IKEA's delayed gratification results in 60% impulse buying - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/06/ikea-as-rat-maze/

<comment><USER2> Aren't IKEAs linear? I never had any problems navigating an IKEA since there are only two directions to walk to. There are shortcuts (paths which obviously don't look like the main path) but I always ignore those (except for one – I think every IKEA has a shortcut right at the very beginning that takes you to the end) and just walk on the main path.

I guess my tip for everyone lost in IKEA would be to always stay on the main path and to never use the shortcuts.

I actually prefer this linear design to the completely non-linear designs of many other furniture stores I have been to. I certainly want to look at everything when I'm at IKEA.

<comment><USER3> It's not so much that you get lost... it's that you have to walk past every other item in the store.. Compared to say "Harvey Norman" where if you want a couch -- you walk to the couches section..

<comment><USER4> It seems rather strange to describe this by saying that "delayed gratification" leads to more impulse buying. What leads to more impulse buying is making everyone look at all the merchandise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I worked at IKEA for quite a while, and it taught me so much about selling. There's this 1 big book devoted to store layout, what product should be placed where etc. For example, a big long wall with products spread out over the whole length is too overwhelming. That's why half-way there's a "break": a big colored display of 1 product, which is either new, or something to get rid of.

Another example, the first thing you see when you get to the marketplace (where they sell all the small stuff) is an area with baskets of cheap high- volume products. (cloth-hangers, napkins, etc.) This gives people the idea that everything in the rest of the marketplace is cheap as well.

<comment><USER6> The important thing about IKEA to me is that they _do_ offer cheap stuff that's quite nice. For example, I was looking for curtains a while ago, and found that IKEA offered a broad selection that were half the price of anyone else's cheapest garbage.

I never ever go through the whole showroom path, though - I just cut through the registers and head straight to the marketplace. Works well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7>
      I end up spending 20 minutes walking in circles trying to
      find the route back to children's furniture (or some other
      designated meeting spot). I wind up passing the same mock
      studio apartment half a dozen times, blood pressure rising
      with each new sighting.

Is that just hyperbole or is the author really that unable to navigate?

It's easy to bypass the showroom areas if you pay any attention at all to any of the maps.

Sure, every Ikea has a route they prefer you to take... but there are frequent "Shortcut to ____" signs to allow you to move quickly between departments and maps with "you are here" on them showing where all the departments are.

What exactly is the problem?

[edit] Interesting video. According to the presenter, people generally only look forwards and thus miss the shortcuts located at the side (or behind as he claims) of the walkway.

Do people really not look all around when they enter a room? That seems so strange to me.

Also, what area of study do you need to be in to do a Phd in how people maneuver through a shopping centre? Sociology? Psychology? That seems really cool and I'd like to learn more about it

<comment><USER8> I went to Ikea with my wife shortly after seeing the Scott Pilgrim movie (yes this is an important detail). We were looking for something very specific, so I looked at the map and pointed out all the little shortcut doors that look like "Employee Only" style doors, except they are not employee only. My wife made a comment that it was like the doors that appear out of nowhere in Scott Pilgrim. She had, in several years of going to Ikea, never noticed them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One benefit of living in the holy mother land of IKEA is that we have stores that are from before their discovery of the one true store layout, and they are much easier to navigate because you have more freedom to go between sections.

That said, watch the video in the article, it shows how "brilliant" the standard layout is, and how it forces you into a state of mind that makes you shop more.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is 60% high? What percent of the things people buy at Walmart are not on their list?

</comment><comment><USER11> The oldest of the Chicago IKEA stores (Schaumburg) was allowed to be arranged without the blinder walls until just a few months ago. Having never been to a different IKEA, I was confused upon walking in last week. I did feel as if I was in a rat maze and I was commenting somewhat loudly on this fact to my wife. A saleswoman overheard me and explained that this IKEA, after years of being a rogue outlier, was forced to arrange the store as dictated by the arbiters of shopping wisdom in Sweden. She apologized and expressed regret at the fact. Before this happened, a shopper could see all of the other floors at once and get a good view, from almost anywhere, of the large atrium that pierces the middle of the store. Now we get to look at painted hardboard panels advertising different IKEA wares. Plus I have no idea where I am because I can't easily view the open area. Not an improvement.

</comment><comment><USER12> This kind of thing seems too much like hostile subversion of my brain, I don't approve of it.

</comment><comment><USER13> So selling IKEA on the idea of indoor navigation with smartphones might not be so promising after all.

</comment><comment><USER14> The first thing that I thought of was "hasn't this guy and his wife heard of cell phones?"

<comment><USER15> They always seem to have terrible reception in ikea stores. Probably due to large areas of steel cladding and RC slabs acting like a faraday cage. The building owner needs to actively supply booster base stations to provide a good mobile signal in a building like this and Ikea don't seem to do this.

<comment><USER16> I wouldn't be surprised if this is deliberate. Its pretty well known that ikea never allow any clocks nor any natural light inside their stores, so customers lose all sense of time.

Building for poor mobile reception would just add to this sense of isolation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I hate the IKEA layout, so I shop at the competition (here in Europe it's KIKA).

</comment><comment><USER18> > One result of Ikea's rat-maze design: 60% of the things people buy there > were not on their original shopping list.

Another result is that I avoid shopping at IKEA whenever possible.

</comment><comment><USER19> I visited IKEA for the first time last week. I guess having all the names of items in Swedish is officially viewed as a feature. I think it's a bug as it's easier to remember a name than a (bar-code) number or a word you cant pronounce. I needed a set of a particular item which always come in 4s. When I got to the pickup area they were all loose, I assumed someone had opened a box so I picked up a sealed box went to the self-service checkout, scanned, paid and left. Hours later and 160 km away I saw that I had only paid for 1 item and had a box of 16. The barcode on the box was the same as the one for each item. Next time I'm there I'll take back the excess and pay the extra but I don't think it's entirely my fault so I'm not going to go out of my way to do a 300km round trip</comment>


Motorola's Value to Google Found in 18 Patents - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-22/motorola-s-value-for-google-found-in-18-patents-used-against-apple-tech.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting. # of patents is a very misleading metric, in the same sense that # of lines of code really doesn't tell you much about quality. My intuition on the purchase is not that each patent is worth ~ 2/3 of a million dollars (~17K patents, ~12bln purchase price - so the math is a little off) or even 1/4 of a of a million dollar (divide by the premium paid that day ~5mm). I assumed that there were a couple big ones hidden in there that had most of the value from a grand strategic point of view. This isn't about nickel and diming everyone on small things, it's about controlling a few of the big ones that will stand up in court.

That said, I wasn't smart enough to figure out which subset were valuable on my own. Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER3> Before anyone goes on to say that of all the patents these are the only useful ones, it's not really like that. First of all, the Courts won't accept many more patent infringement claims than around that number. You can't go to Court and claim patent infringement for 5000 patents. Oracle tried with a few hundred and the judge forced them to drop most of them. This means they're going to find as many that are some of the most useful ones.

Also, Apple claimed patent infringement on 20 patents against HTC, and they only won with 2 very old ones, and I think they won a few hundred millions with them. So it's good to keep that into perspective.

Even if Motorola loses in Court with about 20 of them in the first round, they can try with another 20 in another lawsuit later. This is why Microsoft and Apple will probably settle their patent disputes with Google. Google has too many patents now, more than Microsoft even.</comment>


Details on Android apps support on the Playbook - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2011/sep/29/android-on-playbook-rim-developers?cat=technology&type=article

<comment><AUTHOR> I for one felt this was unnecessary critical for a first iteration. The only major blow is no support for native sdk and hence all the top tier 3d games, and no google maps (is that what was indicated?), since the current map support on the playbook sucks bad.

But on the bright side, pandora, google goggles, and read it later should work.</comment>


Light Takes the Multi-Camera Trend to the Extreme with a Nine-Lens Camera Phone - <AUTHOR> https://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2018/07/light-takes-the-multi-camera-trend-to-the-extreme-with-a-nine-lens-camera-phone/ <comment><USER2> They should get Nigel Tufnel to be their spokes character. Or do they have to wait for the lenses to go to 11?

</comment><comment><USER3> Trypophobia inducing

</comment><comment><USER4> [2018]</comment>


How to kill a company's morale in one easy memo - <AUTHOR> http://technocrat.net/d/2006/8/28/7262/ <comment><USER2> From the comments:

 _My sister used to work for a large multinational that pressured people to come in on Saturdays. The employees would come in but they would work on personal tasks like paying bills and balancing their checkbooks. It was all for appearance and it just pissed off the employees. She left the company after this pressure started. Part of her Saturday "work" was looking for a new job._

In my experience this is par for the course. Sure, you can force employees to spend more time in the office, but past a certain point they'll just find ways to satisfy your crazy demands only in the most technical sense possible.

<comment><USER3> It's a case of misplaced metrics. I can't find the name of the paper or the researcher, but I believe it's been shown that when you try to reward/punish some metric of productivity, invariably the employees will begin to maximize that metric, perhaps at the expense of productivity.

Measuring number of hours in the office is not a direct measurement of productivity, and these employees were meeting the metric, but only costing the company money, not making it any.

Incentive structures are tricky.

<comment><USER4> >I believe it's been shown that when you try to reward/punish some metric of productivity, invariably the employees will begin to maximize that metric, perhaps at the expense of productivity.

