Vidyard (YC S11) Is A YouTube For Businesses - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/22/yc-backed-vidyard-is-a-youtube-for-businesses/

<comment><USER2> I have a few questions that the Vidyard site doesn't seem to address (that I'd need answers to in order to sell it to my boss).

1) The "Venti" plan says "unlimited videos". Does that mean that there's no storage quota? If there is no storage quota, how would you make money off of a large customer? Like, we have a decently sizable video library (about 250GB and it grows by about 25GB each year) and it isn't that high trafficked, but I can see a video library like our's becoming a burden on your service.

2) Do you support captions for the videos?

3) Is there any way to export our data out of the system?

4) Is there any API in case we want/need some further customization in front of it?

Your service looks excellent, but what makes me so hesitant is that it seems potentially low-to-no-margin and my boss would want to know that we aren't getting into a service that's destined to raise prices or cut us off.

<comment><USER3> Great questions re: price and margins. The unlimited videos is achievable both through the scale with the number of videos we host; along with scaling of the file-size post-encoding.

2) Captions are currently not supported - would you be looking for transcriptions on the videos, or time-coded captions based on the point in the video? We're working on some cool features for time-coded commenting that probably covers what you're looking for.

3) Data can definitely be exported - but unfortunately it's not something we've implemented into the tool quite yet. Would be happy to manually support in the meantime.

4) A Player API (for custom controls), Wizard API (for player setup and design), and Content API (for uploading) are in the works. Assuming from the question it's a player controls API you'd need.

<comment><USER2> So, we actually have time-coded captions for some of our library. It's more just a place to upload the caption file and have it served by the player. Although, now that you mention it I'm not personally thrilled with the service we use so more power to you! And it's nice to know that 3 and 4 are on your radar for the future. I tend to trust YC backed companies not to do the evil vendor lock-in type things, but it can be a hard sell to my boss who has gotten burned many times by vendors that promise the world, we put our content in, deliver poorly, and then we're stuck.

Good Luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://VidCaster.com> has been building branded pages for companies for well over a year. We've been using them for <http://hackersandfounders.tv> for months, and we've been thrilled.

VidCaster's also more than just a wrapper around the YouTube API.

They let you import the videos that are already on YouTube and Vimeo, and move them over to VidCaster's streaming service. Crazy good service. Team has been working with online video for years.

Also, VidCaster just demoed at 500 Startups last week and already has paying clients like Microsoft, ZenDesk AirBnb, Twilio, etc...

What I don't get is why TechCrunch seems to give YC companies more coverage than 500 Startups companies. I suppose it's nice to have Arrington as the LP of one of your investors (SV Angel).

<comment><USER5> >What I don't get is why TechCrunch seems to give YC companies more coverage than 500 Startups companies. I suppose it's nice to have Arrington as the LP of one of your investors (SV Angel).

That's just bull-shit. Just because they covered your competitor doesn't mean you get to talk shit about the coverage.

In addition, I just don't get why are you getting so excited about this. You know who is eating your lunch, not VidYard, it's YouTube and the Sales executive who don't know any better than uploading video on YouTube. You have a common enemy called ignorance. Instead of getting riled up about competition may be you guys should work together.

<comment><USER6> ?

iamelgringo is a customer of VidCaster, not a competitor of Vidyard.

I also don't understand your ignorance comment. Vidcaster and Vidyard are two competing companies.

iamelgringo brings up a salient point I think, YC companies get a disproportionate amount of coverage on TC as compared to other startups.

<comment><USER7> Customer of VidCaster? I don't think so, check his previous comments:

"I happen to know Kieran Farr quite well. <http://www.vidcaster.com/> was one of the first companies in our Co-op incubator. And, I have no doubt, that Kieran is going to be far richer than some reporter who still makes his living writing for a company that think that selling yesterday's news written on pieces of dead tree is a viable business model."

<comment><USER6> Pardon me, I inferred from the hackersandfounders.tv site that uses VidCaster was an independent venture and not by a co-op incubator or anything.

The main point I have against this article are that

1) It's poor journalism in that little research into competitors was done. Leena Rao doesn't seem to be aware of the many competitors who have been in this space for years (like VidCaster) but only a few like Ooyala and Brightcove (which TechCrunch uses iirc).

2) Lack of disclosure as to the relationship between TechCrunch and YC startups is a problem. There's an inherent bias without full disclosure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pretty poor journalism, the article is written as if there were no alternatives to youtube for hosting. There are a couple of dozen companies in the video hosting/serving space from Brightcove to Viddler. Wikipedia even has a "List of video hosting services" page.

What makes this company different ?

<comment><USER3> Our focus is on consolidating your web video. Many companies leverage YouTube, that makes sense. We help them kill the outbound link created by the YouTube embed on their site. You can host with us or YouTube and your video players will all look the same.

<comment><USER9> So, essentially you're a front-end on the YouTube API?

<comment><USER3> It's part of the product - customers are using it to transition from YouTube to a more professional (no outbound link, real-time data, customization, etc.) video platform (us).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We're using them as well. We like the ability to queue up videos in the player. Has helped conversions. We also found out that the average attention span was just about 20 seconds on a 90 second vid, so we cut it down to 15 seconds. Cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER11> YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Not using them for your embedded videos (and getting the extra views on your site that will launch you higher in search) could be a mistake for many businesses.

If you want to prevent click throughs, after the video starts to play, just put up an invisible div over the video, but above the controls, so the user can't click through, but can still controle the video.

Once the video ends, pop up whatever you want if you don't want their recommended videos to show.

Best of both worlds.

<comment><USER12> <http://www.youtube.com/t/terms>

See clause 4F, doing this would result in Youtube blocking your site from embedding, and would possibly result in a "google death penalty", definitely not a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Vimeo recently released Vimeo Pro (<http://vimeo.com/pro>) which seems to be addressing a similar market.

Is Vidyard competing with Vimeo or are you addressing a different need?

<comment><USER3> It's directly competitive. We've bundled in more features (chaptering, real- time analytics, player customization, etc.) that should make it much more compelling. We're also an easy implementation of YouTube Chromeless + analytics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What was behind the decision to use Starbucks' size names for your plans? I really like the site and the prices are reasonable, but the thought of signing up for a "Venti" video hosting service doesn't sound appealing to me.

<comment><USER3> Good feedback. We needed some way to refer to the plans on calls, this was an easy solution.

<comment><USER15> The usual solutions of Bronze/Silver/Gold work rather well for that and have the advantage of self-evident meanings and widespread usage. If you want something more amusing, you might try a movie or video metaphor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is why I love Hacker News - although there are other options out there, their feature set (and pricing) pretty much perfectly describes what I was looking for.

I don't know whether this will be the eventual solution vs. ZenCoder (or something similar) and S3, but this certainly seems like a potential option.

<comment><USER17> Maybe I'm just cheap, but I don't see the pricing as very attractive relative to the free options available.

I'm saying that from a relatively small business that is looking to do more video perspective. I'm small enough to be able to host this myself with my own player and not have problems, and not large enough to see the value in $20 or $50 a month. I could see doing the free trial, but 1 video makes it not seem as attractive to me.

If I were you I'd consider doing the trial for a certain number of views instead of the 1 video - that way your true functionality grows with the views (and value) coming to the business. If it were 5000 views a month or something then I get to use the cue up features, see the analytics, etc, but when I'm doing xxxx number of views a month on the videos then I'm more likely to drop the money and convert to a paid plan.

Anyway, just my opinion, but I doubt my monthly small business video hosting will ever be nearing the cost of my invoicing system...

<comment><USER18> Almost anytime you see a product and your reaction is "I could do that myself slightly more cheaply," it means that that product isn't intended for your use.

<comment><USER17> Touche. I say that a lot :-) But there are things I could easily do for cheaper that I still happily pay for - example freshbooks & formstack

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> SproutVideo (<http://www.sproutvideo.com>) is already well established and probably their closest competitor as opposed to Vimeo PRO.

<comment><USER20> Hi, founder of SproutVideo here!

There are a ton of players in this space. Here are some others:

<http://vzaar.com>

<http://viddler.com>

<http://fliqz.com>

<http://wistia.com>

<http://dovie.tv>

Edit: I'd also like to congratulate the founders of VidYard on their product. It looks great. Good luck you guys!

<comment><USER21> SproutVideo's pricing model seems a little mis-aligned in the space with Vidyard and Vimeo Pro. Half the bandwidth for double the price? If you know anything about bandwidth, $1/GB seems excessive.

<comment><USER20> VidYard and Vimeo Pro are both incredibly new offerings. If you look at just about every single established player you'll see that they have very similar pricing models to SproutVideo. VidYard and Vimeo Pro's pricing models seem to be based on the assumption that the majority of their users will not use that much bandwidth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As a fellow entrepreneur from sunny Waterloo, Ontario I've had the pleasure of interacting with michaelrlitt and what I can say is that these guys are going to be big. There's obviously a lot of competition in this space and everybody has good technology under their belt. But what sets these guys apart is that they really get sales and marketing and that's exactly the service they're providing. I have no doubt these guys are going to crush it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Using vidyard on my site and Tumblr blog. Best part is seeing the viewing analytics.

