Ask HN: How do B2B startups sell to corporations? - <AUTHOR> Hi, I am founder of a chatbot startup... it's a b2b.. I am interested to know how to sell to corporate America? how does it work? <comment><USER2> The advice I'll give is based on my experience as cofounder of an early online banking technology company back in the mid-90s. We started with three people in rented class-C space and over seven years did high six-figure deals with large and small banks including Fleet, Bank of America, Citi and others.

There's not really a "how it works" for this. If I had to tell you how it works I'd say: it works by you making friends inside a corporation and convincing them to buy your product. Did that help? :). Probably not, so here's a little more: you preferably start with a member of your founding team who is articulate, outgoing, amiable and enjoys meeting and talking with people. That person needs to know the product and competitive environment cold, and it helps if they are passionate believers in the value prop. They need to have an identified list of target companies. They need to start calling and emailing and working contacts to get meetings. Eventually, if you actually have a value prop, one of those meetings will result in a relationship with someone who is willing to champion the product internally.

You then work outward from that contact, meeting with their colleagues, eventually identifying decision makers who control actual budget that can be used to pay you for something. If you do all this skillfully then you may get them to commit to a purchase. They will then have to shepherd you through a potentially long series of internal policy and legal hurdles. You may need to get on a qualified vendor list, or meet certain business stability criteria. You will likely need approvals of the deal from different departments, and their legal team will review and try to negotiate any agreements you request them to sign. You can see why developing internal champions is absolutely critical. In every single successful deal we did, by the time we got to the second or third round of meetings our internal champions were doing most of the selling.

The last thing I'll say is that it can be powerfully tempting to think you can purchase success at this by hiring the right magic person who can work their little black book and make sales happen. I tend to doubt it, and it definitely never worked for us. A founding sales person can make this happen. That's the person I'm talking about above. But just bringing in a hired gun is unlikely to result in success imo. I think you need to believe in your own thing enough, and be good enough at talking about it, that you can land your first few deals. Then when you do bring aboard professional sales people you'll have some actual idea of why people buy from you and how to systematize the approach. Good luck with it!

<comment><USER3> This is all good advice.

A note jumping through the legal/paperwork hurdles with large companies: be prepared for it to take a long time. A very long time in some cases.

It all depends on who you're working with, how big the company is, and how much money the deal is worth.

<comment><USER4> I've been through deals with large financial institutions that have taken 2-3 years from an initial incredibly positive demo and PoC and strong buying signals, through to a signed contract.

IMO going through that successfully is also sending a signal that you have sufficient endurance - there's a large risk for a corporate to sign up for a long contract with a startup, they don't know how long you're going to be in business for. If the startup doesn't have the appetite to spend 2-3 years to get a contract over the line, then they aren't going to be a stable partner for the long term.

You need to also have sufficient numbers of small/medium scale deals so you're not 100% relying on elephant hunting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am the CTO of a "unicorn" B2B tech company that focuses almost exclusively on the global 2000. Sales are 95% about relationships and 5% about Product. If you want to sell into Citibank, you go hire the one guy or girl who previously sold $20M of X to Citi, who golfs with the VP of Procurement and goes to Billy Joel concerts with the VP of infrastructure operations. Once you hire this person it feels like cheating, like playing super Mario brothers hitting warp zones, but alas I learned this is how business gets done. To get a PO you have to build a coalition: procurement, architecture, operations, finance. You almost certainly will also need a reseller who has an MSA (master services agreement) with the firm, so you don't have to spend 6 months in due diligence with their lawyers. You have to give up ~15% to the VAR just for that facilitation, but it's part of the cost of doing business.

<comment><USER6> Most big corps have anti-corruption policies that prevent decision makers or key influencers from letting sales people take them to golfing or to concerts.

<comment><USER7> No they have policies against paying for those concerts or golf games.

<comment><USER8> IBM's BCG for example has very strict rules about giving and/or receiving gifts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Never underestimate the capability and connections of a good sales person.

There are lots of ways to waste money on sales, but if you are careful to avoid them, a single experienced professional sales person can work wonders, even for a startup that is still a few pivots away from its final shape.

This may not be the most HN-compatible opinion, and there are certainly many additional ways to sell to big companies, but I worry that a lot of founders, especially technical ones, overlook staffing sales until later than they should.

<comment><USER10> > There are lots of ways to waste money on sales, but if you are careful to > avoid them

Do you have any tips?

<comment><USER11> I do. Don't shop price when hiring sales people. Hire the best available at the market rate.

<comment><USER12> Reward them extremely well when they over perform. One sales person can easily create more ARR than 3 or 4 average ones. Make sure you pay them accordingly, and you can save yourself a lot of headaches and wasted hires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I do this for a living for other companies (no I do not want your business) but the most overlooked aspect of B2B selling is patience. Your prospect has many suitors vying for their attention, many bosses that must sign off an the sale, and a legal department and IT department that all want to feel included. Measure your pipeline/sales by quarter, not month. Patience. Patience. Patience. Build rapport, be useful and valuable. Be prepared to do this for a long time.

That's how it works.

<comment><USER12> Depending on how big they're talking, year long cycles are not uncommon.

<comment><USER14> 12 months from first contact to first dollar--nevermind first dollar above recouping costs--seems a deliriously optimistic goal in certain industries.

<comment><USER15> It has been roughly 2 years for us to get first dollar with corporations, and will probably take 3 more to recoup the costs. The good thing is that once you get in, it is pretty hard for competitors to get you out. They really need to have a superior value prop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I took a peak at the OP's post history ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20945426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20945426)), it seems this is their chatbot (for FB): [https://mapletechno.com/landing.php](https://mapletechno.com/landing.php)

Unless you have moved the chatbot to a different website since then, based on the product as is, it would be better to focus on a) translating the website into English and b) finding some beta testers and users.

I guess most of the replies here are based on your use of the word coporation, hence they're sharing advice about lanfing multi-figure deals but realistically, the target market for FB chatbots are small to medium business owners.

<comment><USER17> Paradoxically if this is the OPs business, in my experience they should greatly, greatly increase price to increase chances of selling to an enterprise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you haven't come across his writings already, you might be interested in the insights from somebody named Mark Suster— he has experience has done a lot of thinking out loud about this kind of stuff

Check out his thinking about "elephants" vs "deer" vs "rabbits": [https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be- deer...](https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be-deer- hunters-7fdecf58f4f6?gi=3ba7481c5bcd)

</comment><comment><USER19> We sell to a very narrow segment. I've got Google alerts for loads of phrases and trade show names. We try to attend as many shows as we can. Sometimes with a booth, mostly without...just rocking our own gear and handing out cards. Some have a cheap way to add your logo somewhere to get awareness going.

Once you get a fish on, you'll need a professional sales person to carry the deal forward. Meeting, review, reply, next meeting, follow-up, etc.

Cold prospecting from directories and trade-orgs is another channel. Call,call,call. Then call some more.

And keep pumping the newsletter, opt-in only, keep content fresh.

<comment><USER20> This is the way to go. People will know they are taking a calculated risk with a startup, if you get to know their industry you will gain a better intuition about their use cases (and in particular ones they haven't thought of yet).

Definitely avoid highly regulated verticals at first as they will drown you with security/governance requirements before you even get to their lawyers. Meanwhile get to know these frameworks and what will be expected of you if you want to approach them in the future.

From a feature-set perspective, any large company is going to want to see management interfaces with single sign-on, at least basic roles (read only, billing, ops). Customer should also be able to do everything via API that they can via UI. You should have good audit logs and be able to push them or let the customer come get them. If your architecture supports it, most large customers would like the option for a dedicated tenant instance.

Good luck!

<comment><USER19> Oops! We're in a heavily regulated space. Upside is that it keeps competition out. Your 3rd paragraph is 100% accurate IME

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hello!

I too am working on a chatbot startup, that's b2b: [https://insideropinion.com/](https://insideropinion.com/)

The path I'm working:

1\. Identify a clear problem / use case

2\. Determine inside of a corporation who makes purchasing decisions to solve said problem / use case

3\. Search LinkedIn for contacts at companies that fit into that role

4\. Reach out over LinkedIn and / or use system such as Hunter.io to connect over emails

5\. Goal is a video demo / discussion, pitch the product and show them how you think it can help

6\. If you make a connection, ask if they know others that may be interested

7\. Attend trade shows for your segment if possible

Main thing is follow up, follow up, follow up. Sometimes on my 3rd or 4th follow up I'll get a hit. Ask questions about their business and be as clear as possible. Conversions should be anywhere from 1% - 20% depending on the market segment (I'm not sure what yours is).