After years of direct involvement in measuring productivity, I would accept that as a general axiom. I've likened it to badly applied wallpaper: push down a bubble and it just pops up somewhere else.

<comment><USER5> Even if the metric is a direct business metric that it's manaagement's job to optimize (like profitability or number of users)?

I've always thought it would be interesting to see the results if half of everybody's salary (including the CEO and the toner refill guy) was paid by dividends from shares of the company held in trust for this purpose. As in, every year, everyone's pay goes up/down by the same (relative) amount.

What if, in addition, the shares held in trust were a closed pool, requiring employees to give up part of their bonus share to any new employees hired? The expected net outcome of hiring on profitability would then have to outweigh the decreased income from a (very slightly) reduced share of profits.

I'm not certain that this is the ideal system of incentives (i.e. there might be local minima one could get stuck in), but it would certainly be an exciting experiment...

<comment><USER4> Dan Pink would suggest that if you're trying to drive performance by tweaking monetary incentives, you're doing it wrong. <http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd actually like to take a step back from the hate-fest going on in the comments here and evaluate this. Before you downvote me, at least read what I have to say.

This email is a classic example of poor communication. It's very clear that the guy is frustrated and is taking it out via an emotional response. However, we don't know the whole story here, do we? From my reading, it _sounds_ like this has been an ongoing problem for awhile now. Keep in mind that this was in 2001, not exactly an easy time to be running a software company. I can imagine the frustration of running a large company with thousands of employees and seeing a lack of results, coupled with evidence of employees not spending much time at work. What would _you_ do in such a case? Not necessarily with regard to the email, which I think we can all agree was in poor taste, but with regard to the actions he says he's going to take.

Additionally, we don't know if this memo did in fact kill morale at the company. We know that the company has done well over the last nine years, and that Mr. Patterson was recently honored as one of the best bosses in the country. The Wikipedia entry specifically mentions the metric of great performance relative to compensation, so he's obviously creating value.

I guess my point is that everyone makes mistakes, especially when they're frustrated and facing a large problem. And make no mistake, managing a software company with several thousand people in 2001 would be a challenge. I'm not saying this was the right approach, but what _exactly_ would you do? And more importantly, if you've never faced management at that scale, why do you think it would be more effective than his approach?

<comment><USER7> To get where the author of this memo got (CEO of a publicly traded corporation), work essentially has to be your life. I mean, your #1 priority, ahead of friends, family, fun, and everything else. I have never seen an example of such a person at the helm of a large, multinational corporation, who does not, generally, appear to fit that description. This memo illustrates the total disconnect between that sort of person, and the other 97% of us for whom work ranks a distant 5th-10th on life's list of priorities.

So, in some sense, it's understandable. Inexcusable, but I at least get the place from where this sort of vitriol is coming from. He really thinks he can get people to care as much as he does. In some ways it's amazing that he made it so far while remaining so deluded.

<comment><USER8> And the irony might be that he gets a company that _outwardly_ looks exactly like he wants. The sheep willing to conform will stay and others will move on. Now I'm not saying anything about productivity, that's another question then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "I think this parental type action SUCKS. However, what you are doing, as managers, with this company makes me SICK. It makes sick to have to write this directive. I know I am painting with a broad brush and the majority of the KC based associates are hard working, committed to Cerner success and committed to transforming health care. I know the parking lot is not a great measurement for 'effort'. I know that 'results' is what counts, not 'effort'. But I am through with the debate."

This part proves that this guy is the worst kind of douchebag: one that knows what he is doing is stupid and heavy handed, and yet does it anyway.

<comment><USER10> On the company's web site there's a page about him (he's the CEO): <http://cerner.com/public/Cerner_2.asp?id=27586>

In that it says: "Cerner associates extol Neal for his passion and foresight, his ability to drive change within organizations, his entrepreneurial spirit, and his candid, uninhibited conversational style."

So that's just a candid, uninhibited conversational style :-)

Note that that message was sent in 2001. If you chart CERN against the NASDAQ over the last 10 years you'll see that the memo hasn't hurt company stock price one bit.

[http://www.google.co.uk/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=...](http://www.google.co.uk/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1277323200000&chddm=491878&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=INDEXNASDAQ:.IXIC&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:CERN&ntsp=0)

<comment><USER11> Are you defending this guy?

<comment><USER10> No. I'm pointing out that he may be a total ass, but it doesn't seem to have hurt his company.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but you didn't present evidence that he didn't hurt his company. You presented evidence that he didn't hurt the company so badly that it didn't grow, but not that he didn't hurt the company.

<comment><USER13> > You presented evidence that he didn't hurt the company so badly that it > didn't grow, but not that he didn't hurt the company.

Since no one has presented evidence showing that he hurt his company....

In my book, you don't get to complain about the quality of someone else's evidence unless your evidence is better. And no, "self-evident" doesn't count. YMMV.

<comment><USER12> At the risk of getting meta, I was complaining about the quality of the evidence for the assertion. I never made any assertions about the company suffering in any way because of this guy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks like someone needs to read The Mythical Man Month.

(I know TMMM is about specifically software engineering but for a CEO to think that bums on seats==productivity is fairly depressing)

On a aide note - Americans! Move to Europe! Our economy is collapsing too but we're having a much better time watching it happen...

<comment><USER15> your last line there was the funniest comment I've read on HN in years. thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> We got this:

"Recognizing that many of you may have childcare obligations that may create a personal challenge for you please seek approval from your manager to deviate from the above and don't allow your personal schedule to take priority over your need to support your team's efforts to service the customer."

A lot of people where I work didn't particularly like the tone of that.

<comment><USER17> Translation: "Kids are important and stuff, but keeping customers happy is what matters."

<comment><USER18> "You're supposed to be helping OUR people! What about our stockholders? Who's looking out for them? HUH?!" --Gilbert Huph

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 The fact that the CEO sends emails with subject lines such as " MANAGEMENT DIRECTIVE: Week #10_01: ..." (with "directives" numbered by week and sequence) should have been warning enough.

update: Google Finance and Reuters show that the Chairman and CEO of Cerner in 2006 is still in the position today. Looks like their stock has recovered from this "20% drop nicely": <http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:CERN>

<comment><USER19> The comments imply the original memo was from 2001.

<comment><USER20> But Neal Patterson, the author of the memo, is still the CEO and chairman of the board. <http://www.cerner.com/public/Cerner_2.asp?id=27586>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Am I the only person who saw the line about the parking lot being half empty at 8 and 5 and thought, "Oh, that's consistent with a normal distribution of people working 10 hour days with a couple hour variance in arrival times"?

<comment><USER22> I thought there was going to be a punchline about the CEO not realizing that they'd laid off 50% of staff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hmm... sounds like this issue could be solved if everyone stopped car-pooling.

<comment><USER24> Or if everyone just left their cars at work and took public transit/carpools the rest of the time.

<comment><USER25> Or, if they bought a $500 lemon, left it taking up space in the company parking lot and kept commuting as usual. In that case, are the $500 tax- deductible?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'll call some BS on the stock price affect... after some quick Googling this article seems to pinpoint the exact date:

<http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/4296-1.html>

Comparing CERN stock vs the S&P500, Dow Jones, and a related company ECLP and MDRX will show that all of them tanked the same week, and all of them recovered quite well within a month or so.

<comment><USER27> The link above is actually about the effect this memo had on the stock price. To quote:

 _A blunt e-mail message from Cerner Corp. CEO Neal Patterson about the work ethic of some employees caused the company's stock value to fall sharply last week. The company acknowledges the harsh tone of the message could have caused investors to question if the company was in crisis_ ... _After the e-mail was posted on a Yahoo! bulletin board last week, the stock fell nearly 20% on March 22-23, including 15%, or $6.13 per share, on March 23. Patterson threatened installing time clocks, discontinuing an employee stock discount program and cutting staff by five percent, a morale blow at a company that prides itself on good employee relations. He told managers they had two weeks to get their units in shape, or "pack your bags." In a March 23 interview with the Kansas City Star, Patterson said threatening measures are not being pursued, but he continued to voice concern about work ethics in some segments of the company. He also sent out another e-mail apologizing for the harsh tone of the first one._

It would be interesting to see the apology email.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> From mildweed's comment in the CalTech thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1455037>

<comment><AUTHOR> Just idly curious, but why did people upvote my attribution comment?

<comment><USER28> It's a behavior we wish to encourage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> By the way, isn't this what working for Apple is supposed to be like? Except that when you do get to go home, you can't even discuss what you were working on during the day.

Edit: downvote if you must, but info on the work/life balance at Apple is preferred.

</comment><comment><USER29> _In April of 2010, Forbes magazine named Patterson fourth on their annual list of "America's Best-Performing Bosses"_

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Patterson>

<comment><USER30> Doesn't excuse being an horrible asshole.

<comment><USER31> It is just a business, nothing personal :-)

<comment><USER30> Finally he could have said it more nicely and clearly: "if you work for me, you're expected to have no family life, no personal life, to be manic crazies who live and breathe for their work only ."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As an IT guy hailing from the general area that Cerner calls home, I can honestly say this is where hackers' souls go to die.

</comment><comment><USER33> Man this is terrible management and exactly the type of thing that just asks for backlash.

Where's the students of history? When you create a police state like this in a company, control will be lost, morale will fall and productivity crashes. Abusing your force only makes it worse.