<comment><USER3> Thanks (I'm a founder). We're super glad you're getting value!

<comment><USER24> I like the site - very nice. Has a somewhat similar look to mine...only better (<http://www.growtap.com>). Well done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Your pricing says $40 per 100 GB, up to 3 TB, but your Grande plan is only $20, which also includes 100GB. You also make the claim that for most businesses, that 100GB is enough bandwidth - which I assume means businesses that go over probably do so on account of multiple videos.

If one video of mine in particular was running over-bandwidth, wouldn't it make more sense for me to buy an additional plan at half the price, rather than pay the bandwidth fee? I know it's potentially inconvenient to do so, but it makes the pricing a little silly. I could also host the same video multiple times, and have a rand() select between them, or select the ones that have been selected the least in order to redistribute bandwidth.

It's kind of like on some McDonald's menus, where an Apple Pie is $0.69, or you can buy 2 for $1.39.

Edit: I'm going to email your sales with the FYI.

</comment><comment><USER26> An entire company built around an incremental change to youtube/vimeo/100 other video sites?!

Really?

<comment><USER27> An entire company built around yet another version of Friendster/MySpace/Orkut?

Facebook will never pan out.

<comment><USER26> Good point. Anyone want to start an automobile company?

<comment><USER27> Elon Musk beat you to it ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've just seen the pool-party video which appears after clicking on any of the pictures on the about page (<https://secure.vidyard.com/about_us>). It's weird, and the background music reminds me of erotic movies. I understand that you want to come across as young and dynamic, but I'm not sure this is bringing the message across for your target audience.

Edit: Downvoters, please explain. I didn't mean to insult, but am offering honest feedback on a perceived weak spot - one which I fear could impair the founders intention to make the right impression on their target audience.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the insight - we'll definitely change it, we just thought it was something fun for launch :)

<comment><USER28> Didn't mean to take out the fun - I'd recommend to think about changing at least the music though :) Good luck with your startup! I really like what you are doing; this market is ripe for some innovation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have been wondering why YouTube have not started something like this.

BTW, there is also <http://vidcaster.com> which doing the same thing. Vimeo is doing the same thing now.

Personally, I think if you have multiple sites, then with Adobe Suite and Amazon CloudFront and a few dollars on odesk you can make excellent "video presentation" site for your business. Maybe there is a market for even more customizable service? Something like heroku for Video/FAQ/Tour part of your site?

</comment><comment><USER30> Looks like a Compelling offering! Congrats on the techcrunch coverage.

A key selling point in platform selection is YouTube's massive traffic, while tons of other platforms may win based on the feature set, at the end of the day, the views are on YouTube.

Vidyard seems to be playing the youtube traffic angle well by allowing the videos to remain on YouTube while wrapping the YT API + chrome less layer.

GOOD WORK by you! I'll be testing out that 100GB cap soon.

</comment><comment><USER31> Personally, I find the "Pricing" line of the comparison chart to be misleading. For $199 (a year) you get 50GB of space and 250k views with Vimeo Pro. Under the Free Viyard plan you get 1 video and 101GB of bandwidth. Also, the "Unbranded Player" line of the comparison is checked for Vidyard even though the pricing page says the Free plan uses a branded player.

Maybe just get rid of that pricing line in the comparison?

<comment><USER3> Will do! Thanks for the positive feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The branding opportunity for online videos here is huge. It looks like YouTube missed a large niche here that Vidyard's going to eat up.

</comment><comment><USER33> Looks like a great easy-to-use service, but not one that I expect hackers would use. Why wouldn't you just host your video on Amazon S3 and play them back on your website using something like JW FLV Player?

That solution would cost about 10-20 cents a month (unless you've got heaps of traffic, in which case you're hopefully making heaps of sales anyway...).

</comment><comment><USER18> Article says they're using RTMP streaming. Doesn't that mean it won't work on iPhone/iPad because there's no Flash there?

<comment><USER3> We do HTML5 fall back for iOS/Android devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm always amazed at people who embed YouTube videos on corporate websites, after agonizing about fonts, colors, etc. to get pixel perfect design everywhere else.

At the very least, if you're going to embed youtube, turn off comments on the video :)

Vidyard looks like a great solution for a lot of people.

</comment><comment><USER15> The description "Foo is an X for Y" only works when it doesn't provoke the obvious response: "No, X is the X for Y".

</comment><comment><USER35> Yet another startup with tons of competitors and no real innovation.</comment>


TechStars Launches 11 New Startups In Boulder - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/05/techstars-2010-boulder/ <comment><USER2> My favourite out of the group is RentMonitor [1].

As a student I saw how much effort it takes managing a house with multiple tentants. This has a clearly defined market with customers who have money.

It's good to see many of them have business models baked in from step 1 and are not web consumers plays that I've frequently seen come out of Techstars.

1\. <http://www.rentmonitor.com/>

<comment><USER3> It definitely looks cool (though the landing page main picture is too Microsoft Excel-y - as in not enough appeal). It struck me interesting how the TechStar startup is leveraging YC startup tech like Olark and will probably leverage WePay for payment solution. Throw in notifo support for rent notice alerts (<http://www.rentmonitor.com/feature_tour>), and heck host it on Heroku :-p

Regardless, this is a very good batch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A lot of these look really good, much better than previous TechStars batches.

</comment><comment><USER5> I was initially skeptical of ADstruc, probably because it was a market I know nothing about. I'm sold on it now...watch out - they are going to crush it this year.

<comment><USER6> I checked AdStruct out as well. I asked for a billboard in California: "no results found". Bad. So I said "give me a billboard anywhere". It came up with one result.

It's not great to launch a marketplace that is empty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lots of great ideas there. A few were a little too narrow for my tastes, but best of luck to everyone.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is it just me, or does the cube "o" in gearbox's logo look exactly like Linode's blocks? Same shade of green and everything.</comment>


Get And Keep Yourself Motivated [list post] - <AUTHOR> http://www.dragosroua.com/33-ways-to-get-and-keep-yourself-motivated/ <comment><USER2> So pretty much - don't work, and don't worry that you're not working. Then you'll feel motivated to work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty much :-)</comment></comment>


Don't make founders' equity even - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/24/dont-make-founders-equity-even/ <comment><USER2> "Two were working full-time on the venture, [...]. The third, the brains behind the technology, was part-time. [...] The technology was critical, but the two full-time founders were doing the heavy lifting to build the startup. Five percent would have been a more appropriate allocation for the tech guy."

If the technology was critical, and this third guy was the brain behind it, he deserved more. I'm sure he could find himself other co-founders to do the "heavy lifting". This post repeats "commitment" again and again, how about "added value"? If the tech was the corner stone of this company, the tech guy could have stayed home and still deserved more.</comment>


Who does that server serve? - <AUTHOR> https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html <comment><USER2> I mean, yeah, this is true, but who cares?[1]

It's far too late to actually _change_ any of this; the dream of the computer as a thought amplifier, or of the Internet as a freedom amplifier, are long since dead. The switch to SaaS/SaaSS/whatever sucks, but it's clearly the future, and it's much too profitable relative to the decrease in theoretical value to hope to fight against. The computer of the future is a netbook with a closed-off app store, a dumb terminal attached to someone else's mainframe.

The future is rentseeking, forever. You can either rage fruitlessly against it before eventually giving, turn into a software hermit like Stallman, or get ahead of the game and just start paying your subscription fees already.

[1] Besides Stallman, obviously.

<comment><USER3> > I mean, yeah, this is true, but who cares

Some people care. They'll continue to care regardless of whether you find caring about these issues justifiable or relevant. These same people are also aware of what they're up against: they don't hum along with delusions of grandeur, believing their singular, minute contributions will halt progression of corporate behemoths or allay consumerism. But they're also aware that, if no body actually does care, things will be worse.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Leave a message for the next person who visits this page (pre-alpha) - <AUTHOR> http://fourtonfish.com/message/

<comment><USER2> I think you'll need to implement a queue of some sort. if it's locked while the message is being edited, then any amount of serious traffic will block the whole thing and turn people away.

So instead of leaving a message for the _next_ person, put a message in the queue, and each time somebody visits grab the _next_ message in the queue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for the feedback!

I respectfully disagree and stand by my design decisions.

I've seen projects like the one posted to HN somewhat recently where the guy would accept any PR on a GitHub repo.

This way, you get to leave a message for only one single person in the world. (This also takes care of people posting terrible things on my own website :-)

Yes, while there's a significant traffic, the site is basically unusable, but at the same time this was inevitable if I wanted to let people know about this project.

I recommend saving the link and coming back when the crowd clears up :-)</comment></comment>


A thorough introduction to eBPF - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/740157/ <comment><USER2> If anybody is interested I wrote a go-only library to interact and create ebpf programs. It even parses the compiled elf binary for you and maps it to your variable names:

[https://github.com/nathanjsweet/ebpf](https://github.com/nathanjsweet/ebpf)

<comment><USER3> > However, eBPF opcode programs themselves must be governed by the GPLv2 > anyways, so if you are distributing any software relying on this project you > will probably be open-sourcing the most important part (the eBPF opcode) > anyways.

