Ask HN: How to come up with monetizable side project ideas? - <AUTHOR> I love building small tools which solve problems I myself face in my day to day life. Having been worked in different companies over the last 4 years, I feel I've acquired enough knowledge to develop big applications(big enough to make money) on my own.<p>I was wondering, how one can come up with side project ideas which can generate few hundred dollars per month on the side. Any inputs, resources and wisdom are appreciated! <comment><USER2> It's really easy to make a few hundred dollars a month if you're good at product and can do basic marketing.

1\. Find a popular SaaS product. Like Intercom, Algolia, Segment. Make sure it doesn't have a free plan. This guarantees there's a market for the tool. Check out GetLatka for ideas. [https://getlatka.com](https://getlatka.com)

2\. Build your own take on the product. Find the minimum set of features that make it valuable. 10% of the work for 80% of the value.

3\. Sell it at a 50-90% discount. There will be price sensitive customers that want the popular product, but don't want to or can't afford it.

4\. Target bottom of funnel marketing channels: Targeted quora questions. Paid/organic search queries. Set up retargeting ads on Facebook. Product hunt launch it. That should get you a steady stream of customers.

I don't think this is a great way to build a million dollar business, but is a very easy way to make a few hundred. Shoot me an email if I can be helpful.

<comment><USER3> > Make sure it doesn't have a free plan

Nothing wrong with being free. It can get you popularity like dropbox, robinhood etc

<comment><USER4> I think his point is that if the existing service has a free plan then it is going to be hard to undercut them on price. Dropbox and Robinhood want to dominate the market. OP's advice is for making a couple hundred bucks a month on the side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having created a few money making side projects here is some advice:

1\. In my experience B2B ideas are best for quick monetization compared to B2C.

2\. Think of roadblocks you face creating your own site. Pretty sure somebody else will face them too (many great products were created out of this, readme.io, statuspage, etc)

3\. Don't go all in. I never spend more than 2 weeks before submitting my project on PH, HN, mailing my list. Don't ever make the mistake of working on something for 2 years alone not telling anyone about it.

4\. Don't reinvent the wheel. Ie don't waste time on things like your login page (HNs login page is a great example on how much it matters), hiring designers (a template from HTML5rocks or wrapbootstrap is just as good). A lot of these things (support, auth, chat, etc) are offered as Saas services and can be integrated directly to save you weeks in launch.

5\. Marketing is where you want to spend most of your time since yoh ask about making money. Also don't be afraid of pricing. Read patio11 black art of saas pricing for an excellent guide. Learn content marketing, SEO, etc.

Good luck!

<comment> swingline-747 Clarification: _Don 't reinvent the wheel_ means _Don 't exactly copy another product._ It's damn important to reinvent defensible products that either, and hopefully do all of:

a) solve a slightly different problem

b) target different users

c) solve the problem in a 10x better, compelling way

Uniqueness will be added to the collective, so don't bother creating categories because that requires extra effort building validation from below zero and any new products coming along can execute much easier with the lessons and improvements of the "settlers."

<comment><USER6> I don't believe that your clarification of the point you quoted is correct.

It sounds more as if the commenter wanted to point out that it is better to outsource/Saas chat, login, design and the likes to some external service instead of wasting time on it initially.

With that said - I believe you have a point in what you stated. A lot of products came out as a better copy of another product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Focus less on your own problems and pay attention to the problems that other people have. Especially problems where they've come up with really hacky workarounds -- think Excel spreadsheets, weird approval/email chains, manual import/exporting from one system to another, etc. All good signs that there's something to be improved, and that it's enough of a problem to put effort into.

Couple of other thoughts -- your problems are likely not to be technical. They're going to be obtaining domain knowledge, marketing, and supporting your product.

I'll second the recommendation on "Start Small, Stay Small". Also Eric Reis' "Lean Startup" and 37 Signals "Getting Real". The latter two were really helpful in getting my most successful project out the door and making money.

<comment><USER8> Do you have any book recommendations specifically for the online marketing piece? Or does the space change too fast for books? I've picked up some read user forums, write content for marketing, email lists, and pricing tips, but haven't found a "definitive guide".

<comment><USER7> No, sorry. Mostly it came down to "find out where your customers are". I had a payroll service for home help, so I reached out to the people who place the people and pitched the service as a way to help their customers. I had a site to check for security problems in popular blog frameworks so I made it so you could direct link to a site's results and then helped people out on forums, providing a link to the analysis. Stuff like that.

Advertising on FB/AdWords/etc can help, but there's no substitute for finding your customers yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A friend of mine shared his strategy with me: find some big uninteresting data set from the government or whatever, figure out some way to make it interesting for regular people, and build a nice interface to it.

For instance, turning old real estate and immigration records into an ancestry site.

Monetizing it is still an issue...

<comment><USER10> There's a lot of stuff in this space that hasn't been done yet, but that's for a very good reason. First of all, it doesn't pass the toothbrush test: it's the type of thing that's super valuable the first time you visit but you don't really need to come back to it over and over.

Second big problem: SEO. Search engines like long form written content, they don't know how to value tools that slice and dice data: they simply don't see any value in it and you'll never get SEO from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recommend the book "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup by Rob Walling about this topic. It pokes every aspects of starting side projects including how to find something worthwhile to create. It really changed my perspective of how to find out if a side project could work or not.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for that recommendation, it sounds great! I just ordered it on Amazon, and also signed up for the MicroConf [1] mailing list.

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

<comment><USER13> I second the book and recommend the podcast that Rob does with another guy named Mike Tabor. It's called Startups for the rest of us, lots of wisdom in that library! You can even send them questions and they'll do an entire show in reply.

[https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/](https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> TIME. Time is the MOST precious commodity. Help users SAVE TIME. Save time finding something of value to the USER. You can't "presume" how much to charge. You have to "TEST" pricing then keep jacking it up until your customers don't pay. How can you pay for something what does not offer value. Stay small. Stay NICHE. Grab a slice from a BIG market. Forget millions. slap- yo-self with fury with delusions of becoming a millionaire, and make a goal of making enough to avoid being trapped in a 9-5 lifer situation. It take a LOT of luck + skill + market segment expertise. Like you have to KNOW the market you are going to be competing in. Assisted living , senior care , retirement calculator is VERY hot now. You'll be at it after your day gig 6pm-2am testing / building / iterating. Good LUCKY. launch a free beta version learn what customers value and how much they will pay ( ask them) THEN when you have enough people crack addict addicted to your service / app start charging. Be merciless. But offer excellent customer service. Always be honest.

</comment><comment><USER15> As a marketer, I see countless great projects that were abandoned. What seems like a promising project goes dry when, presumably, the dev can't market it.

Marketing and sales are so important; without it, your project risks a short life.

I would look at what you already have and figure out why you aren't making money on it, versus building something brand new.

<comment><USER4> Would be interesting if there was a thing to match people with marketing skills with people who have side projects that need better marketing on a cut of the revenue generated basis.

I have this problem myself. I've got a product that sells itself within its target market but the market is kind of niche so I have no idea how to get it in front of that audience. I tried Ad words but it seemed like a waste of money and didn't move the needle.

<comment><USER16> Hey what is this niche market you're referring to?

<comment><USER4> Low cost high wattage 12 Volt power supplies. I make adapters that let you recycle old server PSU's that otherwise have zero value because of their proprietary connectors. It primarily has applications in Crypto Currency mining. The real money is in targeting industrial scale miners who need them in volume. I had one really good year in the 5 I've been selling them, mostly by dumb luck.

<comment><USER17> I'd be happy to brainstorm some marketing ideas to help with monetization. It sounds like a great product that just needs some clearer messaging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was in the same boat after 4 years of working and built a simple side project that solves a clear problem and now has several hundred thousand MAU ([https://onthegomap.com](https://onthegomap.com)) and costs a few hundred dollars a month to run.

My question is on logistics: Adsense brings in a bit less than expenses. Many users have expressed interest in supporting the project financially. Any recommendations on services to let people do that? One person recommended Patreon but that seems more geared towards artists.

<comment><USER19> Why not make it a traditional SAAS application that charges $10/month?

<comment><USER20> Not all apps can be monetized that way. Maybe some kind of freemium model, or some kind of partnership with the correct target for the audience would make more sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wouldn't be suggesting ideas and approaches. I would instead concentrate on "few hundred dollars per month". I think you are setting the bar too low if you are in US. Let say this side project will generate $200/month and you are spending 15 hours a month on it. It means that your hourly rate will be $13 (which is way-way below software engineer hourly wage). If the goal is do something useful, then work on opensource (for free). If the goal is to get some additional income, then you need to find an idea which can grow more than couple hundred bucks a month.

</comment><comment><USER22> 1\. Search through the highest-selling 100 apps in your favourite app store

2\. Looks for apps which are poorly-rated (< 4 stars). These are apps which serves an actual need, but whose execution is lacking.

3\. Build polished versions of those apps.

<comment><USER23> Found one: Uber

<comment><USER24> Good example. Remember to start small, build it on open source and sell it to small cities

<comment><USER25> Yes, you wouldn't compete with Uber directly but you could look at some small piece of that business which they can't serve very well because of their size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Applications repeat themselves - apps like chat, productivity suites (word, excel), photos - got moved from desktop to web and later to smartphones. If you had developed a first chat app on iphone back in 2009 then imagine the leverage. A new platform is in the making - AR\VR, so keep an eye.

