The Jobs That Offer Great Work-Life Balance (and Some That Don't) - m-i-l http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-20/the-jobs-that-offer-great-work-life-balance-and-some-that-don-t- <comment><AUTHOR> It is important to distinguish between job flexibility and what I call _career_ flexibility. As a software developer, I can often work from home, and I can go get a cup of coffee more or less whenever I please. However, what happens if you want to scale back or leave the field for a few years? How does that affect your ability to get back into it?

Among my family and friends are a radiologist, emergency room physician, nurse anesthetist, and a (multiple) registered nurses. This is just my own observation, but they appear to have much greater options to scale back on work for a half decade while they have kids than the software developers I know, without severely compromising their career path when they re-enter full time at a later date. And all these career paths pay, at the median _in San Francisco_ , more than the median for a software developer in San Francisco.

With the exception of radiology, telecommuting, which may people consider to be a critical element of a "flexible" job, is not a big part of most health care jobs. However, jobs like registered nurse, pharmacist, nurse anesthetist, and emergency room physician, may offer more flexibility where it counts most, especially to people who want to pursue meaningful careers but recognize that a period of life, probably when they have small children at home, will require scaling back for an extended period.

<comment><USER2> > _As a software developer, I can often work from home, and I can go get a cup > of coffee more or less whenever I please. However, what happens if you want > to scale back or leave the field for a few years? How does that affect your > ability to get back into it?_

I'm a Software Engineer and I've taken major breaks.

After a year working at the DoD, I spent three years dong whatever I wanted / snowboard instructor / kayak guide, etc.

Then I got a job as a Software Dev for 2 years, no problem at all, got the first job I interviewed for.

Then I took two years off to drive Alaska->Argentina, and generally do whatever I wanted.

After that I again got the first Software Dev job I applied for, and did that for 4 years. Now I'm off again to drive around Africa for at least 2 years.

Granted, I have not "climbed the ladder" like my university friends who have been working all of those years, but I've had absolutely no problem dropping in and out when I please.

<comment><USER3> I would imagine this gets harder as you age, get more set in your ways, the higher on the career ladder you've climbed, and/or as your required salary increases.

<comment><USER4> I think its less about age and more about financial independence; the more monthly obligations you have, and total debt, the harder it is to be flexible in your career choices.

Have a low personal burn rate, save at least 20-50% of your income, and don't live in places with exorbitant living costs (SF, London, NY), and you too can be the master of your destiny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From my experience it seems like in many technical roles the work-life balance can be as good as you can afford to make it. There is an obvious trade-off between career development and maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

<comment><USER6> Being willing to say no, is also a huge part of this. The sad thing is always saying "yes" often results in both a worse product and spending your life in the office.

<comment><USER7> I've also found that it can also damage your career. Being a yes-man does not gain you respect or the time to do well on what you take on. Not to be construed as "being difficult to work with is a good career move", it's just worth noting that saying no at the right time can be just as good a move as saying yes at the right time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For me it helped to switch from on-site to remote.

People tell me "what" they want and "when" they need it and I can decide "how" I get it done.

I had to switch from "8h office/online a day" to "being availble for questions at reasonable hours", because no one sees or cares when I'm online.

</comment><comment><USER9> What's the difference between "Data Scientist" and "Data Analyst" on their list?

<comment><USER10> A data scientist is a statistician who lives in San Francisco.

[https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/428914681911070720](https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/428914681911070720)

<comment><USER11> "A data scientist is a person who is worse at statistics than a statistician and worse at software engineering than a software engineer."

\- Me (Data Scientist)

<comment><USER12> I think that's a pretty good definition. To define it for myself I took the Data Science Specialization from Coursera [https://www.coursera.org/specializations/jhudatascience](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/jhudatascience). There's a fair amount of stats and programming involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands It's interesting that front-end developers rate so high. Having been in FED for a while, I can say it totally varies from company to company.

I've worked at dev shops that were virtual sweat shops and had insane goals for each month. This caused you to work 11-13 hour days to hit your goals, less you get put on a PIP (performance improvement plan).

Others shops went to great lengths to give developers what I thought to be far too much reign to do what they pleased. Come in at noon and work till 10pm? Sure. Take two hour lunches? No problem. Sure the work got done _eventually_ but the atmosphere was super lax with little or no oversight.

<comment><USER13> > Sure the work got done eventually but the atmosphere was super lax with > little or no oversight.

What's the problem with this? If the work is getting done, and meets quality standards, do all employees need oversight? Does a lax work environment immediately imply that the work done there is poor?

<comment> at-fates-hands Not necessarily, but if your developers and QA and PM's are all on different schedules, it can lead to some major headaches.

I worked at a place where devs would regularly come in around noon or later. Code wouldn't get checked in and then the QA people were complaining they couldn't test code and the PM's couldn't tell the "business" stuff was ready to look at.

Likewise, if the QA people are coming in late and the dev is waiting for stuff to be checked off so he can tell the PM to send the app for review, it can screw delivery up.

Is the work done poorly? No, but there were headaches when everybody was on their own schedules.

<comment><USER14> Noon to 8 covers most of the core working hours, I've never seen this cause problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > To find positions where work-life balance consistently comes up as a plus, > Glassdoor looked at its company reviews. Users who review a company can also > rate several workplace attributes of their job, including work-life balance, > on a scale of 1-5. To make Glassdoor's list, a job title had to have been > rated by at least 75 people with that position at two or more companies, and > 15 percent of reviews for the job title had to cite work-life balance as a > pro.

This seems like an awfully tenuous way of assessing work-life balance.

</comment><comment><USER16> It seems that a correlation exists between work-life balance and the "hypeness"/"buzzwordiness" of a job/position held. Which is, indeed, very sad.

<comment> at-fates-hands You also have to understand the data was culled from Glassdoor and the people leaving reviews there. I would think to some degree you have to take the data they got with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER17> Especially because access to their site requires entering information about a recent job or interview. There's very little incentive to do this thoroughly or accurately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How would you translate work-life balance to an equation?

WLB = being suitable for the role + sallary + freetime + company friendliness

<comment><USER19> I wouldn't.

For me, work-life balance is not a numbers game - it is a question of whether or not I can step away from work to do activities with my family, pursue hobbies or personal projects,etc. If I get sick, does my boss say, "Get better fast and get back here.", or does he say, "Get better, and let us know when you are ready to come back." If I take an afternoon off to go to my daughter's track meet, is that frowned upon, or does my team say, "Great, let us know how she did!"

If the company truly cares only about getting the work done, and truly lets you live your life as long as the work is getting done, then you have balance.

<comment><USER20> Indeed.

Fundamentally it's about trust and respect.

If my boss, or my team, feels they need to track my time, my output on a day to day basis, whether I was actually ill when I took sick pay, something is wrong.

That same team has to trust, to some extent, that I respect my work, that I produce good output, that I don't cut corners, that I'll be in the next day and not wander off into the horizon.

The two seem inconsistent to me. I'd far rather employ someone who isn't a perfect clean shaven 9-5, than someone who's in first, out last, but pumps out half baked solutions (or worse still, actively includes backdoors or similar).

I firmly believe that flexibility in work is almost always the way to go. Even for shift patterns, a large enough company should be able to find cover if someone can't (or simply doesn't want to) turn up on Wednesday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is an ad-conspiracy to fill the market with data experts, and reduce their salaries. I swear. We're subservient to this oligarchic cartel. (Praised be Marx.)

Vade retro Bloombergas. Happiness is doomed to decrease. It's the consequence of private property... I know what you think: "please no".

<comment><USER22> I sometimes think (although less conspiratorially) that the high number of Dev bootcamps teaching Rails must definitely drive down salaries. Best to focus on 'the hard stuff' to stay relevant.</comment></comment>


Exporting VIM Syntax Highlight - <AUTHOR> http://jmlacroix.com/archives/export-vim-highlight.html

<comment><USER2> :ToHtml does that natively.

But I can definetly understand the authors decision to chose what he calls "the complicated solution".

<comment><USER3> Minor correction (case-sensitive):

:TOhtml

For any other Vim newbs like me who tried it and thought it wasn't built in to my Vim.

<comment><USER4> FYI, there is a setting (which I can't remember but I've always had it) to make all your Vim command completions case-insensitive.

:h cmdline-completion, it's possibly the ignorecase option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd have gone for the Pygments lib myself, but fun hack.

<comment><USER6> Vim comes with a syntax highlighting engine for almost every file format anyone ever comes across. Looking at Pygments, it seems to only support programming languages and a few highly-developer-oriented config files.

</comment></comment><comment> the-kenny In Emacs:

M-x htmlfontify-buffer or M-x htmlize

<comment><USER7> To be fair, that is something the same as `:TOhtml` in vim. The scripts from the blogpost allow for slightly more -the HTML can be generated and written to a file without the editor actually starting. I imagine this would be useful for automation.</comment></comment>


Blind man and guide dog kicked off plane; passengers follow in support - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/14/travel/blind-man-us-airways-incident/

<comment><USER2> Gosh, the cynic in me thinks that this man "active in the blind community", who sits on a "disability advisory board", might have gotten uppity.