Really?

That seems a bit harsh...

<comment><USER2> Not my decision sorry. If you are using them for some kind of server side tech then you're probably in the clear, but if you are distributing any eBPF code you write to a consumer (think IoT) then you'll have to think about it.

<comment><USER3> I'm just surprised they would impose that restriction in the kernel considering they have very little problem with closed-source binary blobs for drivers and whatnot.

<comment><USER4> Apparently you can now load non-GPL licensed eBPF programs, but they can't then access certain functions marked as "GPL only". This matches the behavior for kernel modules.

<comment><USER2> Interesting. @icebraining, do you know where this list exists?

<comment><USER5> The helpers are in [http://elixir.free- electrons.com/linux/v4.15-rc3/source/kern...](http://elixir.free- electrons.com/linux/v4.15-rc3/source/kernel/bpf/helpers.c). See the field gpl_only. For the list of which helpers are available in which hooks, the code needs to be read, to find things like: [http://elixir.free- electrons.com/linux/v4.15-rc3/source/net/...](http://elixir.free- electrons.com/linux/v4.15-rc3/source/net/core/filter.c#L3357).

Unfortunately, I don't believe the high level list of which hooks have gpl helpers is published, so reading the code is the best method currently.

<comment><USER6> This list is under progress. Didn't think about adding licensing information for the helpers, but that's an excellent idea!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In [https://progmp.net/froemmgen- middleware2017.pdf](https://progmp.net/froemmgen-middleware2017.pdf), the authors compile a domain specific language to eBPF from inside the Kernel for a research prototype.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been working a little on NFSv4 lately, and wondering why they didn't do something like this instead of the relatively limited COMPOUND. atomic append and server side file copy should be doable without very much language.

</comment><comment><USER9> Could someone knowledgable discuss the loop thing? Is it just checking for loop termination? Or does it forbid loops entirely? If it checks for loop termination, does that imply a counter value that is statically known?

<comment><USER10> AFAIK, it forbids true loops entirely. It's verifying that the code flow graph is a DAG. You can always unroll.

One of the things I'm playing around with is higher level loop construct stolen from graphics shaders. You should still be able to guarantee termination and worse case execution time if done right.

<comment><USER5> That's right, although work is being done to improve the situation. The first is the ability to have function calls: [https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/cover/848824/](https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/cover/848824/). This won't allow loops, but will allow for less inline boilerplate. Building on this base infra, some folks are working to add a loop counter based verification rather than forcing the user to unroll manually.

<comment><USER3> If you can call arbitrary bpf functions I would imagine it would be trivial to allow loops through recursion, perhaps borrowing the 'gas' concept from Etherium to avoid infinite recursion and/or using too much time for function application?

<comment><USER5> The function call infra being added doesn't change the current DAG restrictions, meaning that the functions are verified using a whole-program analysis semantic, so it may end up working more as just a code organization tool than something fundamental. There is already an ability to tail call to other bpf functions, which does more of what you're thinking, and the bpf runtime enforces a limit of 32 of those tail calls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sweet, I was looking for this but forgot its name. Want to use it as the backend of my way over-engineered Lispkit instead of a traditional SECD machine because, why not?

Just need to find the motivation to sort out my lemon grammar...</comment>


More Than One in Four Home-Sellers Dropped Their Price Last Month - <AUTHOR> https://www.redfin.com/blog/2018/09/more-than-one-in-four-home-sellers-dropped-their-price-last-month.html <comment><USER2> Isn't this a side affect of rising interest rates? Two years ago (when I bought my current house) I got about 3.25% interest. Which means a 200K mortgage is $870/mth. With 5%, the mortgage would have to drop to 162K to have the same monthly payments -- almost a 40K drop in house price (about 16%, assuming the mortgage makes up 80% of the home price).

<comment><USER3> In theory, yes. In practice, no.

[https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2013/06/house-prices- and-...](https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2013/06/house-prices-and-mortgage- rates.html)

"There's no strong correlation between interest rates and home prices," said Douglas Duncan, chief economist at Fannie Mae.

<comment><USER4> > hief economist at Fannie Mae.

So the same company that lied through their teeth during the 2008 crisis and buildup to it, to give the banks ability to package junk loans as AAA CDOs? The one that had to be bailed out by the taxpayer eventually? Sure, let's listen to them, they sound like a trustworthy source.

<comment><USER5> He wasn't working there at the time - only started in 2008 post subprime crisis.

Please don't argue ad hominem, if you have an issue with the statement then make your objection directly.

<comment><USER6> Taleb calls these people IYIs: intellectual yet idiot.

There is nothing exceptional about THIS economist that would make him right. The OP had the right idea.

<comment><USER5> What's your point?

<comment><USER6> The point is that it's not an ad hominem attack. The entire profession of economists on balance do not call anything correctly.

<comment><USER5> It is an argument from ad hominem. Or are economists wrong even when they say something you'd agree with?

<comment><USER4> The original comment ("In theory, yes. In practice, no.") is from ad hominem. It does not provide any actual thoughts or arguments, it simply says that there is an economist that thinks this way, implying that it should be enough of a reason to trust it. There was no argument except for ad hominem! Of course the response to that can only be a defusal of such argument.

<comment><USER5> Err did you click on to the link provided with that comment at all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What a strange metric. It's not 'prices are falling' even though doomsayers really want it to say that. IMO what it mostly says is 'Sellers have been posting really high numbers and slowly walking them back.' Which is effectively a time-based auction, so it's not a completely irrational price discovery model.

<comment><USER8> That sounds to me like the market is plateauing.

<comment><USER9> JP Morgan just laid off a ton of Mortgage brokers fwiw.

<comment><USER10> Source: [http://archive.is/3psee](http://archive.is/3psee)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In California this has become noticeable to even the casual watcher of real estate. Per my earlier comment about people who are speculating and trying to 'flip' houses, I'm seeing pretty rapid price rollbacks on houses that were previously sold < 18 months ago. My speculation is that these people are trying to unwind their position because the market is softening and they don't want all their capital tied up waiting for the rebound.

The combination of higher interest rates and tax code changes which limit mortgage interest deductions[1]. While $750K seems like a pretty high cap for limits to kick in, in the Santa Clara county, the median house price is over $1.3M so that is over $500K of mortgage interest you can't deduct.

That changes the calculus of buying an expensive house and I would not be surprised if that is reducing the number of buyers.

[1] [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/what-the-new-tax-law- will-...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/what-the-new-tax-law-will-do-to- your-mortgage-interest-deduction-2018-02-09)

<comment><USER12> I have a friend who works as a realtor and she says that the market is definitely starting to cool off. There are less "mid-range" buyers and more low-end buyers because the prices have risen too much and interest rates are reducing the amount people can borrow. End result is previously a buyer was a mid-range buyers but now they are low-end buyer because the bank is not willing to lend as much anymore.

Also there is data from CAR which shows both sales price and sales rate is declining. Inventory should start to build up going forward as home sit on the market longer.

[https://www.car.org/en/marketdata/data/countysalesactivity](https://www.car.org/en/marketdata/data/countysalesactivity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.ft.com/content/91122596-c8c0-11e8-ba8f-ee390057b...](https://www.ft.com/content/91122596-c8c0-11e8-ba8f-ee390057b8c9) Rana Foroohar Dark clouds gather over the US housing market

<comment><USER14> pay wall

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What is with the repetitive part of the graph that almost looks like a heartbeat? It looks like some kind of yearly cycle where around the holidays the prices don't move so much (probably because everyone's on holiday). It is a bit higher than the last few peaks, but not by that much. I think people also have been raising their expectations of what they will get recently.

I have been watching Zillow price drops well for Tucson, where I've been looking to buy, and waiting for things to hopefully cool off.

<comment><USER3> Helpful hint: Thanksgiving day is the best day of the year to buy a home (offer accepted) in the US, provided you like what's on offer. It's the slow season but there's less inventory.

<comment> village-idiot I always switched apartments in winter for that exact same reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've noticed several houses over the last month or so that haven't sold anywhere near as fast as expected. Around here (Greater Seattle area), houses have been selling in a matter of days: On the market by Wednesday, open house at the weekend, offer accepted on the Monday.

If there had been just one house not selling that fast I'd have assumed overpriced, or something noticeably wrong with them, but even the new builds are struggling to sell at a price that would have been market competitive back in July / August.

<comment><USER17> Check out [https://seattlebubble.com](https://seattlebubble.com). Numbers started changing in May, was "obvious" in sept. Average time on market is up to about two weeks. Was single digit days back in Q2. I still see in demand property going same day. Inventory is up, sales flat to down, prices mostly flat. Way beyond seasonal demand changes. Will be curious to see what happens in Q1/Q2.

<comment><USER18> >. Average time on market is up to about two weeks.

Still insane.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It is interesting but be aware that expressing these figures as a fraction of listings necessarily biases the result to weak markets, where the properties are on the market longer and the inventories are greater. In "strong" markets (according to the point of view of a realtor; dysfunctional markets to everyone else) such as San Francisco inventory is currently near record lows with only about half as many listings as we had in 2010.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been bookmarking a lot of homes on Zillow lately within the app and I get almost weekly emails about prices drops. This is in the San Diego, CA area.