</comment><comment><USER26> One thing I will try doing soon is to look for job postings of companies, and then look what those companies are looking for, and what domain they're in. The theory is: maybe I can get product ideas 1) as spin-offs from their general mission, or 2) maybe I'd be able to replace their job posting with a product.

<comment><USER27> When I first started consulting, I had an idea of specializing in automating business processes. It was something I had done before, and I really enjoyed it. However I ran into the problem of those that understood the potential had already employed a few full time devs, and those that didn't, also did not understand the potential. I reasoned that people who needed automation were hiring tons of people. So I searched job ads that looked close to what I thought an ideal customer might be as a way to generate leads.

It turned out to be a fairly low quality way to find leads. Random cold calling would have probably netted me the same conversion rate.

<comment><USER28> I have similar story: corporate experience in process design and implementation and moved to consulting with idea of using knowledge and connections. What I realized I have no way to sell to big business. And s.m.b. don't use erp, let alone bpmn. s.m.b are quite happy keeping notes in spreadsheets and smartphones. Most of the market for bpmn comes from regulation and certification e.g. ISO certification requires processes to be reproducible and documented (with appr. software) and the list goes on say if company goes public and all of that. No s.m.b has this requirement, so there's no marketing to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> 1) Go and interact with people/companies in "unsexy" industries. The stuff cool silicon valley companies don't want to touch (shipping, waste removal, small manufacturing, etc). They have shit ton's of small problems that they would gratefully hand over spare change for the problem to go away.

2) Find Entrepreneurs that have had a couple of hits, and don't have the time or resources for small things. They'll more than likely just give you the idea.

3) Pick up freelance gigs and get an agreement that give you rights to the underlying code. (I.E. the unique combination of elements belongs to the client.) If you do enough of this you will start to find efficiencies. You will start finding ideas all over the place when you see how other people work.

4) Read a lot. But about niche things.

5) Read blog articles by Venture Capitalists/ Angels. don't work for them... but built the stuff that they want built.

Also... Please build a themeforest for Bulma. I haven't had time to do it and I hate working in Bootstrap.

<comment><USER30> Number 2 is very true. Make sure you choose people who have actually successfully built something not just a serial wantraprenuer. They can tell the difference between an idea that sounds good in theory and one that will work in the real world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> At the risk of being grayed out to invisibility, I am going to say this.

What you are asking is similar to "I think I have learnt playing the keyboard well enough as an assistant in an orchestra, now how to create great music for ads or whatever to make some pocket money?".

This is a matter of creativity. The situation you describe is usually the other way around - people have ideas first and then learn whatever is necessary in order to realize their creativity, they don't start with a tool set and then look for ways to apply it. That is done by consultants. So may be you must become one?

Creativity can't be taught. No amount of tips is going to substitute for innate creativity, of any degree, because all tips are effective only when you have an idea to work with, which is the product of creativity. If you don't have it, in this case identifying a problem and imagining a suitable solution, just do what all/most successful companies do - copy, but add a tiny variation to claim that its different and your own.

All that said, my tip would be to keep eyes and mind open, and just build whatever you feel is right and release it. Do consider feedback but don't get discouraged by criticism. There are ample examples of how the most derided product ideas have ended up making quite a profit, not just in software, although luck had a major hand in their success.

<comment><USER32> Ideas do not only come from creativity. Creativity is a shortcut but ideas can be mechanically generated. You can analyze a niche market and identify gaps, statistically, and address the ones which will return value.

He doesn't need tips. He needs a process to find a market data set and analyze it for profit opportunities. The amount of untouched data in the world tells me that it's really a matter of time, hardwork, and intelligence, rather than creativity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have already built several sideproject over the past 15 years. For me the hardest part as a marketer is to find a developer, mostly freelancers, who are willing to "dive into" the idea and work with the same passion as i do on the project, even if they are usually getting paid by hour.

The biggest issue for me was finding a suitable developer who is willing to grow the one ore another project together with me. So if any of you guys is interested in a marketing partner and willing to invest his time into a project and split the revenue, i would be happy to get in tough with you.

Now let´s come you back to your question - how to come up with an idea? I will discribe you my way:

note down every "problem" somebody is telling you. No matter if it means "find the cheapest flight price", "would be cool if tool X could do Z" or if somebody tells you a terrible workflow within his company. In addition to that, we are all surfing the web all day long, so simply also note down things you like somewhere, and make screenshots / screencasts, if something is really great.

when you do this some days / week, you will generate hundreds of cool ideas within a very short period of time. but the idea itself is worth nothing at all. the idea itself is just an idea.

<comment><USER34> Sent you an email.

<comment><USER33> thanks. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Start a sandbox of some sort, some kind of (digital) file to collect things in.

Collect stories and examples of successful side projects that resonate with you. (You can start by searching HN. This gets talked about a fair amount here.)

Also, collect your ideas and start fleshing them out.

Also, collect information on how small side projects get monetized.

</comment><comment><USER36> Maybe this is of interest: [https://jamesaltucher.com/2014/05/the-ultimate- guide-for-bec...](https://jamesaltucher.com/2014/05/the-ultimate-guide-for- becoming-an-idea-machine/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Just start building free stuff until something sticks. Then figure out how you can make money from it or something similar.

<comment><USER38> I am in this situation and now I stumbled upon a (good?) idea with some code but it's very difficult to market as it aims at replacing one of the most successful software of all the time, namely git.

<comment><USER37> Have you posted on Twitter or an Ask HN thread here?

I would stay away from Reddit, personally.

<comment><USER38> Yes, both. Honestly, it's difficult to have a deep public convo even on HN. I had some contact with people interested in the idea of a git for (big) structured data. The problem is that a) Data Science practice is not mature enough for the kind of problem my project is solving aka. collaborating around structured data to improve reproducibility and QA. b) mature data science project already have ad-hoc solutions and they are not ready to migrate to a freshly new solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Honestly, if you have a full time job (which it sounds like), i'd consider buying a product. At that kind of revenue prices are extremely reasonable - the only challenging is binary: is this worth $0 or something else.

</comment><comment><USER40> Companies use spreadsheets to fix gaps in their IT processes.

Find these big, ugly, shared spreadsheets and turn them into webapps.

</comment><comment><USER41> My two cents... Find a service-tool-solution for something that could be used by many people (try not to think of only your country/language but global), build it fast and simple but practical and fast, offer it for a really low price (coffee, beer, pizza range) so that you can be certain that you'll have users/customers. Oh yeah, and build it so that it doesn't need too much of your time.

As for good ideas, that's the tricky part. Look around and open your ears... sorry for not letting you know of my exit plan idea ;-)

</comment><comment><USER17> While I agree with some of the tactics here (make a twist on similar ideas, contact businesses, buy a business, brush up an existing product you built)

I'm going to suggest an alternative method that has worked for me.

Start with the money.

If you want monetization to be guaranteed you need to prioritize that first.

Take this method and rinse/repeat for you and your skills.

1) How much do you really want to make from this a month, what would make you happy?

Let's say you decide $1k a month would make it worth it after time, expenses and payment processing fees.

2) You then decide how many customers you really want to have to find and how much support email you want to answer.

Usually developers pick prices like $6 and wonder why no-one buys. This low price screams a lack of confidence in the product. That you aren't taking it seriously. That you may not be around in 8 weeks.

Starting without monetization in mind or equally, pricing low is the death of a product because for someone who dislikes marketing you just set yourself a huge marketing mountain to climb.

At $6 each, finding and selling to 150+ customers - when you don't even have one yet is a huge trek to your $1k happy place.

Let's say you feel more confident about finding and serving 10 customers really well. That seems achievable, right?

So with just 10 customers we're looking at a $100 a month product, right?

Whoa, you're thinking you could never build something that's worth that much.

Maybe you're worried it's enterprise level costs now and that's not the type of product you want to build.

Don't worry, a $100 product can be really simple.

Often developers think that a big cost means solving a big problem and that a big problem needs a big solution. Not true at all.

A big problem can be solved with a small elegant solution.

3) Now we know how much we want to make and how many customers we need and how much we are going to sell it for.

We now need to find the problem we are going to solve.

So how big of a problem needs a $100 per month solution?

Not very big at all really.

Let's say a business owners time is super-conservatively worth $50-$100 an hour.

So to add value, we are looking at saving someone between 2-4 hours a month on a task they normally have to do manually. That's not too bad!

Or maybe you want to help them reduce their business costs by $200-$400. Also, very possible. Now we have the value proposition.

We know what kind of problem we are looking for, so value will be clear for the customer.

4) Now we decide _who_ this is going to be for.

Don't pick people the same as you. They have the same skills and can solve the same kinds of problems that you can.

Pick a group of people :-

\- That are easily identifiable by what they call themselves on social media (blogger, podcaster, videographer, designer, public speaker etc)

\- Make sure they are a group you like interacting with, that you have some experience of working with already in some way (please pick a group you like and care about)

\- Make sure they are the decision maker in their own business (don't pick employees of big corps)

\- What tech skills have you worked with that overlaps with this customer group?

Let's say you've worked on a few video platforms in the past so you know that space well, so you choose to help YouTubers.

5) What is the issue that we are solving?

Ok, so now we're helping YouTubers to either save 2-4+ hours a month or reduce costs by $200+ - for your $100 MRR product.

This is where we breakdown what it takes to run their business.

