-doesnt-exist-In-fact-says-Dr-RICHARD-SAUL-symptoms-routine-causes-drugs-harm-good.html

<comment><USER2> Alert the media! Someone writes an article stating the obvious, revealing Big Pharma's effect on psychiatry and clinical psychology and asserting the uncontroversial idea that ADHD is an invention meant to promote drug sales.

With one difference -- the author isn't a science journalist, he's a doctor with direct experience trying to treat ADHD over a period of decades.

A quote: " ... after 50 years of practising medicine and seeing thousands of patients demonstrating symptoms of ADHD, I have reached the conclusion there is no such thing as ADHD."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

</comment><comment><USER3> One of my best friends struggled through college and ended up failing out of grad school because she couldn't focus and couldn't get her work done. It turned out that her teachers had tried to get her tested for ADHD as a child, but her mother refused, not wanting her daughter to have the stigma of a mental disorder. After totaling her car in an entirely preventable accident that stemmed from how exhausted she was as a result of sleeping three hours a night all semester trying (and failing) to get her work done, failing all her classes, and getting kicked out of her school, she got diagnosed, went on medication, and is currently one semester away from finishing her Master's degree.

I'd like to see you explain to her that the medication is doing more harm than good, and that she could have succeeded in school earlier if only she had tried harder.

<comment><USER3> I absolutely agree that ADHD is likely massively misdiagnosed as a result of symptoms like "being a five year old child", but to say that nobody has it seems as ill advised as to say that everybody has it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a frustrating article the author presents numerous case studies but hasn't put together any long term and wide ranging data to address the disease. The only thing he seems to be saying concretely is that few patients that he saw in his practice presented the disorder. This doesnt really add anything new to the adhd discussion.

<comment><USER2> Yes, all true, but because ADHD has never been characterized, meaning no causative agent has been located, and because there's no conception of a cure as is true for real diseases, the scientific burden of evidence rests with those who would like to say ADHD is real. And they aren't rising to the challenge.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure many mental related illnesses can be described this way though. We know a lot about the brain but not nearly enough to form a clear categorization.

Does something like [this]([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22983386](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22983386)) characterize the described differences symptoms report?

Anyway, when it comes to health issues, the burden of proof rests on ethical issues. It's better to explore all these problems people seem to have. Years ago in biopsych we were shown that early age treatment was important for preventing much worse symptoms later in life. Unreversable but treateable.

If that IS the case, then there is a _great_ problem with people that make a big fuss over children not being treated.

But I'm not a neuroscientist or a doctor. The claims of "over-diagnosing" seem unfounded if there are treatable symptoms that we just happen to currently call ADHD. Comparing diagnostic rates to an earlier time is just silly.

<comment><USER2> > Does something like > [this]([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22983386](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22983386)) > characterize the described differences symptoms report?

Yes, but only as a description. Science requires testable, falsifiable _explanations_. If I claim that I can cure the common cold by shaking a dried gourd over the sufferer (which actually works), I have only described my miracle cure, I haven't _explained_ it or considered alternative explanations for the result.

There is a huge literature in psychology that stops at description and increasingly offers drugs as treatment -- drugs that in most cases were created for some other purpose but are now being prescribed off-label, to treat ailments of questionable origin, with questionable results, to an unquestioning public.

> Anyway, when it comes to health issues, the burden of proof rests on ethical > issues.

No, ethical issues are orthogonal to the scientific issues. If there is no scientific explanation for various mental illnesses, then there's no scientific substance to the field, at which point an ethical debate may begin about the consequences of treating illnesses we don't understand and that may not even exist in an objective sense.

> Years ago in biopsych we were shown that early age treatment was important > for preventing much worse symptoms later in life.

This sort of thing is meaningless until we know what we're treating, otherwise we'll have any number of dried-gourd treatments masquerading as medicine. But wait, that's already true -- Asperger's was brought into existence, and then abandoned, based on votes, not evidence. So was homosexuality, which remained an official, listed mental illness until public opinion shifted away from this outlook.

> The claims of "over-diagnosing" seem unfounded if there are treatable > symptoms that we just happen to currently call ADHD.

Not at all -- this won't be the first time psychology has created a new illness out of thin air, and then "treated" it -- see above. Depression is another example -- some argue that it's an illness that can be treated, others have found that "depressed" people are better at reality-testing and accurately assessing their circumstances than those not so diagnosed. This calls into question the very meaning of "mental illness".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scala on LLVM - <AUTHOR> http://greedy.github.io/scala-llvm/ <comment><USER2> A small clarification: this an older project that is not directly related to my upcoming ScalaDays talk [1]. More updates to come in next few months, stay tuned.