<comment><USER34> While I agree that it asks for backlash - do we actually know what happened? It seems like the company's doing decently, so I'm not sure the students of history will have much to work off of.

<comment><USER33> More talking about actual history such as 19th century Europe.

However this memo is dated as August '06 so we can assume that it happened sometime earlier that summer. From this google finance chart: <http://bit.ly/ar1PSo> it shows the massive dip the company took in July of the same year.

Aside from all that, actions like this will bite you in the ass in one form another. I doubt many visitors to hacker news hold CEO Neal L. Patterson in high regard after this.

<comment><USER35> Actually, other comments mention 2001.

<comment><USER33> Guess I need to re think my argument then eh?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> See also: [http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing- softwar...](http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-software- engineers)

At least Greenspun took into account the need of his engineers' air to be humidified.

</comment><comment><USER36> Never confuse movement with action.

</comment><comment><USER37> I wonder _why_ he's such a jerk.

I can't imagine treating the folks in my department that way. I don't want to own their souls. I _hope_ that they consider the work that they do here enriching, and I also _believe_ that in partnership we make a better department as well as better lives for all of us. I'm _proud_ that our people lead fulfilling lives that include much more than banging out code.

Somebody who wants people to dedicate their lives to their jobs; indeed, someone who seems to want to live in a world where people act that way, is just a mystery to me.

</comment><comment><USER38> This memo is really from 2003 according to one commenter on the Technocrat page claiming to have worked there. If thats true, Cerner stock is up over 600% since - Dow is up 16%. Well...

</comment><comment><USER39> Hypothetically...

The memo would certainly kill morale at most places I've been. The corrective actions being asked for are completely wrong.. but this is aimed at middle management.

Read the beginning of the memo - not the end. If the parking lot is largely empty at 8am and at 5pm..... and workers are expected to work a standard 40 hour week, that's an indication that something might be wrong.

One can also assume that if the organization was functioning correctly and middle management was doing it's job - the CEO wouldn't give a rat's a __about the parking lot - because he'd have the metrics in front of him to say "Damn, that KC facility is doing awesome! Every other facility should be learning from these guys.". Instead, something prompted him to feel that the place was slacking, and seeing an empty parking lot at 8am AND 5pm is a pretty good indication that people aren't even putting in minimal working hours. Fair enough. (And if he's completely wrong - middle management should be able to manage upwards correctly and explain to him why he's wrong, why everyone is car-pooling and why the metrics and results are best-of-class, so he should just back off)

</comment><comment><USER40> Sounds like this guy must have had an unfortunate convergence of: A late-night viewing of Glengarry Glen Ross. A fight with his wife. A bottle of JD.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is a CEO of a company that wants to get a product out the door. Sometimes that's not easy. He's basically using the tools at his disposal. It sounds like he's given his team a year, and they still haven't delivered. An email like this can sometimes shake out the non-performing team members and lead them to quit. In a company with 7,600 employees - I'm pretty sure not every one is a star performer.

Anyways, I've worked for a CTO who basically was a raving lunatic. Every couple of months there would be some kind of a blow up. But, looking back, we also did some amazing work under him, and created a cutting edge service still used 6 years later.

</comment><comment><USER42> From the NYT article on this event [1].

>It made Fortune magazine's lists in 1998 and 2000 of the 100 best companies to work for in America.

Why do people still cite this ridiculous report? It's had both Walmart and EA in the list. Both companies are about as bad to work for as is possible as a professional in a first world country.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging- office-m...](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-memo- boomerangs-chief-executive-criticized-after-upbraiding.html?ref=cerner- corporation&pagewanted=2)

<comment><USER43> I imagine it depends a lot on what you do. Fortune magazine targets rich manager type people so I'm assuming they mean best companies to work as a highly paid manager. I have no reason to believe that Walmart or EA (the actual EA, not one of their game studios) couldn't be great companies to work for if you're a senior manager in charge of major aspect of the company. If I was a global logistics guy, Walmart might very well be at the top of my list of companies I'd like to work for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> That blog layout is really hard to read. There isn't enough structure around the text and too many similar fonts or font sizes are used.

</comment><comment><USER45> Expectations of having employees stay until 7:30 when they're payed to stay until 5... how did we get there?

</comment><comment><USER46> At risk of sounding like a complete asshat to apparently everyone else on this thread, a 9:00 - 4:00 workday is what I had in kindergarten. If I were running a company with this issue I'd consider it a big problem too.

</comment><comment><USER47> The CEO should be required to go to Kansas City and work alongside the employees who he thinks are slacking off. That includes being in by 8am, staying late every night, and coming in on Saturdays. Everyday, he cannot leave until all of the employees leave, and while he's there he must help do the actual work that needs doing so badly. He cannot leave Kansas City until the productivity levels rise to his liking.

After all, if he thinks this is reasonable for his employees, he should lead by example.

<comment><USER48> Have you ever been around senior management of a larger company? Everyone I have met works at least 10 hours a day, and often more. Except for vacation days perhaps, but even then they are still tied to the laptop and phone.

<comment><USER47> Yes, but I'm sure it's ultimately their choice. Does the board of directors or stockholders send the CEO a memo that his car is not in the parking lot long enough for their liking?

If the CEO wants to work him/herself into an early grave, that's his/her choice. But to force employees who, let's face it, aren't going to be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor like the CEO will, to give up large portions of their personal time to improve the wrong metric? That's unreasonable.

<comment><USER49> Agreed. This reads like the ranting of some fossil that clamors for the 'good ol' days' when everyone used to be married to their job. This is apparently one of the best places to work in the country, according to ComputerWorld: [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/349873/No._52_Best_Pl...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/349873/No._52_Best_Place_to_Work_in_IT_Cerner)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Wow. I'd never work there. If I did, I wouldn't work there for much longer. We work on the principle of letting people manage their own time. When there's stuff that needs doing, it gets done but there's always at least some time off afterwards to make sure people can recover from late nights or weekends.

</comment><comment><USER51> "We Make Health Care Smarter"

But we apparently don't check for spelling or grammar.

<comment><USER52> Agreed. It reads like someone who is so fried from overwork he can't spell anymore. Not a good advertisement for working 70 hr. weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> maybe they all started biking to work?</comment>


Create ML - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/documentation/create_ml <comment><USER2> Because I lack imagination and or don't understand ML enough, could someone give a couple of examples of what this could be used for? Particularly at these scales with presumably(?) a smaller initial data set.

<comment><USER3> These are not revolutionary or even helpful ideas, but they can be convenient or fun. For example:

Some medical applications (just for example, you would need quite a robust model):

* Categorize moles on your skin as cancerous or not.

* Categorize cuts on your skin as infected or not.

* Have the user input certain characteristics (images, temperature data, etc) and give some preliminary diagnosis.

Less interesting/helpful:

* Detect photos of certain foods in your app (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, Yelp) and recommend relevant emoji or hashtags.

* For a note-taking or to-do app, classify notes into categories automatically for the user.

* Suggest actions in your app based on what the user types or does.

* Recommend solutions or help articles from the feedback form in your app. Tag the feedback with a certain sentiment to determine how quickly you should follow up on it.

* Detect your products in images/videos and tag them to make them searchable, and recommend relevant things to the user (e.g. in a beer tracking app [2], detect a certain kind of beer, suggest similar types).

If any of this sounds like it's been done before, it probably has, but it's important to note this is done entirely on device (private!) and with custom labels. The current alternative is to use TensorFlow Lite [1], which is a bit more involved. I'm sure as the field develops we will see more creative (and useful/helpful) applications.

[1] [https://www.tensorflow.org/mobile/tflite/](https://www.tensorflow.org/mobile/tflite/)

[2] [https://untappd.com/](https://untappd.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks like a really easy way to integrate your own custom ML models into your app. I imagine this would appeal to a lot of hobbyist developers, especially given how simple it is.

The docs [1] also seem to imply they're using transfer learning from more robust models for their image classifier: "Use at least 10 images per label for the training set, but more is always better." and "Create ML leverages the machine learning infrastructure built in to Apple products like Photos and Siri."

[1] [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/create_ml/creating...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/create_ml/creating_an_image_classifier_model)

<comment><USER4> This will appeal to any developer that wants to deploy machine learning models on macOS or iOS and get the most out of the hardware (Metal w/Core ML).

> The docs [1] also seem to imply they're using transfer learning from more > robust models for their image classifier

I read that as a recommendation for the minimum number of training samples per label (e.g. 10 photos w/leopard tagged).

Apple's Turi Create [1] also also been getting some love these last few months to add support for exporting to Core ML.

[1] [https://github.com/apple/turicreate](https://github.com/apple/turicreate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not long time ago we got Swift for Tensorflow as first class citizen: [https://medium.com/tensorflow/introducing-swift-for- tensorfl...](https://medium.com/tensorflow/introducing-swift-for- tensorflow-b75722c58df0)

</comment><comment><USER6> Interestingly, it's available in Swift only, not Objective C: [https://twitter.com/jckarter/status/1003768142407987200](https://twitter.com/jckarter/status/1003768142407987200)

</comment><comment><USER7> Boy that 'ML' logo sure is reminiscent of the TensorFlow logo..

</comment><comment><USER8> How is this different from Core ML?

<comment><USER3> Core ML is bring-your-own-model (or use the built-in classifiers, which have generic labels). This is an easy way to train custom models (for example, on images from your own product catalog).