What stops them being more profitable?

What tasks do they do everyday?

What can be automated?

What do they hate doing in their business?

If you know this space even a little, you will have answers here.

Maybe video storage is a huge expense.

Perhaps running their community takes up too much time so they can't scale.

Is just publishing a video end to end super time consuming? Look at why.

If you don't know what matters to them, ask. Make a hypothesis and see if it's true.

In just a couple of DM's you might find that they spend a whole day a week on something repetitive. Or are spending money on something that you can optimize. Write a few possibilities down.

6) Make an offer

In just a day or two you can go from no idea, to identifying a significant pain point for a group of people that's easy to reach.

Now you consider a couple of small technical solutions for the problems you've found.

You go back to a couple of your ideal customers and make them a proposition.

Something like - "You said you spent X hours on this particular problem. If I built something to solve that, this week, would that be worth $100 to you?"

If it's a huge pain point they will bite your hand off. If you get weak responses - no worry, you've not built any code yet. You can use the conversation to get to a deal.

They might say it's worth less so you find out what features would be needed to make it worth the $100.

Maybe they suggest a different problem that is more urgent for them.

After a few conversations you should have at least a couple of paying customers and a clear solution.

8) Building

Now you know exactly what you need to build and have customers waiting. There is no excuse but to launch. This will help you focus on the truly essential code.

As you build, reach out to a few more potential customers. (we made sure they were easy to find earlier) Ask them if they have the same problem. Show them what you have.

Go through a few cycles of building and feedback. Make sure people are paying you what you set out in the beginning - or close to it.

Ask your starting customers for referrals. You'll reach your 10 customers with zero marketing spend.

You then have all of the elements needed to scale further if you wish!

Remember that code comes last in this method for a reason. Only build when you have paying customers.

</comment><comment><USER42> So making a few hundred bucks per month with a product/project is not that difficult, but growing that or making it so the time you invested into it is not too high is difficult.

My personal experience, I built a newsletter to a small size (800), took about year to do this so I definitely didn't scale out very fast by any measure.

Either way I did reach a point where I was able to get a few hundred bucks per month in sponsorship. The time I put into it though didn't get the returns I needed to keep going at it so I've put it on hold and am not making any revenue now.

It's one of those challenges where I believe I need to put a lot more time & money into it, take a risk and see if I can grow that revenue to a few thousand per month so that my time has better return. At a few hundred bucks it's not a passive income generating project.

I thought this would be a good story to share because in thinking about what could make you a few hundred bucks, it would be good to define how you get there. Building a SAAS product takes a ton of time upfront, and a few hundred bucks per month won't be enough to justify that time... but of course it's proof of a business model that can get to the thousands per month, and maybe more!

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't understand the whole monetize XYZ, shouldn't we all be designing(making) things that help or solve problems to make others lives easier and therefore built into the project is $omething valuable for your time and ingenuity?

If it helps people then let them try it and pay what they want for it, which tells you how much you're helping based on how much they are paying.

<comment><USER44> I spent a few months developing this app: [https://deepnest.io](https://deepnest.io) where I have a "pay what you want" model. Currently it has a conversion rate of 2.08%, with average payment of $28.73 totalling 1,556.00 in the past month. In terms of income it's really not great, as I imagine actual commercial software in this space is making much more than that.

I guess it really depends on how much you value money vs having people use your software or other ancillary benefits.

<comment><USER45> That looks really nice! Great landing page. The screen shots look like simply straight-forward UI. Good work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I tried to come up with ideas like this for years and failed. Then I just did things that were interesting to me and it led to a business. So, my advice is to not even try to come up with an idea. Simply explore what is interesting, but be open to turning it into a business

</comment><comment><USER47> > how one can come up with side project ideas which can generate few hundred > dollars per month on the side.

You can't. 99.9% of those ideas where you could start something from a blank state are already done, most of them already a few times.

> I love building small tools which solve problems I myself face in my day to > day life.

Sounds like you have already build something. Brush those up, make them available for the public and for the start don't think about how you will make money from those. You will get users and feedback. Those might help you in building something which will earn money.

<comment><USER48> What? Nonsense.

Ask someone you know who doesn't work in technology what they need. A teacher, a plumber, your doctor, your mechanic. I guarantee that someone will come up with something.

Us geeks think all of the problems have been solved because most of _our_ problems have been solved. Meanwhile the rest of the world doesn't know that we can actually help them because they don't know to ask and we don't think to.

<comment><USER49> Even in tech, find some speciality market that isn't well-served by programmers already. My day job is information security, and our tool sets are atrocious. We use them because it's all we've got, and the security field isn't well known for being a software engineering powerhouse.

I could list off a ton of programs I'd love to have, but are way (way way way) too niche to pop up on the radar of anyone who doesn't work in security.

<comment><USER50> What kind of software would be needed

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> For those who have built and deployed applications before, how do you go about planning/developing your idea before you begin building it? For example, do you sketch out rough drafts with something like Balsamiq Mockups or just pen and paper? Do you bother filling out the YC application to flesh out your idea (even if you don't plan on applying)?

There are different approaches to achieve this, but finding a technique that is both comprehensive enough and time efficient is the challenge.

<comment><USER52> For me, it depends on what I'm building. If there is a GUI, then I usually write basic HTML and CSS using Bootstrap as my foundation. I prefer that over Balsamiq because I can work out flow as well as layout. If it is an API then I design the list of functions and parameters first in a text editor. Or the list of commands and arguments for a command-line tool.

If you notice I start with the high-level design first rather than the code. I find I build a better tool/product doing that first and I often save time. Personally I find myself doing a lot of code churn if I start with the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I am taking a different approach and trying to eventually write an ebook after reading the book Authority. I tried coding a food app, but I found that finding product market fit takes too long in some cases.

This time around, I am trying to focus more on the marketing by using off the shelf systems and less on coding the site from hand.

</comment><comment><USER54> a stalled project of mine, maybe you want to take over?: [https://www.meinesz.de/automatische- nebenkostenabrechnung/](https://www.meinesz.de/automatische- nebenkostenabrechnung/)

</comment><comment><USER55> If you understand offset lithography, and ways to impose page sizes onto press sheets given a set of constraints, with the utlimate goal of minimizing expenditure - that'a a very difficutl problem to answer with real work appplications.

</comment><comment><USER56> What software have you yourself paid for? Try making that. If you don't pay for software, what would entice you to pay? If you don't know you need to do market research into what other people do pay for...

</comment><comment><USER57> One other idea is to find old desktop products in weird/small markets that are still selling, and make web apps to compete with those.

</comment><comment><USER58> B2B might make sense but beware it needs more maintenance at some point.

</comment><comment><USER59> I've seen a lot of people have good success with a side project they do called 'waiting tables' and they make a few extra hundred a month very consistently with little risk.

<comment><USER60> Very little retained value there. Short term

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I have a couple ideas I could sell you.

<comment><USER62> Well you already let one loose. Sell your ideas!

<comment><USER61> That was a freebie. Just a taste.

<comment><USER63> How much for the rest?

<comment><USER61> One meeeelion dollars. But act today and get a 50% discount.

<comment><USER63> Can I get a few more 50% discounts stacked on top of that offer? I'd like 150% off, please.

<comment><USER61> How about I give you one of my ideas, and you give me 1% of the profit? Sell the my designs on thingiverse: [https://www.thingiverse.com/ellisgl/designs](https://www.thingiverse.com/ellisgl/designs)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


DMT: You Cannot Imagine a Stranger Drug or a Stranger Experience - <AUTHOR> http://www.vice.com/read/dmt-you-cannot-imagine-a-stranger-drug-or-a-stranger-experience-365

<comment><USER2> "As I exhaled I became terribly afraid, my heart very rapid and strong, palms sweating. A terrible sense of dread and doom filled me -- I knew what was happening, I knew I couldn't stop it, but it was so devastating; I was being destroyed -- all that was familiar, all reference points, all identity -- all viciously shattered in a few seconds. I couldn't even mourn the loss -- there was no one left to do the mourning. Up, up, out, out, eyes closed, I am at the speed of light, expanding, expanding, expanding, faster and faster until I have become so large that I no longer exist -- my speed is so great that everything has come to a stop -- here I gaze upon the entire universe."</comment>


On day of Bear bailout, economy's cracks widen - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/03/15/MN4HVK1R0.DTL <comment><USER2> This is absolutely shameless. Why should Main Street pay for Wall Street's mistake?

<comment><USER3> This isn't just Wall Street's mistake.

Did you read the bit in the article about the 25-year-old kid with "investment properties" in San Francisco and a "lifeline" in the form of a huge home equity loan? That's nothing more than _gambling_ , dressed up as investment (of course, investment banks and hedge funds were doing the same thing on a much larger scale, so it's hard to say that kid was being much dumber than anyone else.)

The article very clearly describes the downward feedback loop that is underway, but what it _doesn't_ tell you, is how this loop is a mirror image of the feedback loop that puffed up home prices in the first place:

1) People overpaid for houses because capital was cheap.

2) Rising home prices made mortgage-backed equities look like a safe, high- return investment.

3) High-risk investment funds (such as hedge funds) went on margin to buy these MBEs in large quantities.

4) Increased demand for MBEs caused mortgage originators to lower lending standards, which made capital cheaper.

5) Goto 1.

