How We Went From 1M To 100M Users In 6 Months - <AUTHOR> http://blog.crossrider.com/post/27337141823/1m-to-100m-users

<comment><USER2> This reminds me of all of those times that people would tell you that their websites get 100k+ hits per day.

Um.. no you don't, you have 100,000 requests to your servers per day. Each page request generates a subsequent 248 requests for assets. You actually get 403 requests per day.

O wait, what's that? You are including "spiders" and other web crawlers in this statistic? What happens if you filter these out?..

100 unique visitors per day! Nice! (So you only just tried to mislead me by a factor of 1000.)

Some people need to learn how to report MAU/DAU/uniques/views/impressions.

These all mean different things.

To say you have grown 1M to 100M _users_ is really disingenuous and a maniuplative use of ambiguity...

</comment><comment><USER3> xSwag made an interesting but auto-killed comment that implies most of these installs are from malware. Is there truth to that?

> Oh wow that is really hilarious. The majority of application downloads from > your network are worms, specifically the lilyjade worm (browser extension), > which, once installed, spams peoples facebook to exploit pages where the > extension is again installed and used for click-fraud. Funny how it takes > your team over two months for application takedowns. You're more than aware > that a vast majority of you're users are from lilyjade variants. Now you're > taking credit for malware downloads. Those aren't 100M users, they're 100M > downloads. Stop hyping yourself up. Further reading if anybody is > interested:

> [1] [http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/05/facebook-takes-aim-at- > cro...](http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/05/facebook-takes-aim-at-cross- > browser-lilyjade-worm/) [2] [http://www.exposedbotnets.com/2012/05/facebook- > lily-systemma...](http://www.exposedbotnets.com/2012/05/facebook-lily- > systemmalware-downloader.html)

<comment><USER4> For some I can only see my comment when I'm logged in. Is it because it got flagged or something?

Also: *your

<comment><USER5> If it was auto-killed, it's for something you did in the past. It will only be visible to users that are logged in with "showdead" enabled and you (presumably to make spammers and trolls think their comments are visible). But I can see this comment so maybe someone didn't like the other one and flagged it.

<comment><USER3> It's not for something he did in the past or this comment you're replying to would be dead as well. He's not hellbanned. It was probably just a duplicate form submission. When you double submit the comment form, the second copy of the comment is automatically killed, but on the poster's screen it looks like both comments are there. You delete the first one instead of the second, and you end up in this situation, with one [dead] copy of your comment.

@xSwag, I wanted to let you know about the [dead] comment directly, but couldn't find a way to contact you here or anywhere else you might use the same username. There's no e-mail/twitter/etc in your profile.

<comment><USER4> I was using nightly firefox build so that is probably why it submitted twice. I have updated my profile with my e-mail now. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't it disingenuous to say you have 100M users? That's like Apple saying they have 25 billion iPhone (SDK) users because people have downloaded that many apps. (Note: world population still ~7 billion.)

<comment><USER7> Extremely disingenuous. In fact it's a lot closer to flat out lying. The extension creators have 100 million users, not them.

They have 7,000 users (developers). They're basically taking credit for all of the work done on all of the extensions and claiming all of the users accordingly

<comment><USER8> The worst part is, they could have said that they had 7k developers who in turn have 100m users, and we'd still be impressed. Instead they just smeared egg all over their own faces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We were one of the early Crossrider adopters and they've been consistently great and above board in terms of support and improving the product.

The majority of our users (Sales People) have never even heard of installing a browser extension so I'm not terribly surprised to hear about the crazy Google "Crossrider Uninstall" options.

This probably also isn't helped by inconsistent branding between the extension name 'by Crossrider', on Windows the browser helper is called 'crossrider.exe', etc. which the users won't be familiar with as they likely haven't even visited Crossriders site.

One last note as to the 'inflated' numbers for Crossrider, they actually directly serve up and push updates from their servers so they're more connected to the users than just having a download. It might make more sense if they had said: "Supporting 100M users for X Customers" or something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the positive feedback Michael. We definitely view our framework as one created by developers for developers and are happy to power so many awesome extensions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Developers always faced the annoying decision of choosing a certain browser and losing a huge chunk of other browser-users, or maintaining several branches of code that is supposed to do the same thing. Well done & Congrats!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks amrif, that's exactly what our aim is, to let developers get the most out of their extensions on ever browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As an extension author, one problem with using Crossrider is that you lose control over the code that is being distributed to users.

At least that's my understanding from reading about Crossrider on Reddit ([http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/inkl0/crossrider...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/inkl0/crossrider_plugins_are_still_dangerous_be_careful/)) where they alleged, for example, that Crossrider extensions changed users' default search engine.

<comment><USER10> I think this proves quite the opposite. As a developer, you can decide if you want to change your users' default search engine (which will probably annoy them a lot), or do anything you want. It's a platform.

<comment><USER11> The fact that Crossrider provides APIs for doing things like that is okay.

My general (perhaps theoretical) concern is that Crossrider is putting themselves in a powerful position by having their software running on 100 million peoples' machines (likely less since some people have installed multiple Crossrider extensions). If Crossrider decided to go evil and start monetizing those extensions, as an extension author I would likely get the blame since the user installed my software and not Crossrider.

A lot of this likely depends on what their business model is. For example, is Crossrider spying on users' browsing experience and monetizing that data? If not, do they have the right to do that in the future?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Growing from 0 to 1M users is probably harder than from 1M to 100M.

<comment><USER13> It really depends on the market size. If you have 1M users which are 40% of the market, it's often difficult. (and expanding in a larger market often implies risks similar to a regular startup).

But if you are in a 1 billion market, your growth rate is impressive and you make data-driven decisions to manage your future growth, then yes, 0 to 1M was harder.

Warren Buffett has a quote for this: "Life is like a snowball. The important thing is finding wet snow and a really long hill". Even if you find wet snow, it's important to look how long the hill really is.

Larry Page uses the toothbrush test: he wants to invest in products that people would use like a toothbrush, twice each day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Awesome story, going to try out your platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks benjlang!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very cool idea. Excited about the possibilities here!

Wish there was more meat to this post though...nothing but the wireframe of what you did to get there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Glad you like the idea of the Crossrider framework. To find out more about us take a look at our website: www.crossrider.com

<comment><USER15> Thanks – I appreciate the note.

Our team did check it out and toss it into our bag of tricks. It looks like a very cool idea that would be fun to build with.

Congrats again on the success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Internet Explorer = Retarded Kid in a Helmet.

Would it be acceptable to depict IE as a ditzy girl, a pigeon-chested homosexual, or a black student with a failing report card? No.

But for some reason, the image a glue-eating retard is fair game. Why?