<comment><USER8> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can I use this with Swift for Linux?

<comment><USER10> No, as it is reliant on the Frameworks built into –and SDKs targeting– macOS 10.14

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can we please replace "Machine Learning" by "Pattern Matching", as this is all it is ...

<comment><USER12> Image Captioning, STT, DeepQN etc now have little to do with "Pattern Matching" anymore.

[1] [https://github.com/DeepRNN/image_captioning](https://github.com/DeepRNN/image_captioning) [∞]

<comment><USER12> Admittedly though the ridiculously primitive apple classifiers can be regarded as simple old "Pattern Matching".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Did Apple just commoditize machine learning? If it wasn't before...

<comment><USER14> The big tech companies keep trying this (commoditizing ML models exposed via APIs), but I am extremely skeptical that they will succeed with this approach.

The reason is simple. _All_ of the work lies with validating that a model solves _your_ particular problem well enough to be cost-effective for your customers or stakeholders to be satisfied. Machine learning is not a commodity the same way cloud infrastructure is, because the model development and validation aspects are inherently tailored to your extremely specific, one-off data generating processes and performance characteristic requirements.

Even if you outsource the model itself, this still requires developing some notion of acceptance testing for the model's performance in _your_ use case, on the distribution of data that matter to _you_. And such acceptance testing still requires high literacy in statistics and model evaluation (e.g., you can't skip on hiring that expensive machine learning engineer _even if you outsource_ because then who, internally, is going to be able to tell you if the outsource solution is a bunch of junk, and why, and what to do about it.)

Short of turning the big tech ML offerings into flat out consulting arrangements, where you trade-off having your own in-house and application- specific and data-specific machine learning staff in order to rent time from experts at the big co's, this model couldn't work.

Don't get me wrong, just as IBM somehow still finds ways to leach from enterprise clients after all these years of not actually helping them, I am sure these lines of business will generate enterprise consulting money.

I just think lots of people will be disappointed that it doesn't somehow mean you're getting Google ML engineer caliber attention or results spent on your company's bespoke needs, and that performance of generic and naive transfer learning from big cookie cutter models often ends up being way worse than you thought.

I feel bad for people who end up suffering the amplified version of vendor lock-in this could create.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Could not seem to find any mention of where the model is being trained...I would assume locally, but again, can't seem to find a mention of recommended hardware for this.

</comment><comment><USER16> Things like this convince me that we will never get to AGI. I have a, perhaps untestable hypothesis, that an AGI could only be built by an AGI, or that if we create it, we won't entirely know how we created it in the first place. (Much as we don't completely understand how to create life force, even though we do create it, through the process of reproduction). We may be able to build components of it (like growing organs in a lab) but I am quite skeptical we will be able to create "life" or in this case "intelligence".

<comment><USER17> In my uninformed opinion, ML is more akin to the subconscious parts of our brain, like our ability to recognize peoples faces. We don't learn how to do this, it's there when we are born. It is a hardwired part of our brain that was formed through evolution instead of learning and does not involve higher order thinking. It's obviously useful, and could/would form part of a AGI system but unlikely to be enough.

<comment><USER18> > to the subconscious parts of our brain Not too bad of a definition since the > basis for ML is statistics on assumptions on what describe the world.</comment></comment></comment>


Advice on Relational Database - <AUTHOR> Good afternoon everyone! As a CS student I have to choose a database to work with for my final project.
So my options are Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL.
Which one will you choose and why.
Pricing is not an issue because for students it's free. Have a nice day ! <comment><USER2> What are you _doing_ with the DB? There's no reasonable way to make a blanket recommendation w/o knowing what your needs or goals are.

So use PG.

<comment><AUTHOR> It will be a full system for an online store for weapons. So I have to choose a DB, back-end which will be Java and front-end which I have no idea yet. Angular,React...

<comment><USER2> I don't see how it even matters from a technical standpoint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ape-box PostgreSQL for quality Oracle for Curriculum

</comment><comment><USER3> What language will you be writing in? Not all languages can access all databases.

<comment><AUTHOR> Java.</comment></comment>


Why Is Ikea a Non-profit? – OnlineMBA.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.onlinemba.com/blog/video-why-is-ikea-a-non-profit/ <comment><USER2> Because it generates an incredible tax break and makes it almost impossible to remove management.</comment>


Why Self-Discipline Is Overrated - <AUTHOR> http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/selfdiscipline.htm#MM <comment><USER2> > Finally, most people who cite these experiments simply assume that it's > better to take a bigger pay-off later than a smaller pay-off now. But is > that always true?

I've always thought that this was the key element of the research: that delaying gratification indicates your time-value of gratification is higher, that your "discounting rate" for future gratification is low. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-value_of_money>

It happens that basically every observed behavior which is common and financially detrimental for low-income individuals and uncommon for high- income individuals can be explained by a single intuitive variable in the human mind: the discounting rate of future gratification. For example, engaging in rent-to-own is more expensive in total than saving up over time to buy out-right. But if your personal discounting rate for that future spent money is high, the extra money is less valuable to you than the current gratification of purchase, and your choice is the rational one.

This expands beyond the obvious example and into basic life choices: school or no? Depends on how you value the future benefits of school, relative to the current difficulties. Work day and night for years on a startup? Likewise.

If this basic model is correct, then our decisions are profoundly, fundamentally affected by our personal discounting rate. If that's true, then education can likely focus on this aspect of our perspective to improve children's appreciation for the payoff of work and so on.

The comments are interesting, and I'd love to see research expand on the question and address his concerns, but there's a reason this interpretation is repeated: it seems consistent with observed behavior.

</comment><comment><USER3> Did you mean to link to the "MM" fragment?

<comment><USER4> Given that HN loves gender differences, he probably did.

And on that note, I'm not sure the marshmallow study is particularly relevant to his point. The reason girls do better in school is probably for a number of reasons, maturity probably being key, but his point that boys are more rebellious is probably part of it. Guys are less risk averse than girls, which is probably why more girls tow the go-to-college line and more boys start their own businesses. For that he should have cited studies on gender differences in risk aversion and the benefits of risk taking, not the marshmallow study.

<comment><USER5> Except for that the article is about self-discipline, not about gender differences or doing well in school.

(Unless you're talking about the submitter and not Kohn.)

<comment><USER4> I'm talking about the submitter. The section header that the submitter linked to (#MM) is entitled "On Marshmallows and Gender Differences: Rereading Self- Discipline Research."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "What worked best wasn't "self-denial and grim determination" but doing > something enjoyable while waiting so that self-control wasn't needed at > all![40]"

The author and I have very different definitions of 'self control'.

<comment><USER7> Could you please define what 'self control' is to you? I only ask because you seem to have a negative perspective on the article.

<comment><USER6> At the risk of being tautological: self control is doing what you plan to do. The exact mechanisms of avoiding temptation, laziness, fear, etc are orthogonal to results.

<comment><USER7> I believe the author was making the point that as humans we cannot always do what we plan to do. We run out of 'ego' before we run out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Training yourself to enjoy what you want to work on is where it's at.</comment>


Photographing Big Waves at Mavericks - <AUTHOR> https://www.cake.co/conversations/L44Nh7h/my-cautionary-tale-of-photographing-the-world-s-biggest-waves-at-mavericks <comment><USER2> Cake is one of the photo-oriented social media sites that popped up on my radar during the G+. Chris MacAskill, Cake's CEO, made himself available for an AMA during the sunset period (the AMA itself seems to have escaped IA archival, though it's memorialised at Reddit: [https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/9tdmoz/hello_my_n...](https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/9tdmoz/hello_my_name_is_chris_macaskill_and_i_am_the_ceo/)).

I have to say that the site and its features really suit the spirit and message of this Mavericks reminiscence.

<comment><USER3> Side note, thanks for showing me there is such thing as 'old.reddit.com'. I find the current site a disgrace of performance.

<comment><USER2> :)

It's one of the few things that makes Reddit barely tolerable these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This isn't something you think about when you think about the USGS or the NOAA. But their monitoring stations, with real-time or short-delay feeds, and sea floor mapping makes the prediction models better.

It's not an obvious use case for data such as this, which is why it's important to remember, and it is similarly important that the data be available in open, preferably human-readable formats.

<comment><USER5> This is definitely something I think about when I think of NOAA and USGS. I've been surfing in California since the early '90s, and have spent many hours listening to the buoys being recited over the weather radio. We knew exactly what times each hour our relevant buoys' readings would come on, and we'd constantly be tuned in to see if there were any changes in swell.

And today, the lifeblood of many surf forecasting websites is based on this data.

This use case is basically all I think of when I think of NOAA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> When Mavericks is nothing, it's literally nothing. I've sailed right through it on the OYRA Half Moon Bay Race which is in late June. Dead flat water. Jellyfish schools. Light air sailing. The zephyr of a breeze shut down as we crept in and it was a parking lot of boats behind us. Like Point Conception, you can sail around it even when it's going off. In June, you're thinking about the Montara wind hole. Mavericks doesn't exist in June.

<comment><USER7> This is not specific to Mavericks amongst "big wave" surf spots. Waves break as a function of swell period vs. ocean depth. More powerful (longer period) swell will break in deeper water, so in many places known for big waves, shorter period swell will just go right over and not break until closer to shore.