I'm certainly annoyed that the government is bailing out companies that should have had better judgment in these matters (companies like Bear Stearns could have interrupted the cycle at step 3; mortgage lenders should have been exercising better judgment at step 4), but I don't see that it now has a choice. When banks the size of Washington Mutual (whose bonds are now almost junk) and Bear Stearns start to go bust, the greater economy has one foot in the grave, and another on a banana peel.

That said, I don't think the Fed is going to save us from our own greed. They can only do so much before they risk turning the dollar into toilet paper. The rest of us just have to _not_ be the 25-year-old kid in San Francisco with huge debt and multiple property "investments" -- he deserves to lose his ass.

<comment><USER4> What bothers me is how we bail out people like that 25 year old, which happens when the government tells banks not to foreclose. People take risks, and people get burned. Nobody understands that better than entrepreneurs. It's not like the government comes and gives your startup a bridge loan if you can't raise VC money.

<comment><USER5> I think in this case, the 25 year old does get burnt - at least a little bit. The question at this moment really is: do we let the whole economy (other saner people who had nothing to do with this mess) suffer now that the plague is spreading, or provide some respite to the entire economy (and not care if, as a by-product, the 25 year old is bailed out a little bit.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> yeah instead of letting a few businesses fail let the whole economy take a stab in the gut. great idea.

these people got themselves into this with the same retarded thing humans always do: assume things will stay the same. in this case the derivatives they were using as securities had a blip because foreign investors got cold feet. guess what? when you over leverage your securities and those securities dip it has a disproportionate impact!</comment>


Most Americans are single, and they're changing the economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-09-12/most-americans-are-single-dot-what-does-it-mean-for-the-economy#r=most%20popular

<comment><USER2> What an awful graph.

Anything other than the bottom value is hard to figure out what the trend is over time, showing they add up to 100% is kind of a waste. The x axis ticks are not equidistant (10, 5, and 2 years between columns)..

Thanks for posting the interesting article. Wish the graph was better.

<comment><USER3> It may be awful from a professional point of view, but it's one of the few popular media graphs where I (a non-professional) can immediately see interesting changes.

I think the decreased period of the x on the right is useful, because we're probably more interested in details in the near past than in 1970. And I don't think it's necessary to expect high fidelity in a popular article meant to summarize a lot of data for lay people.

The numbers, and the relative size of blocks, mitigate your point about trends being difficult to see. For example, it's easy for me to see that both types of marrieds were about 70% in 1970, and about 50% in 2012.

It's also easy to see that, in percent:

\- Marrieds with children show a major decline.

\- Marrieds without children are steady (and I really wonder why that would be, if it's not coincidental).

\- Total marrieds show a major decline.

\- Households with children show major decline (married with plus other families).

\- All other categories, which are single oriented, increase.

Looking at the graph makes me wonder what part of the men and women living alone, and other non-family, were formerly part of a marriage or other family setting (not counting their childhood).

<comment><USER2> > All other categories, which are single oriented, increase.

Well except for single females, which stays pretty steady at near 14-14.9% from 1980 on. To me those kinds of misses _are_ due to this graph.

<comment><USER3> Good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how much of the increase in men living alone can be explained by economic migration? It might have become more common for a man to move abroad to find work and send money back to their family living back home.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, the comment section under the BW article is filled with really pathetic, misogynistic comments. It's no wonder why so many of them commenting there are single.

<comment><USER6> I don't think it's misogynistic to see that marriage is terribly risky for men in particular.

<comment><USER5> Um, what? I didn't mention anything of the sort. How did you hallucinate all that from my comment?

There are clearly misogynistic comments there including saying that all American women are "entitled, selfish babies", etc.

Unless you're here to defend those kind of comments, you're barking up the wrong tree.

Also, if you were the one who downvoted my comment, thanks for that other knee-jerk reaction made in ignorance as well.

<comment><USER6> I didn't downvote you, nor did I scroll far enough to see those sorts of comments.

<comment><USER5> >nor did I scroll far enough to see those sorts of comments.

Apology accepted.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gasper, Your Cloud in a Binary - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sdslabs/gasper <comment><USER2> Have you seen OpenFaaS? [https://github.com/openfaas/faas](https://github.com/openfaas/faas)

It seems like it covers most of your use-cases and with more modularity and scale-out on Kubernetes if needed. For single node use k3s or Docker Swarm.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author Here:

Gasper serves a use case different from OpenFaas.

OpenFaas needs a specific functional configuration for deployment like [https://github.com/openfaas-incubator/node10-express- templat...](https://github.com/openfaas-incubator/node10-express-template) , hence it cannot deploy generalized applications such as [https://github.com/sdslabs/gasper-sample- nodejs](https://github.com/sdslabs/gasper-sample-nodejs)

As stated in the readme, Gasper is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) and not Functions as a Service (FaaS) like OpenFaas.

Gasper can deploy any generic application such as [https://github.com/sdslabs/gasper-sample-ruby-on- rails](https://github.com/sdslabs/gasper-sample-ruby-on-rails) with little configuration i.e the user doesn't need to create specific Functions for his service. He can make any generic application in a language of his/her choice and deploy it via Gasper. The same goes for creating databases via Gasper.

You can think of it as an open-source WIP alternative to Heroku ([https://www.heroku.com/](https://www.heroku.com/)) and Render ([https://render.com](https://render.com)) with super-easy setup procedures and high scalability and reliability</comment></comment>


Text re-encoding for optimising storage capacity in the browser - <AUTHOR> http://labs.ft.com/2012/06/text-re-encoding-for-optimising-storage-capacity-in-the-browser/

<comment><USER2> Um... what about surrogate pairs?</comment>


Show HN: No-Code CI for Android - <AUTHOR> https://www.turingci.com <comment><USER2> This looks really cool. I don't have a need for it now, but if I did this seems like a strong contender.

I'd have someone copyedit it, though. For example you have "pre" instead of "per". Also the sentence "Team needs to staff dedicated release engineer to handle the task with their already limited resources." is grammatically incorrect and gives off the impression that this was built by someone who's ESL. May be true, may not be true, has no connection to how good a tool it is but some people might misinterpret it that way.

Idiomatic ways to write that would include "Teams need dedicated release engineers", "Teams need a dedicated release engineer", and others.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! And you are correct -- I am indeed ESL :) tbh writing the copy for landing site has taken me longer than some of the code :p

I shall revisit with fresh eyes and get it sorted out. Thank you! Please keep us in mind whenever you do need CI.

<comment><USER2> No problem! Congratulations one the launch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Unlimited build minutes. No hidden costs. $7 per month per CI pipeline.

wow. how is this viable for them :

<comment><AUTHOR> author here - we are using spot instances on GCP for executing the pipeline which at 10 hrs/day usage makes us $1 in profit/month :)

<comment><USER4> might I recommend figuring something else out because... that sucks :)

<comment><AUTHOR> hehe - actually I am an Android dev primarily and I thought that starting a project without CI sucks way more. So I built this for myself and was happy paying $7/mo for not having to spend weeks+$$$ on setting one up with current solutions.

Spot instances do take upto ~2 mins to come up so probably a turbo add-on that devs will feel happy paying for or please feel free to suggest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The logo on their website doesn't load properly for me. My machine doesn't have the font "LucidaGrande" and if they read this, make sure you outline your text before exporting!

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there something similar for iOS?

<comment><AUTHOR> we're working on it as we speak! we'll keep you informed or just drop us an email listed on the site</comment></comment>


The Long Climb from the Sun's Core (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://www.badastronomy.com/bitesize/solar_system/ <comment><USER2> _The center of the Sun is extremely dense, and a photon can only travel a tiny distance before running into another hydrogen nucleus. It gets absorbed by that nucleus and the re-emitted in a random direction. If that direction is back towards the center of the Sun, the photon has lost ground!_

It's not really the _same_ photon, though, is it? It's just some measure of energy.

<comment><USER3> What do you think a photon is but a measure of energy?

Imagine you shoot a puff of air across a room (presumably using an Air- zooka(R)) and score a direct hit on me. If I turn around and say, "I can't believe that puff made it all the way across the room," you could object to my comment by saying "It's not really the _same_ puff of air; most or all of the molecules in the original puff are still over here." But this just obscures the fact that a puff of air, as people use the term, really refers to the wave pattern of cause and effect that travelled across the room. The gas molecules that are inside such a puff at any given moment are incidental and ultimately not what I'm talking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> isn't it a bit odd to call light "old" since it's the one thing that actually does not age by definition. i understand they're just counting the time from when it was first emitted, but still...

<comment><USER5> Sort of related to that, is it valid to say it is the "same" photon that is absorbed and re-emitted?

<comment><USER4> maybe they're just trying to live up to the domain name :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whoa,! This is something I did not knew, and I do read a lot about the sun... But bouncing photons? I never imaginated that, totally awesome.and amazing!

<comment><USER7> You should also read about how stars form and evolve over time:

* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution)

* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_sequence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_sequence)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Quite an old article. Anyone know a more recent estimate about the time it takes a photon to ascend?

<comment><USER9> In the Secret Life of The Sun ([http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03694kd](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03694kd)), a popular science program, I remember they gave a range of between 10,000 and 1,000,000 years and mentioned 100,000 as the average later in the programme.</comment></comment>


You can now upload 3D models to Wikimedia Commons - <AUTHOR> https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/02/20/three-dimensional-models/ <comment><USER2> Cool stuff, but I'm kind of disappointed that the Utah teapot category page[1] doesn't have a 3D model yet.