</comment><comment><USER21> I bought a house this past March right before accepting an out-of-the-blue job offer across the country, so I need to sell the house. This Redfin news worries me (although I'm happy for the buyers!)

For anyone who has been through the process of selling a house right at the start of a market turn — what advice would you give? It seems like I need to get rid of the house ASAP, but are there any other important steps that I might miss?

<comment><USER3> Look at "flat fee listing" services. You can save at least 3% (seller's agent commission) and up to 6% by avoiding realtors. These services will charge a flat fee to list your house on the major online portals, but you're on the hook for showing it. You'll still need a lawyer. Not really an ASAP solution, but you can save tens of thousands of dollars this way.

Also, don't sweat a price drop as long as the market you're moving to doesn't lag the market you're in. You might lose money when selling, but if the other market is stalling too you'll pay less and it could be a wash.

Timing a market slowdown such that you sell before a drop and buy after a drop is nearly impossible with a primary residence.

<comment><USER21> Interesting. I'll take a look at flat fee listing services. I hadn't heard of those before.

Unfortunately, I moved from semi-rural countryside to the Bay Area. I won't be buying a house here any time soon haha

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder about the data legitimacy on these sites.

I looked my place up on Zillow a few weeks ago, and it said $1.5 million. There's been only 1 sale here in the past 2 years, artificially low at $950K. A neighbor's just sold for $1.32M.

Meanwhile, Redfin has mine at $1.04M.

Zillow has my original purchase price at about 45% of what it actually was (and publicly recorded at).

WTF?

<comment><USER23> My family who invests in single family homes said that Redfin is far more accurate than Zillow. In other words, he usually ends up paying close to the Redfin estimate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Article seems so click-baity. Last year, more than 1 in 4 home sellers dropped their price, according to the included chart, but the market was hotter than ever.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is true even in Boulder, which mostly endured the 2008 downturn. I'm curious to see how it works out.

<comment><USER9> We'll likely never see a housing crisis quite like 2008, at least not a for a while, but many cities really have overshot reality. I'm in Nashville and it's absolutely insane what people are asking for houses in bad neighborhoods or houses in good neighborhoods. It might not be a lot if you're moving here from California, but if you're from the region even Atlanta or Charlotte, you're getting a bad deal. Condos last I checked were cheaper in Charlotte and Atlanta in good neighborhoods than Nashville. Even in surrounding cities it has greatly outpaced rationality. Homes in East Nashville are up almost 300% in 8 years. That's not normal.

<comment><USER26> Do Airbnb and Vacation homes push prices higher in Nashville? Planning a trip to Nashville and there are a lot of Airbnbs available. I've known a few people with rental or vacation condos in Nashville.

I'm in Atlanta and it's nice to see prices cooling off. Especially since I want to buy soon. A lot of lisitings look like the sellers are way too high especially in hot areas.

<comment><USER27> They absolutely do like tourist-heavy cities like Barcelona or London but a temporary drop in a white-hot housing market isn't a good sign to buy. Houses are still ludicrously expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If you are interested in some really good data on the San Diego area housing market:

[https://www.piggington.com/september_2018_housing_data_slowd...](https://www.piggington.com/september_2018_housing_data_slowdown_here)

</comment><comment><USER29> Would also like to see this data against initial price charts -- my gut is that the market is over pricing on the initial price point and pulling back as the pricing was too optimistic. May just be a sign that people in the market assume their sales could be much more profitable than reality allows.

TLDR: Sellers are trying to squeak out higher prices than in the past and the market is not accommodating the maneuver, or it is a tactic where an initial over inflated price + reduction is a ploy to dangle the properties at the true-wanted initial price.

</comment><comment><USER30> From the article:

> We define a price drop as a listing price reduction of more than 1 percent > and less than 50 percent.

I would like to see the number of houses that increased their listing prices by more than 1% for a clearer picture. Without that information, I don't see how this graph leads to the conclusion of a general price drop.

<comment><USER31> Does that ever happen? As a casual observer, I don't think I've ever seen it. When would a seller raise the asking price of a house already on the market?

<comment><USER30> I don't know how often it happens. That was my question after all. Judging by the downvotes I received, I guess people here either know (or assume) that asking prices don't rise. Unfortunately their downvotes aren't as educational as the statistics I was asking for.</comment></comment></comment>


France's Macron calls for democratic conventions to rebuild EU - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-07/macron-calls-in-athens-for-democratic-conventions-to-rebuild-eu <comment><USER2> Well alot of problems that the EU has had have been related on countries having fiscal control but not monetary control.

[http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/100314/whats- differe...](http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/100314/whats-difference- between-monetary-policy-and-fiscal-policy.asp)

Before the EU and a central currency a country like Greece would print money to deflate its debts, this would cause the currency fall in relation to its neighbors, which makes it cheap to visit Greece, which stimulates the economy and the economy inflates until its time to repeat.

With the Euro currency this option is off the table for Greece. I'm not sure how they solve this unless they move to a model more like Canada where the Federal government controls the majority major monetary decisions and lets individual provinces(EU countries) decide how to spend the money that the main government gives it, thereby limiting the local governments(EU Countries) ability to go into debt and preventing a situation like the absurd spending that went on in Greece.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why not let American states issue their own currencies and have 50 different flavors of dollar, then? I mean, everyone knew that already but considered the advantages of a common currency and common market for goods and services a better option overall. Adopting such exposes various problems (some more political than others) but that doesn't mean going back to a more familiar inefficient system is going to give you a better result.

The EU does need some sort of central budgeting/policy mechanism, but participation needs to be vastly easier and bureaucracies (national and federal) dismantled. Governance should be an _activity_ not a specific job or class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As French are getting tired of Macron's "same old", it's time for another grandiose statement-fest, this time about EU, deeper integration, unity and whatever.

</comment><comment><USER4> A true U.S. of E maybe?

I have a hard time envisioning the various Euro heads of state accepting a subordinate role to a Euro-prez but hey, we did it back in 1787. So it's at least possible.

<comment><USER5> It's amazing that it worked given that it wasn't intentional. The US was originally envisioned as a system much closer to the EU than the modern day US. Overreaction to the failures of the Articles of Confederation due to an overly weak federal government pushed the pendulum the other way and created a much stronger latent federal government than was intended as it started to slowly exercise the full extent of the letter of the law over the next centuries.

<comment><USER6> Not to mention one A. Lincoln changing the rules to accommodate a war.

The first constitution didn't leave much ability to raise taxes, since a loathing of taxes help start the revolution. The result was so destructive, a new constitution became inevitable, and Washington spearheaded

The Return of George Washington: Uniting the States, 1783-1789, by Edward Larson is a good source on these events.

Some learned from this that low taxes aren't such a great thing; others, obviously, have yet to learn (or admit) that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not seeing a reference to the UK, which is probably political tact. It would be tragically funny if this was all leading to "De Gaulle was right, accepting the United Kingdom was a mistake," but I should stop even thinking of the tragically funny things at this point.</comment>


A Wall Street Informant Who Double-Crossed the FBI - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-23/-bro-i-m-going-rogue-the-wall-street-informant-who-double-crossed-the-fbi <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13942266](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13942266)</comment>


Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/ff_openmanufacturing?currentPage=all

<comment><USER2> Aside from hardware there are the more fuzzy areas in the embedded/hardware world where Open Source can make a lot of inroads - anything from Firmware through to VHDL/Verilog designs for FPGAs.

The later is useful because it's more accessible in a way - you have a standard Altera or whatever board, and simply upload your design to exercise it. You can also simulate, debug, etc. This puts it on the software end of the spectrum, but ongoing wins here will eventually broaden.

<http://www.opencores.org/> is already doing some good work on this.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have been very tempted to buy one of these..If you're interested in the Arduino project, you have to check out <http://www.freeduino.org/> .Contains a host of info on the Arduino board.

</comment><comment><USER4> Open applications on an open OS on an open laptop... now all we need is an open design of a high-tech factory.

<comment><USER5> Isn't that what reprap is supposed to evolve into?

Watching people try to enforce IP rules on physical fabrication ought to be entertaining.

<comment><USER4> > Isn't that what reprap is supposed to evolve into?

Yup... but I don't know if reprap will be able to provide electronic parts on par with current ones in the next 5 years. An open-design factory (that takes up a building) is feasible right now, however.

<comment><AUTHOR> I heard a recent podcast in which the inventor of reprap was interviewed [http://www.thefutureandyou.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=3812...](http://www.thefutureandyou.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=381248). In the interview he said that in a new version, to be released next year, it will be possible to lay down strips of a conductor within plastic materials to make circuit boards.

<comment><USER4> Yup, even better, they've been trying to print motors (with magnetic components). But I still think we're ~5 years away from printing a consumer electronics device. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> i have been wanting to see an opensource media player that can compete with the zune and or ipod. using android would be a good OS for it and make apps portable so the largest difference would be if the mobile phone was installed or turned on. my hunch is that an openhardware product that had the following might work REALLY well.