</comment><comment><USER22> I've built and sold a few companies doing enterprise sales. Now I run a small course teaching founders the basics of early stage sales.

Won't plug that here, but I think you'd get a lot out of this interview I did with Stephanie Hurlburt, cofounder of Binomial, where she explains how she learned to close 6 and 7-figure deals as a technical founder with no business background: [https://anchor.fm/sales-for-founders/episodes/How-to- close-7...](https://anchor.fm/sales-for-founders/episodes/How-to- close-7-figure-deals-as-a-technical-founder-with-no-sales-experience---with- Stephanie-Hurlburt-of-Binomial-info-e41kj3)

<comment><USER23> Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This was a pretty good video on selling B2B from startup school: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZi4kTJG- LE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZi4kTJG-LE)

1\. Prospecting 2\. Conversations 3\. Closing 4\. Promised land(revenue)

Slides of the talk: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/v9zlx72t9b4yk8d/Tyler%20Bosmeny%20...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/v9zlx72t9b4yk8d/Tyler%20Bosmeny%20-%20How%20to%20Sell.pdf?dl=0)

</comment><comment><USER25> Contrary to the main sentiment in this thread I've done B2B sales with no prior connections whatsoever. My approach is threefold. Build something that either doesn't exist or is considerably better and cheaper than competition. Give amply time for demoing, like six months free with no strings attached. Be patient.

If I had to choose one approach I'd say demo your service for months so they can get accustomed to it. Most companies I know give demos for very short time-spans. If you give a one month demo the client might not even get the chance to look at it because he has fifty other things to do. Let him get accustomed in using it, making it a part of his workflow.

<comment><USER26> I guess this assumes that the product can be used by a single person, or a small group of people, and don't require a lot of setup. For example systems monitoring, or a group-wide collaboration tool, makes things harder.

I still like the idea though!

<comment><USER27> Counter point: I've been doing integration for system monitoring things, this can be fully integrated in a few days.

The new trendy (and really great tool) is datadog, a HN company. They went out the window when the trial expired after 1 week and their asshole sales were at war against any extension. How am I supposed to demo the tool and sell it internally when it can't even be accessed?

As if it were not enough, they kept calling day after day to try force the sale. Then they got banned soon afterwards, after some mid level folks got a hold of both of these practices. Nobody wants to deal with that.

<comment><USER23> Across the plethora of system monitoring apps who all claim they can do everything, how do you decide and identify what fits?

<comment><USER27> There are no apps that can do everything, there are different use cases that require at least 3 different tools to cover logs, system metrics, application metrics, alerts and performance instrumentation.

If you've never worked in that domain, you can trial the tool and figure out what they're about. Short version is to go for ELK + Datadog + NewRelic.

<comment><USER23> Interesting. What does Datadog cover that NewRelic doesn't?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Go on LinkedIn, find contacts, email/call them to explain why your product would help them and their business, set up a demo over video chat. Pitch them your product, why it would benefit them and try to secure a deal.

After you've got some sales under your belt, sponsor a booth at a tradeshow relevant to your market. Demo your product in-person, collect leads and follow up for more sales. Rinse and repeat.

<comment><USER29> Skeptical about LinkedIn these days as it might be overused. Even I tend to receive lot of pitches these days and generally distrust the medium.

<comment><USER30> Like you, I distrust cold linkedin (and cold emails).

But - we are not everybody.

If you're targeting someone you think has got a specific pain that you can credibly help with - a well crafted, unique and relevant pitch, with appropriately timed followups does work for a significant amount of people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Read this

[https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterprise_sales)

<comment><USER32> Not sure why this is so low on the page, as it was incredibly helpful. I even went to the author's archive directory [1] so I could read his other posts about sales and life running/selling a SaaS company. He is candid and knowledgeable. Definitely bookmarking — thanks for the link!

1: [https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/)

<comment><USER31> Yeah Patio11 is a champ. Also a long time hn user btw.

Probably low because I was in a rush and didn't explain the content at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> All great answers thus far. First, it is not for faint of heart. Second, if you get in door, learn how to say no as not every corporate customer is a good one - some can suck you dry and have you customize feature after feature so you need to be strong.

As a previous commenter mentioned, understanding what your product is and your go-to-market motion is super important. Are you a bottom up developer or user- led adoption with ideas to expand or are you going pure top-down enterprise? Either will take time but I've worked with many a company that successfully went from bottom up and generated significant enterprise sales like [https://Snyk.io](https://Snyk.io).

If you choose to go top down, find advisors or investors who have relationships at some of your corporate prospects. Going top down super early requires relationships to get in the door. Second, you have to figure out exactly who in the organization you need to get to and understand what is their pain and how you can uniquely solve it. I've seen way too many early stage founders get in the door to explore and they end up hunting for dodo birds - they're extinct and don't exist.

There is so much more on this topic and one method I advocate is focusing on enterprise design partnerships vs. selling which has more of a partnering model than a transatcional one. More on that here in a SaaStr podcast I was on - [https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-190-ed-sim-founder- gp-...](https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-190-ed-sim-founder-gp-boldstart- ventures-on-why-saas-founders-should-not-sell-their-products-in-the-early- days/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Cold emails work. Find the best use case for the company. Attach a link or screenshot why/how it would help them. Take a screenshot of their site or chat box, then edit it with an example of your bot in action.

Follow up once. Not too many times. Sometimes people ignore the first time because they're in their emails looking for something else.

Some people prefer cold calling, but I find the success rates are much, much lower and you can't convey the same information. I think cold calling is only popular because it's easy to monitor failure rates.

<comment><USER35> I'd love to see stats that this works. I don't believe it.

<comment><USER34> A little anecdotal, but I get about 50% response rate. This includes selling weird stuff, like once I tried to sell brownies to wedding planners.

In terms of job hunting, I got about 2 out of 4 responses this way, so it's still a 50% rate. This actually landed me my first job.

This was from a few years back though. It might be harder now that everyone has automated messaging and CRMs designed to look like they're from a human being (probably illegally without an unsubscribe button).

It depends a lot on how you do it. I think the message has to hit well, it has to look personal enough, hence the screenshots have to be designed for that specific company. But done wrong, it can look a bit desperate.

You also have to find someone who can make a decision. A lot of people are terrified of this, but higher ranked people can actually forward you to the right VP in charge. We've cold contacted the CEO of the biggest media company in the country this way, and he was very happy with the meeting.

Some people prefer a wider net, like 1000 messages a day, with a 2% success rate. That's fine too. Sometimes it gets better results, because you end up with people more desperate for a solution. I just think the personal cold email method works better than cold calls, and it's a lot more fun.

For founders, personal emails help, because you can ask them why they rejected you, and that helps in improving the product or strategy.

<comment><USER36> _This actually landed me my first job_

I'm late to the party, but thanks for reminding me. I got my first job out of college (engineer) because of a cold call to a business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> As someone who gets sold to a lot, don't under estimate the power of non decision makers in the process. If you can get the person who admins the website or leads the support team to buy in, you'll have way more of a chance of convincing a VP to buy something. Just remember when you talk to these people, they aren't the ones who can sign off and that's ok. Give them tools to help pitch internal and be patient

</comment><comment><USER38> Reading answers on this thread makes me wonder are those sales techniques really healthy to industry as a whole? No one questions that, and yet normalize probably unhealthy ways of selling utilities. "who golfs with the VP of Procurement" .. that's how corruption works as well, isn't it? Is that natural?

<comment><USER39> I don't think it's quite as bad as the thread suggests. Keep in mind that most people are talking about relatively small deals here. Anything big will go through such a complex and regulated RFI/RFP process that Golf plays no part whatsoever. I doubt there is much golf going on between VW and Bosch execs

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> 1 Call up your old Ivy classmates, they work in corpos

2 let your VC do the above

3 crowd favorite, let your VC force other companies he already invested in/sits on board to integrate your product and then do number 2

But in your case number 1 should be change your name and language, unless you are looking for government (NSA/CIA) contract.