[1] [http://event.scaladays.org/scaladays- nyc-2016#!#schedulePopu...](http://event.scaladays.org/scaladays- nyc-2016#!#schedulePopupExtras-7571)

<comment><USER3> This sounds very interesting, allot of very interesting develoment is happening in Scala/JVM land, Dotty, Akka, Lagom etc

For those of you that havnt heard about Dotty, the next generation Scala compiler, I can recommend this link:

[http://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2015/10/23/dotty-compiler- boo...](http://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2015/10/23/dotty-compiler- bootstraps.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This project has been discontinued. But fear not, a new scala-native is on the way, Denys Shabalin a phd student at EPFL is working on completely new implementation of scala-native. His previous work, scala offheap, a way to use off-heap memory on the JVM with type- and memory-safety is very impressive.

<comment><USER5> Would native-compiled scala allow for some of the features that have been prevented by the need for Java semantic compatibility, like guaranteed tail call optimization?

<comment><USER6> > like guaranteed tail call optimization?

Isn't this what the @tailrec annotation is for? If it compiles it's tail recursive. This is separate than actually JIT'ing the call bytecode into a loop, I realize, but for a pragmatic engineer there's already a solution.

<comment><USER2> @tailrec works only for simple cases of tail recursion. For example it doesn't support mutual tail recursion at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This may sound ridiculous, but I am literally sick of Java/JVM land. I would beg for native Scala backend (and it would be my first choice for doing pretty much every thing).I don't know people does share this opinion or not ,but I literally hate JVM.Slow Start up.Tremendously slow/unresponsive java app(I am talking about big apps, like android studio). Ridiculously bad font handling in Swing(there is no way to disable hinting).

Syntactically and semantically Scala is one of the best language's I have ever worked with (although I spend little time with it).It's middle approach to OOP and FP is best approach for enterprise projects.It does not try to shove FP in your throat, but provide best platform to do FP when it is much more efficient than simple OOP. However when it comes to JVM (especially in Linux desktop). My answer is big fat NO.

Of course, I am talking about desktop experience.JVM in server side is great and robust, I don't have anything against it, other than praise.

<comment><USER8> Not ridiculous; I'm with you.* I think that Scala is a solid, relatively modern language and that the Java ecosystem is bonkers. Something like Scala- the-language + Go-like tooling and deployment would make my day. (Maybe what I'm describing is Rust, which I admit I haven't taken more than a cursory look at even though I think it's interesting.)

*Assuming my agreement lowers the probability of being ridiculous, which is an open question… ;)

<comment><USER9> Scala is a modern language unfortunately set back by its need to compromise and be compatible with Java. If we go native and remove the need for Java/JVM compatibility, what is there left about Scala? There are many other languages better at FP, so I guess what remains is the FP+OOP hybrid thing? Which I'm not sure I like anyway, since it makes the language less tidy than I'd like.

Disclaimer: I work with Scala in my day job, and I like it -- it sure is nicer than Java -- but I don't know if I would use it in situations where the JVM wasn't mandated or needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The other announcement[1] from EPFL last week was the establishment of Scala Center, which is already staffed: [http://search.epfl.ch/ubrowse.action?acro=SCALA- GE](http://search.epfl.ch/ubrowse.action?acro=SCALA-GE)

The Center's mission: "Organize open source projects around Scala".

About scala-native, no details are given on whether it targets scalac or Dotty (which another talk [2] describes as a couple years away from production- ready). The situation could change if, say, Akka or Play announced a Roadmap for Dotty.

[1] Martin Odersky: "Scala in 2016". [http://files.meetup.com/18712511/Scala2016.pdf](http://files.meetup.com/18712511/Scala2016.pdf)

[2] ScalaSphere: Guillaume Martres "Hacking on Dotty: a live demo". [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OOYGeZLHs4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OOYGeZLHs4)

<comment><USER11> If you're interested in Dotty, other talks with more information are listed at [https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/wiki/Getting- Started#talks...](https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/wiki/Getting- Started#talks-on-dotty)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apart from startup times, would this really be faster than the JVM? I don't know how the LLVM runtime stacks up - I'm guessing that there are a few targets eg traits that might be more efficient to implement in native code as Scala would be trying to work around what exists in the JVM and Java Bytecode but I have a feeling that it would be very specific use cases like embedded systems that would be considering LLVM as a target where as the JVM would still be preferred in most circumstances? I'm asking from a fairly naive place - I'm genuinely interested and curious to hear some use cases where LLVM would be almost strictly better.

<comment><USER13> Actually you could already do it today.

RoboVM uses LLVM and quite a few People were using Scala with it.

As "the JVM" there are plenty to choose from.

Embedded vendors do have implementations that run with a few hundred KBs or 1-2 MB depending on the use case.

I would say it is just yet another implementation.