The hopeful in me wants to think that with 35 other people supposedly supporting him, it was a true screw-up on the airline.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any advantage of using APC + Varnish + Cloudflare? - <AUTHOR>

I am running a content site (php/mysql/smarty) which already uses APC. I am thinking of installing varnish to cache frequently fetched pages as each pageload hits the DB. Am also thinking of using Cloudflare for speedingup static content and provide a cache if server breaks as it does many times.<p>Am wondering if this setup will offer me a considerable advantage or will I do better just using fewer of them so as to save server resources in the case of apc/varnish and cost in the case of cloudflare? <comment><USER2> Everyone I talk to raves about Varnish.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would too. It is the simplest and single most effective piece of software for performance you can and should put on your web-server.</comment></comment>


The 2020 State of Remote Work - <AUTHOR> https://lp.buffer.com/state-of-remote-work-2020 <comment><USER2> One of the main benefits for me (I would consider it in the "Ability to work from home" category mentioned in the article) is how much better is the environment at home: I don't need to use headphones to avoid getting distracted and distracting other people with remote calls, I can stream some relaxing music from my computer, my chair is great, I have a huge L-shaped table, I have ilumination the way I like it, temperature.

I agree also with most of the other points in the article, both positive and negatives. Right now I work from home about 50% of the time, which I think is great. Most of the team also works remote part time, and anyway we are split between two cities (Madrid and Barcelona) so we must coordinate remotely even if we are at the office.

<comment><USER3> 100%.

The last 10 days I've been in an open plan office instead of my home office I've used for 8 years.

I've had to trade a 5k ultrawide monitor for 1080p, an Aeron for a cheap chair the company bought secondhand, desk at a height that's comfortable for one that isn't (I'm 6'5), natural light for fluorescent and 500ppm of CO2 for 1200ppm+. And a 10 second walk for a 45 minute drive each way commute.

I don't even think CO2 is on anyone's radar, but some complain of headaches and many seem really lethargic by late morning.

And everyone in the office uses cloud software, but there's a distrust of remote working. I was hoping this battle would be won by now, I'm almost at the point of thinking it should be encouraged by legislation.

<comment><USER4> I started a fully remote company in 2008 and thought it was a matter of time until all new startups were fully remote.

It's a win for the environment, productivity and much less overhead which means higher wages. Your hiring pool also increases substantially.

We were successful but I'm surprised how many startups today still want to hire within a small radius of a physical office.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure about higher wages following my admittedly limited experience.

I applied to some remote-only companies based in France, but I was quickly out of the competition because the companies could hire other people at much lower wages than what I (living in the most expensive city in the country) was looking for.

I think that hiring remotely will lead to lower compensation on average, because all else being equal companies will prefer those with lower salary expectations.

<comment> blaser-waffle That's explicitly the point -- target qualified or mostly qualified individuals in lower COL areas. You may not be the best qualified remote worker but we can shave your salary by 80K if you live in rural Kentucky and still get a good enough IT worker in ~6 months.

Companies also make office overhead costs into an externalized problem, in that the employee is responsible for desks/tables/chairs/heating/cooling, plus bandwidth and even computers. I see big advantages and downsides to this, but it is useful from a cost cutting perspective.

The tradeoff is the difficulty of hiring, managing, and communicating remotely. Plus I don't think everyone is cut out for remote work -- after 5 years remote I'm starting to think I'm not...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was really skeptical of remote work before I took my first and current remote job, which surprisingly paid better than my former non-remote job. Conceptually, It was totally outside my Overton window. But having experienced it, my perspective completely changed. I don't mind doing a good job, but I underestimated how valuable the autonomy of my time would be, it's such a blessing. An occasional hour or two mid-day break really suits me. Those days, I am stretching my work day, but more relaxed and less stressed. My output is higher than working in an office.

<comment><USER7> > _An occasional hour or two mid-day break really suits me._

What...like lunch? I don't know any software engineer who doesn't regularly take more than an hour for lunch.

<comment><USER6> When I worked at the office, "lunch" was available onsite from 11:30 to 1:30 and onsite was 30-90 minutes from my house, depending on a very wide range of traffic conditions. It can be food, it can be laundry, it can be errands. Things I couldn't squeeze in before.

<comment> blaser-waffle I've made a habit of using "lunch" to make dinner, via a crockpot or slowcooker. As in, I work remote and use my "lunch break" to throw stew (or curry, or soup, or a roast, etc.) together and have that cook for the rest of the afternoon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Glad to see this data coming out. My company builds tools for remote workers so naturally, I speak with a lot of people who work remotely. I'd say most of the pain points I hear from remote workers line up fairly well with the data in this survey (and also my own pain points since I've worked remote for over a year now).

I'm not surprised to see that 97% of people would recommend working remote to others. Almost everyone I speak with says they would never go back to working in an office. While I can see myself going back to an office at some point in my career, right now the flexibility in my day far outweighs working in an office.

I hear a lot of similar downsides as well. I'm a bit surprised that only 20% of people responded that they struggled with loneliness while working remote. In my experience this number seems to be higher. My coworkers and I work out of coffee shops quite a bit and almost everyone who goes to work in a coffee shop is doing so in order to break out of the loneliness of their home and be around other people (next time you're in a coffee shop, take note of how many people have laptops out). The problem though is that no one really interacts with people at coffee shops because everyone is at their own table on their laptops.

We heard this feedback so much that we started holding Work Clubs[0] at coffee shops where people can sit down with us at the same table and work together for a few hours. It's not networking but it's a way to meet other people during the workday while getting your work done. We've had people from many different industries, ages, and walks of life working together and forming business connections. It's beneficial to the coffee shops too because when we all sit at the same table, order food and drinks, and it frees up other tables for more customers.

Our communities are growing in Portland, San Diego, and the SF Bay Area right now, so come work with us if you're ever feeling lonely and need some IRL human interaction in your day! Mental health is an important factor for remote workers, and we're hoping to alleviate some of those struggles for the remote community.

[0]: [https://outofoffice.app/](https://outofoffice.app/)

<comment><USER9> Neat idea, I don't fit the demographic but maybe there is a stronger representation of the family man in remote working and why that loneliness stat is so low in your experience. My family keeps me plenty of company throughout the day and myself and coworkers have great communication. I have never felt lonely. It's not being with other people I miss though, it's the in person random collaboration sessions I miss. Reddit and this site fill in some of that gap.

<comment><USER10> My coworkers and I will have productivity, creativity, or brainstorming sessions at each other's homes every two or three months (sometimes less frequently) to help fulfill the desire for in-person collaboration. Work is willing to reimburse for travel time because we're lucky enough to have an owner that sees the value in it. Also, we all live in the same region, so it's a 3 hour drive at most for any one of us, depending on where we decide to meet.

You should consider something similar and propose it to management if you think it would benefit the team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The parts that stood out to me:

(my team and I are currently seeing each other in person two full days every two weeks and the rest is remote)

> 3\. Not having to commute is a top benefit to remote workers

Makes sense. Financial, health, and psychological benefits.

> 4\. Communication, collaboration, and loneliness continue to be top > challenges for remote workers and remote organizations

100% agree. I typically have automatic transcriptions enabled (Google Meet) + a full resolution version of whatever document the person is talking presenting is editing.

As for the loneliness aspect, while I don't feel like I socialize that much during work, I have enough energy to go out and socialize after. This is a byproduct of a lot of things and not purely remote/not remote.

> 5\. The majority of organizations with remote workers don't pay for monthly > expenses associated with remote work

Not sure about this one. I think part of the incentive for a company to go remote is savings. On the other hand, a standing desk and a good chair do wonders. Perhaps the savings from rent are enough to cover all of this- I'm not sure. Travel and expenses should be 100% reimbursed, no question.

<comment><USER12> I mean, it's the recurring costs that aren't usually covered, like internet.

My company is fully remote and I'm reimbursed for my home office equipment (computer, desk, chair, router, etc) and for all travel. Even for working from a coffee shop. But not for home internet.

<comment><USER13> Great! Where do you work? If you don't mind me asking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Meetings are MORE seamless when done fully remotely, because everyone is responsible for their own setup. In my experience, the biggest friction is always getting a "room" in the office for people to sit, which often has issues.

<comment><USER15> Yes, it's often the people in the big conference room that are actually much harder to hear, because you have many people trying to jam all of their audio and video through a single mic and camera. Each remote person has their own dedicated mic and camera, so you can see and hear all of the nuance when they speak. But it is not reciprocal -- in return, the remote people get to see a single grainy feed of the tops of their colleagues heads in the office, and variable/muffled audio because the mic can't be close to everyone at once.

We have been trying a different approach at work where everybody always just uses their own laptop camera and mic, whether they're in the office or remote. Sometimes it can seem a little silly talking into your laptop to the person sitting next to you also talking into their laptop. But the upside is everybody's dedicated audio and video is crystal clear; and when we share screens we can all see all of the detail up close rather than having to squint at a tv at the other end of a conference room.

Curious to know if anyone else has tried working this way? We've also been trying out [https://team.video](https://team.video), which has some cool collaborative features that only really work if each person is joining from their own device.

<comment><USER16> One screen. One face.

The only way to do it. Remote people will love it but there will probably be push back from in office people.

In order to enforce it there needs to be a champion at higher levels.

<comment><USER17> There are technological ways to get the benefits of this approach without changing the office workers' habits.

I don't remember the name of the solution, but working with a big SF company which has both many office and remote workers, they had a camera mounted atop a TV in the meeting room. The camera would focus on and follow the current speaker even if they moved around the room, and the audio was clear as long as only one person talked at a time. It worked surprisingly well.

<comment><USER18> There are a lot of products like this available and every corporation's offices I have been to have had one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Tokyo salaryman reporting in.

This is definitely the next career move for me if I stay corporate. I waste about 3 hours of potentially productive time each day -- not to mention the wind-up time necessary when sitting down to work.