</comment><comment><USER41> Usually some combination of marketing and high-touch sales. Marketing makes buyers want to buy the product[1], and sales converts interest into a contract.

For B2B it usually takes three months from first contact to closed deal. That means you need a healthy pipeline of deals to keep the cash flowing.

Crossing the Chasm[2] is a must-read and classic book about marketing and selling B2B software.

[1] As I say, make buyers want to pay: [https://www.gkogan.co/blog/buyers/](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/buyers/)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC119W/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC119W/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Getting connected with some VARs (value added resellers) can be helpful. If you can provide some piece that enhances their package, you can often get included in as a part of some big deals that you might not otherwise have any shot at, and build up some connections that way. Once you're in, and people know you as somebody that does work in X niche, they can start coming to you to do additional customizations or follow-on work in that area.

It's not all roses; sometimes the extra layers of indirection between you and the actual customer can be a little onerous.

</comment><comment><USER43> you need content. if you're not sure where to start, checkout this article on movement first content: [https://www.animalz.co/blog/movement- first/](https://www.animalz.co/blog/movement-first/)

Wistia's CEO recently posted about mistakes made early on, and a better approach to building affinity vs awareness through relationships. [https://twitter.com/csavage/status/1180148970825437191](https://twitter.com/csavage/status/1180148970825437191)

Sales matters, patience matters, but content brings people already seeking a solution to you...and/or agitates a pain point they've forgotten.

</comment><comment><USER44> Don't think of sales as a "funnel" process. Think of it as a process of education and patience. Your job in sales is to get to know the right people at all the customers you want to sell to and to then nurture them patiently until they are ready to buy from you.

Big companies can be sold to by tiny startups. Finding the right person is a grind - no easy way about it. Once you've found them, it is truly about building the relationship and then letting them guide you through their purchasing process.

</comment><comment><USER45> Like many have told , hiring a good sales person is going to work wonders. If you must sell stuff yourself , do yourself a favour and ingrain this [0] before you go wasting time on folks inside a megacorp. We wasted 9 months focusing on the wrong person in a big sale ..

[0] [https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/identify-sales-prospects- infl...](https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/identify-sales-prospects-influencers- decision-makers-ht)

</comment><comment><USER46> You already got some great answers. If you need more book recommendations:

Major account sales by Rackham is a classic

How to sell from Entrepid is an algorithm you can follow [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57daf6098419c27febcd4...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57daf6098419c27febcd400b/t/5b0b4dc68a922dbfa263b389/1527467516482/Entrepid_How%2BTo%2BSell.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER47> You will have easier time if you narrow your market to a more uniform group, like "large hospitals", or "small law firms" \- approaches that apply to one group will not work for another.

Connections are important but in some areas you may have to hire a lobbyist to get them, while in other areas you just need to show up at a trade convention and chat people up.

</comment><comment><USER48> As a related question to this: we're successfully selling into corps but it takes 6-12 months. Has anyone figured out the under $500 credit card thing with seat pricing or know good examples of it (where the ACVs are still high)?

We'd like to land-and-expand since our product has to be used by teams but I'd love to get the sales cycle shorter.

</comment><comment><USER49> From my friends who've started B2B SaaS, most startups leverage connections and introductions from their investors.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'd recommend taking a look at G2.com (where I work), the world's largest B2B Software and Services review platform....they've almost got 1 million reviews on the site and is a great way to get your product out there in front of buyers, alongside trusted reviews from users.

</comment><comment><USER51> Should have intimate connections in the Industry

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/25/amazon_fails_to_sto...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/25/amazon_fails_to_stop_exstaffer_working_for_google/)

</comment><comment><USER52> Find a partner.

Big companies or .gov are too expensive to for you to work with unless they are coming to you.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is my chatbot sign up and support me :) [https://mapletechno.com/landing.php](https://mapletechno.com/landing.php)

</comment><comment><USER29> One tip that I see folks use. Encourage or enforce business email addresses for your trial accounts. This helps you target your cold emails (especially after trial expires).

</comment><comment><USER6> Curious question: what's the name of your chatbot and how does your chatbot offering differ from what's offered by big players like Microsoft and Google.

</comment><comment><USER53> Use all possible contact methods to approach the finalist! Like "The third door"!

</comment><comment><USER54> >chatbot startup

Dead man walking.

</comment><comment><USER55> Some terms to get you started:

\- outside sales executive (e.g., the person who visits the customer, they typically work from coworking or home-offices)

\- inside sales executive (e.g., a sales support person, typically doesn't travel and works at coworking or home-office full-time)

\- outside sales engineer (e.g., a customer-facing technical person who answers questions and helps sell solutions with the sales exec)

\- master agreements (generally-agreeded terms and conditions)

\- Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)

\- Letter of Intent (LOI) - before final quote & contract

\- Purchase Orders (PO's)

\- Request For Proposal (RFP)

\- Request For Quotation (RFQ)

and lengthy sales cycles that often take 6 months to 2 years, depending on the product or service

Another way to get in is start immediately under a master agreement and do consulting-ish tasks, and gradually sell more solutions and temporary staff roles as they come up ("building a beachhead").

<comment><USER39> I'm surprised more people aren't talking about the RFP process. For a small product (maybe Jobs would have called it a feature) like a Chatbot, your best hope if you want to hit the enterprise elephants is to find a "digital transformation" RFP, give a really strong reply for the inevitable chatbot feature in round 1, then get rolled in as a "joint proposal" for future rounds with one of the big boys (Accenture, IBM etc). They get to look modern and open to teamwork, you get your foot in the door and the proposal has better chances. Then if it goes well, you'll get roped into future deals

<comment><USER46> This is interesting. How do you find open RFPs in your area of interest?

<comment><USER39> Trade publications/newsletters, word of mouth (useful to know people, even low level), and of course for anything regulated or public, they're published on dedicated directories</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Cloudstitch – Build and share spreadsheet-powered web content - <AUTHOR> http://www.cloudstitch.io <comment><USER2> Congrats on shipping!

First, I totally understand what it's like to ship an MVP. When we launched our SaaS service we didn't even have a way to rebill our subscribers, knowing we had a month to figure that out. So add this feedback to the end of your list because I'm sure you've got your hands full!

\- I didn't realize at first that the Google Doc and example page were live. I thought they were just screenshots. There are probably some design affordances you can use to make this clearer.

\- You don't have a call to action above the fold. In fact, you have a green "register" button but it's part of your example. Similarly, Log In could just be a link, giving more attention to Sign Up in the header.

\- I think "projects" is a vague name. There are words that can probably do a better job explaining what these are. Themes? Packages?

All in all, great job. It's rare to see so much documentation on launch day!

<comment><USER3> I also did not realize the google doc was live.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. Saw this comment and was like "REALLY?" and then I tried it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I rolled my own version of this to manage the online menu for a restaurant. The restaurant manager updates a Google Spreadsheet with the current menu and item pricing. I pull that data and render either an HTML version for the web, or a PDF version for printing. Works very well.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is something we've been hearing from a lot of folks -- spreadsheet-driven websites are actually a really popular practice that we think should get more love and attention. I'd love to help you package that site you made for cloning and reuse on Cloudstitch so others can use it, too.

\- Ted from Cloudstitch [firstname.lastname@example.com]

<comment><USER6> Have you thought of doing a spreadsheet-powered UI for desktop or internal web applications?

I know of one crazy guy who replaced an entire IT department back in 2000 that was dedicated to tweaking Java UIs. He built his own spreadsheet-powered UI builder and then had the business people add their own buttons/formulas. This worked especially well because it was a financial business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely -- there's a whole interesting world of inside-the-firewall applications of this. Enterprise-style programming certainly has an important role to play, but we're pretty bullish on the role that lighter-weight solutions can provide as a compliment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very much like these two:

[https://assembly.com/gridspree](https://assembly.com/gridspree) (github hosted. a bit more plug and play in style. I did write a bit of code for this)

[https://plugins.jquery.com/sheetrock/](https://plugins.jquery.com/sheetrock/) (just source for putting on your server)

Or

www.cellmaster.com.au (mine)

</comment><comment><USER8> It scares me when I see a SAAS thing with no pricing page. Anyone have an idea of what this costs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi skrowl --

We know and understand your hesitation. It's coming this week. We'll have a free tier that we're aiming to make pretty broad in capability.