(FWIW the helmet should signify _autistic_ , not retarded, because because autistic children are the ones that tend to be self-injurious. And autistics' IQs are all over the place. But I don't think that cartoon is trying to say that Internet Explorer has trouble relating to people because it processes information very differently from the rest of us.)</comment>


Tell HN: I symlink'd my Google Drive to my Dropbox folder - <AUTHOR>

Maybe others know this, but I symlink'd my Google Drive folder inside my Dropbox folder and well, now all of my Google Drive content is sync'd with Dropbox. Maybe simple, but this makes me happy. I dont always trust Google to fight for my content if I get locked out or something.
cd ~/Dropbox
ln -s ~/Google\ Drive/ Google\ Drive/ <comment><USER2> Why didn't I think of that?

Presumably it works the other way too?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't tried the other way. I would think so, but in practice I cannot confirm.

<comment><USER3> You don't want to end up with a circular structure…

<comment><USER2> Well, no, you wouldn't want to do _both_ of course...

<comment><AUTHOR> right this is a one-way, not two-way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome!</comment>


Creative Butlers Need Feedback - <AUTHOR> Hey! just recently launched our service. Do you mind help us with a good feedback to our site? www.creativebutlers.com <comment><USER2> Looks good. I mean you're a webdesign company so of course it does.</comment>


Microsofts Bill Buxton online gadget collection (eg. Watch with OCR from 1984) - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/bibuxton/buxtoncollection/

<comment><AUTHOR> I found out about his online collection after watching his interesting video about gadgets past and the future.

[http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Show-Us-Your-Tech/Bill- Buxto...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Show-Us-Your-Tech/Bill-Buxton-Shows- Us-His-Favorite-Tech)

It's actually pretty great

PS. He even has a Casio watch from 1984! that recogises characters you draw.</comment>


How To Get Great Ratings For Your Mac App - <AUTHOR> http://www.evanmiller.org/how-to-get-great-ratings-for-your-mac-app.html

<comment><USER2> Great article and perfect timing - I have just submitted my first app to the Mac store. Two questions:

You mention in the article that some of your customers amended bad reviews - did they do that on their own volition or did you encourage them to do so.

Is there any way of contacting people who give you bad reviews, so you can help them with the problems they are having, and hopefully get them to give you a better review?

<comment><USER3> I've seen people amend reviews in the App Stores without being prompted, it certainly helps and they tend to mention that they are updating a previous review.

As for contacting people, Apple don't make this easy. The only way i've done it in the past is to match up user names, if you can't do that then you have no way to respond to the review in any way. Hopefully Apple will change that in the future or at least allow developers to push the user towards support via email or similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really liked this article. I'm curious about the professional QA – how did you find the tester, and what sort of things did you ask him to test?

</comment><comment><USER5> This is really a great post. I think the title under-sells it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Thank you for posting this.

</comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for sharing another excellent article Evan</comment>


Video by Hilary Mason: An Introduction to Machine Learning with Web Data - <AUTHOR> http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920017516/

<comment><USER2> I have been working with text mining and NLP for 20+ years but I bought this tutorial this morning because it looked interesting. I watched just the 20 minute introduction during lunch, and it framed machine learning in an interesting way. The video production itself is also well done.

<comment><USER2> Another positive comment: I find myself stopping the video to set up tools that she is using (e.g., the JSONview Chrome plugin, Peter Skomoroch's dataset bookmarks, and I just signed signed up for several New York Times APIs).

Also good advice from the video: ask politely for data. About 12 years ago, I wanted access to a large corpus of news stories and none of the national news web sites I contacted would respond to my requests for legal access to their data (i.e., scraping their sites). I then contacted a local paper we subscribed to (Arizona Republic), told them I was a customer, exactly what I was going to use the data for, etc. I received a permission letter fairly quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The video is on sale for $14.99 today w/code DDMAS.

And let me know if you have any questions!

</comment><comment><USER4> Any reviews if you have bought it</comment>


Ask HN: What API's do you like to work with? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working with the Facebook API and the Dropbox API and I'd say I like working with Facebook's better simply because the documentation for the Dropbox API is somewhat lacking.<p>Interested to see what other API's people are working with and why they like them <comment><USER2> SendGrid has a great API. Dropbox's API is pretty straightforward to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I spent a while trying to figure out why the PHP getFile method wouldn't work with files that had spaces in them. I finally figured out that the filename has to be rawurlencoded which the API wasn't doing.

<comment><USER2> That's rather annoying, that it didn't do it, but it apparently wasn't well documented that it had this behavior.

My only dropbox interaction was simple enough that I just used the DropboxUploader PHP script, so I didn't worry about most of that stuff (only using it for internal company stuff, so errors aren't critical).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the WPF API</comment>


The smell of a good startup - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2008/05/03/the-smell-of-a-good-startup/ <comment><USER2> Man, I sure would love to control my thermostat from a web browser. That way, if my dog called me up at work and said it was a bit nippy, I could fix the problem without driving home.

</comment><comment><USER3> Scoble's job seems to be to promote new startups. The article would have been much more interesting if after his whole "smell" thing, he ended up saying this one smells bad. But because its a positive article, one is left wondering why he couldn't actually come up with something substantive, that the best thing he could think of to say was that the company had a nice aroma.

</comment><comment><USER4> sounds like in this case smell = (passion + spending money only where it helps things get done)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you slow down and think about it, this is really the same argument about the difficulties of telecommuting.

Sure, you can do all the hacking in your cocoon, but there's so much more to systems development that just the hacking part.

I want to see the look in users' eyes when they use the software. I want to see how they interact with each other. I want to see all the other things people do as they work with the software. I even want to see their paperwork and whatever else is on their desk/vehicle/work area.

Developing systems take more than just being Stallman/Turing/Woz. You need to be a little Columbo too.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is he a VC/angel now?

</comment><comment><USER7> It doesn't have scoble attached to it.</comment>


Obama tried to give Zuckerberg a wake-up call over fake news on Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/obama-tried-to-give-zuckerberg-a-wake-up-call-over-fake-news-on-facebook/2017/09/24/15d19b12-ddac-4ad5-ac6e-ef909e1c1284_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_no-name%3Apage%2Fbreaking-news-bar&tid=a_breakingnews&utm_term=.c74b1da671bb <comment><USER2> _"There's been a systematic failure of responsibility" on Facebook's part, said Zeynep Tufekci, as associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies social media companies' impact on society and governments. "It's rooted in their overconfidence that they know best, their naivete about how the world works, their extensive effort to avoid oversight, and their business model of having very few employees so that no one is minding the store."

Facebook says it responded appropriately._</comment>


Show HN: Daterangepicker for jQuery and Knockout - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sensortower/daterangepicker <comment><USER2> Nice!

This is an aspect of UI that seemingly goes overlooked in many analytics/ad platforms I've used. It is amazing how painful it can be to select your date range when that is one of the most commonly performed tasks for reporting.