1 hour morning prep to go out, 1 hour commute each way on central Toyko trains, and 30 odd minutes settling in at the office. Only to do exactly what I could be doing at home...At this point, I think telling developers the benefits of remote work is preaching to the choir.

<comment><USER20> > 1 hour morning prep to go out

What on earth are you doing?

<comment><USER21> Business clobber is a lot more hassle than throwing on jeans and a t-shirt. In a formal office environment it's best to look sharp and that takes some prep time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not commuting is huge. That adds about 3 hours a day to my availability, when you consider the prep time and various other incidentals.

One way to pitch it to the boss: savings on relo and the ability to tap into a much broader hiring pool. I'm seeing this now with a private equity group, where they've decided it is cheaper to hire operating talent nationally in major metro areas and let them commute / remote work vs. relocating everyone for a two or three year gig. (After which point, you're laid off in a small town where you're brand new... not a good thing; absolutely no way I would relo for this gig)

</comment><comment><USER23> The place I worked at before my current employer had a bizarre attitude to remote work. Our manager was strongly skeptical of work from home, but half of our team was distributed in branch offices which were effectively remote work! I worked in one of these satellite offices, so I had all of the collaboration difficulties and none of the upsides (still had to come in. To an open plan office.)

After a bunch of people left I got promoted to lead developer, but I was the only one left in the branch office. The rest of my team was concentrated in HQ a couple hours' drive away. The manager and software architect (his right-hand man) still micromanaged technical decisions. _I_ couldn't get ahold of them for weeks at a time as they were so overbooked, but my team members could occasionally corner them for hallway conversations. So I'd get asked something, have to make a best guess judgement since I couldn't ask them, someone else would corner them and they'd tell them the opposite of what I decided. But I wouldn't find out about this until we went to integrate something and found the two halves had been implemented to different directions.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've been working remote 10 years now. I love it.

I am surprised, though. One major downfall wasn't listed-- the remote worker is not 'completely plugged in' with the rest of the team (if they are co- located). That little bit of drag brings some inefficiencies. But for me, remote work is now a 'must have'.

</comment><comment><USER25> In my previous job in Germany I could work remotely as much as I wanted. I would usually work from Spain, since is where I come from.

It was close to ideal: having lunch in 30min and spending the other 30min at the pool or going for a short break to the beach (just 5min away).

However I discovered that when I spent more than 1 or 2 weeks working remotely in a row I would start feeling detached from my job. It became increasingly difficult to be motivated and concentrated in certain tasks.

In my current job employees can work remotely 1 day a week by default with possibility to extend it occasionally. I find this to work better for me personally. It allows me to be flexible and productive while working remotely and at the same time it keeps me engaged and connected with the challenges and goals at work.

<comment><USER26> May I ask hod did you find remote work in Germany? I noticed in my time there German companies were highly conservative and didn't want to hear about their employees not being present in the office.

<comment><USER25> I was working for a small startup. Since they did not have many developers, each of us were quite key to their product.

Knowing that, I could convince them to work remotely every now and then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think that to some point larger companies who do not have a good time management are the most scared by remote work.

The idea of someone slacking off freely at home is probably less bearable than slacking off at the office.

</comment><comment><USER28> > Communication, collaboration, and loneliness continue to be top challenges > for remote workers and remote organizations

While probably years off and slightly dystopian, I'm interested to see how VR may change the remote communication and collaboration aspect. Stuff like ImmersedVR for the Quest (no affiliation) that allows you to be in the same virtual room as someone else, being able to glance over at their (virtual) screens by turning your head and having access to a digital whiteboard seems pretty scifi but are novel solutions to these problems.

<comment><USER29> I think video is mostly useless and VR will be even more so if only for the simple fact that many people cannot use it due to motion sickness. Better tech is unlikely to ever change that. (I can't even do 3d movies). I think chat and voice are plenty good and don't have all the drawbacks of a visual solution. I find not having to see people in real life, on video, or in VR to be one of the main advantages of remote work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Interesting results. I am also a remote worker and glad to see this trend is picking up. Everything has upsides and downsides but upsides of working remotely outweigh downsides buy quite a margin. Not only working remotely gives peace of mind (little flexibility on working hours.); working in a familiar/comfortable environment increases productivity, especially for people like me who are a little uncomfortable when surrounded by other people. (bonus you can sit awkwardly in you PJs)

</comment><comment><USER31> I've shared this a lot recently, sorry for doing it again, but usually the feedback we get is extremely positive:

We've turned our internal wiki with processes and experiences from running a fully remote company for over 8 years in a nice digestible PDF: [https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf/](https://mobilejazz.com/company- handbook-pdf/)

<comment><USER32> Thanks a lot for this reading its a lot of insight since il currently preparing to launch my own remote company and my vision of it align a lot with yours.

Do you have any resources or tips for how to handle the financial and paperworks of having people from different countries ? Thats the thing im having the more trouble finding info about

<comment><USER31> Unfortunately that is a very difficult question to answer as it is very specific to your company's tax and legal residency and those of every single team member.

In our case we offer proper employment where we have a legal entity and thus actually can employ team members. For people with tax residency in other countries the only somewhat non-bureaucratic and sustainable solution is for them to go self-employed and have a "consulting contract" with us. That said, regardless of the legal technicalities, we treat everyone the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have worked 100% remote at two different jobs for the past 8 years.

I gave upon remote work this week.

I slowly entered a phase of resenting work and resenting my family and home life. They each slowly encroached on each other until I was not sleeping, not being productive at work, not engaged with my kids and generally hating life. I felt like I was a husk of a person, a cipher or automaton.

Fortunately my company has an office 40 minutes away so I have the option to commute without changing jobs.

Admittedly, I have some unique circumstances that probably put me in a tiny minority. I still think remote work is a great idea, it's just not for me anymore and I wish I had realized that 3 years ago.

<comment><USER10> A lot of people use work to get away from their families. Just be aware It can be an indicator of other problems in your life. In all of my relationships (friends, family, romantic) I've observed that people usually severely undervalue personal time and are unwilling to commit to taking care of themselves.

Good luck and I hope the office life brings you some happiness. I sometimes find myself jealous of those with commutes that get to chip away at their podcast queues daily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Glad this covers the good _and_ bad aspects of remote work. One thing is missing though: the cost of an extra bedroom to use as an office.

In many real estate markets, going from N to N+1 bedrooms is a considerable price increase.

<comment><USER6> Some people set up desks in their living room / common areas. I haven't seen anybody pass judgment for not maintaining a separate, dedicated room for remote work.

<comment><USER35> I could see a room outfitted to spec become a standard some day. Starting with a working microphone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is the average remote job paid significantly less than the average local job? Is the HN trope that every developer should be making $150k+ simply wrong? Curious how to reconcile this data with the giganto salaries everyone here is always talking about getting. I like the remote lifestyle OK, but am I shooting myself in the (salary) foot by working remotely?

> Below is the breakdown of salary ranges for respondents in USD.

> 18.6% $50,001 to $75,000

> 16.8% $75,001 to $100,000

> 14.2% $25,001 to $50,000

> 12.1% up to $25,000

> 12% $100,000 to $125,000

> 10.8% $125,001 to $150,000

> 9.7% $150,001 to $200,000

> 5.9% Over $200,000

<comment><USER37> One thing that's come up with remote work is missing out on promotion, since you aren't as naturally visible to your manager or boss. So, if you are working remotely, you might not want to be full time to make sure to get some of that visibility. (I know this isn't directly related to the question, but it's something to consider)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I have worked remotely for 5 years, and for 3 years previously. Let's say I have been working for 25 years. That means 32% of my career has been spent working remotely. And it's been the most productive and personally satisfying part of my career.

But, note when I say remote it's "work from home most of the time" remote. Not work in some other country on the other side of the world remote. I do in person meetings with clients and partners a couple times a month.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm currently working as a Senior Software Developer at a startup. I have been wanting to work remotely from my next job change.

I'm from India where engineers generally get paid less compared to engineers in the United States and many European Countries. Although I'm not looking for the same salary as that of an US engineer, I'm looking for a pay something close to that amount. Is this the reality today? How many companies pay remote workers regardless of their location?

<comment><USER39> > Although I'm not looking for the same salary as that of an US engineer, I'm > looking for a pay something close to that amount. Is this the reality today?

You can get close to that money in two ways, in my knowledge and experience.

1) Work for a FANG company (Only Amazon, Google are there, but there are others which pay well e.g. VMWare comes to mind now).

2) You join a good netork for freelancers. I currently work for one, and I make the amount, which fits your description of 'near US salary'. Since cost of living is low, it does feel like a high paying job.

<comment><USER13> You mean you work a company? Or you work as a freelancer on platforms like Toptal, freelancer.in etc ?

<comment><USER39> I work for a Bay area Startup client via Toptal.

PS: I didn't mention the name earlier, to avoid being taken as marketing for a platform. Now that you asked... :)

<comment><USER13> Haha okay. Toptal is great! How is your experience so far? How many hours do you need to work per week?

<comment><USER39> My experience has been good. For about an year I worked full time. And then later on, because of wanting to work on my own projects, switched to part time.

But, of course, any platform is not perfect, and mileage varies. One of the problems, I have seen other people face and say is difficulty in getting the first client. But in some of those cases, I also found, that their experience was in a narrow domain (e.g. Wordpress developer in one case). If a person is skilled in a breadth of technologies, then I think, its relatively easier to bag a client.