-small form factor ~ 3.5"x2"x .25" -flash based storage ( internal flash and maybe external port ) -bright LCD display with 320x200 display -wifi -supports OpenGL ES (nvidia tegra would be great) -battery -gps -bluetooth -wii based accelerometers.

nokia has a set of products that are a good start, but i think we could do better.

</comment><comment><USER7> Now that I've read the entire article, I think the author makes the same mistakes that the Chinese ripoffs do. He's talking about the guys selling the $400 museum monitor going out of business because they're so expensive. But price is only a small part of the solution. I'm willing to bet that the mfr knows his market, understands their needs much better than the cheap newcomers, has a better distribution network and reputation in the field. It's really hard to compete solely on price unless you're selling cheap consumer commodity goods which this is anything but.

<comment><AUTHOR> You could have said the same about Linux compared to Solaris, pUnix and Windows 15 years ago. Now Linux is the dominant comercial OS.

<comment><USER7> OK, but how many small companies will fight for 15 years to get a piece of what is really not a very large market (museums)?

The point is that price is probably not enough of a competitive advantage to topple the market leader. Given enough time anything can happen, but you have to be reasonable about what's likely.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that price is not enough but I do think price/performance is. I believe this is why the consumer Linux desktop has not been as successful as enterprise Linux.

It may take 15 years for the idea of open source hardware to be accepted. Once people are comfortable that lower price does not imply lower quality I doubt that it will be a hard sell. I agree that now that may not be the case for the museum environmental sensor market but until someone try's it will not be known.

Open source software achieves its cost savings by eliminating or greatly reducing many levels of organization and overhead that exist in proprietary software vendors (i.e. sales, marketing, human resources, project management,..) not by reducing quality. Larry Augustine has a good article describing this <http://www.sandhill.com/opinion/editorial.php?id=54>. It is reasonable to think that the same thing could happen with hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Open source software is appealing because it's free. There is a very low amount of commitment when you download the source for open-source software. You can sort of poke around and come back to it as you please.

Open-source hardware requires you to commit money (would have mattered more to me when I was a student), and a little more time to really get anything useful out of it. And when all is said and done, it is considerably more difficult to distribute your creation.

<comment><USER9> You just managed to prove that you have no understanding of what Open Source is actually about.

The entire purpose of open source if you go back to the origin is about the Freedom to build upon, produce, and learn from other's software. Stallman was frustrated with the printer at the lab because he couldn't fix a flaw that he had previously fixed on a earlier printer.

With hardware if their is a flaw or it just doesn't quite meet the need you have then you can take the design and fix the flaw, or build upon the base to get what you need. That is the purpose of Free, Open Source Software and Hardware.

Open source has little to nothing to do with being free that has been a side effect of giving the source away, why charge for a product if anyone can build it themselves?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The combination of open source hardware and software is very exciting. Especially if someone can create viable home fab.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is anyone else concerned that if all of the easy money in high tech is undercut then there won't be any more profits to fund continuing innovation? As neat as something like Arduino may be, it's not exactly cutting edge technology.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't have to be cutting edge. I do some hardware/embedded SW moonlighting. Since a lot of the smaller projects seemed to have a common platform, I made a run of PC boards so I didn't have to reinvent the wheel with every new project. If I had known about the Arduino at the time I wouldn't have bothered: I'd just have used their design with my firmware and saved a bunch of time.

The point of this is to build on someone else's work. Just like I can use Apache without having to build my own webserver, I can use the Arduino design and add my customizations to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I live near NYC, I was actually thinking of taking their arduino class in two weeks. <http://www.eventbrite.com/event/190440613>

</comment><comment><USER5> I like the idea that the internet of things will be built with a diversity of agendas.

</comment><comment><USER4> "I hear the sound of a thousand business models crumbling."</comment>


FCC wants real answers from ISPs on broadband investment - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/08/fcc-wants-real-answers-from-isps-on-broadband-investment.ars <comment><USER2> what total hogwash. the FCC legally prevents competition in the first place through the high cost of regulatory compliance and then makes a few token gestures in the consumer interest. If the government really had a problem with what the telecoms do they would cut the subsidies they receive.

I'm not even going to bother going into the whole AT&T NSA fiasco because then we're feeding the conspiracy troll.</comment>


How to Be an Effective CEO - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/07/how-to-be-an-effective-ceo.php <comment><USER2> loved this line: "Core is what you have to do really well and do in-house. Everything else you can and should outsource"</comment>


DRM advocates getting nervous about consumer backlash - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070923-drm-advocates-getting-nervous-about-consumer-backlash.html <comment><USER2> The content owners' problem is that they look at this is a black-and-white issue. The DRM on iTunes is about as restrictive as is acceptable, and it's at a level that users rarely bump up against.

Here's a free idea for, say, NBC Universal that will rocket them to the forefront of digital content. Make a website with a slick streaming viewer, and put your whole content archive up there. The entirety of show and movie you've ever produced, outtakes, behind-the-scenes, everything. Organize it well and give it a nice UI, and it will instantly become huge. Put in some ads (as a user, I have no problem with being forced to watch a few 30-second ads in exchange for an hour of good, well-presented content), and you'll be printing money.</comment>


Classic IT short jokes collection - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sysadminsarena.com/classic-it-short-jokes-collection-great-after-a-busy-day-e5869f6076f8#.9rw8j2411 <comment><USER2> Two strings walk into a bar.

The first string says, "I'll have a rum and coke."

The second string says, "Same here.#uu6€^My¥ZZ~~0◀<bell><bell><bell><tab>000x[,_5"

And the first says, "Sorry, my friend here's not null terminated."

<comment><USER3> An ASCII character walks into a bar. The bartender says "What's wrong?" The ASCII character frowns and says "I have a parity error." The bartender nods and says "Yeah, I thought you looked a bit off."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A binary number was walking with it's head down. Some guy asks: Hey, are you sad? The binary number responds: No, I'm just a bit off...

</comment><comment><USER5> I question the decision to format this entire post as <h2> but I like the jokes :)

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you for your feedback. I also question myself this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I didn't get the ICMP one. Or the RHEL one.

But the .DS_Store joke was great.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think those are inside jokes.

<comment><USER6> They're all inside jokes!

<comment><AUTHOR> you got me

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Tell us your best!

<comment><USER7> Lotus Notes.</comment></comment>


A Crash Course in Information and Visual Design - <AUTHOR> http://throwww.com/a/1q3

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this cause I had some time and figured I could have used something like this when I started out. I hope it's helpful.

<comment><USER2> It gives a good overview of the topics that made me want to learn more about them. I think some links to resources for further information after each section would be very useful for someone using this article as a starting point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point - I'll add some reference material.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I never appreciated design until I sat down with one of my graphic designer friends. He would spend hours on what I thought were simple things such as typography and placement of objects. Graphic design is under-appreciated and usually goes unnoticed unless it's bad enough to be noticeable.

</comment><comment> alok-g >> Consider why newspapers are written in columns rather than across the entire page. Or why the text block on this site is only 600 pixels wide.

Why are multiple columns not preferred on the web as opposed to wasting half the screen space. I guess there may be issues with scrolling but those should be solvable.

<comment><USER4> I see three main reasons.

1\. The web has its origins in the world of research and academia where most publications have at most 2 columns and usually only one. The current "newspaper/magazine" trend and the challenges associated with it and large display sizes are quite recent.

2\. In the early 90s, the average display size was 800x600. At that size, a line of text set at 14px contained roughly 100 characters. Nobody really felt the need for shorter lines. Besides, newspapers don't lay out their content in columns because of legibility concerns but because it makes cutting and moving (parts of) articles easier an improves the general flexibility of their composition. And that's good for advertising, too.

3\. Back to the origins of the web, one of the main design goals of its creator was to create a medium that was as independant of the client as possible. From that point of view, columns seem to be quite difficult to execute well. But of course, most of today's web doesn't really fit in their original view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In it you say >The "Articles by" pane floats on the right side of the page, but below the title, not inline."<. Do you think having the Articles by section on the right as a fixed div is better since a user will always have them visible on the right? Instead of it getting lost the moment you're finished reading the mere beginning of the article?

</comment><comment><USER6> Excellent post. Would have left a comment on the original article but I'm not about to give permissions to a new app just to leave a comment. Please consider an alternate comment system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ndunn2. When I built the commenting system, I figured that asking people for the bare minimum information from their twitter account would be enough to get them to sign up, but it really seems I was wrong. I worried anon posts would result in too many "stfu nigger fag" type comments, and didn't want to give up any design to Disqus. And sign-up on the site I figured was too much of a hastle. Ugh......

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love this site, keep up the good work.

</comment><comment><USER5> excellent read. thanks.</comment>


"2015 will be the year that Perl 6 officially launches for production use" - <AUTHOR> https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/get_ready_to_party/ <comment><USER2> I've been writing Perl every day, at work and at home, since 1993, ranging from mission critical operational components in the USAF, to automation that produced many 9's of network availability in a 'fortune 10' giant, to innovative operational management and process systems in a Silicon Valley (kind of) startup, to some pretty interesting stuff at my current company (SAP).