Have you given thought to the other common approach of dragging to select a date range? Most of the issues I've seen with those implementations tend to be around the fact that the visible range of dates to drag/select does not scroll when you move your mouse off to the side or something similar. So if the max date you want is not displayed, the ability to scroll to select breaks.

Not sure when they yanked it, but an older version of Google Analytics[1] had the ability to drag a slider on a linear timeline that had a transparent chart of event volume during that time. I LOVED it because you could easily refine your selection to a date range where there was a spike in activity for example.

That was a much more specific and tailored implementation, and I understand this is meant to be more general, but just a thought to consider.

[1] [https://techwyse.com/blog/images/GoogleAnalyticsWeeklyQuickT...](https://techwyse.com/blog/images/GoogleAnalyticsWeeklyQuickTipUnderstandi_6103/image_thumb_4.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I think part of it is that it's hard to implement properly & programmers don't typically enjoy working with time.

The main focus of this project is on: 1) day / week / month / quarter / year selection 2) proper timezone, Monday / Sunday start of the week support 3) stable maintainable codebase

That GA implementation is indeed much more specific and tailored. I think it's another problem with these calendar components — even though it seems like a very trivial UI thing, it is still hard to generalize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Keen to try this out.

Could you clarify whether Knockout is always required? The docs show examples that don't use any KO-specific code, but the readme lists it as a dependency.

<comment><AUTHOR> It does require Knockout (~22kb) to work.

There's also a knockout binding that is there to help you integrate the component with existing knockout apps.

But you can also use it with any other framework through jQuery integration.</comment></comment>


Hackers Can Disable a Sniper Rifle–Or Change Its Target - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-can-disable-sniper-rifleor-change-target/

<comment><USER2> Just FYI, Tracking Point is apparently out of business. Their offices are shut down and empty.

So, at least some of the worries of their hardware being insecure are moot.

I am well acquainted with one of the neighbors in that building.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not so moot no - what about the devices sold? What about security updates then?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Another example of security not being taken seriously. The proliferation of IoT devices could end up being a disaster if security isn't a primary consideration in their development.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, it's one of the reasons I'm neither betting on IoT being big any time soon, or engaging in it myself (heck, Heinlein had similar advice in _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ in 1966).

The saving grace is as the CEO comments:

 _"The shooter's got to pull the rifle's trigger, and the shooter is responsible for making sure it's pointed in a safe direction. It's my responsibility to make sure my scope is pointed where my gun is pointing," McHale says. "The fundamentals of shooting don't change even if the gun is hacked."_

As long as you're following the Four Rules ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Cooper#Firearms_safety](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Cooper#Firearms_safety)) at worst these hacks will brick your rifle or make you miss, but in practice they wouldn't make you hit something you're not willing to hit.

<comment><USER3> That's not a saving grace at all and I'm surprised they would try to downplay this given the potential liability. It's totally reasonable that there's someone/something you ABSOLUTELY DO NOT want to hit very close to your intended target. This exploit can make you inadvertently hit that target instead of the one that you aimed for.

<comment><USER4> _It 's totally reasonable that there's someone/something you ABSOLUTELY DO NOT want to hit very close to your intended target._

If that's true, _you don 't take the shot_, with rare exceptions like hostage shield situations and war, which these guns are not suitable for.

The rules exist for many reasons, including that we don't entirely trust the gun or ourselves. These guns provide additional failure modes, but the existing ones are bad enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2015/05/robert- farago/break...](http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2015/05/robert- farago/breaking-tracking-point-going-bust/) It looks like tracking point is closing up shop.

</comment><comment><USER6> Will make a great movie..

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure Eraser (1996), staring Schwarzenegger, had a smart rail gun that auto-targeted hearts.

It might have even been hacked or jammed in the climax, my memory of the movie is a bit fuzzy.

<comment><USER8> I don't think the guns failed, but eventually Arnold got one for each arm and shot them both from the hip:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thLez2LmlKU&t=1m43s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thLez2LmlKU&t=1m43s)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you write quality iOS codebases? - <AUTHOR> I have been doing both front end development and iOS development for 5 years. I have found that on the front end, its gotten pretty easy to write clean maintainable code.  Tools like Redux lets you cleanly move businesses logic out of the view layer and React allows you to have an easily written declarative interface.
iOS seems pretty far behind in code quality. Most iOS projects I have seen have thousands of lines long view controllers containing tons of logic, globals everywhere, 200 line functions, little to no unit testing, and no architecture.  For those experienced iOS devs out there - do you have healthy iOS code bases you are proud of, and what do those look like from an architecture standpoint?
I have personally tried to introduce different types of architectures like MVVM and even Redux, but this has always been rocky on iOS, both from a tech standpoint because you are working against the ecosystem, and from a human perspective because (and this is a huge generalization) a lot of iOS devs tend to have an old school mentality and don't see the issues I am pointing out as problems - thats just how things work on iOS.
I would love to hear from someone that has experience cleaning up messy legacy iOS codebases, or examples of healthy iOS architectures that are open source. <comment><USER2> I'm currently at a company where our iOS product has millions of paying customers. FWIW:

We run a flavor of the coordinator pattern + MVVM. We use delegation to handle messaging between view models and view controllers. Services are currently handled by a super ugly singleton, but that's a by-product of legacy architecture. New features usually inject the service directly into the view model.. and there has been some talk in potentially moving the service to the coordinator to mimic a unidirectional data flow.

The issues you mention, i.e. globals, lack of unit testing, fat view controllers and lengthy functions... none of that stuff, if included in a pull request, would pass our code review. So generally we self police each other to avoid code smell.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the thing that is very tempting to do is to just have a ViewModelDelegate (which would be the controller) that has one method `func stateChanged(state: ViewState)` and then have the controller rerender itself whenenver that function is called. This would be nice and redux-y since the view could be a pure function of the state. But since iOS doesn't have a declarative user interface or the virtual dom, you would potentially be rerendering the whole screen when just one part of it needs to change. How do you guys overcome that? Or do you have multiple delegate methods that the view model calls on the controller depending on what needs to happen?

<comment><USER3> I don't have much experience in iOS/Swift, but would SwiftUI address the declarative part?