<comment><USER8> That's why a lot of breaks are literally un-surfable in bigger swells. What was once a nice sandbar or reef, now only has whitewater and their are waves breaking well past the usual spot--usually in a way that is either two dangerous or not fun.

I remember paddling out at C-Street in Ventura in 14-17ft swell...didn't surf a thing and thought I was going to die. Go on a 4ft day and you will be lucky to find a place in the line-up.

<comment><USER9> Most people are going to think they're going to die in triple overhead surf at any break

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am reminded of the amazing story of surviving a 100ft wave.

"We free-fell for about 50 feet before we landed on the back slope of the wave," Alladio said. "And those machines weigh about 900 pounds, so I went deep, down into the water almost up to my elbows. And that was the moment when I felt a little shot of panic."

[https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/DESPERATE-RACE-FOR- SU...](https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/DESPERATE-RACE-FOR-SURVIVAL- RIDING-FOR-THEIR-2652731.php)

</comment><comment><USER11> As someone who hasn't grown up around the ocean the size and orientation of some of those waves look almost alien.</comment>


Companies That Presented at Y Combinator Demo Day 1 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/23/here-are-the-companies-that-presented-at-y-combinator-demo-day-day-1/

<comment><USER2> Reading these dozens of one sentence summaries gives me an inkling of what it must feel like to be an investor who is pitched to all the time -- a concept really has to stand out to be noticed.

<comment><USER3> Yes it's really hard as an investor to 1) stay alert through hours and dozens of startups, and 2) actually understand enough of what they do from the presentations to know if you want to know more. Not perfect by any means, but I certainly can't think of a better way for them to do it without taking massive amounts of time from the founders.

<comment><USER4> Then again, isn't not being able to understand what a startup is doing a good indicator that perhaps they aren't ready for your investment?

<comment><USER3> Certainly yes, but it usually takes longer than 3 minutes to figure stuff out. What I really need is an hour at least with a startup 1 on 1 to know if I'm really interested. But like I said above, that doesn't scale with so many companies and investors. So you have to trust your instincts, but there's often a herd mentality as investors talk to each other and try to use those signals to help them.

<comment><USER5> Would they typically hold longer form talks kind of like public company analyst days where they get into more detail over an hour or so and several potential investors who have dialled in grill them on what is being presented? Apologies for the noob question, I don't deal with startups but am curious about the information dissemination process they use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was surprised to learn GitLab was part of the group. At my last company we were using GitLab for quite some time, I had no idea they were in a place to take seed money (figured they'd be looking for a higher round). Either way GitLab is pretty cool.

<comment><USER7> From a recent GitLab blog post[1]:

> At first glance, it might not seem obvious for our company to join Y > Combinator since we already have 10 employees and hundreds of paying > clients. The reason for joining was learning more about how to grow as a > company. We were always really focussed on GitLab and of course we never > want to lose that. But we want to avoid as many mistakes made by fast > growing companies and to learn from the Y Combinator partners that have seen > hundreds of organizations growing fast. There are regular events that > feature experts in all facets of building a company, from user retention to > enterprise sales. And it is great to hear stories from other startups,what > they have overcame and how relentlessly resourceful they have been.

[1] [https://about.gitlab.com/2015/03/04/gitlab-is-part-of- the-y-...](https://about.gitlab.com/2015/03/04/gitlab-is-part-of-the-y- combinator-family/)

<comment><USER8> GitLab CEO here, thanks for posting this swaroop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not involved in the startup scene at all, but isn't "uber for laundry" a punchline at this point? What are cleanly doing (or what aren't they doing) that dozens of failed startups didn't do? This isn't snark, YC are saavy investors and I'm interested to know what they see.

This article, for example, is a year old: [http://nymag.com/news/features/laundry- apps-2014-5/](http://nymag.com/news/features/laundry-apps-2014-5/)

Unrelated, I found it interesting that clean.ly doesn't resolve to Cleanly's website--for that you have to go to getcleanly.com. Do -ly's confer status these days to the point that the URL is unnecessary?

<comment><USER10> Apparently you didn't read that article or you would see what they are doing...every load of laundry gets a cookie or healthy treat delivered with it. Clearly a game-changer.

<comment><USER11> The cookie is the secret, they fatten up their customers with the free cookies and in a year pivot into an apparel ecommerce play now that their user base has outgrown their clothes.

<comment><USER10> The clothes are undersized compared to average so the customer base feels extra obese and they pivot into a social fitness tracker network and an on- demand healthy meal provider with an IOT ordering widget.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pigeonly (improved inmate to outside world communication) strikes me as interesting. It's not very sexy but I think it's a somewhat interesting problem domain (and sadly a growth market) where connections/talking to people/understanding the market can give you a pretty hard to immitate advantage. Doesn't seem very hard technically but pretty hard non-technically.

<comment><USER13> This guy's story is great, too. Former inmate, was at $3M+ ARR as of Dec 2014: [http://www.crewlab.net/pigeonly/](http://www.crewlab.net/pigeonly/)

<comment><USER14> There was an episode of Planet Money earlier this month talking about Pigeonly: [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/03/13/392862778/episode-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/03/13/392862778/episode-610-the- prisoners-solution)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When I saw this post I thought it'd be a report on the very first Y Combinator Demo Day ever and where they are today.

I still think that'd be really interesting.

<comment><USER16> Same here. I'm hoping TC or even Sam Altman will do a similar post comparing how demo day has changed over the years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> yhat seems really cool. Saw Greg Lamp at papis.io conference late last year demonstrating a beer recommender they built : [http://www.slideshare.net/Yhat/building-a-beer- recommender-w...](http://www.slideshare.net/Yhat/building-a-beer-recommender- with-yhat-papisio-november-2014)

</comment><comment><USER18> > Pomello

Fellas, if you are here, - keep in mind the "keming" issue with your name when spelled in lowercase. On the TC website with the body font they are using the name looks and reads like Pornello. Had to re-read it to understand why the brief didn't match the name.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the heads up, this is a first for this issue. Not sure there is much we can do about it at this point. Hopefully, it won't be the first thing people's minds jump to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can't figure out how Kickback gets around the gambling legalities if they are hosted in the US. They also say they use PayPal for withdrawals which is shocking since gambling is against their TOS.

<comment><USER21> It's a game of skill, not a game of chance, and thus isn't covered under the gambling regulations.

<comment><USER22> Doesn't that have to involve your skill in the performance, e.g. sports betting is still illegal in more than the number of states they say they are operating in, isn't it?

<comment><USER21> You're playing the video game, so it is your skill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wow, that's a ton of companies compared to "back in the day".

It'd be interesting to have a nice summary of recent batches and where they are to see what kinds of ideas have gotten traction. There are some there that, from the one sentence blurb, don't sound that interesting, but I think the YC folks and the people they invest in are smart, so there's got to be something there.

I'm personally interested in seeing what BookTrope is doing, as it's in a similar space to my own LiberWriter.

Good luck to all of them!

<comment><USER24> The site [http://yclist.com/](http://yclist.com/) has a list of YC companies and where they stand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> cindercooks.com looks cool. I love me a good steak, so I would buy one today if it would ship today. Early 2016 though? Not pre-ordering that far in advance.

<comment><USER26> I personally feel like being able to cook the perfect steak by sight/intuition is a skill worth learning.

<comment><USER27> There are now 3 YC companies making temperature-controlled cooking products, with 3 different engineering approaches: Cinder, Nomiku, and Pantelligent (note: co-founder). In each case, the basic tech works, and the result is really delicious, matching and sometimes exceeding what a "sight/intuition" skilled chef can produce. You'll believe it when you taste it!

<comment><USER28> Sounds nice, but have any of you guys figured out the cleaning part of the equation? Because if not, I'd gather most consumers will stick with their pans. (Pros are a different story, of course.)

<comment><USER29> Cinder is supposed to come apart (we'll see what they launch), so you can stick the cooking surfaces in the dishwasher.

Nomiku should not really get dirty (it only comes into contact with water).

Pantelligent doesn't make it clear if the handle will be immersible, but it isn't that much hassle to clean a pan without soaking the handle.

<comment><USER28> Good luck with that... At the very least, probe into waterproofing that pan. You can't afford to fail this, because someone _will_ place it in their dishwasher or soak the handle, and word of mouth will rinse off any early adopter enthusiasm when news of broken pans hit cooking forums. Your pan would then be about as easy to sell as a grown dog with a "moody, dirty, bites" sign around its neck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> A group of TechCrunch bloggers posted their favorites for the first day as well. [http://techcrunch.com/gallery/our-10-favorite-companies- from...](http://techcrunch.com/gallery/our-10-favorite-companies-from-y- combinator-demo-day-day-1/) I found it interesting because none of the companies I had internally thought of as potential breakout hits made their list.

</comment><comment><USER31> Hesitate to post an AskHN about this, but which company has the 66 year old (co-)founder? [0] Glad to see this diversity.

[0] [http://venturebeat.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/03/xlarge_YC-...](http://venturebeat.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/03/xlarge_YC-infographic_v4.png)

</comment><comment><USER11> Will somebody please sum up which ones are LO-MO-SO and which ones are MO-SO- LO [1]

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

</comment><comment><USER22> "like comments, but they automatically follow your code as it's moved around in your program"

Wait, don't comments do that?

(edit: oh, they mean like forum comments, not like source-code comments?)

<comment><USER32> That's kind of a low-resolution summary of what we were saying -- you can annotate code on omniref, and we'll carry those annotations forward/backward in time, until the code changes.