Also another valid criticism of it is, the selection process is very tedious. Personally, I like solving algorithmic problems (and had spent time learning and solving DP/etc based problems), so I didn't have much issue at that stage++. But often several good developers, don't find that stage to be useful. And I agree, as some friends I referred, struggled with that, and those people I had worked in the same team for long, and know them to be very good developers.

But despite some issues, I still think, it has value. As for me, it solves the problem of being in India and work for SV client, and get good rates. Also no commute. And use that time for exercise instead. Also of late, the ability to work part time, and work on my own projects.

Ask me any other question you have, I will try to answer it in a generic way (not ready to reveal my specific instance details)

++ Edit: I too had difficulty at the mock project stage. Where I found it too cumbersome. Especially the UI part, in React, and was almost ready to give up. It was also partly due to over-committing at that stage, and promising them a demo in 10-12 days, as I was eager to finish the process fast. May be in hind sight I should have taken 16-18 days. As I was not fresh with Reach and was learning on the job (as we all sometimes do)

<comment><USER13> Great! This really helps. Thanks a lot! I would love to discuss more about how the interview process was like. How do you think we can connect?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This data is interesting but I'd love to see a similar survey done from the perspective of companies that employ remote workers.

</comment><comment><USER41> Interesting results and well written casual but sensical analysis.

One thing that bothered me a bit though was the "product placements". Were there any (financial or otherwise) incentives to publish those? If so, and even more so if there _weren't_ , I feel like this should have been more explicitly disclosed. Apologies if I skipped any disclosure inadvertently.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'd love to work remotely. To date, though, there seems to be a very strong bias from employers in not doing so. Simply being in the office looks "busy", while not being in the office looks like slacking, regardless of what's actually getting done.

Quoting Allen, 80% of life really is just showing up. For better or worse.

<comment><USER43> Tell me about it... as a technical leader at the startup I work on, I would love to be remote and for my team to be remote (we are kind of remote as we are collocated in 2 offices in different countries). But the CEO and HR department do not believe in remote teams. It is the one thing that I struggle with and will change in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER42> I've learned to look at the bright side. Any day I drag my ass in I'm scoring an 80% right out of the box. I'd feel guilty not much getting done on a day remotely, but for some reason I don't feel it much when I'm at my desk.</comment></comment></comment>


HP laptop battery doesn't last for 26,280 hours, is still cool - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2008/12/10/hps-battery-doesnt-last-for-26280-hours-is-still-cool/ <comment> tsetse-fly Technologizer is blogspam. This is just a summary of an article that was submitted 3 hours earlier.[1] His other submissions are the same.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392861>

<comment><USER2> probably why the link to their site is "rel=nofollowed" this make the link, just a link - and if their goal is anything but "sharing information" (I.e. ranking in google..) this does nothing for him.

<comment><USER3> 'nofollow' does not make outlinks useless. Some crawlers still follow them. Some users still click them (and thus toolbars/etc report the visits). Some secondary inlinks may be created by people who discovered an article via a nofollow outlink.

And even Google may count them for something -- I'm sure 'nofollow' is part of their analysis, but I doubt it's equivalent to 'the link wasn't even there'. That'd be throwing away information, and Google didn't get where they are by throwing away bits. (I would guess the 'nofollow' discount varies by site.)</comment></comment></comment>


Google admits changing phone settings remotely - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-45546276 <comment><USER2> Given that phone OSes are guest VMs on an unreachable host and managed from a centralized authority with push-permissions, this shouldnt be surprising.

Is this news because of how easy it was accidentally rolled to production and applied to more people?</comment>


Ask HN: Distraction Free YouTube Removed from Chrome Webstore - <AUTHOR> A few years ago I created an extension called "DF YouTube (Distraction Free)" to help me to quit wasting so much time on YouTube.  It simply uses CSS to hide different parts of YouTube, such as the sidebar, video recommendations, feed, etc.  The extension has had up to 180,000 users and has always maintained a high rating, currently 4.5 stars.
Recently I received an email from Google notifying me that the app has been taken down from the Chrome webstore due to "irrelevant, misleading, or excessive keywords in app descriptions, titles, or metadata."  Not being able to identify anything that could be triggering this, I resubmitted it unchanged, and it was rejected again, with a warning of a permanent ban.
I have emailed email@example.com and firstname.lastname@example.com with requests for a review and explanation but have received no response.
What can I do about this?  Does it seem likely that someone at Google took exception to my app, which hinders YouTube's clickbaity functionality?
Meanwhile, I have ported this app to Firefox which I now use as my main browser, so feel free to look it up on that platform :) <comment><USER2> I'm working on a similar plugin!

[https://github.com/a13o/disengaged](https://github.com/a13o/disengaged)

May I ask if scripts like this require a lot of upkeep to stay on top of site changes? I already noticed YouTube has a lot of different layouts based on platform and browser

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a cool project. Do you plan on having custom applications for a bunch of different websites? I can certainly see that becoming logistically complex. Speaking to my experience, since 2015 YouTube (er, sorry, YouTube™) went through one major style revision requiring a re-working of my app, and they have just gone through a minor one, which will require some tweaking.

<comment><USER2> Yeah I'm planning to cover a bunch more sites like twitter, Reddit, imgur, etc. Time waster sites. But I'm def worried about how all these sites are adopting frameworks, cuz it makes the DOM more dynamic. I think the number of sites the plugin can cover will be a function of popularity and contributors.

Thanks for the data, if I estimate 1 breakage per site per year (plan for the worst) that helps me get a picture of what I think I can support myself

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Might be [https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/branding#description](https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/branding#description) for the name that's the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just wanted to let you know the extension is back up on the Chrome Web Store. Thanks again for your help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What makes you think you can use "YouTube" in your product name?

You have no association or claim to the YouTube brand.

Learn to name software without "lifting" the IP of a company like Google. Basic branding, copyright, etc.</comment>


My "must have" software list, what is your list? - <AUTHOR> http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2010/05/must-have-software/

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably best to comment here (instead of my site): my list is: Excel, git, GnuPG, Latex, Papers, R, TrueCrypt.

</comment><comment><USER2> This may be a bit unusual, but I'm quite fond of my clipboard manager. It makes juggling multiple clips/bits of info very easy and lessens context switches. Since it's backed by SQLite and has decent search/retrieval, I also use it as a catchall for commonly used items, whether to paste or simply to reference.</comment>


Orthogonality is Pretentious - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ianbicking.org/orthogonality-is-pretentious.html

<comment><USER2> This is a silly argument and a misinterpretation of the purpose of orthogonality. Orthogonality is not a goal in itself, nor is it's purpose to eliminate redundancy. It's a tool to reduce entanglement of features. It helps simplify designs by ensuring that changes to one feature do not affect other features. This reduces the chance of unintended or inconvenient side effects when making changes. This is helpful for software architecture in general, not just programming language design.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Pretentious" is among my least favorite words. It usually says more about the speaker than the people that the speaker is labeling with it.

<comment><USER4> This is from 2006 and there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then. Ian is an exceptionally smart guy and one hell of a hacker, I wouldn't care to hazard a guess as to what he thinks now. Perhaps he'll drop in and enlighten us.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is Ethereum vaporware? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Since I had no idea what Ethereum is: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum) "is a blockchain-based cryptocurrency that includes a virtual machine featuring stateful user-created smart contracts and a Turing-complete contract language."

[https://www.ethereum.org/](https://www.ethereum.org/)

At least this article/opinion seems to think it's not vaporware [http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/01/vapor-no-more-ethereum- has-...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/01/vapor-no-more-ethereum-has- launched/)

</comment><comment><USER3> What do you mean? Whether it actually _exists_ or whether it will have a significant impact on the world?

If it's the former, the network has just recently launched and you can buy "ether" from a few crypto-coin exchanges. Also "apps" on top of Ethereum will start showing up soon. Augur.net has a crowdsale tomorrow.

If it's the latter, well who knows? It's been years since Bitcoin was created and it's still debatable whether it was "successful" in changing the world or not. Ethereum promises to allow many more "Bitcoin-like" apps on top of it (but not necessarily currencies, also other types of decentralized apps), so from that point of view it may have higher potential at least.

</comment><comment><USER4> I just looked at the etherium page and it says they already launched it and there are already companies/applications built using it.

That doesn't really answer the question one way or the other. Still, for what it's worth I would like to remain optimistic about it.</comment>


Ask HN: your biggest Aha moment as a hacker? - <AUTHOR>

Every now and then in every hacker's life, there comes a moment when you just solved a frustrating  problem which you and may be others were working for a long time. Solving it gives you immense satisfaction, makes it all worth it, gets you a rush of energy and makes you love your life as a hacker/designer... a Peak Experience, aka Aha moment. Was curious as to what is the biggest peak experience fellow hackers had.
One such experience of mine was when I found the  true cause of slowdown if a 31 thread implementation. We had tried a LOT of things without any luck. And finally when I found out the reason, it was like finding out Kaiser Soze's true identity! BTW, the reason was a lock taken by infinibnd firmware, and we were on track again with 0 code lines changed!
What's your biggest Aha moment as a hacker? <comment><USER2> A big "Aha" moment for me was that I could just grep the big scary tar.gz source code of a project. (And that the big scary tar.gz wasn't that scary)

Before that moment, I had to post a question to the project's forum or submit a bug report if I had a problem with a project. Then one day, all of a sudden, I realized _I could_ just go ahead and grep the source myself and that the source wasn't scary. I realized that not only could I look at the code myself, but also that I had enough skills in general that I could follow along with other people's code.

Essentially, my "Aha" moment was actually _exercising_ Freedom 1 from the four essential freedoms of free software.