<comment><USER9> I could possibly use service like this. I have a RSS reader on Sheets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> No forced TLS, and when I manually enter https most of the resources try to load over http. c'mon, you've done the hard part of getting TLS, now you just need to make your home page aware.

EDIT: when I sign up it POSTs my password _IN THE CLEAR_. what year are we in?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi finnn -- we're on it!

<comment><USER10> While you're getting it brought up to current security standards, may I suggest not using GoDaddy for anything, including as a certificate authority, and fixing the issues with your actual SSL configuration ([https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=buttstitch.io](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=buttstitch.io))

EDIT: Here's a handy guide to configuring your SSL [https://mozilla.github.io/server-side-tls/ssl-config- generat...](https://mozilla.github.io/server-side-tls/ssl-config-generator/)

<comment><USER11> Buttstitch?

<comment><USER10> Fuck! Correct link: [https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=cloudstitch.i...](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=cloudstitch.io)

<comment><USER12> +1 for cloud2butt!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Awesome project! Just wish I could see the pricing...

</comment><comment><USER14> Very interesting!

I will be keenly following how your website and sites made with it are crawled, indexed and ranked by Google, Bing and other Search Engines.

A few years ago this kind of content would have been completely invisible to all search, making it very bad for SEO, but Google is stepping up their game in crawling Javascript/AJAX driven content.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acloudstitch.io](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acloudstitch.io)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks andrenotgiant!

We're keeping a close eye on the SEO implications of this approach. Even with Google's snapshotting the page post-Javascript execution, I think there's still value in offering pre-rendering, e.g. to reduce latency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is good stuff. There is also a SaaS offering to do this for mobile apps. It's called AppSheet [1] and they let you create iOS and Android apps from spreadsheets -- Google Sheets or Excel.

Disclaimer: I don't work for them but I do happen to know the founder and the team.

[1] [https://www.appsheet.com/](https://www.appsheet.com/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, Ted from Cloudstitch here. Thanks for kicking the tires and giving feedback.

We're particularly interested in hearing what domains you might be interested in using this for. We're going to be building out as many reusable projects as we can in the coming months, and if there is strong interest for some over others, we'd love to hear it!

<comment><USER16> heyo

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is pretty cool. Nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is an API planned or doesn't that make sense?</comment>


Microsoft shutting down Wunderlist in 6th of May, 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/insider/2019/12/09/microsoft-will-shut-down-wunderlist-on-may-6-2020/ <comment><USER2> The original company blog announcement (the canonical "Our Incredible Journey") is [https://www.wunderlist.com/blog/join-us-on-our-new- journey/](https://www.wunderlist.com/blog/join-us-on-our-new-journey/)

Wunderlist has been absolutely awful for me the last 6 months or so. It crashes _all the time_ on opening, and the syncing is so bad that sometimes items will disappear from a list immediately after I add them, then reappear a while later, _on a single device_.

This is on an iPhone 6s; I'm not sure if it's always been this bad and I just didn't notice early on, or if something changed. The only thing keeping me on it is the fact that my wife is familiar with it too and we share a few grocery lists, which is extremely handy.

What's with the video paired with the announcement? [1] It doesn't make any sense without the "moving" metaphor from the post, and even with it it's really strange.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOvU5iqjsBQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOvU5iqjsBQ)

</comment><comment><USER3> Even though I knew this day was coming, it's still a bummer. Wunderlist hasn't been updated in ages and didn't need to. It was functional and stable enough to get out of your own way. It's clean, concise and not overly complicated.

I still haven't found a good alternative to switch to. Microsoft's Todo app is garbage and I don't care to deal with that ecosystem just for a Todo app either. Can't they just open source the entire thing so we can just self host it?

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow this is disappointing. I still use wunderlist for collaborative sharing of todos. It has not received major updates in forever but honestly it doesn't need it. Still fully functional. It will be a sad day when it's shut down.</comment>


Facebook hack let the attackers access Tinder, Spotify, and Instagram accounts - <AUTHOR> http://uk.businessinsider.com/facebook-hack-tinder-instagram-spotify-accounts-2018-9?r=US&IR=T <comment><USER2> Wondering aloud, I recently ran into an issue with Spotify randomly playing one specific artist repeatedly. Cannabis club, which was corroborated by other users recently. After resetting my password it seems to have subsided.

The rub is that my Spotify account started as an FB passport, but my FB account has been deleted for over a year at this point. Why does it seem like my FB data is still being used somehow?</comment>


Why I No Longer Want to Write Software for Companies That I Don't Own - <AUTHOR> I'll start by saying "Agile Project Management Is Farce and does more harm than good". I've been researching tech turnover for a bit now, with a focus on programmer turnover, and with no reservations I can say that so-called Agile project management is a leading cause.
The goal of Agile project management is to make software development a more customer-centric and more iterative. This is a noble goal. Agile however, whether intentionally or unintentionally, has had a secondary effect of robbing developers of job satisfaction.
Here let me give you an example. About 10 years ago I worked with somewhat of an influential in the Ruby community. We both worked at an "Agile" software consultancy. After finishing a task on our project work board I remember watching as that developer went back to claim the task the followed logically from what he just finished. He was shocked when he saw that the task's card has been claimed by another. He then said, right there in the office, quite loudly and openly "I am not getting the satisfaction of completing a thing when working like this."
So Agile robs developers of sense of satisfaction of ownership and completion. Well if the developer is being robbed of this satisfaction then to whom is this satisfaction being transferred? Well, project managers. Who get rewarded for the "velocity" of the team, which is more of a product of the hard work and less of a product of task management.
So developers have three things making them want out:
1) No ownership satisfaction 2) No completion satisfaction 3) Someone else taking credit for their work
Ok, this are not the only reasons for developer turn over but this is a big one. There are others like toxic environments, Title VII discrimination, and so on.
It can be denied that 1.5 - 2.0 year developer turnover at tech companies is pretty woeful. We are dropping the ball somewhere and its hurting business bottom lines and developer careers. <comment><USER2> I completely agree; it also has the effect of making software worse, as far as I can tell. At the last few mid-to-large sized tech companies I've worked for I've watched project and engineering managers push hard for more velocity trying to get their bonus. Eventually they start telling people to take shortcuts, or rewarding the developer who gets things done faster but, as an example, doesn't write any tests. They then get mad at the other devs who won't approve their patches during code review or end up spending their time fixing the bugs in prod created by the developer being rewarded for "moving fast". The pressure on the managers trickles down and the software ends up being broken.

<comment><USER3> The problem I witness when the general goal laid out is improving "velocity" tends to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what velocity is.

Namely, velocity is speed plus a direction, and most of the activities that would normally help codify a sane and deliberate direction (i.e. rigorous requirements, rigorous design, rigorous validation, etc.) are all primed to be sacrificed at the Agile altar. What you end up with is just "speed" as a priority.

When organizations have KPIs & OKRs which set "velocity" as a prime directive what that usually means is just "speed". As long as your development cycles are shorter and shorter, then you're rewarded. In these kinds of organizations the incentives align with flailing around spastically, so long as you're doing it 1x a month, 10x a month, then 100x a month. Taking the time to be exactly right 1x a quarter, and then building on that, isn't seen as desirable.

As one would expect, there aren't an enormous number of people who are actually satisfied by doing random crap for a random cause as fast as possible. In fact, that's what machines are for, not people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I will not work at Agile/Scrum shops for similar reasons. Although my primary reason is different. Estimations break the whole process. Most of engineering is discovery work and discovery work can't be estimated, leading devs to estimate 10 times what tasks actually take so that they don't get in trouble for not finishing tasks on time.

I work for a smaller dev team currently and I take a project and finish it A to Z. It is extremely satisfying to have complete individual ownership over a task and we've achieved greater development velocity than I ever thought possible.

<comment><USER5> And the follow-up problem is that most Agile proponents say that "estimations aren't to be taken as timelines". But that doesn't address the fundamental issue that management always uses the engineering estimations as a method of managing their timelines.

Not to mention that "velocity" and burn down charts actually reinforce the idea that estimations _are_ ways of tracking how much work will get done in Agile. Otherwise, tracking those metrics would be completely pointless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have been working in some form of agile methodology or another for years and wouldn't have it any other way.