It's part of our way of dealing with the problem that happens on StackOverflow all the time, where the top-rated answer is completely out-of-date.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Happy to see Nomiku on the list - they ran a fantastic Kickstarter campaign, and I hope they get the help they need to scale up into everyone's kitchen.

</comment><comment><USER34> Have Apple relaxed their restrictions about duplicate functionality in apps produced by the same developer? GroupAhead are cloning their own apps with a seemingly fixed set of features (membership, calendar, forum, links). A friend had his app denied with Apple saying that the new app should be rolled into another app he had already created.

</comment><comment><USER35> Has anyone made a "March Madness pool" style game for YC demo day?

</comment><comment><USER36> First glance: the ratio of features to products to businesses is astounding.

<comment><USER37> I had the same first impression. I see many cool products, some cool ideas/concepts, but....very few real businesses. That's how it goes though, 5 years from now, one, maybe two of these 'companies' will be around still. It's a fun game.

<comment><USER38> Fair comment for typical accelerators but not really true in the case of YC. There are far more alive or exited than dead companies in YC's alumnus.. [http://yclist.com](http://yclist.com) (out of date but it's the old data that's relevant here).

<comment><USER36> Do you have insight into the financial operations of every company on that list?

There are a fair number of zombie startups in Silicon Valley that haven't yet exhausted their funding. Some even have enough revenue to keep the lights on. But it doesn't mean they're anywhere close to having a thriving business that will be able to sustain itself and grow meaningfully over time.

When evaluating startups, alive/dead is a lazy means of analysis. This is particularly true in today's funding environment, where companies can raise seven figure seed rounds and establish a fairly long runway very early on. The real question is how many of the startups funded today will ever realistically be in a financial position to return capital, and how much, to their investors.

<comment><USER37> Exactly, I do not count, 'Hey we've made it five years now, but can hardly break even and have no clear vision of where to go from here' as 'alive'. In fact, by that time, the investors have probably written them off and will be trying to figure out if they can salvage some talent from it before their runway ends. In the end, YC or not, less than 10% of these guys will become real companies. It's just statistics. YC may get you the seven figure round, but if you keep your, 'product', or 'feature' as such for a few years, you're dead.

Edit: Not trying to discredit what these start ups have done so far, it's very hard getting to that point alone.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Biography of 37signals with Jason Fried - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/37signals-jason-fried/ <comment><USER2> Andrew is getting really good. I listen to maybe 1/10 shows. It's a lot of fun watching someone get better.

His strategy seemed to have been start with hyperactive bluntness which was great. It was a little hard listening to him say "how much do you make per year" to someone who didn't want to say it, but it meant he got. Now he seems to be getting more subtle and calm. He's getting good at picking the point where pushing needs to stop by intuition: " _I'm happy to change my mind about big things but my beliefs are my beliefs._ " (around 31min).

<comment><USER3> To clarify that point...

Believing in something doesn't mean you're closed minded. It means you have an opinion, a point of view. My beliefs come from keeping an open mind, questioning assumptions, experimenting with new ideas. I wouldn't believe what I believe without approaching life this way. My mind remains open, but I haven't found better answers yet so I'm comfortable with what I believe: Avoid organizational complexity, product complexity, and political complexity as best you can. Things are pretty simple and easy until you make them hard and complicated.

My 6th grade science teacher told me: "Never believe yourself to be completely certain of anything." I think that's good advice.

Hope that clarifies things. It was a great question from Andrew.

<comment><USER2> At the risk of being argumentative, I don't think so.

Usually, and seemingly in the context of that interview, _belief_ usually means something different from ' _my current position._ ' It does usually imply some sort of rigidity and does imply an unwillingness to change. In the context of current political correctness it also amounts to a request that thee not be challenged too much.

Notice how that word ends that line of questioning as if either, (a) you have arrived at the root cause or (b) the issue is no undependable. Belief (or practical synonyms such as conviction) leads to no more questions. _'I became very convinced that these are correct'_ would have prompted the question 'why/how.'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi Andrew - thanks for a great interview. Just wanted to comment on your point about "changing the world": though I'm sure you haven't reached your full ambition yet, I think you're definitely helping out the audience that you are reaching.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm still watching this, but before I forget: The statement about launching Basecamp on svn reminds me of Max Klein.

<comment><USER6> I'm missing the reference here. (and it seems that there are too many Max Klein to get help from Google) Do you mind explaining what that means?

<comment><USER5> Jason said that it was really easy to launch Basecamp because they'd already built up an audience with their blog. Tons of instant PR from people who already wanted to hear from them.

Max (from here, <http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=maxklein>) said that he was going to be writing a blog about interesting, random stuff, so that when he announces something of importance, he'll have people listening. Thus Cube of M.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Andrew, if you see this, the link to the mp3 is broken. (Same with the Kevin Hartz interview)

<comment><USER8> Fixed it. Thanks.

For some reason, this doesn't work:
The FULL program
 <img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-4094" title="Audio Version" src="<http://mixergy.com/wp-content/uploads/Audio-Version.png> alt="Audio Version" width="26" height="21" /> Prefer audio? Great! Right) click" here for the MP3 format.

But this does work:
The FULL program
 <img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-4094" title="Audio Version" src="<http://mixergy.com/wp-content/uploads/Audio-Version.png> alt="Audio Version" width="26" height="21" /> Prefer audio? Great! Right) click" here for the MP3 format.

<comment><USER9> But the audio RSS feed stopped working :( I've just noticed that I've lost like a week and a half of great interviews.</comment></comment></comment>


Schneier: The War on the Unexpected - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_war_on_the.html <comment><USER2> "In criminal matters, law enforcement is experienced in separating legitimate tips from unsubstantiated fears, and allocating resources accordingly; we should expect no less from them when it comes to terrorism."

I don't think you can expect untrained citizens to distinguish between false alarms and something genuinely concerning. However, it is asinine for a trained police officer to then investigate, find nothing, and arrest someone anyway. There needs to be consequences for anyone in a position of authority for arresting an innocent person simply to cover their own posteriors.

</comment><comment><USER3> False alarms abound. A general sense of alarm is maintained. The government sets itself up as a protector. People do whatever the government wants. The system is working perfectly. What problem is Bruce Schneier trying to solve here?

</comment><comment><USER4> To better educate yourself against a common "false alarm" check out this movie --all TSA screeners are req'd to watch it before Thanksgiving. It's produced by the Department of Justice.

<http://sikhswim.com/2007/10/16/video-on-common-ground/>

-Savraj

</comment><comment><USER5> It is at the same time astounding and unsurprising how wrong our security policy setting bureaucrats are. I work with bomb disposal robots. I'm no security expert, but I understand a bit about the field.

Not only is the edifice of security extremely inconvenient and abuse-numbing, but it doesn't actually accomplish much of anything.

Take a CD. Break it in half. Now you have a plastic knife. The idea that we need to suffer through half measures ignores the most import premise in security: you're only as strong as greatest vulnerability.

</comment><comment><USER6> My only explanation is that a country is globally as intelligent as the mode of the 51% less intelligent of its citizens (it may even be much less than that due to bipolar politics).

I can't explain the braindead politics we have to deal with in western countries otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sorry, Schneier, but I have to report this to the authorities.

</comment><comment><USER8> Alas, this may be the beginning of the end for startup news as I once knew it: a forum free from the messiness of politics.

<comment><USER9> The sky is falling!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> USA is becoming a scary place to live.

</comment><comment><USER11> This privacy/security issue to me is the most important issue of our generation -- especially with the huge datastores everybody is building.

As a libertarian, I want to be completely left alone by government. If I act odd then that's my own business. In fact, eccentricity in thought and action are things we should praise, not report.

I do, however, understand that there is going to have to be some uncomfortable trades to make the modern world function. A retired politician once asked, "Nobody wants to record and mine behavior, but lets assume that right now there are five guys in this country with a lethal, contagious disease that they have been trying to spread to as many people as possible. We would really need instant access to everything they've done over the past week or two, and it would be too late to try to pass some kind of law to create a database to get it. Do you collect and mine that information beforehand, preparing yourself to save millions of lives, or do you make the decision that individual privacy is more important than all those lives?"

To me it's a tough and complicated issue. At the end of the day, I'm willing to put up with some degree of false positives, even if it involves my detention or arrest if it supports the greater good. False positives are always an issue with any system. The question is whether the current security system is appropriately tuned to the security threat. Does it do more harm than good?

Beats me.

<comment><USER6> > The question is whether the current security system is appropriately tuned > to the security threat. Does it do more harm than good?

Let's see... The current "security system" of the US seems to consist in attacking other countries, turning its citizens into paranoids and implementing counter-productive policies. It kills thousands of people and destroys wealth. Kind of like a second 9/11, with less intensity. So I guess it does way more harm than good.

And please, don't mod this as a troll; that's basically the thesis of Schneier's book "Beyond fear".

<comment><USER11> Please. Tell us what you really feel. Stop holding back so much. :)

I know it's fun to lob rhetorical hand grenades around. The nice thing about the US is that we have a system where failure is accepted. If you don't like the policies or leaders, there will always be someone along later that's more to your liking. We've done all kinds of screwed up stuff -- and all kinds of good stuff. I think it's absolutely important to point out where we're wrong, but a little perspective can be useful too.