From what I've seen you can supply state to a view and it'll take care of the rendering for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a similar skillset to you and to be fair I've seen some pretty horrible React codebases in my time as well. You're correct though the architecture story is far behind on iOS, SwiftUI and Combine are attempts to address this and in my opinion they work really well. MVVM and Redux / Elm style architectures are really trivial to implement now. There is also a push for more functional approaches in general, if you look at videos from talk.objc.io or pointfree.co both of these focus on functional approaches to common architecture patterns. I hope that these recent developments from Apple are a signal of things to come in terms of providing better developer experience and insentives to use the platform's toolkit. To remain relevant I feel Apple has a huge amount of work to do in this area, documentation, XCode improvements and making SwiftUI a proper UIKit competitor (currently you will have to combine them for anything non-trivial).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for those examples. The kickstarter app is opensourced and seems to be a good example of the MVVM pattern - [https://github.com/kickstarter/ios- oss/tree/master/Kickstart...](https://github.com/kickstarter/ios- oss/tree/master/Kickstarter-iOS)

Ive been out of the iOS game for about two years and now getting back into it. Have you had luck convincing your organization to use SwiftUI? What have been the painpoints? I am finding that people on my team are pretty traditional, even hesitating to use autolayout, so pushing SwiftUI might be an uphill battle.</comment></comment>


Nobody trusted the election results so we built a crowdsourced validation - <AUTHOR>

Hello, I wanted to share this project we suddenly built last week after the Honduran elections, it's aimed to provide transparency to the tally sheet count for the Honduran elections. The project is http://conteo.votosocial.org/ (it's in spanish), a crowdsourced solution where we crawled the tally sheet scans from the official government platform and moved it to our own storage (in order to prevent tampering) then asked people to login with Facebook and start typing the values for each sheet, also asked 3 different people to validate each sheet. If you find an error you can correct the sheet and the validation count starts again. All changes are logged.
Honduras had elections the past November 24. We elect the president, 298 majors and 128 congressmen during the same election day every 4 years. A few hours after the voting closed the official elections institution, named TSE, presented the first results for the presidential elections having as the probable winner Juan Orlando, the candidate for the governing party Nacional with a lead of 37% then Xiomara(wife of a coup deposed presidente Mel Zelaya) with 28%.
People complained on social media that the system wasn't counting correctly, sheets were tampered and some were ignored.
We wanted to validate ourselves, we didn't want to have the doubt. We built it in about 24 hours of coding plus some more for testing 2 days after the election day. By Thursday in about 10 hours all sheets that we had in our power were entered by about 1.2K users, we repeated the process yesterday so we now have 96.91% of the tally sheets counted.
Up to now our results show a slightly different result but still the governing party wins the election with 35% vs 27%. Not what people expected to find a fraud in the system but at least we brought transparency to the process. We also made the code open source.
Hope you like it and feedback is welcomed! <comment><USER2> Would love to read a blog post that goes more in detail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we plan to make a final report on our findings, also a little bit of the technical part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is there a repository?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is the repository [https://github.com/corp/ActasCounter](https://github.com/corp/ActasCounter)</comment></comment>


Turn Bluetooth Off When You're Not Using It - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/turn-off-bluetooth-security/ <comment><USER2> Should be suffixed by (2017)

When I read "BlueBorne, announced this week" I feared there was some new vulnerability, and this article has quite a lot about BlueBorn (which was also from 2017)</comment>


Puerto Ricans Favor Statehood for the First Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07/politics/election-puerto-rico/index.html

<comment><USER2> I was just reading about this, this morning. But do they really? I mean the votes show it, but at the same time, 500,000 people left that question blank on their ballot, and they also ousted their governor who was pro-statehood. It would be great to see this progress in our lifetime!</comment>


Webapp: image recognition to find nearest tennis courts from satellite photos - <AUTHOR> http://ahathereitis.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-it-works.html

<comment><USER2> Specialized image recognition especially detecting objects with fairly rigid structures or common color patterns seems like a nice intermediary step relative to the more complex issue of detecting arbitrary objects.

During a few drunken nights my friends and I have had many conversations about doing an image crawler that would detect nipples.

You know that bathing suit that's see through that your friend's hot girlfriend likes to wear and posted a photo of herself on MySpace (just to be a tease)? Yeah, we wanted to find those photos.

We were going to call the site tittr.com.

Turns out nipple detection has many practical applications especially in digital mammography and there's even been a few research papers written on the subject.

<comment><USER3> There's actually existing vision recognition software that can identify a blow job, and blur out the relevant part of the pictures. Such software is marketable, although I think it was an academic paper. I'm not going to look for a link at work, but I do remember it was robust with respect to rotation of the picture, which made for some amusing collages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Impressive site. Looking at that was one of those "DOH! Why didn't I think of that!" moments, which is usually the indicator that you've got a good idea :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In action over at: <http://www.ahathereitis.com/>

<comment><USER5> I had trouble reading this URL. At first I thought it was "a hat here it is"!

<comment><USER6> I had really trouble reading this URL after you mentioned it looked like "a hat here it is".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's impressive.

It seems to be missing a few. All the examples I've seen missed are actually single courts (like in the backyard of a house). To see the examples, go to Palo Alto/5 miles and look just to the west of Sharon Heights golf club, near the Valley Rd, Walsh Rd, Sargent Ln, Moore Rd area. I can count 9 single courts that are not labeled.

EDIT: Looking closer, these 9 could be just outside the 5 mile radius of the search.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is awesome. I'd like to see more about the overall structure of the program, i.e. how the search work was partitioned and completed.

</comment><comment><USER9> Old school technique. He should have just used SIFT keypoints or something. Much faster and more accurate.

Still, cool demo.

<comment><USER10> It seems a license from UBC would be required to use the SIFT algorithm in a commercial venture. This may have been enough to dissuade the algorithms use in this case.

<comment><USER10> OP mentions this being a "hobby project" so my comment re. why the SIFT algorithm was not chosen is likely incorrect.

<comment><USER11> The main reason is that I haven't read up to that section of "Learning OpenCV" book... I guess I have some additions to my reading list ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Too bad it isn't real time and able to find tennis courts anywhere that Google Maps has coverage. I guess, however, that all that image recognition is highly CPU intensive and thus he has to generate results for an area, cache them, and then deliver them.

<comment><USER11> The biggest problem is that I don't think Google would allow me to do that - from what I understood from their Maps TOS, the imagery is strictly for displaying to the visitor.

<comment><USER12> I'm sure that if you sent them an email telling them what you were doing they would allow it. (Either that or they would say "Hey! Good Idea!" and a few months later they would come out with Google Sports Courts, able to find basketball courts, tennis courts, football and soccer fields, etc.)

It would be worth a try at the very least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Now if only there was a way to do this in real time for street parking.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm wondering what sort of spatial / geo-enabled database and backend he's running with. GeoDjango with PostGIS and some cronned script to do crawl google maps and do the computer vision stuff for a given area would be what I'd use. He could even go the whole hog and EC2 it, spinning up instances as needed and prioritising the crawling of commonly-requested zip codes.

<comment><USER11> He is here ;)

Alas, Google doesn't allow that - their satellite imagery are for displaying purposes only... I guess it can be argued that storing the imagery, processing it, and discarding after processing is not a violation of TOS, but it is likely that retaining the coordinates of the found objects is a "derivative work", which is prohibited, yadayada.

So I just get public domain imagery from USGS. It is slow, but public domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm quite intrigued by this but it didn't find the tennis courts near my house. I think it was foiled by tree's and shade blocking some of the lines.