Personally I find healthy that languages have multiple implementations, specially since it clears the confusion between language and implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Github and mailing list shows no activity for >3 years. Either the idea did not work out or all they had was just idea and nobody came forward to pickup and develop working software.

In any case Scala seems to have large following among those who love JVM and Java ecosystem libraries.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a cool direction. Other than previous Scala knowledge, what are some advantages of using some sort of scala-native over Rust? I've used Scala and I always imagined that I'd use Rust if I wanted something similar without the ecosystem of JVM libraries.

<comment><USER16> > Other than previous Scala knowledge, what are some advantages of using some > sort of scala-native over Rust?

For one, it isn't as low-level as Rust. That can be good or bad for your use- case.

Also, Scala has a bit more expressive type system than Rust so you get that. Scala has scalaz/cats and shapeless which aren't really possible in Rust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> While interesting in and of it self, it seems to have seen no changes since mid-2013, looking at its GitHub repository ([https://github.com/greedy/scala](https://github.com/greedy/scala))

        > This branch is 211 commits ahead, 10086 commits behind scala:2.12.x.

Is there any new context / development that makes this extra interesting right now?

</comment><comment><USER18> I've clearly been paying too much attention to politics. My first scan of headlines here left me asking, in which case before the Supreme Court was LLVM an issue?

Although I must admit I would love to read the late Scalia's opinion of LLVM.

</comment><comment><USER19> How about compile speed. I found Scala compiled much slower than Java.

<comment><USER20> Java's type system is barely doing anything for you in comparison with what Scala does. Higher kinded types, implicit parameters, implicit conversions and type inference are not free. The type level tools that libraries like Shapeless use let you do type checks that are unimaginable in the java compiler.

Guess what: The more work a compiler is doing, the slower it's going to run. Comparing Java and Scala compilation is like comparing the gas mileage of an 18 wheeler truck and a small city car. Guess what? The 18 wheeler won't do 30 mpg.

<comment><USER21> The scala type system is incredibly strong (and undecidable) but the implementation itself is not conducive to compilation speed. Two of the primary motivations for Dotty are 1) reducing the complexity of the language and 2) starting clean slate on a more reasonable compiler.

Im of the opinion that most groups don't want the complexity that scala brings, and we're going to see that in the community growing around spark. The databricks style guide clearly avoids a lot the complexity of the language, and the people who are coming to scala for the tech and not the language are going to follow their lead.</comment></comment></comment>


Hope – A Python JIT for astrophysical computations - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cosmo-ethz/hope <comment><USER2> Here's the doc page that lists the supported language features: [http://pythonhosted.org/hope/lang.html](http://pythonhosted.org/hope/lang.html)

Compared to numba, it looks like hope adds: (1) support for recursion, (2) automatic simplification of expressions using SymPy and (3) support for arithmetic with array broadcasting (e.g., as used in their Point Spread Function benchmark).

<comment><USER3> Interesting post. It seems that everyone wants to write their own jit rather than cooperate with the on-going open source efforts. 1) Support for recursion is in a PR for Numba that has just not yet been merged. 2) optional simplification of expressions using SymPy has been contemplated and is easy to add, though it's not clear if it's the interface people will want as it slows down compilation. 3) Numba has support for some array broadcasting via vectorize and is getting more in the coming 6 months.

A C++ target for Numba would also be of interest if anyone wants to participate in the development. Numba 0.15.1 was just released this week: [https://github.com/numba/numba/tree/0.15.1](https://github.com/numba/numba/tree/0.15.1) [http://numba.pydata.org](http://numba.pydata.org)

conda install numba

<comment><USER2> Totally agreed, I am much more excited about Numba right now. Numba has some really nice tricks up its sleeve -- I especially like the ability to easily write (g)ufuncs.

There are a lot of edge cases to nail down for these JIT compilers. Everyone writing their own is likely to end up with none of them being useful for end users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an impressive job. I'm curious why the arxiv paper uses Julia's benchmark suite but doesn't make any other mention of Julia in the discussion, given that it's quite relevant to this work.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is crazy! It actually generates C++ code on the fly by translating AST nodes one to one [https://github.com/cosmo- ethz/hope/blob/master/hope/_generat...](https://github.com/cosmo- ethz/hope/blob/master/hope/_generator.py)

<comment><USER6> It's basically the same strategy rperl uses, compiling a restricted and typed subset of perl5 to C++11 on the fly, via Inline::CPP [http://rperl.org](http://rperl.org)

I wouldn't call that JIT, because the term JIT is normally used for direct compilation to machine code, and all those other compile-to-c|c++-on-the-fly languages don't call it JIT neither.

<comment><USER7> I'm sure clicked the upvote, but your comment is gray now. :( Please, other readers, try to correct, upvoting the parent comment! It's a good comment, and it deserves to be upvoted. I can't do anything more. Thanks.