<comment><USER3> Ummmm, any introductory book on Emacs or Vi would have a chapter on cross- referencing tools, specially etags/ctags.

Do people really not know how to "dive into" code bases?

<comment><USER4> Maybe it has to do with reliance on IDEs? I've seen people completely lost without IntelliSense, etc., and they're usually not familiar with using tags or grep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It was my first programming assignment, actually. I was a co-op student, working in a factory. A database used to communicate between the fab area and the order/sales types, suddenly stopped working. The original author was no longer around. I have no idea why I got picked to fix it... desperation, I suppose. I vaguely remember that some poor secretary had to do everything by hand while I figured it out.

I plunged around stupidly for a long, long time. I called it a database, but really it was more like a process-- a collection of one-off tools, on a variety of machines, that slowly massaged factory data into a form useable by the front office.

Eventually I blundered my way to the solution. Reading the manual for one of the languages used, it mentioned using EBCDIC codes when writing characters. A little bell went off in my head-- somewhere I had read that another machine in the pipeline used ASCII encoding.

None of this meant anything to me, but I knew that all the programs assumed a certain line length, and defensively stuck in a line terminator character just to be certain. A little poking around revealed that, sure enough, somehow a single record of the wrong length had got into the original data file.

So in the end, changing a single character in a single program made the whole apparatus wheeze back to life.

It was a great moment for me, seeing how such a little thing could have such a huge impact. There was also a heady feeling to the fact that nobody around me seemed to have any idea what I was talking about-- they were just happy the thing finally worked again.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1) When I discovered there was a general order to learning web development. Beforehand, learning web programming was a giant mess of half-complete youtube videos and inaccurate articles.

2) Nested loops. Awesome.

3) Finally getting it through my thick skull that using fewer different moving parts in hacking, design, learning, etc is a way to actually get things done that also impress people. Before, I dove in and tried to use all kinds of variation, inventions, hacks. Now I use those things as accents, not the foundation of anything I do.

<comment><USER7> > When I discovered there was a general order to learning web development.

Wait, what?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I first read the BSD Unix source code and realized in a way that I had not before that the kernel which ran my C programs was itself just another C program, compiled with the same kind of C compiler, debuggable with the same kind of debugger (in many cases).

</comment><comment><USER9> Learning C trying to figure out how to deal with a large 2D array (a map for an RPG) on a calculator (limited RAM and program size) when it finally clicked what a pointer is. I was hooked from that moment on.

</comment><comment><USER10> I had taught myself HTML and Javascript as my first adventure into writing code. A PC gaming related sites I visited often started doing some dynamic pages with Perl (this was the late 90s), and I just thought that was the bees knees, so I went off to learn Perl. I wrote a simple guestbook style script for a little site I had, uploaded it, went to the browser and got a nice 'Internal Server Error'. I read every line of code I had written, couldnt find the error, then realized my FTP client was set to upload in binary rather than ASCII. Uploaded the script again in the right mode, went to the site, and it worked. I didn't even know the difference between the two at the time.

It's not really an 'aha moment' that's on the same level as others mentioned here, but it was the first script I ever wrote. Before that, the dynamic portion of the internet seemed like magic. I've been hooked ever since. :)

</comment><comment><USER11> When I realized that I hadn't learned languages, I'd learned techniques, and I could just change languages given a bit of time to bootstrap and some common starting points.

Basically, paradigms were my Aha. Kinda lame, but apparently there are a lot of developers who haven't figured them out yet.

<comment><USER12> Not lame at all, the ability to think in and see abstractions is one of the most significant realizations in any/every area of life, regardless what field it occurs in.

My biggest Aha moment was when I realized that abstract art uses similar thought processes as computer science and software engineering to produce abstract representations of some aspect of reality. The specifics and logical rigor differ, but the general idea is the same.

<comment><USER6> I agree. I thought I was raving genius when I unlocked the concept of abstraction into different fields. It's something that's very difficult to explain to people who haven't done it yet. I don't mean to be condescending in tone; 2 years ago, I would've had no clue what I'm currently talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Going to a shell, telnet'ing to port 80 and getting back a bunch of HTML. At that particular time and level of knowledge that was a huge A-Ha moment for me.

Teh internet is just text sent over a series of pipes ;)

</comment><comment><USER7> This was a long time ago, so I don't remember the particulars, but it was in a large Fortran-based CFD flow solver code. The code used a lot of dynamically- allocated arrays, and somewhere in there we had a bug that would occasionally manifest itself in a crash. The problem of course was that we couldn't consistently reproduce it. This was before the days of really good memory debuggers, or at least, before we discovered such tools, so the bug just kind of lingered on for a long time.

The day I finally tracked it down was a red-letter day, for me personally anyways.

</comment><comment><USER14> Understanding db normalization - subsequently realizing normalization should also apply to code.

Attempting to implement conways game of life and accidentally creating mesmerizing mandalas made of ascii characters!

"getting" lisp, writing a lisp, Figuring out how to implement TCO, macro expansion, quasiquote etc. then doing it all over again!

Realizing that almost all programming is a form of macro expansion/parsing/compiling. (taking the plunge from generating html/sql/css to generating an entire language is seriously not such a huge leap when you think about it)

Picking up and reading the smalltalk-80 reference manual, lisp 1.5 manual, and SICP cover to cover. Wishing I was 30 years younger and then realizing I am infinitely grateful for the opportunity to just absorb all of the work that has come before me and build upon it.

APL - finally the magic of the characters I had only accidentally typed in dos when pressing alt + num keys were mine to wield! (seriously though I really dig APL and its children) The book that finally made it click for me was "APL With a Mathematical Accent" - highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wrote my own deployment scripts to deploy django-based projects. Before that, I used to deploy manually; it was a long, frustrating process that was error prone.

The "aha" moment being that it's just a bunch of scripts to automate mundane tasks, "how didn't I think of that before?". Everything really is just that. All the tools we use are just programs that automate things we'd have to do manually otherwise.

This is kinda embarrassing to admit as a programmer, but in my windows days, it never occurred to me that I could just write scripts to automate mundane tasks. It seemed like everything had to come from "real" companies or "real" projects. If no company made it, or no open-source project exists for it, then you're stuck doing it manually.

I also now realize that this is the mindset of the average company that has no clue what it's doing. They also think if a tool doesn't have a GUI, it doesn't exist. 'git' is not a real system because it's all from the command line.

Incidentally, I had that aha moment around the time when I was transitioning from GUI tools to command line tools.

</comment><comment><USER16> 1\. When I first realized I could loop and conditionally branch inside it (my first programming lesson) to do interesting stuff.

2\. When I got OOP, and later when I realized the folly of vicious mutability.

3\. When I discovered FP, composability and the Turing machine.

4\. When I lately realized that software development is a giant hack to solve various business problems. ;)

</comment><comment><USER17> At my first serious job, I wrote part of the interface for an embedded product. Because we were a tiny company I helped assemble, shrink wrap and finally ship them. My Aha moment was when they finally left the warehouse and that real people would depend on our stuff. It integrated their security systems and has to work, real people would be affected by my work.

</comment><comment><USER18> 1\. When I grew up in Taiwan, I was an avid reader of a certain PC gaming magazine. In addition to the usual strategies and walk-throughs, every issue also contained hex editing guides for various popular games. I could follow the instructions well enough, but I didn't understand hexadecimal numbers, so it was just monkey-see-monkey-do. Then one day, while flipping through computer books at an underground store, I "got" hex numbers, and my mind was blown. A whole new game hacking vista opened up in my mind's eye.

2\. While learning Clojure, I tried my hand at implementing the Lisp interpreter described in PG's "The Roots of Lisp" paper. There were many "aha!" moments along the way, but the biggest one came when I understood how I could define the "eval" function inside my interpreter, which allowed me to run a Lisp interpreter inside my Lisp interpreter (which was running in Clojure, which was running on the JVM, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER19> my biggest aha moment came when I realized that all of my aha moments come after rest or working on other things

<comment><USER6> or the shower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am building my first web app and learning Ruby on Rails as I go, so I literally have Aha moments every single day. When I get something to work (that I've never done before) I literally jump up and down. The feeling of seeing an idea come to life is just unexplainable!

</comment><comment><USER21> Discovering map while writing in scheme was enlightening! It opened my eyes to functional programming and more than made the all nighter worth it.

</comment><comment><USER22> These are the biggest AHA! moments that stuck out for me

      1. Understanding recursion in C
      2. Understanding lazy evaluation in Scheme
      3. Figuring out how to implement lazy evaluation in C

A lot of superficial differences between languages melted away after that. Definitely a "level up" feeling as a developer.

</comment><comment><USER23> Understanding the Continuation-Passing Style transformation, and how it makes the internal state of the interpreter explicit.

</comment><comment><USER24> It took me a while to remember mine. It was my first introduction to functional programming using JavaScript. I didn't even realize that's what I was doing but when I realized that I could write a function that returned a function my brain damn near exploded with possibilities.

</comment><comment><USER25> I guess for me, it would be to realize how all softwares are basically abstractions. and how even the most scariest/magical software is only the summation of many smaller (lesser scary) pieces.

</comment><comment><USER26> "it's a Unix system; I know this!"