It sounds like you've been working: \- with toxic people; or \- in toxic organisations; or \- in immature agile organisations

If your ways of working are taking away your job satisfaction, you definitely need to raise that up with the team you work in (like in a standup, retro or just during the day). If it doesn't get addressed because the team disagrees, you're in the wrong team. If it doesn't happen because management disagrees, you're in the wrong team.

When I say you're in the wrong team, I don't necessary mean you're wrong or the team is wrong - only that you two are not a good fit for each other.

</comment><comment><USER7> > He was shocked when he saw that the task's card has been claimed by another.

If this is project management, then where is the planning ? This really has nothing to do with Agile, it has to do with planning which is not absent from Agile.

> "I am not getting the satisfaction of completing a thing when working like > this."

This is a people issue, it's very attitude based. Oh someone took my ticket, my work life is horrible. How about 1) talk to the person who took it, 2) talk to someone and explain the reason this should be done a different way (communication something agile highly promotes), 3) go with the flow and move onto something else. Don't be a snowflake.

> 1) No ownership satisfaction 2) No completion satisfaction

I work in a small agile house, and I have much more ownership and involvement in project completion that I have had anywhere else. In fact that is a premise of such methodologies as scrum which time box, and reduce the scope and objectives to things like sprints.

> 3) Someone else taking credit for their work

I am not sure about this one, but this is consistent of many work environments. Heck I've worked in offices where some egos would take credit for anything.

<comment><USER8> The fact people _can_ take tickets and you have to _fight and have an argument about it_ really shows that there's a discourse inevitable in systems like Agile.

Who gets the 'tickets', why are 'tickets' always ruling people, when will 'tickets' be more like working for your own company?

The fact is the tickets themselves are acting like a virtual currency of which only one person gets, exclusively.

If more than one person could work on a ticket this would solve the problem, but the fact that people are locked out and it's exclusive makes them an argumentative point and causes greed/habits to form.

Fix the tickets, not the people. All the credit and satisfaction comes from this one point.

<comment> UK-AL Fighting over a ticket isn't an agile issue. In fact this the opposite of agile.

The developer at standup/meeting/story kickoff should of explained the situation and asked to work on the ticket himself or pair on it. Problem solved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you have some ticket system where programmers can just take work, your team is breaking the first rule of Agile.

        Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

A ticket system is a process. Individuals and interactions come first. Programmers talking to one another and being happy is more important than your task database in agile.

<comment><USER10> Why does it break the first rule of agile software development?

 _" That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I joined a new project recently after working in a mostly relaxed agile environment for most of my career. I would describe my current project as "Agile at all costs". No testing, no requirements, just go. Just do. I have to say it's created an environment where almost every developer is super unhappy and ultimately producing a sub-par product.

I want to go back to just doing good work. Obviously focusing on what the customer needs and wants, but where the engineers have a choice to do something the right way instead of just the fast way.

<comment><USER9> Whoever said agile means no testing and no requirements is doing it wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I disagree. To me, Agile is a successful way to work, and I prefer it.

Completing a task is where I get my satisfaction, even if it is a part of a larger piece. Also when I see the client try out the new functionality and giving me feedback (positive or negative) on a completed task.

Another good point with agile is that I can pick any task I see fit and have the capabilities to complete. I'm not stuck with a certain part forever, that is awesome and I love it because I get to learn new things.

In your anecdote, it seems to me that the person complaining is not really interested in the agile concept and prefers to work the old-fashioned way. That is fine, but unless the workplace have projects that adhere to the waterfall-model that he could work on, maybe he's just in the wrong place?

</comment><comment> mr-ron If the engineer is only getting satisfaction from claiming a closed ticket, and then not getting tickets claimed when they owned the work, then the team is putting values and metrics in the wrong places.

Either have multiple people claim a ticket, or change the definition of success from an individual releasing a ticket, to a team releasing a successful ticket.

Agile done properly should reward success on the team level. Tickets are rarely one-person affairs. If reward is happening on the individual level, one per ticket, then the usage of Agile is incorrect.

</comment><comment><USER13> So while I totally agree with this, I have some questions:

First off, do you think Agile is better than Waterfall? I personally think that it delivers a product faster, but I'm not sure if it actually has a macro improvement on the job process. I think waterfall probably addresses your developer-centric issue of satisfaction better than Agile does. I think we may have thrown away too much with the anti-waterfall hatred our field has adopted.

Second, what alternative do you propose? I think Agile is a problem, and ultimately a pretty bad process for organizing. The overhead is so expensive. The most effective and efficient my team has ever been was when we just quit Agile and wrote what we had going on up on the white board. And you know what? I've seen this work better than Agile in a wide range of settings. "Self organizing" really seems to be the key, but regardless of the self- proclamations that Agile is self organizing, it really seems to shoot itself in the foot with extra mandatory process.

Finally, it seems like all of the good solutions don't scale. Do you think this is a problem of trying to scale problem solving? I don't think I accept the argument that this is just the cost of working at larger scale, but I haven't thought of a good way to keep a team organized and still get work done without an extreme amount of organization and process (Agile) or a really involved team lead/product owner---who will slow everyone down by needing a lot of touch points.

<comment><AUTHOR> The first problem with agile is that false dichotomy - "It's either agile or waterfall". Sorry but that dichotomy doesn't exist. Waterfall vs Agile is just a good-bad binary. Surely you want to iterate quickly and stay in constant contact with customers, if that is all agile is then I am all in. However, I can't subscribe to robbing developers of ownership of a domain. I would even do microservice arch if it meant dividing things up into domains and assigning developers microservices that they own. I want to keep developers and giving them responsibility and ownership is a good way to do it.

Its funny because, in Agile you hear "You don't want one developer leaving with all the knowledge" now instead we have all the developers leaving with all the knowledge.

<comment><USER9> Nothing in the Agile Manifesto says anything about robbing developers of ownership of a domain. The first line of the manifesto is "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools", which suggested to me that individual work satisfaction is right there at the top.

Whoever is running your team is doing it wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't hang on every word of the agile manifesto. For example you don't have to google too much before you find people having debates over unit testing vs acceptance testing in the name of being "Agile" not giving to much attention to the "over processes and tools" part of the manifesto.

<comment><USER9> If we are going to critique Agile I think we should first agree what Agile is. Agile is the manifesto, not what some random dudes on the internet say it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agile is not the manifesto, I has really never been. Agile does not have a real definition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Turnover, IMHO, is due to market demand, not satisfaction issues.

After 1.5 - 2.0 years, a dev has more skills that are in demand and will gladly jump ship for a better position and/or pay elsewhere.

<comment><USER15> To be more precise, the problem is that employees' raises are not keeping up with the job market, so the only way to get what you're worth is to change jobs frequently.

If companies would make more of an effort to keep their employees happy (financially, work satisfaction, etc.), they'd spend much less time recruiting and training new employees, and productivity and profitability would probably increase.

Hiring a new employee at the same level of competence is going to cost at least as much as retaining an existing employee, so I wonder why companies get into this cycle of constant turnover. The only way they'd save money is by constantly hiring inexperienced employees to replace the slightly more experienced ones who left, but what they'd gain in cost would be quickly eroded by lower productivity, loss of collective knowledge of the product, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Both jumping ship for raises and other things are also true according to multiple sources. Job satisfaction is another leading cause. The tech industry has to fix the issue of turnover, its costing too much money and careers are being diluted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The problem with agile (in my mind) is it codifies some very bad practices.

One, working your developers to death. In every agile environment I've worked in, nobody ever took a day or two to plan, do retrospectives after a sprint. It was always, always, "Get back to work." I had one job that did weekly sprints every week.

Two, it transfers the risk of bad management from management to the team. "Look! Anything can be built by planning in two-week stretches! We can change direction anytime!"

</comment><comment><USER17> This just came out:

"WEB-BOOK LAUNCH: The deepest dive into our unique way of working. No post- its, no backlogs, no sprints, no stand-ups, no velocity tracking, no agile, no scrum, no roadmaps, none of that. We've gone a different way, and now you can too. Read up, Shape Up:"

[https://basecamp.com/shapeup](https://basecamp.com/shapeup)

</comment><comment><USER18> Developers are highly paid because their knowledge is highly leveraged. Someone else is benefiting from your application of knowledge by an order of magnitude of what they're paying you. Why be the cow when you could be the dairyman?

<comment><USER19> Because dairy farms go under all the time. These days, the well fed happy cows just stroll over to the next field, where there are massages on tap if the stress of eating grass in the sunshine gets to be too much.