Edit: oops. I didn't read the disclaimer about only processing the Bay Area for now.

</comment><comment><USER15> Didn't pick any courts up in my city (and there are plenty). Here's one right near my house <http://i49.tinypic.com/8yi4cm.jpg>. Maybe the search hasn't processed my area?

<comment><USER16> Is your city in the Bay Area? He specifies it's only processing the SF Bay Area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm really impressed by this. Good job.

</comment><comment><USER17> amazing</comment>


I Think the Hyperloop is a Maglev Tube Train - <AUTHOR> http://dylanized.com/the-hyperloop/

<comment><USER2> Some of the points seem a bit silly.

\+ For instance saying it "has no tracks" but then ... it's in a tube. This seems to be nitpicking, as the tube is effectively a track. The question of whether something uses a track or not is mainly of interest because things that don't use tracks have more flexibility, and can go off-route. Something that requires a fixed guideway (like a tube) is for all intents and purposes, on a track.

\+ _Most importantly, the tubes would considerably safer than traditional high speed rail, since debris or other obstacles couldn't get in and block the vehicles._

Er, is "debris and obstacles" an actual safety problem on existing HSR lines? Oh wait, Shinkansen: perfect safety record over 50+ years of very intense operation.

It's pretty clear that _grade separation_ , and some effort to avoid trespassers, are important, but these things are of course standard practice. Putting everything in a tunnel would appear to at best offer a minimal safety improvement, at great additional cost.

\+ Similarly, the vague hand-wavy discussion saying that the tubes would be "cheap and easy to construct" seem a bit specious. Either precision is required or not (and at 500+mph, one had better get this right!), and the form of a tube doesn't seem to make much difference compared to other maglev technologies, e.g. the "U-channel" being used by the JR maglev (one of the notable attributes of the JR tech is that it has a very large gap size, and so is less susceptible to precision issues, as compared to e.g. the transrapid tech).

So if you take existing JR maglev tech, and ... add a roof, is it actually any different than the vague "tube" notion this article talks about?

Maybe Musk does have some truly transformative idea, but certainly nothing in this article is that.

[I think Musk's coyness about this is pretty annoying... if he really has a great idea, and intends to make it public, why not just _say it_ instead of making flirty glances and beating around the bush?]

<comment><USER3> _> I think Musk's coyness about this is pretty annoying... if he really has a great idea, and intends to make it public, why not just say it instead of making flirty glances and beating around the bush?_

I agree, and it reminds me of nothing so much as the protracted and anticlimactic unveiling of the Segway.

A tech-world-famous entrepreneur coyly keeping mum about some radical new technology that is supposed to CHANGE THE FREAKIN' WORLD, MAN--and then it turns out to be a revolution in keeping airport security guards from having to walk so much.

I'd love to see it be everything Musk promises (just like I'd love to order a personal cold fusion generator from Amazon), but such lofty claims need substantial evidence to have any credibility.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, he's mentioned it as an idea and I believe in the interview, he said he wanted to check with his engineers to make sure it could be possible.

He's not hyping up the next product as much as he's musing about the notes & ideas written down in his journal when people ask him bluntly "what else are you working on?"

And to be fair, Musk's track record on creating things that are going to CHANGE THE FREAKIN' WORLD, MAN is pretty dang good (paypal, tesla, spacex as if I have to even name them).

<comment><USER5> The feeling I get, and it's just a feeling, is that it's an idea where the hype is sort of getting away from him.

I wonder if he even took it all that seriously at first, he may not have realized he's made the transition to Man Whose Words Are Given Great Attention.

He seems like he's starting to realize that, but only now...

<comment><USER2> Musk: "oh crap!" ><

<http://xkcd.com/799/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Constant starting and stopping would be a performance and efficiency issue. A better way would be to have local trains that ran on parallel tracks and sync'd speed with the main train and passengers and cargo would be xfered to the local train - alternately, traffic could be segregated into seperate cars by destination and then cars would be spliced back and forth between the local and main train.

</comment><comment><USER7> It'd have to be a vented tube, or else you'd be spending most of your power shoving air through the tubes.

The per-kilometre cost is going to be astronomical.

I don't think one of the problems of maglev is stopping distance: that's mostly constrained by how many G's you want to subject your passengers to.

<comment><USER8> It might be possible to build a tube system with a blowback mechanism so that the displaced air can be temporarily pushed aside without wasting too much energy.

Most long train tunnels have a secondary tunnel that acts as a buffer for this sort of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> First, let me say I think that estimates of _cost savings_ over the European/Japan figures are ridiculous for anything at the ground level that moves a lot faster than state-of-the-art maglev or HSR.

A closed tunnel doesn't buy you much.

Mostly-evacuated tube, or at the very least some type of sealed hydraulic (which is problematic) is the obvious plausible idea to achieve supersonic speeds. The problem is structural engineering of a very large negative- pressure-sealed structure in which a fault anywhere could destroy the whole thing. It would need complex airlocks, which would make each station enormously expensive as well.

I would note, however, one of my ideas that may have some synchronicity: that the speed of sound in a gas rises rapidly as the molecule gets less massive, and the drag force drops as the gas becomes less dense. Simultaneously, if hydrogen cars are going to get off the ground they need a distribution pipeline system. A train that traveled in a tube of hydrogen could effectively bypass the 'air' speed of sound and move at at least mach 3 before reaching the H2-transonic range. Sealing STP hydrogen in a container can be done an order of magnitude easier than sealing vacuum or highly pressurized gas.

The "tracks", of course, would be some form of maglev. Ideally, an 'Inductrack' design, which have not been seen in use yet but offer substantial advantages. On the other hand, given the progess on high-temperature superconductor manufacturing, perhaps those advantages are shrinking.

On Googling, it would appear that I'm not the only one to have this notion: [http://www.supersonictubevehicle.com/docs/STV%20--%20Denizli...](http://www.supersonictubevehicle.com/docs/STV%20--%20Denizli%20%281%20Jul%2010%29.pdf)

I don't understand attempting to use a propeller-based primer mover, however. A linear induction motor with variable coil spacing, on a multiple unit train, should function just fine for this type of use.

</comment><comment><USER10> > I started thinking it was some type of high-altitude blimp network, surfing > low-earth orbit and dragging capsules with commuters inside

I'd like to hear more about that idea.</comment>


Octopus that mimics other animals for defence (youtube) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygh1-ul6E94&feature=player_embedded

<comment><USER2> I've read a lot of articles that have given me the impression that octopi are really intelligent, and could be our replacements in the far future.

The sci-fi fan in me is hoping that there's a race of superintelligent octopi deep within the ocean that we just haven't found yet.

<comment><USER3> It would be hard to fight a creature with 8 arms and no bones. They would grab all of our extremities and still have four arms left to beat us up.