</comment><comment><USER27> Apart from every page in Cormen's Algo book (which I will ignore because of the share number of those), my biggest AHA moment was about 3 years back when I realized that I can say "return a,b,c" to return 3 variables in python. Till then I had been only using C++ and could not fathom that a programming language can be painless.</comment>


Chronic Complainers Drain the Life From a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.caycon.com/blog/2011/10/chronic-complainers-drain-the-life-from-a-startup/ <comment><USER2> I am not sure I buy this argument. While some complaining is obviously not warranted, much of it does point of specific pain points (especially something like, "why do I have to follow this procedure, it is stupid", "I hate this program") and "my manager doesn't understand me".

If you simply turn it down as complaining you won't get to fix the issues in your company. Big stupid companies are created that way. Do you want to be disrupted by the next YC batch?

</comment><comment><USER3> Something is off about this article. If anyone is truly a chronic complainer, they shouldn't have had a chance of getting hired. Startup employees need to be similar to founders, because both their compensation and the effects of their work are closer to that of founders than they are to employees at BigCorp.

</comment><comment><USER4> Frustrating title - they're not talking about customers complaining about service or product. Rather, they're talking about whining, bitching, moaning, grumbling, to fellow cow-orkers.

> _Ten to twenty hours a month is a lot of time to waste_

Sometimes not working isn't waste, it makes active working more productive. And 20 hours a month is nothing. I've been in jobs where most people would waste easily 10 hours per week with no effort. (Just as working at someone else's startup is useful experience: you should try working minimum wage at an established firm to see how they do things wrong.)

To address the article: there's not much you can do about people constantly moaning. Telling them to "fuck off" causes more trouble than it's worth; you can't really ignore them; they are toxic but what can be done?</comment>


GPU folks: we need to talk about control flow - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@afd_icl/gpu-folks-we-need-to-talk-about-control-flow-c20fd225197e#.t8zrzrc46 <comment><USER2> Buggy shader compilers are no surprise to me but it's a serious issue that needs to be addressed by _all_ GPU vendors. Vulkan and SPIR-V may help a little as the GLSL compiler frontend is moved out of the "driver" component and the resulting SPIR-V blob can be more easily manipulated.

There are some major issues at play:

1) Shipping an OpenGL-based product on multiple vendors' devices (especially on mobile) requires a huge amount of QA effort and per-device bug workarounds. Pretty much everyone makes their games on top of Unity/Unreal/etc because the engine vendors do most of the QA work.

2) Issue #1 is made worse by the fact that many consumer devices do not get GPU driver updates because the phone/tablet OEM end-of-lifes their products too soon and/or the mobile operators and other middlemen don't ship updates as they should. This means that if you ship a GPU-using product, you need to support devices with old, buggy drivers and this is expensive.

3) There's a huge untapped potential in GPUs, there are very few non-graphics apps taking advantage of the processing power but I can't see it changing for the better before GPUs become easier to target and verify correctness of operation.

It would be too easy to blame GPU vendors' software engineering practices, but I (as a GPU driver programmer) see that the bigger problem is issue #2 (not that the GPU drivers are faultless). Even if the drivers _do_ get fixed and updated, getting the updates to the hands of the customers is still going to be an issue. The middlemen need to be cut out of the equation, we can't be dependent on the business requirements of OEMs and operators when shipping mission critical software infrastructure.

This is a bit of a chicken and egg problem, games are not important enough to OEMs and operators fixing their update delivery mechanisms, but no-one dares to use GPUs for anything more important before this issue gets sorted out.

<comment><USER3> You missed one of the most major issues:

Most of the vendors know they have serious issues here, but hide them. Literally. You never notice because they don't use open source compilers (even for things like CUDA, let alone shader compilers), so it's not obviously more than "just a bug" until it happens to you continuously. Instead, they pretty much never have to fix the bug until someone notices, and then they hack it some more and move on, instead of fixing underlying issues in their structurization/etc passes.

Most vendors i've talked to can't even tell me what control flow breaks their compiler (again, doesn't matter if we are talking shaders, cuda, you name it. it's all broke), they know plenty does, but are fairly ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ about doing more than working around whatever bug they get given.

Meanwhile, over in open source clang/llvm world, we can basically fuzz test CFG's, etc for CUDA.

The death of some of these compilers can't come fast enough.

<comment><USER4> _" You never notice because they don't use open source compilers (even for things like CUDA, let alone shader compilers)"_

Actually AMD recently completely open sourced their entire GPGPU compute stack. See [https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute](https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute)

Compiler, assembler (LLVM based), linker, driver, etc. Everything is open to my knowledge.

<comment><USER3> Actually, we wrote the CUDA support in clang :)

and yes, AMD has done this because they have nothing to lose anymore :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Found a bug on Nexus 5 that was never fixed - struct constructors in WebGL glsl were completely broken:

[https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/pull/7556](https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/pull/7556)

Also some other code that seemed completely valid failed on Nexus 5 devices - so we had to revert it:

[https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/pull/9948](https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/pull/9948)

Basically mobile GPUs are a mixed bag of bugs all over the place. Three.JS is an attempt to find common path through those bugs in order to achieve reproducible results.

If you want to try your hand at this, there is still this outstanding issue that we haven't yet tracked down on the Nexus 5 devices:

[https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/9515](https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/9515)

</comment><comment><USER6> I see "Next stop: Intel."

I sincerely hope that you test our Linux drivers (I work for Intel on them). We'd be excited to learn about anything you find. Please feel free to file bugs here ([https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Mesa&comp...](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Mesa&component=Drivers/DRI/i965)) and ping us on #intel-gfx on Freenode.

<comment><USER7> > I sincerely hope that you test our Linux drivers

I sincerely hope that they test out _both_ Linux _and_ Windows drivers. It is well-known that these drivers at least in the past were developed by two completely different teams, so the results might be quite different and thus interesting.

<comment><USER5> There was a ThreeJS bug that differed based on whether it was a Linux or a Windows Intel driver -- specifically this one:

[https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/10331](https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/10331)

Linux Intel didn't reproduce, but Windows Intel did. Windows Intel acted like Adreno GPUs but Linux Intel behaved like NVIDIA GPUs. Fun times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is from 2013 but still a fun read.

[https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-emulator- and...](https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-emulator-and-opengl- drivers-hall-fameshame/)

<comment><USER9> Also this, from the guy who ported Valves Source engine to OpenGL: [http://richg42.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl- dr...](http://richg42.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver- quality.html)

The vendors are Nvidia, AMD, Intel/Linux and Intel/Windows respectively. Yes, Intel maintains two completely separate OpenGL implementations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Depending on the rendered garbage this could have security implications!

It is pretty easy to capture the image from a canvas. The rendered garbage could reveal buffered adjacent/random memory (requires research). The memory can be extracted from the image with the right interpretation.

</comment><comment><USER11> You can be proactive in getting these kinds of issues fixed. Make a small repo and submit it to the webgl conformance tests.

[https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGL](https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGL)

There are already something like 2500 tests

</comment><comment><USER12> Mobile GPU vendors seems to be firmly in the "make some games and common apps work and to heck with the specs and all the rest"

AMD and nVidia seem to have this better worked out

<comment><USER13> This is a series of articles (previous entries have been on HN in recent weeks) that finds bugs in other vendors too.

AMD, for example: [https://medium.com/@afd_icl/first-stop-amd-bluescreen-via- we...](https://medium.com/@afd_icl/first-stop-amd-bluescreen-via-webgl-and- more-ba3eaf76c5fb#.z7cgofrih)

They are doing the suppliers alphabetically, so they'll get to NVIDIA in good time :)

What mades you think that driver stability was a mobile problem? :D

<comment><USER12> > What mades you think that driver stability was a mobile problem? :D

Not an exclusive problem, but it seems to be worse on those platforms :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's worked on mobile GPUs, no one uses conditionals in shader code since the performance hit is gnarly(and used to be even worse before branching support). It's a fairly uncommon code path.

As far as these go they aren't that bad, I've seen a highly regarded vendor's shader compiler die and bring down the whole Android stack which resulted in insta-reboot.

If it isn't in the rendering path for Android(HWUI) or Chrome then it's best to tread carefully on mobile GPUs.

</comment><comment><USER15> Could someone briefly explain why seemingly innocuous changes to the code can have such large effects on the resulting images?

</comment><comment><USER16> Note that GPGPU compilers have the same sorts of problems; see e.g. [https://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=27738](https://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=27738).

</comment><comment><USER17> Would it be better if GPU drivers could compile open-spec bytecode and upload the result to the GPU to do all of the computation? This way OpenGL may be used as a library, shipped with the application.

<comment><USER7> Vulkan does - you can upload shaders in SPIR-V (open-spec bytecode) to the GPU.

<comment><USER18> Sadly, the translation from SPIR-V to system-dependent machine code can still be buggy. Although hopefully most of the optimisation will take place at the SPIR-V level, which, as I understand it, is pretty similar to LLVM. That should enable reuse of thoroughly debugged code, instead of each vendor maintaining their own full compiler.

<comment><USER7> > Sadly, the translation from SPIR-V to system-dependent machine code can > still be buggy.

This is true, but it eleminates at least one one the points where things can go wrong. Additionally this approach has the advantage that developers (with some practice) can read the SPIR-V "assembly" code to make sure it is correct. With existing solutions it was already hard to get and interprete the intermediate code to find out whether the problem is in the frontend or backend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Excellent article, but not the article I was expecting from the title ;)

From the title, I thought this would be a post about warps/wavefront divergence :)

<comment><USER5> Me too. I was hoping for better coordination of warps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> To be fair, the reason gpus can be fast on gpu workloads is that the hardware makes totally different assumptions about typical control flow across processed pixel tiles. You can't run Call of Duty or Tensorflow at the speeds we see today on x86 style control flow. (Knights Landing proved that!)