Edit: I've found the culprit: believe or not, the older Opera browser can have the "down" linked area in the middle of the up arrow! On the same hight (same Y) just changing the X position of the mouse will change between the UP and DOWN vote! The down vote area extends from the down arrow up to the top of the up arrow(!) and is of the same width (a few pixels at most). Weird. I must avoid that browser for HN.

[http://s4.postimg.org/nyec1bmvh/badlink.jpg](http://s4.postimg.org/nyec1bmvh/badlink.jpg)

Anybody knows how this is possible?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anybody know how this compares performance-wise to Numba ([http://numba.pydata.org/](http://numba.pydata.org/)) which seems like a pretty similar effort? Numba translates to LLVM bytecode rather than C++.

<comment><USER3> The performance numbers they show are fairly cherry-picked and are not really showing a broad-based comparison of Numba's capability. In addition, Numba is still under active development and the version they used is a few versions older than released. Still it's good to have use-cases and examples which drive Numba improvements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks quite ambitious. (And cool)

The numerical python ecosystem is definitely improving, but it's getting pretty complicated, particularly when heterogeneous architectures factor into your work flow.

</comment><comment><USER10> Assuming this is Python 2.x (doesn't seem to be specified in the benchmark results), then the use of "range" is problematic (should be "xrange").

<comment><USER11> Not really. "range" returns a list, "xrange" returns an iterator. I assume that the list is much easier to reason about in a JIT. In python3, range is a type of its own and certainly more useful for in a JIT.

[https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#typesseq- ran...](https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#typesseq-range)

[https://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#range](https://docs.python.org/2/library/functions.html#range)

<comment><USER10> How is allocating and populating a Python list order to do a simple for loop in a tight inner loop not problematic? Neither CPython nor PyPy can optimize that out.

As I said, this is assuming we're on Python 2.x.

<comment><USER12> PyPy optimizes that out, you have a thing that looks exactly like a list, but is implemented differently under the hood

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks really nice! Is there any simple recipe built in to parallellize array operations over n threads or does the user need to provide ones own parallellization scheme?

</comment><comment><USER14> I found it interesting to note that one of their use case is numerical integration. As of now Hope does method by method JIT. Numerical integration is one of those things where just "method by method" JIT leaves substantial room for improvement. It is the poster child used to showcase the strength of Stalin, the lisp compiler that substantially outperforms numerical integrator written in C. The main feature that Stalin uses to achieve that impressive performance is inlining of the function that needs to be integrated, right into the integration code. Such inlining is hard to do when code reside in separate compilation unit, separate functions and loaded dynamically, especially when the caller is only aware of a function pointer and not much else. The later the integration routine is compiled, more chance would there be for the compiler to know more about the function pointer, and JIT could potentially help a lot here.

It is indeed possible to do these inlining in C++ using its template machinery but it seems Hope does not to this yet. I am really curious about what Hope does and what plans do they have for the future. Inlining does give huge speedup for this application, more so if one is performing multidimensional numeric integration.

Another thing that I was curious about was how does Hope optimize away the dynamic semantics of Python. If one where to isolate one aspect of Python that makes it ridiculously hard to speed it up, it is its dynamic nature. It seems that Hope removes the dynamic aspect by analyzing the AST of the Python code. Since Python was never intended to be type inferred, it surely poses a substantial obstacle. I wonder whether Hope devs intend to add the Cython functionality of selectively removing dynamic nature of specific functions via annotations. Given the difficulty of automatic static typing of a piece of Python code, any little help afforded to the compiler should go a long way.

The other thing that I am really curious about is what does Hope do about Numpy vector expressions. Cython for example calls back into Numpy, so there is not much speed benefit to be had. In fact if this is being done in a loop, this hurts performance because of the overhead of the call. So if one really wants performance one needs to write the low level indexing code in the Cython syntax. I think it is a matter of personal taste, but if I were to write low- level C,C++; I would rather write it in C,C++ itself. The latter has the additional benefit of mature toolchains that target C, C++.

Finally, a number of tools aimed at similar use cases have been mentioned in the post and in the comments. I will add a shout out for copperhead. It isolates a subset of Python over which one can define a ML like semantics which is then used to aid compilation and parallelization, all hiding behind the familiar python syntax.

<comment><USER15> Just a note - if this use case is important, I've observed that Julia will often properly inline numerical integrals - even some fairly tricky ones. But you do generally have to make sure your loops are striding the quadrature in the memory correct order - Julia doesn't seem to reorder them.

 _I wonder whether Hope devs intend to add the Cython functionality of selectively removing dynamic nature of specific functions via annotations._

You should definitely look at Julia.</comment></comment>