To put that in non-cow terms, the rewards of just getting straightforward compensation these days are really good. So good it's not obvious that starting your own thing is worth it monetarily.

<comment><USER18> Of course there is risk in starting your own venture. It's not a guarantee of success, but the upside is exponentially greater.

Chasing (relative) peanuts is still a better call for most.

<comment><USER20> > but the upside is exponentially greater.

See, I don't think most people care if they are millionaires or billionaires. And you can become a millionaire on a software dev salary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> IMHO - agile seems to be easy to learn but hard to master. I think we have tons of advanced beginners engaged in a global cargo cult.

Its such wide-spread phenomenon, such that we have an "even more agile" dark manifesto, pointing out the pitfalls in which the agile has fallen (eg. processes & tools) - [http://darkagilemanifesto.org/](http://darkagilemanifesto.org/) ...and the golden [http://programming-motherfucker.com/](http://programming- motherfucker.com/) that urges us to just cut out the cancer.

</comment><comment><USER22> 1\. Would you work for a company that doesn't use agile? 2\. Will you hire other engineers? 3\. How will you address those issues in your company? 4\. Are there companies that successfully addresses these issues?

</comment><comment><USER23> Satisfaction on our team is by releasing code. The book keeping in ancillary. We operate as a team, and one person (or a pair) might write it, another tests it, and anyone might deploy it.

As for capital A Agile leading to turn over, I'd be interested in seeing the data. Most of what I've read says that employees leave managers.

</comment><comment><USER24> Agile, Waterfall, Shmagile Shmoterfall I say.

All these "practices" are just ideas like "hey work in small sprints and deliver on the go" that have been shaped into ideologies and standards we "all need to work within" by the law of averages. If you have a 100 average developers working for your average corp developing software, they need a structure - oh look, here's agile - let's pay money to people to teach us how to agile (??!? i'm still confused by this, like are people seriously that dumb?) then force the strict set of guidelines and rules onto everything because thinking outside of the box or working outside the guidelines confuses the averages and introduces chaos. Keeping team small, agile and keeping agile/waterfall/whatever-silver-bullet bureaucracy out of their way is the solution.

We are dropping the ball because we focus on using "standard processes" for the sake of using "standard processes". The stricter you need to implement the rules and guidelines, the larger the chance something smells in your companies culture.

</comment><comment><USER25> Those are some of the reasons why I don't think I would like developing at a large company. Where I work it's just me and 2 other developers. I don't own the company but it's sure satisfying

</comment><comment><USER26> You tell a story about how one developer at one company was disappointed, but it doesn't follow that other people will feel the same way.

</comment><comment><USER27> What is agile development? Is it anything more than a buzzword?

I have worked in several environments that embraced "agile". And they were all different, for the most part.

The only things they had in common was bad management and negligence of tech debt.

<comment><USER9> The Agile Manifesto

        Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
        Working software over comprehensive documentation
        Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
        Responding to change over following a plan

There are many variations built on top of these, but without these it's not Agile.

[https://agilemanifesto.org/](https://agilemanifesto.org/)

None of these things makes management easier, you still need a good manager to make a project work.

Nothing in the manifesto says you should ignore technical debt, that is simply a choice your manager has decided to make. Its not the fault of Agile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've had some good 'agile' experiences and some bad. We havent always done agile "to a T", we usually shape and mold it to work for us. However some companies it is very apparent how shit this thing is. We do our company wide sprint review thing with each squad (yeah we copied spotify squad thing). When a PM gets up and says "our squad complete 12/12 points" everyone goes fricking nuts like it's the best thing ever. What did the squad accomplish? They added some images on a page in our app...

I guess overall what i've learned, and this probably applies to a lot of things in life not just software. "Important" (C level, managers etc) act just like my 8 month old daughter. They see things that are new and shiny and they want it, badly. Tech companies see that other tech companies do AGILE, JIRA, all this shit. Those manager types then decide we need to do this ourselves. So you are forced to implement some managerial system that nobody understands. It's all crap i tell ya.

</comment><comment><USER29> While I agree overall that Agile is not what it is sold as by many, I am troubled some by the way you presented your argument, but not your argument itself I don't think.

As a CTO/Executive, I read from what you wrote: I have a few unhappy engineers but my project is moving faster and more successful. So I'd say ok, I'll work on managing the edge cases.

As an engineer who's worked in waterfall cycles and almost every iterative cycle you can name, and have designed a few; I think what you meant to highlight was that project managers are claiming work as being more complete then in reality (higher velocity) so they get a pat on the back in the short term but wind up with longer term product problems like maintainability and accountability. Ironically, the two things that engineers like and that help bring job satisfaction.

To that I would agree, there has to be a process that is designed around the cadence of the business and the team. And the process must not be fixed or rigid and grow and change as the team does. This is how you keep people around longer. And PM's are there to facilitate not dictate or take credit away from engineers. But PMs also deserve credit where credit is due and shouldn't be looked upon as the enemy in the engineering cycle, which has always kinda existed but seems to be getting worse at many companies.</comment>


We Made a Tool So You Can Hear Both Yanny and Laurel - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-clip-yanny-laurel-debate.html <comment><USER2> I hear yanny even on the left-most setting of the slider, with a softer Laurel underneath.

Everything more to the right than left-most, and it's unambiguously Yanny to me.

Fascinating how some people hear differently.</comment>


Ask HN: Customizable Desktop Messenger? - <AUTHOR> Are there any highly customizable desktop messengers either cross-platform (maybe even a web app) or for mac?
Right now I use Signal which is great but it's missing a lot of features I'd like, many of which are so specific to me it wouldn't even make sense to contribute them via PR. I want to be able to transform the messages directly, add new buttons, toolbars, etc.
I'm looking for a kind of chrome-extensions-for-messenger type thing, ideally not tied up with some kind of social media, or ad-network, or gaming, or with a bunch of business features (like Slack etc.). Just a vanilla, extensible, desktop messenger.
If worse comes to worst I could whip one up for me and my comrades but maybe y'all have a link that could save me some time. <comment><USER2> Mattermost might be too similar to Slack. But it's open source and so are oft of the extensions, e.g. you can self-host and write your own bots. There's a "bridge" to talk to IRC, XMPP, Slack [https://about.mattermost.com/](https://about.mattermost.com/) [https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost- server](https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server) [https://about.mattermost.com/community- applications/](https://about.mattermost.com/community-applications/)</comment>


Lockheed Martin to develop ground-launched hypersonic missile - sahin-boydas https://newatlas.com/military/lockheed-martin-develop-ground-launched-hypersonic-missile/ <comment><USER2> There is an interesting discussion about the effects of hypersonic nuclear capable missiles and glide vehicles here [0]. In summary, this doesn't change much. But what the larger players are afraid of is proliferation of hypersonic missile technology [1].

[0] [https://thebulletin.org/2020/01/hypersonic-missiles-new- arms...](https://thebulletin.org/2020/01/hypersonic-missiles-new-arms-race- going-nowhere-fast/#)

[1] [https://www.rand.org/blog/2018/03/hypersonic-missiles-a- new-...](https://www.rand.org/blog/2018/03/hypersonic-missiles-a-new- proliferation-challenge.html)

<comment><USER3> [0] Is I have to say simply wrong on every point.

Russia has large missile defense deployments S400 and S500 and selling them to lots of countries. This is in no way a secret and a huge bone of contention between Turkey and the US for their purchase of S400.

Hypersonic missiles make aircraft carriers sitting ducks without any defense. This is a pretty damn large shift in military power at the US expense.

<comment><USER4> For hypersonic missiles to work against ships, they require either nukes - <AUTHOR> which case conventional ICBMs on a lower trajectory work fine - or terminal guidance, which is an absolute _bitch_ through 3000K plasma. There's a difference between being maneuverable and maneuvering _to hit a moving target_ , after all.

I don't think they change the naval balance of power much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lockheed was intimately involved in the current UFO story being promoted. They had worked on and off for years with Bigelow Aerospace. When Bigelow won the AATIP contract, 2 of the 38 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents were written by highly credible Lockheed scientists.

It's assumed that Bigelow affiliates initially enchanted Lockheed with the credibility of former intelligence employees. In 2015, Lockheed executives invited Tom DeLonge to a barbecue for Skunk Works. Bigelow affiliates were there.