[1] [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Utah_teapot](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Utah_teapot)

<comment><USER3> Done! [0] And now it is adorning the teapot's own article. [1] The beautiful thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can contribute. I just used the "Upload file" link at the side [2] and it led me step by step through the upload, so you don't even need to know a thing about Wikitext or the myriad of Commons policy (there was a thing about patents but hopefully it's safe on that front). Btw, I uploaded the first one I found that had an open license and resembled the teapot, [3] and am not that acquainted with 3D models, so if you find a better one, don't hesitate. In the future, please be bold [4] in fixing any deficiencies you find in the Wikipedia projects. :)

[0]: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Utah_teapot_(solid)....](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Utah_teapot_\(solid\).stl)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot#3D_printing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot#3D_printing)

[2]: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:UploadWizard)

[3]: [https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:852078](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:852078)

[4]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold)

<comment><USER2> Awesome! And thanks for the advice. I'll keep it in mind in the future — instead of critiquing Wikipedia, I should just fix it myself.</comment></comment></comment>


Announcing Rust 1.0 Alpha - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/01/09/Rust-1.0-alpha.html <comment><USER2> Congrats to everyone involved (and there sure are a lot of you)!

The TL;DR of the alpha is basically this:

1\. The concept of a six-week release cycle begins today, with the first beta coming in March.

2\. Breaking changes will basically cease, with the exception of a list of libraries that are still unstable and features that may be tweaked ([https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/wiki/Anticipated- breaking-...](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/wiki/Anticipated-breaking- changes-during-1.0-alpha)).

3\. Given the aforementioned degree of remaining instability, users should still probably stick to the nightly releases in order to help keep their code up to date and weed out bugs in the compiler.

As ever, it deserves to be reiterated that the 1.0 release does _not_ represent the language being "finished" in any way, only that things will stop breaking. The language will continue evolving rapidly after 1.0, and even the 1.0 release will contain several known (and sometimes rather unfortunate) restrictions that will be backwards-compatibly lifted over time.

Post-1.0, I expect there to be a large community outreach to determine which work to prioritize (for example, I foresee a great clamor for making macros more usable). With developer help I intend to publish a blog post before then detailing exactly which deficiencies Rust 1.0 will contain, and the use cases that they currently either prevent or make awkward.

<comment><USER3> Finally! I hadn't used Rust for two weeks, and when I downloaded the nightly last night, code from two weeks ago was breaking. Feature stability will help.

<comment><USER4> Yes, this is a big deal. I tried looking into Rust a couple of months ago, but the speed of change meant that blog posts and tutorials from just weeks before were sometimes completely broken.

Getting to 1.0 means that the ecosystem has a chance to grow properly which means "lesser" coders such as myself have a chance to learn and get involved.

<comment><USER5> Tutorials should at a minimum be dated and if possible include the version of rust used when making the tutorial.

<comment><USER4> And most are dated and versioned, but a changing API still meant that the corpus was not expanding and knowledge was being lost. Tutorials got out of date so quickly it was hard to get a foothold when trying to learn.

The evolution is important and I don't want to seem like I'm saying it shouldn't have been done the way it was, it was very well managed from what I saw from keeping an eye on the project. I am just happy that it will now be stable letting the ecosystem grow and feed off itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Coincidentally, I used Rust for a little board game solver this week and have been delighted by its performance and typechecker feedback!

My Scala v1 was was very concise but took ~3 seconds to simulate a whole game. The naive Rust rewrite did it in 0.7 seconds and my current version churns them out at 0.015s each!!

[http://github.com/iamdanfox/qwirkler](http://github.com/iamdanfox/qwirkler) if you're curious.. This language is really fun!

<comment><USER2> Performance is an area where Rust still has a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick, so I'm happy to hear that you managed to make your version fast. Did you have to make any design compromises to that end? We're very interested in optimizing the typical use cases.

<comment><USER6> I have currently got some bit-swizzling [1] going on to fit the concept of a Piece into u8. (one of 6 colours and one of 6 shapes). I'd like to turn this back into a nice enum if I can!

Introducing laziness by writing an iterator was actually one of the biggest single improvements (I couldn't figure out the syntax for a while, but lifetimes worked much better than I was expecting)!

[1]: [https://github.com/iamdanfox/qwirkler/blob/master/src/piece....](https://github.com/iamdanfox/qwirkler/blob/master/src/piece.rs)

<comment><USER7> FYI both kaoD and Kibwen's post seem to be dead because they included a link to a URL shortener (seems a little melodramatic on HNs part...) so I'll reproduce it here w/o the URL shortlink and see if that helps

>Hm, an enum like `enum Color { R, O, Y, G, B, I, V }` is represented by a u8 at runtime (see for yourself here[1]), which means that you're only saving a single byte in your `Piece` struct by doing that manual optimization. What was the magnitude of the speedup that you saw?

[1]: [http://play.rust- lang.org/?code=%23%5Ballow(dead_code)%5D%0A...](http://play.rust- lang.org/?code=%23%5Ballow\(dead_code\)%5D%0Aenum%20Color%20%7B%20R%2C%20O%2C%20Y%2C%20G%2C%20B%2C%20I%2C%20V%20%7D%0A%0Afn%20main\(\)%20%7B%0A%20%20%20%20println!\(%22%7B%7D%22%2C%20std%3A%3Amem%3A%3Asize_of%3A%3A%3CColor%3E\(\)\)%3B%20%20%2F%2F%20size%20in%20bytes%0A%7D)

<comment><USER6> Ah that's good to know, looks like I should switch it back! The manual u8 stuff was pretty marginal. (It was also before I discovered the `PartialEq` and `Copy` traits, so please forgive my Rust inexperience!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow. Anyone remembers Rust pre-0.1? When it had typestate, ML syntax, garbage collection, etc.? So nice to see how the language slowly evolved and was molded to fit as best as possible the problem they were trying to solve.

<comment><USER9> > the language slowly evolved and was molded to fit as best as possible the > problem they were trying to solve.

Which is...? Wikipedia says [1]

> "to be a good language for the creation of large client and server programs > that run over the Internet"

and that looks too vague to me.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_%28programming_language%29...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_%28programming_language%29#cite_note- infoq2012-19)

<comment><AUTHOR> Memory safety without garbage collection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been incredibly impressed by the willingness of the Rust team to take a step back and re-evaluate old decisions. I think this 1.0 release will be much better for all the iterations put into e.g. dynamically sized types and other things that never quite fit in their first half-dozen iterations of the design. Congrats all!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Personally, I try to have strong opinions, weakly held. :)

<comment><USER11> > strong opinions, weakly held.

I like that, its mine now.

<comment><USER12> [http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/strong_opinio...](http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/strong_opinions.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The one thing that would put rust over the top right now is something along the lines of gofmt - something simple, with zero configuration, that can be run on commit or even save.

<comment><USER14> Ugh. I hate gofmt. It's a good idea in principle, but even with "go" there are times when you want things spaced out to align columns, or hide a distracting error handling case on one line (instead of making it take 3 lines of precious vertical screen real estate).

I find gofmt to be too opinionated about certain things and I will never use it for my go programs.

<comment><USER15> Why is it a good idea in principle then? Automatic reformatting of the source code always seemed like a bad idea to me for precisely the sort of reason you describe.

<comment><USER16> It's good enough when you can configure it and apply it selectively. If I want to clean up a function in my code base, I can e.g. select it and run "perltidy" over it, which has a configuration dot file for the company code standard (or CPAN guidelines etc.).

Or just clean up some nags so that version control behaves better. But if the only option is not running it at all or having all the code automatically fit to whatever the people On High have deemed to be visually pleasing? Yeah...

<comment><USER17> It's irksome when the auto formatter does something ugly. Though, I think the issue is far worse with Perl tidy. With, gofmt my view is more "I don't like this bit but fuck it." Probably because, Go has much simpler syntax.

<comment><USER16> Both languages (being bastard children of C) often run into exactly the same problems, where the syntax doesn't differ greatly. If you e.g. are accustomed to having indentation without tabs, margins within function calls or prefer non-tabular variable declarations, you can have that in C, Perl, Pike, Java, etc..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel like this is the moment that so many devs who have observed rust over the past couple of years have been waiting for. I for one am looking forward to diving in.

</comment><comment><USER19> > The core libraries are feature-complete for 1.0.

Can someone well informed about Rust give some impressions on the standard library? It is as comprehensive as in python or Go for example?

<comment><AUTHOR> Core team member here.

The standard library is _not_ "batteries included," on purpose. Given that we have Cargo, and it works well, tying package updates to the language version has quite a bit of downside, and very little upside.

That said, the Rust team itself maintains and provides a number of packages on Crates.io ourselves. Many of these were pulled _out_ of the standard library over the past few months.

<comment><USER2> The upside to a batteries-included stdlib is, of course, that you _don 't_ have to go fishing around for the best lib to do $WHATEVER_PARTICULAR_TASK, and you also don't have to wonder whether whatever lib you eventually choose will be abandoned by its developer next month.

At such a young stage of language development, I agree that it makes more sense to let the community develop libraries in order to foster competition and quality. But eventually (read: no less than a year or two from now) I think it will be up to the project maintainers to officially endorse certain third-party packages and commit to their maintenance. At a certain point, the advantages of a library that's well-known, well-maintained, and well- documented outweigh the disadvantages of de jure ossification.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's been my experience that the standard library is _never_ the place for the best lib to do $WHATEVER_PARTICULAR_TASK, but different folks have different preferences. We'll see how it all shakes out!