Bugs are annoying, but so are mismatched programmer expectations.

<comment><USER20> There's a difference between speed and correctness. If you promise something in the spec (e.g. unreachable control flow not mattering), in practice, that promise should be upheld. If it's upheld with a 32x slowdown (e.g. warp divergence), then so be it, but the code should still run correctly according to the spec.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> GPUs do not actually have control flow.

They are SIMD vector processors (Same Instructions Multiple Data).

CUDA and OpenCL make this a bit more explicit.

<comment><USER7> > GPUs do not actually have control flow.

Wrong. Let's look at the instriction set of the AMD GCN3 ISA:

> [http://gpuopen.com/compute-product/amd-gcn3-isa- > architecture...](http://gpuopen.com/compute-product/amd-gcn3-isa- > architecture-manual/)

which links to

> [http://32ipi028l5q82yhj72224m8j.wpengine.netdna- > cdn.com/wp-c...](http://32ipi028l5q82yhj72224m8j.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp- > content/uploads/2016/08/AMD_GCN3_Instruction_Set_Architecture_rev1.1.pdf)

which even has a whole chapter about control flow: "Chapter 4 Program Control Flow".

<comment><USER22> > Wrong.

I'd say it's more like "not quite". ~10 years ago, the statement was pretty much correct. GPUs were entirely SIMD, so they couldn't truly branch, but could fake it with predication. Longer branches would involve executing both branches on every thread and only committing the results of the active branch.

Modern GPUs can do much better, since individual warps/wavefronts can truly diverge. Within warps, however, it's still a bit of a mess.

<comment><USER7> > ~10 years ago, the statement was pretty much correct.

If one looks at the capabilities of CPUs from 10 years ago, one can easily justify similar completely outdated statements for CPUs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Coffee with me – founder.im - <AUTHOR> http://founder.im/josh/ <comment><USER2> Needs more information about you. So far Coupa Cafe is the biggest selling point. Just add a link to your LinkedIn or something.

</comment><comment><USER3> Any chance you'll stop by in Algavre? :)</comment>


Collaborating with your computer using typed holes - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oo8wIi2qBE <comment><USER2> very cool this is why i actually gave it a try, but using this in practice once things got more complex it wasn't as useful</comment>


YouTube Originals will become free and ad-supported by 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/28/youtube-originals-will-become-free-and-ad-supported-by-2020/ <comment><USER2> I have YouTube Red so I can listen to YouTube videos in the background on my phone, but I don't think I've ever watched a complete YouTube original.

If anything, I have a general sense when I see the "Original" tag that it's probably overproduced and flimsy content relative to normal YouTube videos. The marker is probably anti-selling the content to me at this point. Even though I've ostensibly "paid" for that content.

Contrast to Netflix Originals which I generally assume are at least mildly relevant, interesting, and/or produced by reputable creators.

I think Google messed up by going after the most popular creators, who are mostly playing a game of clickbait and lowest common denominator attractors.

Netflix did the total opposite, forgoing the big name filakers and finding artists who have niche audiences that were previously considered too small to fund.

Google needs to realize the "Top Youtubers" and "People who need funding for a small but traditionally produced film" are very different categories.</comment>


Helium - lightweight PHP MVC Framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/healeyb/Helium

<comment><USER2> As much as I appreciate innovation and inventiveness, the last thing PHP needs is another framework.

<comment><AUTHOR> thought it might be interesting to some people. The more overview you have over your preferred ecosystem, the better.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's up with all these services charging $10/$15 a month? - <AUTHOR> More and more frequently, I notice that online services charge $10/$15 a month. For example. I just saw a service that tracks your laptop/phone, and they want $15/mo to track more than three devices.
B2B services are more excusable, but still, the fees are pretty high. It seems to me that you need to spend $150 a month to subscribe to the 10 services you might find useful. $2/$3 a month sounds much better to me, especially for services for which users aren't very expensive.
What are your experiences with this (from either standpoint)? How much do you pay a month for various online services? <comment><USER2> $15 is ridiculously cheap. Don't even get me started for businesses: $15 pays for a third of the cab fare for your consultant to get from the airport to your office. For a revenue generating app it is a no brainer.

$150 is not much for a person to be spending on ten identifiable line items, either. Maybe if you only know poor college studentsr that sounds like a lot of money. For a middle class family, that sounds like a cable bill. If your service is in the top five most important things for mom in her life, price in two digits is irrelevant. She spends more on shampoo, hair care, feminine hygiene, paper, magazines, romance novels, etc, etc.

<comment><USER3> I was going to make my own reply, but as usual patio has succinctly made the point. So I'll give some examples of what $15 really means.

\- I spent $18 a month on Netflix without a second thought.

\- $15 is one less meal per month at Chipotle (for 2 people). I'd gladly give that up for a decent service

\- Average cable bill in the US is probably $80+. Give that up and you not only waste less time, but can afford at least 6 of these services.

\- Once you're out of college, you will GLADLY give up $15/month to save time. Time with family is precious and anytime I can spend a small amount of money to gain more time I consider it a win-win.

\- Most middle class families probably spend more than $15/week at Starbucks alone.

\- From a business standpoint, $2/user/month is simply not sustainable.

<comment><USER4> I pay $25/year for Flickr Pro, which is almost exactly $2/user/month.

<comment><USER5> Just because a discounted price for a year up front works out to be a low amount per month, doesn't mean it's worth little to the business charging it. Depending on the business, it might actually turn out to be $4 a month if that user were prone to cancelling after 6 months. Additionally, there is alot to say about money in the bank now to fund development now.

I would be happy if our 20k users all payed for a year up front discounted by 30%, rather than a full-price for every month. Why? Because we don't have much income now, and getting the money now would allow us to expand much faster, so the next 20k users would signup quicker, and would not have the big discount for an entire year up front.

<comment><USER6> Also, the overheads (credit card fees etc) are often lower on $25/year billed yearly then $2/month billed monthly (once you are at Yahoo's scale this might not apply, but for a lot of businesses there is a flat fee for processing credit cards below a certain threshold).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is because the psychological upper limit at which people start to take notice of what appears on their credit card statements when they decide to decrease their monthly expenses seems to be around the $20 mark.

As long as you're below $20 plenty of people will continue a subscription until their card expires even if they _don't_ use a service, above that the cancellations go up, so do the chargebacks and the retention goes down.

This has been researched ad nauseaum by the services you refer to, which is why they all converge on the same price range.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, this makes me think that I'm charging way too little for historious at $3/mo, but, then again, something tells me that if I charged $15 nobody would buy...

<comment><USER7> I'm going to write a little blog post, just for you (and for everybody else that earns money through subscriptions). If it works out you owe me a beer. Stay tuned, back in 45 minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I owe you a beer even if it doesn't work!

<comment><USER7> Ok, it's up:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639712>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll give it a try! If you're ever in Greece, I'll buy you that beer!

<comment><USER8> Please tell us if it worked :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I will, as soon as sales are stable enough to have statistically significant changes! There'll be a blog post about it here for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's important to remember that "expensive" is relative. Depending on an individual's income or company's revenue, $10/$15 can be huge difference or just a drop in the bucket. When a business is billing out consultants at $150/hr, spending even $100/mo on something that makes employees more productive or efficient is generally a good decision.

It's important to not only look at the cost of the product but also the benefits that it provides. Do the benefits outweigh the costs to the degree that you're comfortable spending the money?

To put it another way, it's more useful to think about the value of the tool relative to the price. It's less about whether a given dollar amount is "expensive", and more about whether the value exceeds the cost.

For example, all told, we gladly pay upwards of $200/mo for hosted services that are not necessary to run our business. However, the value that we receive from that money far exceeds the dollar amount that we spend on them. So in this case, even though $200 isn't insignificant, the dollar amount alone isn't relevant. We consider the services "inexpensive" because the value relative to the price is amazing for us.

</comment><comment><USER10> Phase 1: Collect Underpants

Phase 2: Instead of complaining create a "service bundle" of services you would use together that add up to $150, contact the service owners and ask them to get into a bundle agreement for $50 bucks total, you take $5 on each sale.

Phase 3: Profit

<comment><USER11> Sorry, idea taken already :)

<http://www.appsumo.com> does that. And my tool is part of that bundle :)

<comment><USER12> Isn't appsumo a temporary deal? At least I took it that way, kind of like those cable deals where it is 30 dollars a month for 6 months so long as you sign for 2 years except with this you don't sign a contract you just can't use them for less than full price anymore (unless I missed that).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You could easily pay 2$ per transaction + % of the revenue to credit card processor. So, 2$ price tag = 0$ profit, or even loss.

Also it's probably about 8 times simpler to get one $15/month subscriber than eight $2/month subscribers.

It's the market. If it was feasible to sell those services for $2/month - there would be competitors taking advantage of that fact. Since there's (I assume) none - that means it's not economically reasonable to sell something at that price.

<comment><USER14> _If it was feasible to sell those services for $2/month - there would be competitors taking advantage of that fact._

I think Apple has proven that with the App Store. You couldn't buy many professionally developed for a few bucks 5 years ago, even those that took as much development time as the top titles on the iPhone now. Apple has made the billing and distribution side so simple that development time and expenses are almost the only variable.

<comment><USER13> Yes, but that actually proves the point. I don't mean that it actually costs banks $2 to handle a transaction. It's what they charge small businesses for a transaction. If you're Apple and can negotiate a 5cent (or whatever) fee per transaction and able to sell apps to millions of customers - then $2 apps would be profitable. For all other approx. 99.999% of companies out there - $2 per app or month is just not feasible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It depends on the value you get. Some SaaS are free or cheap, they probably cost little to the company, or the company is running cheap (single founder in ramen).