They were all involved in helping DeLonge's pitch for media projects to promote aerospace and the Pentagon to younger audiences. UFOs weren't discussed until the 2nd or 3rd meeting. Detailed here- [https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28377/tom-delonges- ori...](https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28377/tom-delonges-origin-story- for-to-the-stars-academy-describes-a-government-info-operation)

Later, prominent executives from Lockheed Skunk Works and a Major General were talking with DeLonge and John Podesta. All under the assumption that Hillary Clinton would win the Presidency.

Later, Lockheed dropped out. It's impossible to know the extent of what's happening but it would be illegal for the US Government to engage in disinformation either directly or indirectly. The claim that DeLonge's operation is controlled by the CIA is false. The former intelligence people working with him are true believers who lack any actual evidence of aliens.

Most likely, a highly sophisticated private group with complex financial incentives is purposely misleading individuals and groups. They're exploiting naive former government employees and dubious government scientists who skirt the line of fraud in the pursuit of radical technology. And the Air Force uses it for cover and the CIA for national security vectors and foreign disinformation.

<comment><USER6> >it would be illegal for the US Government to engage in disinformation

Smith–Mundt Act of 2012 legalized domestic dissemination of propaganda.

<comment><USER7> "The U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (Public Law 80-402), popularly called the Smith–Mundt Act, is the basic legislative authorization for propaganda activities conducted by the U.S. Department of State, sometimes called 'public diplomacy.' [...] The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 [...] allowing for materials produced by the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) to be available within the United States."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith–Mundt_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith–Mundt_Act)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool, more ways to kill eachother. Woo.

<comment><USER9> That's why we should always be asking our elected officials, why continue the madness?

<comment><USER10> > That's why we should always be asking our elected officials, why continue > the madness?

Allowing one's arsenal to slowly become obsolete is akin to disarmament, and unilateral disarmament isn't wise if one values their independence.

Similar weapons are being deployed by the US's military rivals:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-ZF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-ZF)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avangard_(hypersonic_glide_veh...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avangard_\(hypersonic_glide_vehicle\))

This particular madness will continue until all major powers come to some measure of political unity. A helpful first step would be for all of them to _have_ elected officials.

<comment><USER11> Absurd. When does it end? Or are we just caught in this dangerous resource drain ad infinitum?

<comment><USER10> > When does it end?

I already answered that:

>> This particular madness will continue until all major powers come to some measure of political unity. A helpful first step would be for all of them to _have_ elected officials.

Alternatively, the US and other democracies could be destroyed and their populations either exterminated or forcefully assimilated into some kind of authoritarian world superstate.

<comment><USER11> > Alternatively, the US and other democracies could be destroyed and their > populations either exterminated or forcefully assimilated into some kind of > authoritarian world superstate.

A false choice you attempt to make true by ensuring the cycle of escalation never ends. No US war since 1945 has been undertaken for the purpose you ascribe.

<comment><USER10> > A false choice you attempt to make true by ensuring the cycle of escalation > never ends. No US war since 1945 has been undertaken for the purpose you > ascribe.

You don't understand deterrence.

<comment><USER11> You know what I understand? How are you inside my head?

In fact, an understanding of deterrence is the basis for my critique. Deterrence is just branding for an endless cycle of escalation, investment, and global danger. It's almost as if, perhaps, you weren't alive during the Cold War and don't understand its absurdity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "At DeathTech, we don't make the missles that kill people, we make them deader."

[From BASF the chemical company's "We don't make a lot of the products you buy. We make a lot of the products you buy better"]

</comment><comment><USER13> Building badass shit like that is pretty damn cool.

</comment><comment><USER14> i wish i was a US Citizen so I could work on things like this. I assume you'd need TS-SCI....

<comment><USER9> If you are smart enough to work on projects like that you should be putting your efforts to the benefits of humanity, not helping regimes build weapons of mass destruction. We need to end this madness we call the "arms race". This threat is greater than global warming.

<comment><USER15> The arms race was the main driver of progress in the 20th century, with countless civilian applications, including the Internet. We could use a good old fashioned arms race nowadays. It creates demand for top notch science and engineering like nothing else.

And you could argue this benefits humanity, too, even besides the technology transfer. There hasn't been a world war since 1945, and the only real reason for that is that it would end really badly for everyone involved.

<comment><USER16> Imagine how much we could have progressed if we just focused on progress rather than acquiring power through intimidation in some artificial zero sum game.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I'm trying to imagine that, but then I remember that we live in the real world here, with finite resources, and thousands of years of history, not in some utopia where everyone sings kumbaya and dances merrily around a campfire.

<comment><USER16> Yes, this is true: If you denuclearize you too will end up with a bayonet up your ass in the street.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We have an arms race again! Putin announced hypersonic missiles, and now the US has to have one.

<comment><USER18> what the russians built, we built in the 50s-60s ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_Low_Altitude_Missil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersonic_Low_Altitude_Missile))

<comment><USER19> It says an airframe was never constructed, let alone tested, much like my perpetual motion machine

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This got to appeal to the Military Institute of Technology Cadets here on HN

</comment><comment><USER20> The US military is looking to outfit Starlink, Kuiper and other commercial LEO satellite constellations with hypersonic missiles, for an on-demand kill of any spot on Earth within 90 seconds. Project has been in the works for nearly two decades but the exponential reduction in cost per kg to LEO has made this nightmare finally fully viable.

See Space Development Agency under the newly minted Space Force for more information.

<comment><USER6> This seems like the kind of space weaponization that's in every significant geopolitical players interest to ban. Ditto with conjectures that cost- effective commercial launches makes SDI satellite missile defense viable. It's just going to encourage all the players to go all-in on ASAT, park SLBMs near each others coasts while racing to a constellation of hypersonic missiles of their own. The last thing US wants to do is encourage China / Russia to hit any spot in mainland US in 90s. Or anyone for that matter, it's way too destabilizing for all parties involved.

<comment><USER21> yes, it's incredibly destabilizing if you worry in 2 minutes all your bases and defenses could be destroyed, leading to accidentally launches. In the cold war it almost happened by accident (launch or we'll lose our ability to respond!) multiple times. Short time to react just makes it much much worse!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Rate my site - <AUTHOR> http://www.yaymylife.com

<comment><USER2> Just from the url, i was excited to check it out. Great name. But then I get to the site and I'm like... peach or salmon color or whatever that is??? Really??

The last thing that jumps out on the page is the content. The share links and ads are overwhelming.

Your design doesn't fit your mood. You don't have to come up with a design all yourself, just steal the features you like from other sites.

I think something like the bing.com design could work REALLY well for your site. Some bright and inspiring fotogs, then maybe a translucent block to hold the content.

Don't be afraid to make the content for people to read in a big font. The length of each individual peace of content is so small that it doesn't matter if it stretches onto a few lines.

If you look at the page right now, the ads are the most prominent thing, and clearly, I didn't go to your site to look at ads. So make sure your content does the talking, and they are the first thing the user looks at.

</comment><comment><USER3> I suggest you remove email verification and add it later once you have traction.

You shouldn't fight spam until spam fights you... until then, you are just discouraging users.

</comment><comment><USER4> First is impression is the share links overwhelm the design. If share was just a simple link I don't think I'd been as bothered. The issue is they stand out too much.

(I personally don't care for share links so take my impressions on them lightly)

<comment><USER5> I have never used a share link. I doubt many have as well.

<comment><USER6> I do think the share links are too prominent on the site, but I have used them and statistics show that in general people do use them. Just find a way to make the stand out more than the share links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I did a live version of this kind of site. Very simplistic and anonymous. Haven't done much with it because I've moved on to other projects. <http://lovingthat.com> and <http://complainaboutthat.com>

<comment><USER8> Any chance you could share our code? I'd like to see how you did that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> make the font of the content bigger :)

also, a much smaller point: consider putting in ads later when traffic makes it legitimate to put an ad in. for now the zoosk ad that I see does not match in the spirit of the type of content you probably are trying to bring in.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like the generally idea of a positive FML-type site and I love the domain, but really, ads already? Sacrificing user experience for an extra $0.20 this early gives your users serious doubts about your intent in building a great destination site/community site.