Perl 5 has certainly paid the bills. I have taught it to hot-shot C programmers and mainframe Cobol programmers alike in a community college.

Perl 5, by any modern standard, is, at best, a 'quaint' language.

Perl 6 is literally everything I wanted Perl 5 to be. The incremental data typing is very exciting. The regular syntax is going to make it even easier to teach. And there are so many other well considered and awesome features.

And I just get giddy when I think of the amazing things that really smart people are going to make with Perl 6. It's powerful from the top of its head to the bottom of its feet. And I think that it's going to be a very fast language too.

Thank you, Perl. Thanks to the many people who have made it possible. May my 13+ years of high hopes not be in vain!

<comment><USER3> I haven't touched Perl in quite a long time. For the type of automation stuff you are doing, i'd likely use python or ruby, depending on the nature of the problem.

Would you say people like me should be looking hard at Perl 6? I'm curious what the benefits would be.

<comment><USER2> At least for the past decade or so, I would (roughly and humbly) put Ruby and Python on par with Perl 5 for the purposes of system administration, with a whole lot of pros, cons and caveats. Very roughly. It's just that, as a language, Perl has always resonated with me, even though I've rather enjoyed writing in both Ruby and Python.

Assuming you are akin to 'Jill Sysadmin' or 'Joe Devops', I would honestly say that Perl 6 won't be more compelling than Perl 5 for a while.

And, by the way, Perl 5 has grown enormously in the past 10 years. I would say that if you haven't taken a look in a while, give it another shake.

I honestly struggle to imagine the really cool things that will start to come out of Perl 6 acceleration. It has some really novel concurrency concepts, far more interesting than goroutines, for instance.

And once again, I _believe_ Perl 6 will turn into a very fast language.

<comment><USER4> > And, by the way, Perl 5 has grown enormously in the past 10 years. I would > say that if you haven't taken a look in a while, give it another shake.

 _this_. I can hack a bit in Perl 5, but "modern Perl" is virtually a unique language that just so happens to be written using the same words I use. I haven't had a chance to really learn modern practices, I keep telling myself I'm going to sit down and do it, but I haven't had a chance. But what I've seen is really pretty different than what I grew up with.

It's pretty amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this is true, I'm incredibly excited. Perl is like a girl I used to love, broke up with, but never got over. I'm eager to start hacking on Perl 6 code, but don't want to put the time in dealing with preproduction versions of the language.

Very exciting.

<comment><USER5> To me, Perl was a girl like none I'd ever met, strange and wild and inspiring! But polite society rejected her... it was just because they didn't really _know_ her. My parents said she was trouble and banished her from our home. I loved her so much I would sneak out at night and find any way I could to spend some time with her.

(Wait, or is this the plot of _Phantom of the Opera?_ I'm bad at musicals.)

<comment><USER6> It's the plot to Les Miserables, I think. Not sure.

<comment><USER7> It's not the plot to either, I'm afraid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Compiler feature matrix: [http://perl6.org/compilers/features](http://perl6.org/compilers/features) Note that there is also a JVM target. This is exciting!

<comment><USER9> It is a pity that the concurrency column is as red as it is. I hope it does not end up like Perl threads.

It would be so nice to have easy threads in this language.

<comment><USER10> Rakudo MoarVM is the real Perl6, and it's almost all green.

<comment><USER9> Ah OK then great! Thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> IIRC, this was a premature claim that has been written without any consulting of the actual Perl 6 community:

[http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2014-11-05#i_9617218](http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2014-11-05#i_9617218)

<comment><USER12> I'm confused...the post says that the speaker is Larry Wall. Is he really considered a 'random outsider' to the Perl 6 community?

<comment><USER13> Larry is very involved in Perl 6[1]. I'm not sure what grondilu was thinking there. While as far as I know Larry sprang that on the rest of us, the general reaction I've seen has been that the gauntlet has been thrown down, and we've got to live up to it.

[1] [https://github.com/TimToady](https://github.com/TimToady)

<comment><USER11> The speaker is Larry Wall but I interpreted timotimo's quote as meaning that the abstract on the FOSDEM page, along with the pseudo-announcement, has not been written by Larry himself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unfortunately I cannot recommend the parrot backend for production use yet. We recently found a serious GC bug which is reproducible under very tight memory constraints, such as my mips box with 256MB RAM or with very big perl6 modules.

I'm working on it for a week already and cannot promise to be finished until Jan 31, 2015.

But the other 2 backends, jvm and moar, are doing fine.

<comment><USER10> Parrot should just be abandoned, MoarVM is the way to go.

<comment><USER14> If you care about small perl6 apps, which do not have to scale with concurrent CPUs, yes. But parrot has a much bigger scale. And lock-free threads.

<comment><USER15> And JIT?

<comment><USER14> The parrot jit will need some time. First the runloop changes for method calls and argument autoboxing needs to be reverted, then the jit will be revived.

But on the other side I just fixed the GC bug, so it looks good now even on parrot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So, will 2015 also finally be the year of Linux on the Desktop?

<comment><USER17> Just thought the same thing.

However, Linux on the Desktop (almost) already had its time, and it passed. It was around 2009, Ubuntu was at its pinnacle, it was the time of Compiz and Gnome 2 and transparent terminals and themes and whatever. A lot of my (non- technical) friends were suddenly interested in Linux (well, distros of GNU+X11+Desktop Environment+Free/Open Source applications). This was a free alternative to Windows, better than Vista or XP, actually easier to use for many tasks ("I can't believe that it is so easy to install new fonts, I never knew how to do that on Windows"). This was before all of the experimentation (Gnome 3, Unity, ...) that, while in principle a good thing, the way it was executed effectively killed the old lineages (Gnome 2). When it comes to languages: Python 2.7, and on-topic: Perl 5. This was also before all the annoying in-fighting for _mostly_ political reasons (systemd _cough_ but there are many more examples). I don't know whether politics is an issue for Perl.

But that there is no golden way of transitioning to a new version in the FOSS world definitely is a problem that is harming so many projects.

<comment><USER18> But there is. Make damn sure the old and the new can live side by side on the same system for as long as the user/admin see fit. Thus making the user/admin the arbiter of change, not the project devs or the distro maintainers.

You find this on the kernel level, where old and new APIs sit side by side. But higher up it seems like egos override pragmatism. Or "perfect is the enemy of good".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would like Perl to be the Perfect Extended Ruby Language. Sometime ago, there was a post from some Perl people about using Scala for the next Perl. Today Haskell, Clojure, Julia, Scala, Ruby and Lisp (batteries provided by quicklisp) are very big contenders.

Perl has cpan but I think the Perl community is really small, the great exodus happened long ago. Perl can make you feel as a real hacker, also J, but cryptic syntaxes is no longer buying you anything.

How can anyone seriously take any credibility to a calendar when Perl 6 has been delayed for ever.

Perl 6 is not the gift that Perl 5 was hoping to receive, Perl 6 is a modest advance not a revolution.

Today, now, we need much more. I wish Perl 6 the best, but I doesn't believe it will gets much traction.

Edited: Grammar. Summary: Too little, too late, there is no longer confidence.

<comment><USER20> Honestly, there are so many (too many) languages out there now. I highly doubt any of them has more than 100 regular contributers.

Perl built an awesome foundation because in the beginning, that was all there was so you had 1000's of regular contributers to the core and cpan. I don't think any language will ever see that kind of activity again.

Perl6 has a lot going for it though. I believe with its new OO system, concurrency similar to Go, and the ability to compile to a binary, might take this new language to places where Ruby, Python, Perl5 can't go.

And in the similar perl5 fashion, it will be the programmers and not the corporates that own it. Therefore one is only limited by their imagination and not their pocket book.

<comment><USER21> Do you mean contributors to the core or to the package system?

Because NPM (for Node.js) has a cool way to browse the recent updates at 100/page at [https://www.npmjs.org/browse/updated](https://www.npmjs.org/browse/updated) and so far today over 500 modules have been updated.

We live in a much bigger world than Perl was, so that's not surprising. The huge trouble is that these hackers don't talk much to each other.

<comment><USER22> The equivalent in the Perl world is at [https://metacpan.org/recent](https://metacpan.org/recent).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A yapc europe talk mentions even more features:

[http://act.yapc.eu/ye2014/talk/5704](http://act.yapc.eu/ye2014/talk/5704)

</comment><comment><USER23> As a related preview, Larry's keynote for the Austrian Perl Workshop last month:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enlqVqit62Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enlqVqit62Y)

(He mostly talks about his travels.)

<comment><USER24> So Larry uses LinuxMint. Good to know that he sticks to the Free Software principles :)

<comment><USER25> Is that sarcasm? Because Linux Mint certainly includes and provides access to non-free software.

<comment><USER26> GNU's child Debian provides access to non-free software. Any OS provides access to non-free software.

<comment><USER27> > GNU's child Debian provides access to non-free software

Correct. That's why Debian is not in this list of Free GNU/Linux Distributions: [http://www.gnu.org/distros/free- distros.html](http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html)

<comment><USER26> I can still compile non-free software to any Distro on FSF's list.