To quote the esteemed Thomas Callahan the Third: "Run for your lives!!! Your weapons are useless against them!!!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've never met one, but I think octopi are the coolest.</comment>


Got $5? $10? $500? Here is how to start investing with any budget - <AUTHOR> https://thefinancialdiary.com/got-5eur-10eur-500eur-here-is-how-to-start-investing-with-any-budget/ <comment><USER2> Since when is P2P lending low risk?</comment>


Watching Songkick Demo At Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://www.flickr.com/photos/fredwilson/1063095836/

<comment><USER2> That's the north cambridge office. The photo makes it look more drab that it is. It has this funky 2nd floor kitchette thing -- looks like Fred took the photo from teh stairs going up to it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just a quick thought: does YC provide any presentation coaching before DD? I can't think of one topic that sends people into fits faster than public speaking! IMO, it's a skill that should be practiced as much as possible, but real opportunities are rare...

<comment><USER4> My best tip for public speaking: speak loudly. Don't scream, but it makes you stand out and seem incredibly confident if you're just speaking louder (more loudly?) than everyone else. This, of course, takes a certain amount of confidence to do.

<comment><USER5> Personally I'd recommend "deeper" (if possible) and "more relaxed" before "louder." At least, that is what you want for an English-speaking audience. If you're loud but your voice is nasal or shrill then you may have the opposite effect.

A deep, relaxed, resonant voice conveys the assurance and confidence you're looking for. People associate it with maturity, wisdom, and masculinity (Think Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones). People associate a shallow, shrill, nasal voice with a whining child. Most people can also recognize tension unconsciously.

The key to speaking with resonance is slow, relaxed, deep breathing (sort of like Yoga breathing). This has the nice side effect of helping you stay relaxed.

<comment><USER4> That is definitely good advice, the loud thing doesn't work if you're uncomfortably tense.

<comment><USER5> The word my vocal directors always used for what I think you mean is "project." (As in "project your voice to the back of the auditorium") A quick google turned up:

<http://www.paulmason.com/Support.html>

<http://www.paulmason.com/Resonance.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> keep 'em coming, it looks like they are in pg's basement, nice.

<comment><USER7> Oh my gosh, now that you mention it, it does look like when Cartman has secret meetings in the basement.

<comment><USER4> with more expensive folding chairs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's Songkick all about? The title sounds cool.</comment>


Going After Google - <AUTHOR> http://chovanec.wordpress.com/2011/04/02/going-after-google/ <comment><USER2> > as the old Afghan (no, not Klingon) proverb has it, "Revenge is a dish best > served cold."

That was surprising

<comment><USER3> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge#Proverbially>

<comment><USER2> That's what I get for never fact-checking Star Trek... ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


Google Chrome finally gets Do Not Track support - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/11/06/google-releases-chrome-23-the-last-major-browser-finally-gets-do-not-track-support/

<comment><USER2> Which websites actually honor Do Not Track headers, and how?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track></comment></comment>


Introducing //TODO for companies that are committed to open source - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1889-introducing-todo-for-companies-that-are-committed-to-open-source

<comment><USER2> Hey all, I've been part of pulling this initiative together and thought I'd just put together some of our early thoughts.

The primary purpose is to get the open source program managers from companies together. It turns out there are a bunch of challenges for companies who want to run open source projects effectively, and we discovered we had only rarely even shared our own experiences of doing so - let alone figured out how to improve things.

A roadmap for the group's work is still to be defined... at this point you should consider this an invite to get involved. But we imagine some of the outputs might include things like:

\- shared best practices for running large open source programs well

\- certain criteria or qualities that 'good' projects should aspire to (responsiveness to community, maintenance, test-coverage, clear licensing, etc)

\- tooling & instrumentation that makes it easier for companies to reach and maintain those standards

\- a directory of projects from members that meet some or all of those criteria

I don't want to imply that we're committing to do all of these, but perhaps these non-normative examples give a bit more colour to the sort of things we'll tackle.

If you're at all interested, please sign up. We hope to have a face-to-face workshop very soon to kick off the work and understand what members want to prioritize.

<comment><USER3> If I'm understanding the intent correctly, it sounds like the home page could use something like this:

      "Does your company release open source projects? Would you like to
       improve how you interact with the open source community to better manage
       and run your projects? Join your peers at //TODO and collaborate on
       practices, tools, and other ways to run a successful and effective open
       source program."

<comment><USER2> Yes. Maybe this is why we are not in marketing :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> After reading this announcement, I have no clue what this is or why my company might want to join it.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. "What it looks like to release open source projects, how to shift ownership of projects from companies to the community, and how to make sure that open source projects remaining healthy and active" has been discussed for almost 20 years. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they have something to contribute here, but why not hold the announcement until they actually say what they're going to say?

<comment><USER2> For open source in general, we absolutely agree... but company-run projects aren't always as successful - and yet we feel they can be a valuable part of the overall open source landscape.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for the comments everyone, hopefully I can answer some of the questions about what TODO is about and where it's headed, don't miss jamesgpearce's comments too.

One of the first principles when forming the group was that we wanted to collaborate with, and learn from, each other before developing prescriptive guidelines. The ten member companies that launched with TODO are just a fraction of companies that have open source programs; there are companies in wide ranging industries like finance, automotive, and retail that have already expressed interest in participating too. So instead of launching today with our version of the answers, we wanted to invite dialogue and particiaption.

Many of the participating and interested companies have already written extensive documentation and internal tools to solve some of the unique challenges of their open source programs. We want to take that experience, find the common patterns, and open it up to the broader community.

We believe that the best practices, tooling, and development principles that will come from the group will improve the overall quality of the projects; that these projects can be adopted by other companies with certain expectations.

If these are the same problems you face in your company's open source program, we'd love to hear from you and have you participate because you can help define the problems we tackle.

</comment><comment><USER7> At first I thought this was going to be a tool that highlights "//TODO:" comments in code for contributors to hack on in open-source projects.

<comment><USER8> At this point, that might be more useful than what it currently is...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Okay I'm not sure this is well thought out, at least the sign on procedure is not. Here is a series of messages they present to the user:

1\. It is for companies with dedicated resources for open source projects.

2\. The person signing on has to mention the company he is with, so ideally a person from the "dedicated resource" or open source department of a prospective company?

3\. They exist to discuss "how to shift ownership of projects from companies to the community".

So as a person of an open source department at their company, one is expected to join this to help their company render their department useless?

They should bake it better and present it to the right person.

<comment><USER10> I kind of read that a bit differently.

First off, we can probably agree that not every corporate open source project is one that the community expresses an interest in. For those projects without community interest, this is moot.

For projects that the community does have an interest in, it can easily become unwieldy for a company to try and lead an open source project for a variety of reasons. I see it as beneficial to the company and the community for the community to gradually assume ownership of projects they are interested in.