<comment><USER11> Isn't putting in ads from the beginning just a honest thing to do? Might work better than putting off users later on by changing the model? (Or might not be better, that's why I am asking).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like the concept and the name--and second pulling the registration, the ads, and the Share rollover. The rollover is especially annoying at the bottom of the page (i.e., in the last item) because it can interfere with Next button, about which there is very little cursor-friendly space. You could move page numbers to center, like Google, or box them, like Digg (I think). Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER13> Nicely done, plain and simple.

You have what looks like the back-tick character sitting below your google ad box on every page.

I would change your screen name to something else, like SiteAdministrator. Creator is a little too Old Testament. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Welp.

I submitted this several hours ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1189162>

I like your site, how have you been attracting users?

</comment><comment><USER14> Seems kind of like a trivial me-too site.

</comment><comment><USER15> Another one of these. And this one seems to be used by older people.

The only one of these that's really good is mylifeisaverage

<comment><USER16> beyond mlia, <http://www.givesmehope.com> looks like it's trying to the opposite of FML.

Not to say that competition should be a hindrance, but I think its worth looking at these when comparing.

Also, somewhat tangential, FYML is in urbandictionary with the Y standing for "Yeah" and some usage on twitter in that regard. Nobody has the full domain yet.

<comment><USER17> There's also <http://www.mylifeisg.com/> which I think is related to MLIA because MLIA links to them. But people don't seem to care about it much given that it currently just says:

        Error. The g_config table is empty or does not exist</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Apache Wave - <AUTHOR> http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/12/introducing-apache-wave.html <comment><USER2> As someone who used Wave intensely (all day, nearly every day) from the day I got my invite, until the day they announced it was going to die, I couldn't be happier about this.

Wave was invaluable to my daily business processes, working with people on projects that move way too fast to set up up a more structured/"proper" collaboration environment. It had pretty much completely replaced email for me at one point between me, my associates and my friends.

Can't wait to see it get a second life, and hopefully i'll be using it a lot more in the future now too. I still stand by this having potential to really change how we communicate with people.

<comment><USER3> I think for most people the stumbling block was "Here it is, now use it." Use it for what? What are some real world examples? How is this different?

I think more "this is exactly how I use Wave" demos - from people who use it, like yourself - would really help it along.

<comment><USER2> I spent a lot of my time on Wave spreading the word to colleagues and friends, and had a lot of them using it daily as well. I even had my work (large government agency) considering a dedicated Wave server after telling them it will be possible one day, and showing them how it worked (they were VERY impressed).

I think Google really needed to give it more time, and at least give it SOME time while open to everyone to try. Giving it to select people, who can send invites but then wait days for them to be activated, then shutting it down due to it "not being used enough", was ridiculous.

As for the "Use it for what?" thing, I kept hearing that a lot, but every single person I showed it to, from other IT workers to my technically illiterate brother, all got hooked once they started using it to organise their lives.

<comment><USER3> _As for the "Use it for what?" thing, I kept hearing that a lot, but every single person I showed it to, from other IT workers to my technically illiterate brother, all got hooked once they started using it to organise their lives._

But that's the problem - there's weren't enough people who knew how to use it showing the rest.

E-mail works badly - terribly sometimes - but it works good enough. Wave never reached critical mass. There weren't enough people saying "hey, this is how I use it". Screencast please!

<comment><USER2> You're absolutely correct.

I'd do a screencast and try and push the word out more, but to be honest I feel "burned" by Google for scrapping it.

When the Apache version comes out, i'll definitely be spreading the word (if it's as good as Wave was from Google, though i'm assuming it's going to be even better).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great news. Wave has loads of potential, it just needs someone to take it by the hand and show it some UX love.

<comment><USER5> absolutely. i realize now that this mentality is likely the cause behind wave's quick downfall, but it wasn't only until after wave was pulled that i began to think "wish I had a wave for this".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm pleased that Wave will be in such able hands. It really shows that Google does care about open source when they take this much trouble to follow through on their promises.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am not able to find it; Google announced that they would have an exporter for the data that's presently locked-into Wave. Has there been any news about it?

<comment><USER6> It's built into the current web interface.

Click the box with three dots at the top right of a wave and then choose export.

<comment><USER7> Thanks!

So I have to manually click every single wave that I've created and do it. :-/ Is there an exporter that's available?

EDIT: it looks like it allows one to export waves in batches of 10.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are they opening just the protocol software? Or also the UI?

<comment><USER9> It seems they are also open-sourcing a web client, maybe not exactly the same UI as the official client, but I can't see why they would go to the trouble of changing it. Kudos to them for calling it "Wave in a Box", J Tim would be pleased.

[http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open- source-n...](http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-next- steps-wave-in-box.html)

<comment><USER10> There was a CLI proof-of-concept app, but nothing else.

Probably should crack open Photoshop and do a couple of studies to get a discussion on a native client going...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I know that our team was happy to learn about this. Whether it will get used or not is yet to be seen. I did take a few minutes to get it compiled and running locally last night and have to say that getting basic* Wave functionality was easy on Ubuntu 10.10.

*UI and feature set is pretty light in comparison to the current state of Wave(+UI)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm really quite curious why Google is still investing time into wave. It seems to me that either it is a worthy endeavor (which I think it is), or it isn't (ie, it should be scraped). But I don't understand scraping it and then revitalizing it soon after. Couldn't they have done the work the Apache Foundation will do faster in-house?

<comment><USER13> Just because Google doesn't want to take care of its baby doesn't mean that it's a bad thing that it takes a bit of time to find a new home for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So who is starting a wave hosting business?

<comment><USER15> Process One (developers of ejabberd) are working on an independent implementation:

[http://www.process- one.net/en/blogs/article/processone_wave_...](http://www.process- one.net/en/blogs/article/processone_wave_server_ejabberd_extension_video/)

[http://www.process- one.net/en/blogs/article/proof_of_concept...](http://www.process- one.net/en/blogs/article/proof_of_concept_wave_client_for_android_by_processone/)

I wouldnt be surprised if they eventually offered corporate hosting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I used wave a little, but didn't really have any use for it. I always recognised the huge potential of the protocol and service nature of it, however. I'm very glad to see this happening.

</comment><comment><USER17> I currently have a use case for wave and would like to use it. Would you recommend against it? What's the current status. When will it go offline?</comment>


Introducing... the earth-scraper - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2048395/Earth-scraper-Architects-design-65-storey-building-300-metres-ground.html?fb_ref=LikeButtonTop&fb_source=home_oneline

<comment><USER2> Interesting idea: digging a 65 story hole and lining it with a building. It may be uniquely suited to Mexico City (on an ancient lake bed). In most places you would have to remove 600 feet of bedrock, not a cheap proposition.</comment>


Ask HN: In the process of accepting a job, how do I respond to other inquiries? - <AUTHOR>

I just accepted a job verbally (coming out of college) and I'm waiting to get all the paper work so I can sign it and make it legally official. I don't see any reason that anything could go wrong with the offer but I've gotten a couple other inquiries from people saying they want to interview me.<p>Is there a standard way to handle this situation or should I just tell them I have accepted an offer and if things somehow go south (again, I have no reason at all to believe they will but it's just not official legally yet) then I can just go back to them and say I'm back on the market? This isn't life and death but any advice is appreciated. <comment><USER2> You can use this to your advantage. The last time I was in your position, I was totally transparent with the interested parties, and it worked in my favor. ("Yes, I'm interested, but I've got to tell you that I'm inking a contract next Monday. If you can expedite me through the hiring process and make me an offer before then, I can consider it. After that, it's out of my hands.")

Offers flooded in during that final week. People who otherwise take 3 weeks to make a decision hurried up and made their offers within days. I actually ended up accepting an offer that came in about 24 hours before my deadline.

</comment><comment><USER3> Never turn down an interview. They can really only lead to good things, and it's always nice to have more than on opportunity on the table.

Depending on where you are, it might be looked down upon if you play your offers against each other. If you are in a small market, I wouldn't do it, but if you're in a major market it's usually pretty accepted.

<comment><USER4> There is a caveat to that - don't turn one down unless the cost of the interview and your interest in the company aren't worth it. There is a point where constantly interviewing prevents you from doing the things you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Never, ever decline interviews until you are officially 'on board.' Things don't always work out, for a variety of reasons, and there is no reason to paint yourself into a virtual corner, and not have any options at the end of the day.</comment>