Now for how much a single person spends, it's a different story. Let's assume your target audience is software developers. An average software developer should net more than $5,000 a month. Spending $150, is like 3% of his salary. Not a lot, so he could even subscribe to more services and more expensive services.

If your target audience is Egypt for example, where the developer net $200-$250/month, subscribing to only one service may cost 10% of his salary. So it's a luxury he can't afford.

Bottom of the line, your target audience and market readiness is the one that decide the price tag for your SaaS.

</comment><comment><USER16> Really depends on the service. If you think of a laptop/phone tracking service as a productivity/accountability tool for businesses to keep an eye on their workers it only has to save 2 hours of productivity in a month to pay for itself even if you're deploying it for minimum wage workers. (unlikely) If the service is too inexpensive they have more users to support and many of them may decide that even $2-$3/month is too expensive if they don't have any good reason to be using the service in the first place. If they keep the price high they attract fewer but higher quality customers that are cheaper to support. I'm guessing many of these services do offer good volume discounts.

</comment><comment><USER17> This discussion reminds me of Joel's fantastic _Camels and Rubber Duckies_ article ([http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html)). It's long and won't lead you to any conclusions, but it's entertaining and very educational.

</comment><comment><USER18> When you're aiming at consumers, I think <$5/month or <$50/yr is definitely a better price point. I think Flickr Pro's ~$25/yr pricing is much more in line with something most consumers would go for. And that's even at the semi-pro level. But, when you're aiming your app/service at professionals, freelancers, or small/medium business, then slightly higher prices might fly. Still, though, there are so many "must have" apps now, that the subscription fatigue should start hitting people bad.

What I'd really like to see is more webapp service synergy. Most of us would be much more likely to pay $10-$15/month for Dropbox + Evernote Pro + Backpackit.com Personal (substitute your favorite webapps in here) than they would to pay ~$5/month/service. Something about the bundling would make people feel like they're getting more for the price, even if the absolute price is the same.

At least that's my $.02...

</comment><comment><USER19> $15 dollars for a "useful" service is nothing. The average person spends that "everyday" for lunch. The companies offering these services have to charge enough to pay for the servers, developers, tech support, etc.. and yes, also to make a profit, it is a business after all ;)

</comment><comment><USER20> here is our pricing page for a Web CMS service targeted to designers. one of my big concerns is that people correlate a hosted CMS offering to the cost of standard hosting so our prices seem high, any feedback on your first impressions of value/price would be appreciated. <http://www.webvanta.com/pricing>

</comment><comment><USER21> if you think it's too expensive relative to its operating costs, launch a cheaper competitor :)

</comment><comment><USER22> Before I read your post and from reading the title I thought you would say why is it so cheap.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's easier to start high and lower than start low and raise

<comment><USER24> Not if you grandfather.

<comment><USER5> Grandfathering also has the benefit of making people very happy with your service, and reluctant to ever cancel their account. I keep my usenet provider account because I am afraid of losing my 25% discount I received when I signed up two years ago, even though I don't necessarily use the account to it's "full potential".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't think your basis for deciding those prices are too high is a rational one. It basically amounts to, "I think those are too high because... I think they are too high!"

There was often someone slaving away long hours to create and make that service available to you, all of which cost big bucks or at the very least, the opportunity cost of their time is big bucks. $15 is nothing in the grand scheme of things. You are always free to create the service yourself and/or scratch that itch another way.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's foolish to assume your price sensitivity is the same as your customers'.

Please, stop speculating and read a book or two on pricing. I personally recommend Pricing With Confidence. They know more about it than you do.

</comment><comment><USER27> > $2/$3 a month sounds much better to me, especially for services for which > users aren't very expensive.

How do you know if they are expensive or not?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you gain traction for an education startup? - <AUTHOR>

I am currently working on a startup (http://nvrforget.com). I have gained some (~150) users who would like to get into the beta, but that is a measly amount compared to other startups. How would you suggest gaining traction for this? I don't have a problem with having a small user base except that I need to gain funding somehow and that is not going to happen when I only have so few people.
This seems to be a problem inherent with education startups and I wanted to ask the best in startups to make sure I was leveraging all the possible options.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. <comment><USER2> So even if you had 200,000 users, that would not necessarily make the business a great candidate for funding, but that is neither here nor there.

Education is quirky. Who is your customer for this? Is it school districts, teachers, students, parents, etc?

If it's school districts, you lose. Selling into them largely requires enterprise sales skills and credibility, which (unfortunately) you don't have. They also have sales cycles which last 12 ~ 18 months, require getting about ~5 different approvals (sometimes more), and can be torpedoed by a single recalcitrant decisionmaker, including at least 1 to 2 whose _job_ it is to torpedo your deal.

Teachers: do teachers have a pre-existing slot in their book for the exact problem you solve? If so, you can use demand harvesting techniques like e.g. SEO. It's fairly slow going, but it will work. (This is how I got about 200k or so users: building a better mousetrap for people who absolutely, positively know they have a particular flavor of mouse to catch tomorrow.) If you have to create the demand for your product, well, godspeed. A lot of teachers are going to feel actively threatened by the introduction of one more scary computer thing into their day.

Parents: Like teachers, except with less attention and less money. (Homeschoolers excepted.) The overwhelming majority of software sold to parents comes in boxes and is either sold on brand name (Kaplan, etc) or box art. They find users by giving WalMart a bigger discount than their competing box did. Run screaming from this opportunity.

Students: I would run screaming from pitching educational software directly to students below undergraduate. Do they spend any appreciable amount of money on educational software directly in the status quo? No. Undergrad is also not a walk in the park, either.

P.S. Rather than selling Spaced Repetition done for the 473234th time, you might consider selling Spaced Repetition for $HIGH_STAKES_EXAM_TAKEN_BY_RICH_PEOPLE. Spaced Repetition for _passing the bar_ , for example, would command a price about ~50 times higher than spaced repetition which looks like it would help a fourth grader on their vocabulary tests, even if it is _the same software in the box_.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting P.S. - I actually am making it with trying to specialize for different types (one I am thinking right now is Med students). The bar exam idea is very good, I should look into how this could help with that Thanks.

<comment><USER3> Med students fall into the rich category as the bar. Try doing specialized medical fields, microbiology, psychology?, child care, etc. Go for the long tail

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's hard to say without knowing how your product works, but here's what I can say having worked in for-profit education for over 10 years (including Sylvan Learnin Center, Kaplan, Grockit, The College Network, and Veritas Prep). In for-profit education, there are two parts of your marketing angle. The first is convincing people that they need to pay for prep, and the second is convincing them that you are better than the competition. Your first challenge is to convince me that it is worth my time and money to train myself to memorize things faster. Is there a short presentation (~5 min) that you could put up on YouTube that just scratches the surface of your product, but at the same time actually gives some benefit to potential users? Kaplan uses this technique by giving a short 10 question challenge, and then having an expert teacher explain shortcuts for each. The takeaway is that if you can learn this much in 30 minutes, imagine what $1500 and 3 months can do. Maybe you can adapt that sort of approach. If you were giving people a taste of the product, you'll be able to convince them that they want more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks... very good ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It appears that you are creating a spaced repetition app that works for memorizing poems and passages where order matters as opposed to the usual model that works for memorizing a set of facts in random order. That's a good idea. If it works, I'll use it.

I think you should stop calling it an education-based startup because that sounds like something teachers would buy. You need to be clear on your homepage etc. that you have an improved tool for power memorizers, get in their communities and open it up as soon as possible for feedback. Offhand I can think of: -Self-improvement hacker communities like 4HWW forums, Steve Pavlina forums, etc. -Memorization forums -Homeschool forums -Secondary ed/college student forums

But you need to open it to users _soon._ People don't tell their friends to use something that doesn't exist yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good thoughts... I am opening it up to users very soon (invites should start going out by the end of this week).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://imaginek12.com>

They have connections to schools.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I have heard and looked into them, but the thing is I would have to get into their incubator which is quite difficult since I am still a full-time highschooler.

<comment><USER7> I have a few friends that are in it - I can probably intro you, they might be able to give you some good advice since they're in the trenches with this stuff. E-mail me if you're interested (nbashaw at gmail.com).

<comment><AUTHOR> Just sent you an email (stephen at nvrforget.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why are you worrying about traction when you haven't even launched a product yet?

The hardest part of getting traction is making something anyone cares about _at all_. Given that your first guess will be wrong, you need to launch the product so you can start iterating.

To be sure, education is a really hard niche to break into. But there's always an angle, and you'll never find it until you get involved with your customers.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the most clever "email collecting pop-overs" that you've seen? - <AUTHOR> You know when you land on a page on a random website and a few seconds later a pop-over appears asking for something, usually an email address. What unique tactics have you seen that really caught your attention? <comment><USER2> If I encounter these, I immediately block these permanently with uBlock if the site is useful, otherwise I never return.

Throwing it in my face makes me less likely to do it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow! Just Wow!I guess you must be an advertiser to think anyone actually has any positive thoughts at all about those things.

[http://stiobhart.net/2015-05-04-overlays-new- popups/](http://stiobhart.net/2015-05-04-overlays-new-popups/)

and

[http://stiobhart.net/2015-08-18-jsoverlaysrevisited/](http://stiobhart.net/2015-08-18-jsoverlaysrevisited/)</comment>