<comment><USER20> I think Python and Go are two examples where the standard library has very much proven invaluable.

Without it, it's difficult to be confident in the portability of components, and it quite frankly makes the language less attractive for use.

Like the other poster mentioned, I'm happy for the RUST folks to take a "wait- and-see" approach, but at some point, I believe "blessed" components are going to be expected and strongly desired.

<comment><USER21> Python is a prime example of a rotten standard library.

Take urllib/urllib2 (use requests instead), unittest (use py.test or nose), os (too low-level, hence arcane usage) or time as examples (use pytz for anything serious), and of course Tkinter.

Take all of the modules that solve minor/niche tasks that could easily have been put in a seperate library (e.g. wave), that are usually a bad idea to use (e.g. pickle), that contain some copy/pasteable functions the authors deemed useful _as comments_ (itertools), have documented bugs with copy/pasteable workarounds (csv).

Oh, and the way they do exceptions is a mess.

Oh, and don't try to read the Python standard libraries source code. It's ugly.

No, standard libraries should constrain themselves to providing a good foundation for library designers.

(I still like Python, and use it a lot.)

(Since you mentioned Go. One thing that I love about Go is that everything interaction with the underlying OS goes through the syscall package. Also, their designer went for more minimalism. And they didn't have to worry about design mistakes they made 25 years ago. Python _is_ old. I'm not a fan of Gos compatibility promise: it means Go 1 will rot away too. But they're in a much better starting position.)

<comment><USER22> It all depends what you're using it for. If I'm writing code that's going to be around awhile and can tolerate some dependencies, I'll totally use, say, requests. But I use urllib2 from the repl _all the time,_ especially if I'm on a machine that isn't mine. The fact that any Mac already has the tools on it to grab some JSON from an API, parse it, and do something useful with it from the command line, without having to download or install anything, is immensely useful, even if the API is a bit suboptimal. The same applies to quick and dirty things I'm shoving into a Gist to share with colleagues. Not all things have to be elegant to be useful.

(That said, those kinds of usecases aren't really in Rust's wheelhouse, so I still think in Rust's case having batteries not included is probably the right call.)

<comment><USER23> It's possible to achieve the best of both worlds. We could introduce the concept of a standard distribution instead of a standard library. A release of Python should ship with specific versions of requests, nose, and other packages that have a broad community consensus. Those packages could be individually upgraded later, but every install of Python 2.7.9, for instance, would have requests 2.5.1 or greater installed. That would avoid the stagnation packages see when they enter the standard library, and would maintain the benefits of universal availability.

Every language ecosystem should work this way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Being a game developer, inheritance is a really important language feature. I'm not one to abuse the power. Currently, for school I've been working on an OpenGL game engine in C++. It's a component based system. The only real inheritance situation that's important to me, is to allow the user of the engine to create any object and make it inherit from GameObject (example: Duck would inherit the members and methods from the GameObject class). Everything else is a component that plugs into GameObjects (Mesh component, Transform component, etc.)

Over Christmas break, I played around with Rust and I'm really enjoying it. However, I can't figure out a nice way to inherit members from other structs. My current idea, like many others, is to keep a pointer to a "parent" object. So, Duck would have a GameObject, rather than be a GameObject.

Does anyone have any recommendations for better ways I can achieve what I would like to do? I will also accept the fact that inheritance is _not_ needed in a language, but it does make a few situations easier.

<comment><USER25> I'm a game developer and I don't use inheritance a lot, and when I do use it it's almost never for virtual dispatch. (I wouldn't mind it being added to Rust, but I don't expect I would use it).

Anyway, if you're already doing a component based system, why do you need inheritance? Just do a normal ECS. You don't subclass GameObjects in most implementations of ECS (and this is a good thing).

<comment><USER24> I guess I should do some more research regarding that. Although, I just liked the idea of inheriting from a base "empty" game object. It makes it easy to have lists of GameObjects. Also, all of my components inherit from a Component class which makes it possible to AddComponent() and GetComponent(). That way, a user of the game engine could create a new type of component and easily add that to any game object. However, I may be over complicating that as well...

<comment><USER25> Honestly, it sounds like you are over-engineering this... Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the impression I'm getting here is that you're writing the engine before the game.

Never do this. Just don't. What you should do instead, is write a game, and while writing that game, write its engine. At the same time (Or even, write a game, and then refactor the engine out as you go).

Then, after you're done, that engine can then be extracted and made to be more generic. This is basically how every engine used in the game industry was made (although in many cases the game the engine was written with never shipped).

Trying to make a generic engine from the start will be worse in basically every measurable way. It will take longer to write, take more code, use more memory, and be slower...

Again, sorry if I misjudged your comments. Anyway. On to what you said specifically:

Having an empty base object so you can have lists of GameObject (presumably lists of `GameObject*` in reality) is basically going to destroy performance and the cache. A reasonable rule of thumb is that a read from memory will take about 100 times longer than, say, a float multiplication, unless you know it will be in the cache. Then, to operate on these game objects, you'll probably use virtual methods. Another rule of thumb is that vtables are basically never in the cache (and they're also unpredictable branches).

Really what you want to have is several flat arrays of the data each part of the engine needs to operate on. This is also good from an encapsulation standpoint, because then each part of the engine only can see what it needs, and not necessarily the whole game object. Then, the way you'd implement a component system in this style is that you'd make that array the canonical place the data lives.

This can work well for some games but isn't worthwhile for every game. (Generally I actually think the biggest benefit is that it makes gameplay and tools for non-developers easier to write.)

<comment><USER24> > Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the impression I'm getting here is that you're > writing the engine before the game.

Your impression is a little wrong, see below.

> Never do this. Just don't. What you should do instead, is write a game, and > while writing that game, write its engine.

I'm not making a game. We have an OpenGL Game Engine class in my Game Programming program at college. I'm creating my game engine with the idea that someone could simply include it as a library and then use its features to develop a game. This Game Engine class is now over, however, I'm still developing my engine purely for personal learning purposes. Yes, I am creating demos to test features of my engine, but I'm not writing anything that would be considered a game.

Regarding the rest of your comment, I totally agree and understand what you are saying. This actually makes sense, however, it's just not the way that we've been taught so far in my program. Being a student, we are familiar with the practices that our teachers use. This makes us somewhat close minded, but it's really nice when people (like you) give a completely different way of doing something.

Thanks for the help! I'll look into these different methods of structuring my engine.

<comment><USER25> Examples != a game, and given that scenario, I would recommend trying to make a game at this point, but I'll leave it be.

And that's fair. I didn't think this way until after working in industry for a while, and my code from when I was at school was very high level and OO.

If you're interested, Mike Acton (lead at insomniac, and one of the smartest people in the industry) had a good talk in CPPcon that you can find online about Data Driven design[0], which is basically what I'm talking about (he's a bit more extreme than I am). I'd also recommend looking at his 'Typical C++ Bullshit' slides[1] for a shorter and more amusing take on the issue.

[0]: [http://youtu.be/rX0ItVEVjHc](http://youtu.be/rX0ItVEVjHc)

[1]: [http://macton.smugmug.com/gallery/8936708_T6zQX#/gallery/893...](http://macton.smugmug.com/gallery/8936708_T6zQX#/gallery/8936708_T6zQX/593426709_ZX4pZ)

<comment><USER24> I guess I should mention... I did write a maze game for a final project in a different class with it. This semester, I was one of the few that actually _wanted_ to work hard on my engine. I just find it really fun because there's so many problems you have to think about when developing an engine, and even more solutions. It's very rewarding for the brain.

This semester, I used an app to keep track of how much time I put into every class.

\- game engine: 106 hrs

\- AI: 10 hrs

\- physics: 10 hrs

\- ogre: 12 hrs

As you can tell, my game engine was the thing I worked nearly every day on, mostly late at night. If I took an assumption about my class average on hours put into their game engines, I'd say a safe guess is around 15 hours if we don't include my time and the 2 others who also put an insane amount of time into their engines (it was pretty much a competition between 3 friends to outdo each other).

Back to making my maze game... We had the entire semester to work on either a solar system or a maze game. I pumped out the maze game in 3 hours with my engine on the day it was due. The thing is, I was confident with my engine. I put so much work into it, and I understand how it worked under the hood, that I knew I could produce something very fast and easily with it.

The game itself was simple. Have a first-person camera walk around the maze, pick up a key, and then go to the maze exit and open the door. Even though I did it in 3 hours, I also included the ability to pick up a gun, attach it to the camera like an FPS; added a skybox; added a simple sin wave twirl for objects sitting on the ground; and a few other small details here and there.

Anyways, sorry I went on for a little bit there. I'm just really happy with how much my engine is progressing, but it still needs a lot of work and polish. I'm way more open minded now after this discussion. I feel confident about not needing inhetitance now, especially since I feel like in a couple months I might port everything to Rust.

I also realize that it was very risky leaving that project until the last minute. If I ran into an issue, it could have severely messed up my mark. Making a game at the same time as an engine does indeed help with the engine development, I see the benefits of doing so. When I get a chance to continue working on it, I will probably continue developing the maze game along side it.