In my perfect world there would be a lot less government involvement in all of our lives. We would be armed and take care of things like terrorism ourselves right when it happened, instead of farming the responsibility for our security out to big government. But both the left and the right want to take away all of our freedoms and do all the worrying and thinking for us. So that means we turn what should be personal things like health care, personal security, property ownership, and privacy into a huge multi-generational political argument without resolution. And then people complain that the government gets it wrong! I think people are all too happy to take away somebody else's freedom for their pet cause. It's just when somebody else does it to them that they squeal the most. That's why I can only answer what freedoms I am personally willing to trade in the war on terror. I can't and won't make those decisions for other people.

I can make one observation, though. As democracies are attacked by terrorism they have a tendency to get more and more restrictive. I would expect the US to follow that pattern -- it has in the past. The thing I am watching is whether those restrictions are temporary or permanent.

I don't countenance too much the argument that politicians use fear to keep the war on terror machine humming along. To me that sounds a lot more paranoid than just simply acknowledging that there are people right now who are actively plotting to kill lots of Americans. It's nothing to go beserko about, just something to consider when you make decisions to vote for representatives. If attacks continue over the next few decades, voters will punish politicians who downplay the threat of terrorism. That's just political reality.

<comment><AUTHOR> _The nice thing about the US is that we have a system where failure is accepted. If you don't like the policies or leaders, there will always be someone along later that's more to your liking._

I wish. Some of the top layer changes in elections, but it seems like the bad guys in the government have very long careers, alternating between government appointments and jobs in companies closely tied to the government. Cheney is a famous example, but there are thousands more like him.

The culture in this world seems to be quite different from that of startup hubs. These people are suits squared. They fail a lot, but not because they try wildly imaginative things. They fail because succeeding (as we'd measure it) is not their goal; power is.

<comment><USER11> I don't know, Paul. I just am not the person to sit around wringing my hands over how bad the political system is -- and I'm a political junkie :)

I've consulted with large government agencies and I've seen the alliances that form between various players, congress, and various agencies. My opinion is that any cohesive group of people with a lot of time on their hands is going to try to take political power from other people. The caricature people use is Cheney and the military, but it happens all over the place. I remember back in the 80s environmental groups would go around to state legislatures, getting them to write very complex laws. Then they would hit all of the local governments, offering to consult with them so they would be in compliance with the laws they helped write! So the big old wheel just keeps turning around and around.

I will agree that the structure of the system is broken. Complex systems have a tendency to spin out of control. But in general the whole thing kind of hangs together anyway. We're not out in the streets with M-16s shooting at each other. Instead we can sit in our cushy chairs enjoying all of the benefits of freedom while we craft pithy arguments to toss at one another.

I remember when the economy was in the toilet during the late 70s. Carter used to get on TV and say not only did the country suck, it was pretty much all our fault. Here's hoping that form of leadership doesn't return.

<comment><USER12> I'd take Carter over the current leadership of this country any day of the week.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Should You Pay Twice as Much for a Mac? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.eweek.com/applewatch/content/channel/should_you_pay_twice_as_much_for_a_mac.html <comment><USER2> There are dozens of ways to explore the differences, and not everyone will care about the same things.

But a data point I haven't seen yet is total ownership time. I have literally had my Power Mac dual G5 for over 5 years. And although I finally upgraded it recently to an Intel Mac, it took me a long time to decide if this was even necessary. My "old" machine still works beautifully, and I simply moved it to a different room.

I have other reasons to like Macs of course, but I know plenty of people constantly upgrading PCs and it wouldn't surprise me if over 6 years I have spent less on computers than they have.

</comment><comment><USER3> My iMac lasted 6 years and died last month after being on for 24/7 for all that time. It cost me £1,200 when I bought it. So that's around £200 a year. I expect my new Mac Mini will last just as long and it only cost £400.

My £1,500 PC on the other hand is only two years old and is showing signs of dying and I question the value of trying to fix it given that no one seems to be able to nail down the problem. PCs just don't have the life expectancy of Macs.

</comment><comment><USER4> While we're sharing random anecdotes: my last PC (which I inexpertly built, fairly cheaply) lasted about 5 years of heavy use. While waiting for a new one, I used an old Dell that was lying around which is at least 8 years old, and worked fine. I've seen several people using similarly old PCs.</comment>


Show HN: Real-Time job opening notifications from remote-friendly companies - <AUTHOR> https://hireremotely.co <comment><AUTHOR> If anyone has some remote-friendly companies they would like to see added to HireRemotely, just drop the company name below and we'll try and get it added.

<comment><USER2> Automattic,

Zapier

Also, I would love to subscribe to any new jobs that have keywords in the job description that I can specify.

And if clicking on a logo opened up their Jobs page, that would be amazing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just added Zapier and Automattic. I'll look into linking out to their job pages from HireRemotely. Thanks for checking it out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Minor UI bug: If you select one company, then go back and hit `Select All`, your previous selection is removed.

Expected behaviour in to add all companies.

</comment><comment><USER4> hit your site, understood what it was, tapped 'add all', mobile browser auto filled my email, hit go and got the confirm screen all within 5s

good work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! This was an MVP, so we'll be making improvements over the coming weeks as well.</comment></comment>


Link Click Tracking: You're Doing it Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://tech.matchfwd.com/link-click-tracking-youre-doing-it-wrong/

<comment><USER2> Faster is better.</comment>


Ask HN: Is iOS 7 Beta reliable and stable enough to use on your primary phone? - <AUTHOR>

I'm installing it now, but still curious what bugs and crashes people are experiencing. <comment><USER2> Well, if you're "installing it now" it's a little late to ask, isn't it? :-) I put it on my iPhone 5, which is my primary phone. Having been through many betas before, I'm prepared for some things to not work. Previously, mail, SMS, and phone functionality have always worked and that's what I expected this time. Those important functions work reliably in iOS7.

I've restarted once because something in Safari locked the whole phone. Some apps are broken (Podcasts), or look wonky in spots (Find My Friends). Everything mostly works, though. Even the Pebble app to connect to the Pebble watch. I figured if anything would break, it would be that.

If you want everything to work all of the time, never put the first iOS beta on your phone. Something is always not right. (Last year I was at WWDC, and the new maps app wouldn't render maps for me, just a grid. Not knowing SF that well, that was a major breaking change for me. <G>) Wait until beta 3 or so if you need reliability.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm running it on my primary phone. The battery life is terrible, it crashes semi-frequently, and a bunch of apps are really buggy. If you are fine with that, then yes.

</comment><comment><USER4> Put on my 5, no show stopping issues but I definitely agree on the awful battery life. Started at 90% and was at 60% 2.5 hours later with pretty light use. Doesn't seem much slower to me outside of the music app, which is really slow currently.

Have had a few issues with apps, most notably the Apple podcast app which is completely broken. Had one incident where the lock screen was totally blank other than the top bar but was fixed by a restart.

</comment><comment><USER5> It has been working pretty well for me. I had an issue during install where I couldn't activate my phone. I had to restore back to iOS 6 and then "restore" from iTunes by selecting an upgrade file. It was a pain but it turned out okay.

As for bugs and such, I haven't encountered any that would stop me from using the beta or are frustrating. The only app I have right now that crashes on my is Google+.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm running it on my 4S. It's a bit slow, somewhat choppy, and there are a lot of annoying glitches. The reminders app is currently stuck frozen, which sucks because I use it everyday. Also the mail app is intermittently freezing as of yesterday afternoon.

Don't forget that certain apps will not work. For example, neither the eBay app or MLB apps are working for me (and I use those everyday too).

</comment><comment><USER7> Had it on my iPhone 4S and the installation was the smoothest so far. Running it on your primary phone could be a bit risky, depends on how you use it. I use Podcasts app a lot and having that completely broken is unacceptable to me. I'm going to revert back to iOS6 for now until Beta 3 or higher comes out. Also, I hate the Home screen and the icons...just so terrible of a job from Ive and his team.

</comment><comment><USER8> I installed it on my old iPhone 4S. Battery life is atrocious (even with WiFi- only Airplane Mode enabled) and everything is choppy. I've had the phone reboot on me a few times. I've also read that Apple's Podcasts app doesn't work.

I can deal with all the other issues, but terrible battery life is a dealbreaker. I'll hold off putting it on my primary phone until it improves.

<comment><USER9> I'm easily going a full day on the 4s with iOS 7. Not sure what your definition of atrocious is though. Also experiencing a little choppiness but nothing deal breaking. A couple of crashes here, but they seem to be more of Springboard crashes than full reboots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I put it on my iPhone 4 last night. It's mostly unusable. I installed Stitcher and can listen to podcasts but that's about it. Lots of apps crashing/won't install, camera is totally borked, battery life blows.

Upside is it's nice having a break from my phone.

</comment><comment><USER11> iPhone 4S here:

 _Pros_ ~ Two words - Control Center. I can easily change anything that I want without jailbreaking. It seems like they are moving towards an SBSettings-like iOS. For reference, SBSettings is a jailbreak-only package that allows you to change nearly every aspect of your iDevice.

 _Cons_ ~ Some apps are broken and will just not really work (ie. Alien Blue) with iOS 7 yet. Lag is very small but just enough to be noticeable. Restoring from a backup may take overnight, depending on the amount of data you already have. Some features can take some getting used to before you feel comfortable (ie. displaced 'delete' button when typing in passcode).