The policy is if the official repos have non-free software. You can always install non-free on any of the FSF listed distros also. Also I think the world has moved past FSF when you just look at the distro names. Very small communities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> After a quick look, Perl 6 still looks like $#%&@ to me. I don't see why anyone would bother.

When Python 3 came around, I thought it was a good idea and that everyone would want to migrate as soon as possible. What we got instead is 3 more parallel installs of language versions. Beside Py-2.7 (which will apparently never go away), you will need Py-3.3, 3.4 AND 3.5 because every project wants a different one. Why would anyone want the same drama with Perl?

<comment><USER29> There's definitely a lot of very interesting stuff in Perl 6, but sadly, I can only get all too well where you're coming from: aside from adding a lot of visual clutter (which _does_ matter), I've come to see the overuse of sigils (in both 5 and 6) to be just wrong, conceptually. It's like they're of the biggest flaws in Perl 5 that should have been at the top of the list of stuff to get rid of.

Yet they lie at the very heart of what the language _is_ , to many people -- to such an extent that to do without them in Perl 6 would have violated one of the key design principles from its earliest days: "Perl 6 should still be Perl."

<comment><USER30> > overuse of sigils

"Overuse" is subjective. If you are you suggesting that some use is good, can you give an example of usage you think is good and usage you think represents overuse?

That said, I didn't like some specific things about use of symbols in P5 and the problems have been fixed in Perl 6.

And of course there is more than one way to do it, for example this is one way to write the Ackermann function in P6 using Unicode names (symbols) for parameter/argument identifiers:

proto A(Int \𝑚, Int \𝑛) { @[𝑚][𝑛] //= { _} }

multi A(0, Int \𝑛) { 𝑛 + 1 } multi A(1, Int \𝑛) { 𝑛 + 2 } multi A(2, Int \𝑛) { 3 + 2 _ 𝑛 } multi A(3, Int \𝑛) { 5 + 8 * (2 __𝑛 - 1) }

multi A(Int \𝑚, 0 ) { A(𝑚 - 1, 1) } multi A(Int \𝑚, Int \𝑛) { A(𝑚 - 1, A(𝑚, 𝑛 - 1)) }

(Based on [http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Ackermann_function#Perl_6](http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Ackermann_function#Perl_6))

<comment><USER30> Hopefully better formatting:

      proto A(Int \𝑚, Int \𝑛) { @[𝑚][𝑛] //= {} }

      multi A(0, Int \𝑛) { 𝑛 + 1 }
      multi A(1, Int \𝑛) { 𝑛 + 2 }
      multi A(2, Int \𝑛) { 3 + 2 𝑛 }
      multi A(3, Int \𝑛) { 5 + 8 * (2 𝑛 - 1) }

      multi A(Int \𝑚, 0) { A(𝑚 - 1, 1) }
      multi A(Int \𝑚, Int \𝑛) { A(𝑚 - 1, A(𝑚, 𝑛 - 1)) }

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What's supposed to be so great about Perl 6? I associate Perl with inscrutable cat-walked-on-the-keyboard programs and little else. Can someone in the know explain?

<comment><USER32> Perl was, in its day, a breath of fresh air. It had an emphasis on practicality that made easy things very easy: regex literals, default arguments like $_, minimal syntax overhead, with things that would be syntax in other languages hoisted to interpreter args (-e, that arg that means "run this as an awk-style loop"), and so on. More than that, the project worked as a holistic ecosystem, rather than just a language and some tools: these days every language has something like CPAN, but it was a huge innovation at the time. Perl also pioneered a lot of the unit-testing infrastructure that we take for granted these days; every project in CPAN was expected to have tests, using the same libraries, and they ran as part of the install process. A cynic might say that perl innovated here out of necessity; lacking static typing and not having VM isolation means good unit tests are a necessity. But still, the resulting infrastructure is very good, and some very solid programs are written in perl. In many ways I'd say it was the go of its day.

The downside of the emphasis on practicality was that the language always suffered from incoherence; with no principled foundation it's been slow to adapt as the practical things users want to do change (e.g. I'd argue string manipulation is a lot less important than it used to be - if you were writing perl today, you might give json manipulation the same prominence as regexes). Perl 6 may have been an effort to fix this, but went too far in the opposite direction; overly formalized, with a premature separation between VM and language that massively slowed development.

There's a lot of good stuff about modern perl - Moose and the like - but IMO it's too little, too late; other languages have been able to improve their infrastructure to (mostly) match perl for easy things. Meanwhile perl's incoherence makes it very hard to write large programs and solve hard problems, where languages with a firmer theoretical foundation and stronger stylistic principles have a huge advantage.

<comment><USER33> I think the impact of Perl is even bigger than what you are describing. I kind of see Perl as the first language which finally lead the masses out of the wilderness-of-C, and brought forth the light of reference-counting/garbage- collection (no more manual memory management and segfaults), dynamic typing, and "advanced" data structures like hashes/dictionaries (no more off-by-one errors, no more buggy reimplementations with pointer chasing). And actual honest-to-goodness strings, not null-terminated abominations. All without out a syntax that was too scary or unfamiliar. In the 90's Perl was the gateway drug to the more lispy future that we now inhabit.

<comment><USER34> I like that Perl 5 uses reference counting instead of a full-blown GC and that small scripts start up quickly with a small memory footprint. Alas, Perl 6 went down the garbage collecting virtual machine path, at which point, it has to catch up with Java while trying to differentiate itself from it.

<comment><USER30> What startup delay and RAM usage do you think is just too large to be acceptable for a small script, no matter how good a language/compiler is in other respects?

<comment><USER34> Good question, and I'm not even sure. Perl 5 on my Mac is about 1.2 MB resident to run a one-liner, though, and I'm pretty sure I _can 't_ load the JVM in 1 or 2 MB. Need to follow up on that to find smallest practical Java program (as a contrast)

Similarly (same laptop), I can get perl to print its version (5.16.2) in about 0.01 secs (2nd time), but java (1.8.0_11-b12) takes about 0.11 secs (2nd time).

Most of my work is in Java, but it gets to be a tyrannical hammer that must be used for everything in some minds :-(

Again: Parrot having to compete with the JVM makes me sad.

<comment><USER30> Fwiw most Rakudo devs now prefer MoarVM for most things because it's generally the fastest, leanest, least buggy and most specification compliant of the currently available backends (MoarVM, JVM, Parrot). MoarVM is definitely the right pick for folk who want the leanest startup P6 can deliver.

[http://moarvm.org/](http://moarvm.org/)

Even with the MoarVM backend, Rakudo takes a lot more time and RAM to startup than the compiler for most mainstream languages. It handily beats the JVMs devs use but that's not saying much.

On the third hand, a few devs have said they are regularly using Rakudo at $work, including for one-liners.

If anyone wants to try P6 I recommend RakudoBrew:

[https://github.com/tadzik/rakudobrew](https://github.com/tadzik/rakudobrew)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wonder what kind of community will grow up around Perl 6.

<comment><USER36> I wonder which features of Perl 6 would make them want to use it at all.

<comment><USER30> If I had to pick one thing it would be practical Unicode for the rest of the world.

Most English devs have no idea just how bad things are with current langs.

A quick experiment.

First, translate "Practical" in to Thai: ปฏิบัติจริง ([https://translate.google.com/#en/th/Practical](https://translate.google.com/#en/th/Practical))

Next, see Unicode Inspector: ([http://apps.timwhitlock.info/unicode/inspect?s=ปฏิบัติจริง](http://apps.timwhitlock.info/unicode/inspect?s=ปฏิบัติจริง))

Note that ปฏิบัติจริง is 9 somethings or 11 something elses.

Finally, move the cursor along the "characters" in either google translate's output field (it's fiddly but works if you are patient) or the Unicode Inspector.

 __Note that there are SEVEN movements. __

What sort of elements are these cursor movements moving over?

Graphemes.

There aren't 7 Code Points. Or 7 Code Units. Or 7 Bytes.

There are 7 Graphemes.

Graphemes are defined in the Unicode consortium's glossary as "What a user thinks of as a character."

[http://www.unicode.org/glossary/#grapheme](http://www.unicode.org/glossary/#grapheme)

There really couldn't be a more fundamentally important aspect of text processing for half the planet than dealing with text at the grapheme level ("what a user thinks of as a character") BY DEFAULT, unless the dev wants to do tricky stuff.

But almost all current langs (including Python 3.x) get this stuff terribly wrong in all sorts of ways.

Perl 6 takes graphemes seriously.

From Synopsis 15 ([https://raw.githubusercontent.com/perl6/specs/master/S15-uni...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/perl6/specs/master/S15-unicode.pod)):

* Perl 6 by default operates on graphemes

* Perl 6, by default, stores all strings given to it in NFG form, Normalization Form Grapheme. It's a Perl 6-invented character representation, designed to deal with un-precomposed graphemes properly.

* The Perl 6 C<Str> type, and more generally the C<Stringy> role, deals exclusively in NFG form.

* By default regexes operate on the grapheme (NFG) level, regardless of how the string itself is stored.

So, as far as graphemes ("what a user thinks of as a character") are concerned, Perl 6 gets this basic aspect of text processing right when almost all others get it terribly wrong.