Even if the community takes the project in a direction the company doesn't like, the company can always fork, or revert to an earlier version and continue. It seems like a win-win to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> James Pearce (Facebook Open Source Person commenting in here) gave a pretty interesting talk about Facebook's internal Open Source process at OSCon: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk&list=UUP_lo1MFyx5...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzL6Zoy_ndk&list=UUP_lo1MFyx5IXDeD9s_6nUw)

I think things like this are a good way to get companies more aligned with contributing to open source, even aside from the mammoth technology companies already involved. I know that for many companies, the decision not to open source parts of their software isn't based on any idealogical disagreement with open source, but because their software projects haven't been designed with open sourcing as a goal, and if they can now take that into account when starting new projects, I'd expect that you might see a lot more open source software. So I think an organization that helps foster that can provide a lot of benefit.

And I'm not even a big open source zealot, but the number of companies who "get" the fact that participating in open source can be useful for lots of reasons (many better than "get the community to do work for free for us"), could certainly stand to be higher.

</comment><comment><USER12> Interestingly fully-open companies like mozilla aren't in there

</comment><comment><USER13> 'talking' isn't really a problem that Open Source has. Funding on the other hand...

</comment><comment> vhost- I'm surprised this came from Github considering there's nothing even remotely parsable anywhere.

Maybe it's my (legit) dyslexia, but I can't understand what the hell this is.

Secondly, Walmart labs?

<comment><USER2> I'm involved & left some thoughts in a neighbouring comment. Also: [https://github.com/walmartlabs](https://github.com/walmartlabs) :)

<comment> vhost- Crazy! I had no idea they did stuff like that.</comment></comment></comment>


Most time management is rubbish - <AUTHOR> http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2009/03/26/most-time-management-is-rubbish-here-are-ten-things-that-work-for-me/ <comment><USER3> Overall, I agree that time management does not work for everyone in the same way. I certainly hate Outlook yelling at me 10 times a day about doing X and attending Y. Thankfully, I am in a position where I am not obligated to live by Outlook and can choose my own system.

I wrote a super simple webapp <http://untodos.com/> (mostly for myself) that is pretty much the opposite of every time/schedule management app out there. I don't care about the preciseness of the tasks, I care about the priority. Inside my mind, I can't visualize 4:15pm-5:45pm Friday next week. The only time horizons my mind intuitively understands are today, soon, and whenever. My app and now my life is designed around that principle. After years of being burdened with feeling stressed and overworked, I think I finally have a handle on my busy schedule now and I know my stress is much lower.

My biggest gripe with traditional time management method is that you lose sight of the big picture and only concentrate on the small urgencies. We forget the important due to the urgent. If writing a book is one of your life goals, where does it fit on a calendar? I know where it fits on mine, in the "whenever" section. Once a day, I go over my "today", "soon" and "whenever" sections and move things around as I deem necessary.

I feel my view of managing my time is more encompassing than compartmentalizing. I am one person, I don't want "buy groceries" on a separate list from "meet clients" because both happen within hours of each other anyway. My life is one life, why have separate types of calendars and events. I thought deeply about what actually matters to me and realized that all I care about a task is whether it is "work/chore" or "fun/relaxing." As long as I have a bunch of fun tasks interspersed between my regular chore todos, I can manage my time well.

I guess the key lesson about time management is that you have to know yourself and figure out what works best for you. For some, it's Outlook, for some it's GCal synced with iPhone using RememberTheMilk app merged with iCal feeds from your fridge. And for some like me, it's just a no-deadline, no-reminder list of tasks with varying priorities. Find what works for you and grow with it. And if something doesn't work, don't blame yourself and personalize the stress as being caused by your inefficiencies but rather seek a system that fits your personality.

<comment><USER4> Your "work/chore/business", "fun/relaxing/pleasure" dichotomy seems to be universal. I can look at any task on my to-do list and instantly put it in one of those buckets. Probably anyone with a to-do list can.

Why is this?! Assuming this ability is universal (and not just something chime and I are good at:), there must be an innate psychological reason. Possibly even a "simple" reason.

I will venture a guess: real or imagined self-threat is always associated with failure to complete a "work" task. This is never true for an individual "play" task.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER3> My method of dividing the tasks into two buckets is very simple. Is it fun? If it takes me more than 5 seconds to answer that question, it's not fun. Fun is easy to categorize. So the complement of fun is thus easy to categorize too.

The reason I break it down into two is because of how I look at tasks with respect to stress. Nearly every task either adds (even if slightly) to my stress or relieves it. Very few are on the border and if they are on the border, I'd say they add to my stress just because they're not actually relieving it. My goal is to mix it all up in a healthy balance that best suits my personality.

<comment><USER4> I may not have posed my question clearly.

You say: "Nearly every task either adds ... to my stress or relieves it." My question is: why does this seems to be true for everyone?

The answer is not necessarily related to energy or time expenditure. For me, playing consecutive games of intense full-court basketball is fun/relaxing/play.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find David Allen's "Getting Things Done" to be an excellent system for managing tasks.

I've been using GTD for the past four years and I can honestly say it has really improved my handling of time and tasks.

Additionally, it has really really reduced my stress levels because I _know_ I haven't forgotten anything and I never miss anything important.

<comment><USER6> I've tried a to implement GTD a few times but am never able to stick with it - Its an interesting system and the only one that I ever tried to implement.

I called David Allen's company to see how much the 'coach' would cost so that a couple of my colleagues and I could get started, but it was way too high for me to consider.

I always revert back to moleskine & 3x5 notecards.

<comment><USER7> I tried implementing GTD but it didn't stick either. However, there are tons of useful things you can pick up just by reading GTD-the-book, going through some of the methods and seeing what clicks with you. For me the two-minute- rule and concept of breaking a task down into actionable steps really changed the way I do things.

Another thing I picked up from GTD was 43 folders - although I don't use it as gospel, the concept of sticking things that don't have to be done yet away in a folder for when they _do_ need to be done saves me so much brain-bandwidth (I use RTM to manage this).

I recommend the book to everyone, really; even if you don't end up a GTD- lifehacker, I'm pretty sure you'll find a few things that work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This actually isn't too bad - It's basically a rehash of the things you'd expect, but with some personal commentary.

I think the big thing about time management is it all comes down to this uber- productivity philosophy. Works well for getting "stuff" done, but sometimes being productive means having a terrific idea when you're out on a hike.

For me, time management is simply about getting all the cruft (bills, etc, etc) out of my life -- and enabling me to be free the rest of the time... So, I think a lot of these productivity kicks are probably really useful -- they just take it too far.

<comment><USER9> The problem I have with most time management techniques is that I'm a writer. Sometimes sitting down and trying to write for an hour is like trying to bleed a stone, some days it just isn't going to happen.