</comment><comment><USER12> Not on iPhone 4. I tested it on my friend's phone and it went unusable and you're also risking geting the phone locked. I would wait the last version, more polished in all aspects, specially on the speed one, because on iPhone 4 is WAY slower.

</comment><comment><USER13> Airdrop didn't work for me last night (to a new Macbook Pro) BUT I haven't installed the latest OS X update so maybe that was it. Weather app (built in) crashed on me. And the wife says eBay's app crashes on her.

</comment><comment><USER14> On my 4S, it's pretty slow (mine was a little slow on iOS 6). Battery life is pretty much the same.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have seen it crash a lot. Some landscape orientation apps load in portrait mode and are unusable.

</comment><comment><USER16> Minus a few apps, yes</comment>


Show HN: Spatulah – Scrape instagram comments into a CSV file - <AUTHOR> https://spatulah.com <comment><USER2> I like the idea and love the your website. Did you guys use a Privacy Policy Generator? Because this...

Examples of personal data include but are not limited to: your name, NRIC, passport or other identification number, telephone number(s), mailing address, email address and any other information relating to you which you have provided in any form to us; your photos; your employment history, education background, and income levels; personal data of your family members, such as next of kin, spouses and children; information relating to payments, such as your bank account number and credit card information; and information about your usage of and interaction with our website(s) and/or services including computer and connection information, device capability, bandwidth, statistics on page views and traffic to and from our website(s).

...is way too much. I am aware that Instagram doesn't have most of the latter information. But still. It's a deterrent, for me at least.

Anyways, good luck....love your website..cool design.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey mad_dev, thanks for checking this out! We actually have an in-house legal team, and we use the same privacy policy across our multiple apps. The reason for this is that a lot of client projects require it to be there, so we just use that privacy policy for everything.

For Spatulah, we don't actually have any of your instagram data other than what's available via their public website anyway. We do get your email address when you sign up, but thats strictly for login and resetting your password.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which CRM are you using? - <AUTHOR>

We're growing our customer base and are increasing the amount of incoming leads that we can't deal with it by ourselves without the help of some technology. So we're hoping you can provide us with some info:
1) Which CRM are you using?
2) Why did you choose it?
3) Any problems you are having with it?
We are a SaaS company that sells one product in a 3-tiered pricing strategy. We don't have a sales team at the moment, but will be building one out. Thanks! <comment><USER2> 1\. Daylite. www.marketcircle.com.

2(a). Because all my data are belong to me. (sic) (AKA I don't want to be held hostage to monthly fees in order to keep my business going. That's why I abandoned 37 Signals.)

2(b). Because we are all-Mac and Daylite is kind of all there is on the Mac.

2(c). It has an iPhone app - this is the killer feature of Daylite for me. It is actually better than the desktop software. This is a $50/year item, not a one-time purchase, which is the primary reason I am always looking for an alternative. Do you hear that, www.marketcircle.com? Abuse your customers with pricing and they'll constantly be looking for the door. Which I am.

2(d). Because in fact Daylite works quite well for a team of 5 to be up to date on all of the projects and opportunities going on in the office.

3(a). Daylite's ability to sync remotely with my MacBook has been shit, frankly. The so-called "offline" capability isn't capable.

3(b). Daylite's ability to sync between its own contact database and Address Book, and between its own calendar and iCal has been shit, frankly. Marketcircle blames this on Apple's sync services. 3,500 contacts? C'mon. It's not that much.

What I'm looking for - I watch for stuff that will plug into Google Apps and will have an app for an Android phone. I'd be gone in a second, as soon as I'm comfortable that I have control over my own data utterly and completely.

Tried Salesforce, Zoho. UI is crap, complex, overdone for our purposes.

Breathing and blood. Hard for humans to outsource comfortably. Same with business - finance and CRM. While I and happy/eager to go to the cloud, I won't do so until the data exit is simple and trivial.

/Phil

</comment><comment><USER3> For the past 2-3 years, I've been using Salesforce almost exclusively... once I feel like I need a CRM, that is.

Prior to that stage, I stick to email and Google Docs. Highrise doesn't really work for me and I guess I just like my personal process better.

SFDC may be expensive, but:

1\. Every (good) sales person you hire was probably using it at their last job. 2\. It's one less thing you need to manage -- trust me, you don't want to risk losing your customer/lead data. 3\. Why innovate on the sales process? SFDC may be clunky, but the lead -> opportunity -> account process is pretty straightforward.

Feel free to ping me directly if you want to discuss further. I've walked a bunch of companies through this process over the past few years, happy to help if I can.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've used Highrise and Salesforce.. SF was too expensive and pandered to fortune 500 companies with large budgets and long lists of feature requests. Highrise was a huge improvement but still fell short in terms of email integration and some other key features.

We're working on a fully email integrated simple CRM. If you want to be a part of our free private beta (to be released late next month) please let me know. My email is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you want to outsource your CRM or are not sure, take a look at <http://www.sugarcrm.com> or if you might want to be control of your destiny and include ERP then take a look at <http://www.openerp.com> which includes CRM amongst many other modules.</comment>


How Genius annotations undermined web security - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/25/11505454/news-genius-annotate-the-web-content-security-policy-vulnerability <comment><USER2> Isn't this essentially the same thing as hoodwink.d?</comment>


Mike Honda says he's not going to move into his district - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2014/04/27/mike-honda-says-he-not-going-to-move-into-his-district/ <comment><AUTHOR> tldr: House Rep cannot afford to move into the district he represents (17th Congressional District) after boundaries are redrawn. Tech drives up housing prices story.</comment>


Why PouchDB? CouchDB in the browser - <AUTHOR> http://arandomurl.com/2012/03/27/pouchdb-is-couchdb-in-the-browser.html

<comment><USER2> Very interesting. I've pondered building something similar when I needed client-server replication for a project, but for that it ended up being easier to just use Backbone.js and a server-side API written in Python.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is interesting, but how does PouchDB replicate to an external server with the same origin policy implemented by most browsers?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are 2/3 solution, CouchDB can serve arbitrary files over HTTP, you can have a proxy to server your app and the couch api from the same host, or you, and the other is CORS, CouchDB doesnt natively support CORS yet but that is coming very soon, in the meantime I have been using a node.js CORS proxy</comment></comment>


Show HN: Hacker News, but for videos - <AUTHOR> https://hackervid.io <comment><AUTHOR> It's meant as an homage to HN, obviously.

During lunch I often want to watch interesting videos, and could not find good, regularly updated and curated list. Source code is here : [https://github.com/netgusto/hackervid.io](https://github.com/netgusto/hackervid.io)

It's empty of course; let's hope enough hackers take a minute to paste their favourite videos in.

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice!

I often find myself clicking through videos but quality is hit and miss. I hope this helps.

Thanks for posting the code.</comment>


Embracing the Internet of Things for Cats - <AUTHOR> https://realm.io/news/pragma-sally-shepard-internet-cats-wearables/ <comment><USER2> I admit this product does not really collect any particularly sensitive kind of data, but I still find this sentiment exemplary for the IoT market and it kind of bothers me:

 _The data (collar, toys) needs to be collected, sent to the cloud, and quantified (to view the results). There also obviously needs to be an app._

The problem the author was trying to solve was "get obese cats to move more" and the technical implementation of the first prototype was a simple "if cat does not move for a certain amount of time, activate toy". None of this requires that there is an app or that the product should need an internet connection for basic functionality. Yet those points seemed to be baked into the design from day one, without even giving them much thought. I'd like to know why this is the case.

Now, in this case, of course you need to collect data to figure out the correct parameters, get feedback and figure out more complex behaviors like the adaptive toy. But even then, this tracking could be done locally by the "brain" that was described later and only uploaded occasionally and with user opt-in.

<comment><USER3> I don't find anything wrong with this. You need to remember while the cat is an important stakeholder in the system, the executive stakeholder is the cat owner (he pays the bills) and thus he needs to see the value. Thus the app is to keep the owner in the loop and show them stats about the cat's activity.

<comment><USER2> I'm not convinced a (mandatory) app is always seen as added value - often it can be a liability instead.

But anyway, it's not clear to me at all that the owner would _want_ such statistics or sees them as valuable. They bought the product to solve a specific problem - get their cat to exercise - and I assume the value they expect from it is to see their cat interact with the toy and eventually lose fat.

The statistics are all nice and well and may even be of interest to some customers - but that's in no relation to the hefty price that _all_ customers are paying for them: That suddenly your cat toy requires a smartphone, an internet connection and an external cloud service to function. (Not to mention the collected data itself)

Things would be different if the cloud service was an obvious requirement for the product's core function - e.g. a location tracker that lets you find out where your cat is right now via smartphone. But that's not the case here in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this is why people say the internet is developed for cat lovers. There is a great market for us to reach the cat lovers through the internet. No matter which social platform you visit, people are always sharing cat videos! Thousand of shares can help marketers to spread the message. Maybe we will say "cat marketing" instead of viral marketing soon!</comment>


Ask HN: Template for legal agreement for a mobile application - <AUTHOR> I am working on a mobile application and wish to use a template file for 'terms of condition', 'privacy policy' and license. Do any have any suggestion <comment><USER2> Try this one - [https://www.pandadoc.com/templates/](https://www.pandadoc.com/templates/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are some massive long templates . I was looking for a something simple like these [https://volafile.org/privacy](https://volafile.org/privacy)</comment></comment>