Anyways, thanks for those links, I'll be checking them out tonight!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Stupid question, but how can a web developer relate to Rust? I had to look up 'systems programming' and Wikipedia basically told me it is writing software for certain hardware components.

Will I ever be writing a web application in Rust?

<comment><USER27> My background is primarily web development, however I've been writing a text editor in rust for a few months now. Prior to that, I had never written any software outside of the web.

Honestly, its not such a big change once you get into it. I'd encourage you to just give it a go, build something just for fun with it. Be it a command line tool, game, whatever. My experience has shown me that just because you've only been involved in web development, by no means limits you from systems/low level development!

<comment><USER28> To me it's more like s/he asked if they could build web apps with it, not about their chance to like it considering they come from web apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Congrats to the Rust team on all their hard work paying off.

Looking forward to watching Rust expand into almost every corner of the development world: web, applications, systems, embedded, safety-critical, games, hard real-time, on so on!

</comment><comment><USER30> Great news! Have been waiting for 1.0 to jump into rust. Anyone knows when the final 1.0 will come?

<comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR: twelve to eighteen weeks. Possibly more six-week increments after that, depending on how we feel during beta. Full details: [http://blog.rust- lang.org/2014/12/12/1.0-Timeline.html](http://blog.rust- lang.org/2014/12/12/1.0-Timeline.html)

<comment><USER31> Congratulations! I look forward to seeing the ecosystem expand now that core has solidified. Very exciting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Well here we are. I think this is what a lot of folks were looking for, anything before Alpha just seems too bleeding edge. Will be interesting to see what the next year holds for this language.

</comment><comment><USER33> Congratulations to the rust team. I've been having fun for a while in the language can't wait to start developing serious tools now that we have a stable release :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Is the Book up-to-date? [http://doc.rust- lang.org/1.0.0-alpha/book/](http://doc.rust-lang.org/1.0.0-alpha/book/)

<comment><USER34> most of the stuff; there are some notes when stuff is outdated

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Pretty nice! I mostly used Rust Nightly till now. The language, the ecosystem, etc. seems really mature now. I've been following language development for a while now. I've never seen something that is really a _new_ language and is that far before 1.0 or in such a short time.

The language developed rapidly, without sacrificing reinventing things, changing opinions a lot. I am not sure how they did that, but it's really impressive. Usually languages lack documentation, stability, performance, etc., have lots of rough edges, no users or libraries, but none of that is true for Rust.

I am really curious about how this was achieved. Maybe someone involved could describe how that was possible. I am sure I'm not the only one interested in this.

A year ago there was an article about using Rust for an undergraduate class on operating system development. Rust was 0.7 back then and _very_ different and way more mature.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7009414](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7009414)

<comment><USER36> I'm sure that developing a large application (Servo) in parallel with the language helped quite a bit.

<comment><USER7> To be fair, rustc is also a pretty huge application that they (and any self- hosted language) developed in parallel with Rust :D

(I'm pretty sure I remember hearing that rustc has more code at this point then servo does, but don't quote me on that)

<comment><USER37> If you just count *.rs files, rust and its in-tree libraries are around 400k lines, and Servo and its immediate dependencies are around 310k lines.

Caveat: use of 'find' and 'wc' is almost invariably totally misleading :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Well, there's been some buzz about rust in the haskell community, which piqued my interest. And now it's time to give it a look.

<comment><AUTHOR> Lots of us Rust people really like Haskell too. What's the Haskell community say? Have any links I can check out?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Awesome job! I so want to port it to the VAX so I can say "I put Rust on some old Iron" :-)

Time to start exploring it again.

</comment><comment><USER40> Is there a way to parallelize the build?

I just checked out the github repo on a quad core 3.4GHz i7 with 16GB ram, and make -j8 took 37 minutes -- the c/cpp stuff (like llvm) built in parallel, but all the rust stuff did not, such that 7 cores (HT) of 8 were idle for the bulk of the build.

</comment><comment><USER41> Are there any plans for ARM-support? Last time I looked, it did not seem to be supported.

<comment><USER29> ARM is well supported, and has been for quite some time. Where did you read that there was no ARM support?

<comment> odroid-user I attempted to install Rust on my ODROID-XU3 (which is running Lubuntu 14.04.1 LTS) just now by running:

      curl -s https://static.rust-lang.org/rustup.sh | sudo sh

The resulting output was:

      rustup: CFG_CURL             := /usr/bin/curl (7.35.0)
      rustup: CFG_TAR              := /bin/tar (1.27.1)
      rustup: CFG_FILE             := /usr/bin/file (5.14)
      rustup: CFG_SHA256SUM        := /usr/bin/sha256sum (256sum)
      rustup: CFG_SHASUM           := /usr/bin/shasum (5.84)
      rustup:
      rustup: processing sh args
      rustup:
      rustup: CFG_PREFIX           :=
      rustup: CFG_DATE             :=
      rustup:
      rustup: validating sh args
      rustup:
      rustup: error: unknown CPU type: armv7l

What should I do?

<comment><USER2> Rather than trying to run the compiler itself on a given platform, I'd recommend cross-compiling binaries from a known platform. I'm not an expert in this aspect of Rust, but here's some example Rust code that targets the PSP: [https://github.com/luqmana/rust-psp-hello](https://github.com/luqmana/rust- psp-hello) (AIUI the magic is in the psp.json.in file, which communicates a target specification to the compiler).

Feel free to come ask in #rust on irc.mozilla.org if you need some experts to consult!

<comment> odroid-user I have a VPS running x86_64 Debian unstable so I installed Rust on it now.

I compiled an hello world on the VPS, the content of which is:

      fn main () {
        println!("hello world");
      }

using

      rustc main.rs

and the resulting binary ran on the VPS and said

      hello world

I went to the example Rust code you linked that targets PSP and had a quick look at it but it was kind of a lot at once so I went looking for alternatives and found [https://github.com/japaric/ruststrap](https://github.com/japaric/ruststrap) which seemed promising but the README was not very clear and the archive hosted by that person is from 2014-12-17. I cloned it to my VPS and attempted to run the ruststrap.sh which it didn't want to unless it was root so I let it be root but it ended with

      + apt-get install -qq g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf
      E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

So I'm not sure if I was supposed to run that on x86_64 or not or if maybe I was supposed to run something else first. My VPS is a bit of a mess so that could be the reason also.

I am going to go back now to the example Rust code for PSP you linked and look more at it, it seems to be the most promising at this point (though it will be a bit inconvenient for me in the long run to do any development on the VPS instead of locally.)

Thank you for your comment and the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> What the status of Rust for Android/iOS?

<comment><AUTHOR> Every commit is tested against Android. We just merged a PR that improves our iOS support.

<comment><USER42> Thanks for clarifying. I checked the FAQ and there was a question about Windows support, but not mobile platforms.

For others who are interested, there are instructions here for building Rust for Android and iOS, see "Platforms":

[https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/wiki/Docs](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/wiki/Docs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Congrats to the whole Rust team. Awesome work. Time to jump in.

</comment><comment><USER44> Hi everyone, Have you guys already had any cool projects and want to share with us? I just quickly made a site here where I would love to showcase your Rust project. [http://builtwithrust.com/](http://builtwithrust.com/). Thanks all,

</comment><comment><USER45> Great job rust team! I've been playing around with this lately and it's a lot of fun.

</comment><comment><USER46> Does anyone know of the Rust Book is available in epub format?

Or, if not, but if it's still possible to build one from source, what are the required dependencies I have to install to be able to build the epub?

<comment><USER47> It would be more useful in a format which works on Kindle, since that's by far the most common. It wouldn't hurt to support both and also pdf. If there was a single page view of the book it would be quite trivial to export it to a single ebook file.

<comment><USER48> Open source tooling for creating mobi's are nowhere near epub's and Calibre does a good job of converting epub to mobi, so I don't mind when projects offer only epub, although I'm a heavy mobi user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Quick poll: what's your favourite features in Rust? What's the core reasons for you are going to use it soon?

</comment><comment><USER49> So that's why I'm suddenly getting all these "warning: use of unstable item" after doing a rustup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, though you will get fewer tomorrow: [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/pull/20786](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/20786)

<comment><USER50> That won't get you less warnings, it just won't turn these warnings into errors for doc tests.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Congratulations to the rust team! Committing to 1.0 is a scary step :).

</comment><comment><USER52> Congrats and thank you guys for all the hard works.

</comment><comment><USER53> Just downloaded, I'm excited for this

</comment><comment><USER54> Finally time comes to have a look at it.

</comment><comment><USER55> This is Super Exciting!

</comment><comment><USER56> Congratulations!

</comment><comment><USER57> Stupid question...

Why not 'let' and 'var' instead of 'let' and 'let mut'?

It's just so ... weird.

<comment><AUTHOR> One reason is that let takes a pattern, so you can do things like:

        let (x, mut y) = ...

Another reason is that we feel 'mut' more cleanly communicates mutability than 'var.' Another reason is that we prefer immutability by default, and let/var doesn't communicate that as nicely as let and let mut.

There are some discissions about this on the ML archives, RFC repo, or discuss, if you're interested.

<comment><USER57> let (x, var y) = ... can easily express the intention.

Also, communication is in the ear of the beholder. Var: variable, that varies. 'Let' would be immutable by default.

Thanks for the response anyway.

<comment><USER58> Well then it would be:

        let var x = ...

the `mut` or `var` is part of the pattern match.