I've noticed I can easily get 3,000 words done in a few days without a problem, but the extra 2,000 words before I finish a chapter tends to screw me up. Suddenly I'm doing two jobs at once, I have to finish one story line but tie it to the next. I also hate the advice of 'you should write _n_ words a day no matter what', because it's inherently useless advice. I don't write unless I'm writing something I know is half-way decent, I don't believe I should write simply for writings sake.

I don't think any programmer here would add an extra 500 lines of random code 'just cause'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The only time management advice that I took to heart was "If it takes less than 5 minutes, do it now, don't schedule it." It is amazing how much stress it saves, particularly with my SO, and it takes about as much time to do it as write it down

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm really surprised that one has yet to mention this book / system - <USER2> Management For System Administrators:

<http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596007836/>

This is a wonderful system focusing on goals, priorities, proper breakdown of tasks, stress management, relaxation, maintaining focus, etc. It gives a wonderful breakdown of how to manage planners, and this system has been working for me for years now. Hope you find some value out of this!

</comment><comment><USER12> "Time management systems don't work...for me...well, except for this one."

<comment><USER13> The author's apparent todo list:

\- Write blog post

\- Put paid link to one site in.

\- Do internal SEO to other post with paid link

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have recently been wondering if all of this multitasking I was so proud of is a prime reason that time seems to pass too quickly... You mean it's almost April already?

I have been working at purposely slowing down, doing a more thorough job. My clients and friends seem to appreciate having my full attention. So does my wife :)

And I still get enough done that I am satisfied. Maybe it is because I am not having to do things over so much?

<comment><USER15> You have too much free time. Get some more clients so you can make more money. Doesn't your wife want ...'things'?!?

<comment><USER14> But then I would have less time to pore over HN!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In other news ...Most Top 10 Lists are Rubbish

More at 11</comment>


Ask HN: Browser add-on: Have you or your friends made any money from them? - <AUTHOR>

I have a few ideas around Browser add-ons but from what I read earlier, browser add-ons are hard to monetize or very hard.  Do you have any experience with monetizing them? How much did you make. What is so tough about monetizing them? <comment><USER2> The hard part about monetizing them is there are really no popular ways to run ads, and the browser addons that DO run some sort of ads are immediately called out as "adware" and shunned from the network.

In my experience, most add-ons/extensions fall into these categories:

-open source and generally want to help UX holistically -corporate and looking to advance their brand by way of addon -individuals looking to create some sort of monetization strategy

</comment><comment><USER3> We built one that gives movie/tv show suggestions with every new tab. There's a link to buy that movie on Amazon which uses our affiliate code. Here is the extension: [http://goo.gl/eiYqco](http://goo.gl/eiYqco)

It was published last month and two purchases were made through our Affiliate code, so I would say about $5/month

</comment><comment><USER4> We once tried to make a VBScript add on for Netscape and Firefox. I don't think there was that much interest in it after JavaScript was more widely adopted. A lot of websites used to be written in VBScript instead of JavaScript for Internet Explorer only. But then they also used ActiveX controls as well.

Your best bet would be something that searches for prices on Amazon and uses your Amazon Affiliate code for when they buy something you get a commission. You could do that for any affiliate program.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats a useful. Thanks. I will use Amazon affiliate code.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are good books for funding a small company/becoming self-employed? - <AUTHOR> I'm in my late 40s years and will likely "drop" out of Academia within the next 3-6 years. I'm also thoroughly fed up with it and have been thinking about funding a small software company for a long time. Essentially, I will be forced to do that anyway, so I better start planning for it now. I'm working on a "test" product now in my spare time to later check how this side project does on the market. It's currently in early alpha and still takes a long time, but it already has some unique features. (I've also sold shareware in the past, though not very successfully.)
The question is about books and resources to help with the business side. I've looked around and found metric tons of crap. I really don't want to waste my time on another self-help book or books on how to get an "entrepreneurial spirit." What I'm looking for is solid & concise information on numbers and indicators, business plans, etc. I'm not shy of math.
Some talks at Y-combinator are useful, e.g. I found [1] informative. However, these talks seem to be mostly geared towards startup funding - I'm more interested in small bootstrapping, starting a one-man business without initial funding.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBC16jhiwak <comment><USER2> It helps to already have a potential client or two, before even starting the company (or a financial cushion for one, two years or the ability to survive without financial support, i.e. parents, partners, farming community, etc.).

Since you want solid and concise information, your country would also play a big role, but I'm guessing omission of that information is an indication, that you're probably in the US? Every country has their own legal quagmire when it comes to concise information about founding a company. If you're in the EU, thanks to their open borders policies, you even have the choice of choosing a country and the corresponding legal framework.

Nonetheless, (me from Germany) I think this is valid in the US too, are you sure and have put some thought into whether you really want to create a one- man-show company and not be a freelancer? The latter choice is often easier, especially from a bureaucratic point-of-view.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not to be too trite, but the reason there's not much is because there's not much to say. If you're using college math you're making it too complicated.

Cash flow is king. P&L tells you if you can survive for the first 1-5 years. Balance sheet tells you if it's worth surviving for the next 5.

For SAAS it's the basic LTV, churn rate etc.... the guy who started salesforce has a nice pdf/book floating around that I'm trying to find.

For solo consulting it's lower your costs to bare minimum and then charge an hourly rate you can live on that assumes you work 40%-50% of the year. If you can't find work at that rate you don't have a business. Patrick Mckensie's blog has nice info on raising rates once you're started.

But in general it's all about cash flow when you're bootstrapping.

The best small business book I know of is Traction.</comment>


A Car Dealers Won't Sell: It's Electric - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/01/science/electric-car-auto-dealers.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share <comment><USER2> This is another classic "innovator's dilemma" case, where the "customers" of the incumbents (in this case the dealers) want nothing to do with the disruptive products and then they go to their suppliers (the car makers) and tell them nobody wants EVs. Then the car makers take that as "feedback from the market", and don't try to invest too much in them. All the while, the actual disruptor starts thriving in the market, to the incumbents' shock.</comment>


Blockchain for the masses: A peek into the not-so-distant, decentralized future - <AUTHOR> https://gautamdhameja.com/blockchain-for-the-masses-a-peek-into-the-not-so-distant-decentralized-future-d1861e839053 <comment><USER2> Nobody has even figured out how to get cryptocurrency into the hands of the masses and make it easily obtainable. If I want to buy cryptocurrency, I have to use Coinbase and pay enormous fees, waiting 7 days to even get it, probably losing money in the end. There are no Bitcoin ATM's around me, what's my other option?

Also not to mention something like 85%+ of cryptocurrency is in exchanges, so "decentralization" is just a marketing word for cryptocurrency.</comment>


Ask HN: What is something you wish you'd known before becoming a web developer? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Tools are boss.

learning all the different tools will enable you to not only find the correct ways of creating apps/websites but it will connect you to the communities that can help you.

stack overflow is also really great.</comment>