(There are a couple other langs that seem to have made an effort to take graphemes seriously enough. For example, the .length function for strings in Elixir (related to Erlang) returns the count of graphemes by default. And a few like Clojure take graphemes seriously, just not seriously enough.)

So, a significant and rapidly growing chunk of the planet's programmer population are likely to end up interested in at least playing with P6 to see if it gets this bit right (and they'll find it does).

<comment><USER37> _Perl 6, by default, stores all strings given to it in NFG form, Normalization Form Grapheme._

Perhaps in specification, the feature comparison matrix suggests that NFG is Not Yet Implemented in any implementation in practice:

[http://perl6.org/compilers/features](http://perl6.org/compilers/features)

I wonder if that "significant and rapidly growing chunk of the planet's programmer population" will find that an untested and partially implemented feature suffices for their needs in the real world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I am still waiting for Hurd.

<comment><USER39> When will be the Year of Hurd on the Desktop?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> 2015 will be the year that Perl 6 officially announces the date on which it will launch for production use.

</comment><comment><USER41> To me Perl is the monk's language. Not very friendly monks either. Solitary monks, except when they're talking about the virtues of Perl with each other. Except within intentional cloisters, it's not a good language to use for largescale or outward looking projects.

</comment><comment><USER42> Does it still matter? My last line of Perl at work was back in 2005.

Since then, our clients have been using Python, Groovy and Powershell code for the same set of tasks.

<comment><USER43> I know this is ever so slightly off topic, but is Groovy in popular use these days? I seem to see it mentioned quite a lot recently.

If so, what for? General scripting tasks?

<comment><USER44> Groovy is one of the best kept secrets of the JVM scripting world. I hardly _ever_ write pure Java if I can do it in Groovy instead. Look at how insanely easy parallel programming is in Groovy using gpars: [http://gpars.codehaus.org/](http://gpars.codehaus.org/)

It's literally:

GParsPool.withPool { def result = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].collectParallel {it * 2} }

Why oh why people still torture themselves with pure Java.

<comment><USER30> An equivalent in P6:

      [1,2,3,4,5] X* 2

This (theoretically) parallel processes and then puts the results back in order. The X is the cross metaoperator; it applies the following operator (the * symbol which is the multiply operator) to each of the combinations of the items in the lists on its left and right, and does so in parallel if the compiler so chooses, and ensures the results are returned as if it was processed sequentially.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 2015 Half Life 3 can be announced

<comment><USER45> 2015\. 5 - (1 * 0) - 2 = 3. Confirmed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> hopefully all my cryptic perl5 1-liners will still work.

<comment><USER22> Perl 5 is not going away for a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> but, but, but... Netcraft has confirmed: Perl is dying!

</comment><comment><USER48> HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA

</comment><comment><USER49> Perl is easily the worst language that the world has ever known. Let's just forget that mistake and move on.

<comment><USER40> You consider awk, sed, and bash to be better programming languages than perl? You're funny.</comment></comment>


Net Neutrality is about to get Trumped – let's build a wall to defend it - <AUTHOR> https://opendemocracy.net/digitaliberties/matthew-linares/internet-equality-is-about-to-get-trumped-let-s-build-wall-to-defend-it <comment><USER2> Without net neutrality you can kiss independent media goodbye.</comment>


Ask HN: Are Docker, CoreOS and mesosphere dying or growing company? - <AUTHOR> I am following these companies from past one year. All I know is that these companies built really good products but now they don't have a proper revenue model. <comment><USER2> I'm not sure that I follow your conclusion... enterprise support revenue is real.

Kubernetes is obviously very hot right now.

Mesosphere has built Kubernetes on DC/OS by the way. It's currently beta but should be GA in Q2.

</comment><comment><USER3> CoreOS is already acquired by Red Hat so that rules them out from the question I suppose?

</comment><comment><USER4> CoreOS was just bought by Red Hat.</comment>


Ask HN: Vet my idea - <AUTHOR>

Dear HN community, let me know your thoughts.  If you are a founder or know someone who's having the exact problem, please put them in touch so we can help you better serve your customer.
Problem: Some founders are so focused on growing their business and working on product/sales/biz dev/funding that they sometimes can't keep up with the customer development/feedback process.  A good problem to have.
Example: I recently had lunch with a founder with $1M ARR, 100% growth rate, who basically told me that his support has seen zero process improvements for the past two years.  Everything is manual.  They had been growing so fast, so busy onboarding customers and responding to product issues that there was no time to create a better customer life-cycle process.
Solution: Customer success as a service to help startups get a pulse on customer happiness by analyzing feedback and designing process and UI improvements that thinks a few steps ahead.  Give us your customer feedback (text and/or voice) and we will tell you what your customers are thinking, what's not working, and processes/UI/UX that will eliminate the issue they are having. <comment><USER2> No.

\- Its the founder's (and company culture's) job to always be taking feedback and improving processes. If a founder can't find at least a little bit of time to implement suggestions that their customers or their team have, then they're not going to be able to find the the time it would take to implement suggestions you give them.

\- Even if they did, what would they pay for this / how do you grow a real business around it? For B2B non funded apps, you need at least a $100/month per user.

\- This sounds like a consultancy, not an app. It would make for an interesting "productized service" but pricing it would be tricky.

my 2 cents

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, particularly on the pricing.

Agreed with all of the first point. Based on firsthand experience working at 3 startups and with a handful of business owners, I hypothesize that there are a large number of founders who are indeed interested in acting on the suggestions. It's not every founder, but many that I've worked with are open to finding what works and trying along the way.

Problem #1: Some founders are not that good at understanding their customers. Working with customers is an art, just like sales, in that there's no cookie cutter solution or exact steps like assembling widgets on a factory line. Interpersonal communication is uniquely human and can't be automated. Of course persuading them to change habits can be hard, but maybe not when framed in the perspective of the bottom line.

If this is indeed a consultancy, how would you price it? Based on email/call volume or users?

<comment><USER2> This might help - [http://casjam.com/resources/productize-your- service/](http://casjam.com/resources/productize-your-service/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I tried something along these lines a decade ago, offering infrastructure for developer relations, for companies that were interested in productizing and licensing their technology to developers, but didn't know what to do.

Found no buyers, because the companies that were interested in outsourcing this, weren't interested in changing their internal practices to accommodate the feedback that their new customers were providing. I would have been fighting against the people cutting my paycheck.

The companies that were willing to change their internal practices, weren't interested in me, because infrastructure is not the hardest part of this: culture change is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting observations.

How long did you work on this before you came to the conclusion? How many companies did you approach? Who (and what titles) did you speak with?

<comment><USER3> Nine months? Three or four companies in the particular space I was in? I talked with both the tech owners and the company owners in all but one case.

I had just come off of three years building a developer relations platform that drove one of their competitors basically out of business. The relationship was not smooth, however; it was financially successful for them, but I butted heads with them constantly, again, because they didn't want to change their culture or processes, and I had scores of customer evidence that they needed to. They wanted to finally bring it in-house, so I thought I'd try it again elsewhere.

One company realized, as they talked with me about it, they would have the same problem: they hadn't realized what "doing it right" actually entailed, and weren't prepared for an internal culture shift. They brought this up with me directly and I agreed, and we stopped talking.

The other three just stopped talking, and I inferred it was something similar from how they were behaving during the initial discussions (I only received feedback later from one of them).

I've had related experience talking with startups over the last couple of years. I don't generally try to help startups that don't already know they need customer development and product/UX design. It's not an effective use of my time to teach you the value of design when there are other startups who already understand my value. (In addition, unless you're talking exclusively with VC-backed startups, most startups can't afford to pay you.) As design includes user research and customer feedback, I feel these are the same issues you'd run into. I think you're underestimating the amount of culture change you'd need to effect.

Your business proposition sounds a little like a managed Get Satisfaction. You triage the boards and collect feedback and provide some UI comps... to whom? To the C-suite guy who hired you? And then he demands it of the product manager and tech lead, to fit it into the roadmap? The roadmap they previously had full control over? What is the priority of these changes over all the other changes that had been signed-off on? And that's how your changes get swept aside, and your contract doesn't get renewed because none of your changes ever made it into a release.

Every person in that company is used to doing their own thing, or they'd already be taking feedback in from customers and supporting them better. You may need to convince an entire chain of people to implement your changes, and _then_ a whole other chain of people to implement instrumentation and reporting in the app so you can see patterns of use in the app, and _then_ a whole other chain of people to implement servers to collect that data, and _then_ a whole other chain of people to analyze that data, then _then_ a whole other chain of people to let you go interview customers directly (because data can't tell you _why_ they're behaving that way), and then back to the first chain to change the roadmap _even more._

That sounds exhausting and expensive, why would anyone let you do that if they're already making a million dollars a year?

Perhaps there's a narrow niche of change you could effect, a very limited subset of non-threatening, incremental change, like Draft Revise does with its A/B-testing-as-a-service. But if the entire internal chain of command isn't banging down your door to help them change their culture and processes, I'm not sure I'd invest myself in the work, as it's not likely to stick.</comment></comment></comment>