<comment><USER57> No.

        let x = 100 // constant
        var y = 200 // variable

        x = x + 1 // error
        y = y + 1 // 201

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Wake me when we get there

</comment><comment><USER60> How can you have an alpha without generics?

<comment><USER61> You can read up here: [http://doc.rust- lang.org/book/generics.html](http://doc.rust-lang.org/book/generics.html), as well about "output" generics here: [https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/0195-asso...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/0195-associated-items.md), and explore usage in collections here: [http://doc.rust- lang.org/nightly/std/collections/](http://doc.rust- lang.org/nightly/std/collections/).

<comment><USER62> Are "Traits" basically C++ Concepts?

<comment><USER63> Somewhere between C++ concepts and Haskell typeclasses with a hint of Java interfaces.

But yes, their primary usage is to require that type parameters exhibit a certain set of properties.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


British Airways cancels all flights from Gatwick and Heathrow due to IT failure - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/27/british-airways-system-problem-delays-heathrow?CMP=fb_gu <comment><USER2> Discussion - 220 comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14429858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14429858)</comment>


Ask HN: Opportunities for Old Guys in Infrastructure? - <AUTHOR> I am an infrastructure guy who is nearly 50. Has anyone of my age moved into a less rapidly changing workplace, where you are not required to be on call, with infrastructure skills? <comment><USER2> There are plenty of enterprises that never ship and have outsourced their on- call. It's pretty low-stress except when they lay off the entire team because they didn't ship.</comment>


Positional Scarcity - <AUTHOR> https://alexdanco.com/2019/09/07/positional-scarcity/ <comment><USER2> > But recently, Google has started to use their power as the effectively sole > search provider in a few really extortive ways. First, the Basecamp > situation above: by making a design choice to stuff so many ads above > organic searches for a company's own name, businesses like Basecamp are > effectively forced to pay up whatever Google wants in order to access search > traffic for customers searching for them directly. That's pretty extortive.

On the flip side, if I were a competitor to Basecamp, I love the access I have by advertising on Google on Basecamp. If Basecamp's business suffers from users going to an alternative, perhaps their product offering isn't as unique or valuable as they would like to think. Also I would point out that people searching Basecamp on Google rather than going to Basecamp.com may look for Basecamp type products. It's like if I search band-aid. Maybe I mean band-aid branded products, but giving me access to similar offerings is great for me as well as competitors

<comment><USER3> Too bad you're downvoted. I agree. For example, Apple barely needs to advertise, as (until recently at least) its products are a quality class above everyone else, so basically, every non-Apple laptop is an Apple advertisement. I haven't used Basecamp so I'm not so sure about them, but ... maybe they're just not _that_ good?

<comment><USER4> > _Apple barely needs to advertise_

Apple has a $2B marketing budget and has advertising everywhere, all the time.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, absent advertising, how would the previous poster, like so many others, have come to believe the fiction that Apple products have better quality than their competitors'?

What they do have is higher prices. They could, in principle, deliver better quality, but Apple's record-breaking pile of cash demonstrates clearly that they are _not_ spending it to give customers better quality, but rather pocketing it.

So, what are customers getting for their extra money, instead? They are displaying an ability to spend wastefully, a social dominance signal. They feel like they benefit, and Apple actually does benefit.

Everyone who thinks they attracted a more desirable mate via such a display has, instead, attracted a mate who was fooled by such a display. What is the correlation between quality and foolishness? It must surely be negative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is simply a virtual form of real estate business.

As real estate brokers say, the price depends mostly on 3 things: location, location and location. If you are on Manhattan you pay more for that land than far away in Brooklyn. Similarly with the Domain Name System - shorter domain like www.abc.com is more desirable than www.hdhfjenyrj.goobledygook. There is no scarcity of string combinations for domain names yet people fight for desirable ones by paying a lot of money. It's a form of congestion pricing around naturally formed monopoly in desirable locations or domains.

These big tech platforms create their own land online - virtual estate. Limited human attention creates the scarcity of valuable locations where advertisers would like to show their ads. So they compete for being shown on Manhattan of the web - Google's top of the search results and Facebook's feed. The platforms can charge them huge monopoly, real estate like, prices for it.

<comment><USER7> Where that analogy falls short is that if a given company pays for cheap and/or inferior real estate, you will still find that company if you explicitly go to their physical location – you don't have to walk past four competitors who paid extra for the right to stand in their driveway.

<comment><USER8> How is Google's website analogous to someone's driveway?

"Explicitly going to their location" is typing their website into the address bar, and as far as I know, there is no interference by Google there.

<comment><USER9> This just isn't how a majority of people find sites, though. To your normal users, google may as well be the address bar. Hell, I've watched users go to google, type facebook.com (or wherever they're going) into google, and then click on the first ad link.

So, you have this situation where typing basecamp.com into google may not bring basecamp as the first result and the people buying the ads know that.

<comment><USER8> Hence snidane's comment about location location location is accurate.

Google owns a coveted location, and now they can charge rent for it. Apple owns a coveted location, and charges Google rent for it.

But it could not be simpler or easier to bypass Google.

<comment><USER10> > But it could not be simpler or easier to bypass Google.

Really? Unless you pay Apple considerably more, you will have a google search bar prominently on your phone that you can gimp but cant hide or change to another search provider.

<comment><USER11> I have been racking my brain for several minutes now trying to figure out what you're taking about. I never paid Apple anything to switch my Safari search bar to DuckDuckGo, and I can't imagine 3rd party browsers are restricted from using a plain address bar or any search provider they want

<comment><USER10> I meant 80% of the market runs Android primarily on hardware price..

If you are using a newer Android, the manufacturer has been coerced to make a google search bar not only prominent but impossible to hide, even manually by the user.

<comment><USER11> Ah, that makes sense. I was afraid maybe you were referring to something horrible coming in iOS 13

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This sounds like a bit of a shakedown, and I'm not in marketing, but can someone confirm what I heard at last my last company - is it true that should at least pay _less_ than anyone to advertise against "Basecamp", because they're deemed most relevant?

<comment><USER13> Yes, this is true. The price you pay per click is based on a ton of factors loosely proxying to "customer satisfaction". F.ex. Do alot of users bounce? Does it have a high CTR?

Considering the intent of users searching for "basecamp" they are pretty much guaranteed to get the best "customer satisfaction" metrics compared to competitors and therefor getting the best price.

My experience with branded searches is the CPC being somewhere around 1-10% the price of non-branded searches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is probably a phenomenon of user tolerance which is game all companies try to balance with making money and delivering value to stakeholders and customers. This only really became a problem when it went from 1-2 ads at the top, to 3, and now 4 above the first organic results.

Considering on mobile you'd have to scroll quite a bit to get to the first non ad one could argue Google as a service as a whole is worse off for consumers, not to mention for the whole internet which benefits from accurate rankings.

I'm curious if people would be so outraged if it went back to 1-3 on average. Or whether this would improve the UX as a whole. But Google lately has given way less of a shit about putting the UX above monetization strategies. Which is as much as consequence of their market position where there's no alternative.

</comment><comment><USER15> Have you tried searching for Facebook in the App Store? The first result is...Amazon.

<comment><USER16> I get Google Maps. For a while if you typed "alexa app" you got an scam that tried to sell you a "echo subscription". I stumbled into it when an elderly man with poor vision got fooled because his screen magnification was so high the paid ad was the only thing shown on the screen when he searched. He would've had to scroll down to see the actual search results. Looks like Apple finally nerfed the imposter but now shows the Prime Video app before Alexa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I knew the concept but didn't knew the name of it it's positional scarcity

So it's basically, like they say in the article ""pay to get a better place in line""

It's the most common behaviour in the marketing world and that's why I hate PPC and love SEO

in PPC the more you pay, the more you will appear high in the ads when someone is look for search term related to your niche

In SEO, you need to earn your place. Ofcourse companies often use a spend a lot of money on SEO but because the way google built their algorithm, if you write high quality content in the right way you can earn your place without paying a dime

<comment><USER18> in my opinion it is scarcity all the same: attention scarcity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is a psychological component here that is very similar to the arms race mentality.

An object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

It may be an undetermined distance away, but there will be a behavior bubble until the way we engage (in a linear format) will be disrupted. Then there will be another 'scatter', and we will re-form into different version of engagement (web 3.0?).

</comment><comment><USER20> At least they're decently well indicated as ads. Go to bing.com and search for some tech company. It does the same, but the ads are subtly labeled, making them seem like natural search results.</comment>


Request for comments about the next Cozy architecture - <AUTHOR> https://forum.cozy.io/t/request-for-comments-about-the-next-architecture/3255 <comment><USER2> How will be sent the system emails? The "Send Email" worker states that Cozy will contact the SMTP server to send the email. Will the SMTP configuration be part of the Email app (not a good idea in my opinion), will it have to be set up manually via Postfix for the self-hosted (ok), or even better, could the SMTP configuration be part of the "Settings" service?</comment>


The Ebook Wars: Amazon At Fault or Publishers - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/04/11/the-e-book-wars-who-is-less-evil-amazon-or-book-publishers/

<comment><AUTHOR> Important to note that unlike Apple's eBook offering, Amazon's diverse market selection makes their situation tough to compare. Amazon does provide digital books, but also sells physical versions and facilitates marketplace transactions of the exact same titles (when they're available in paper form).</comment>