Show HN: An app to help overwhelmed PMs never miss an important request - <AUTHOR> https://followup.loophq.com/ <comment><USER3> This may sound crazy, but I'm OK with a request falling through the cracks if it was not important enough for the requester to follow up with me.

The most effective PMs I've worked under had a heavy filter on incoming requests, at least for established products, with "No" being the default answer. If multiple people started asking for the same thing multiple times, clearly it was important. But if you say yes to every little things that comes in via any channel, you end up with a complex, cluttered product.

I feel that a product like this is better applied to a customer services/support team, where you really do want to make sure every little complaint is addressed properly.

<comment><USER4> > I'm OK with a request falling through the cracks if it was not important > enough for the requester to follow up with me

The issue with this approach is that there will be a bias towards people who quickly/persistently follow up. Personally, I'm very hesitant to do so especially with busy people, as I don't want to add to their workload (or indeed, I dislike being pushy in general).

<comment><USER3> That isn't what I meant. Admittedly, I can see why it was read that way, so let me clarify the larger point:

As a PM, you need to listen to your entire community, not one person. Whether they politely request something and wait, or whether they are excessively persistent, that is still just one request. And unless you only have a handful of customers, you need some consensus from the entire community that the request is a good one before saying "Yes", and getting to work on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The value Loop gets with this level of access to user data will far outweigh any benefit they offer. No wonder they're giving it away for free. How much do you think users should be charging Loop for this data?

<comment><USER6> Precisely my concern. After knowing about loop I was intrigued and I was thinking of creating an account. I started the process with Gmail and I quickly stopped as soon as I've seen the scopes for which they ask to be authorized, for example edit/delete permissions on all my drive files. Not going to happen.

<comment><AUTHOR> we totally understand the concerns and are hyper-vigilant about security and access to user information. the permissions we ask to approve are the minimum and standard permissions required by the underlying cloud platform (google, office365, slack etc). part of the loop functionality allows the user to interact with content that exists on the user's underlying platform i.e. read/reply/forward emails, open/access/edit files etc. all of that is specific to the individual user, is protected through the encrypted credentials and token provided by the cloud platform upon oauth and governed by out privacy policy and terms of use.[https://loophq.com/privacypolicy](https://loophq.com/privacypolicy)

<comment><USER7> Your candid and detailed responses here are much appreciated!

The product hits a lot of checkboxes for me as an overloaded project manager. If this ever turns into something self-hosted or (ideally) run-able directly from my workstation/phone without a cloud account, I would very likely give it a try! Best of luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome. I'm looking forward to trying this out. As a PM, I currently use Simplenote to jot down quick requests, or file it in JIRA if time allows. Eager to see if this turns me into a superhero.

Also, it's common to perceive that when these small requests fall through the cracks, its due to poor or lack of process or simply a bad PM! But I would argue that, just like processes breakdown with scaling companies, the same happens with PM's, just on a project level. Cognitive overload is real.

<comment><USER9> > Awesome. I'm looking forward to trying this out. As a PM, I currently use > Simplenote to jot down quick requests, or file it in JIRA if time allows. > Eager to see if this turns me into a superhero.

As a side note, a JIRA board full of random feature requests in my experience will generally become a patchwork graveyard of backlog feature requests with little to no coherent relationship or roadmap between them.

In my experience, when this occurs, it is then recognized that maintaining a roadmap and list of feature requests works better in a wiki or similar documentation-oriented space through which one can categorize and cross link the feature requests as needed, as well as keep track of information such as how often it has been requested, etc.

This allows for a clean separation between actual planned work that needs to get done and prospective planned work that may never get done, but we want to think about in the context of the rest of the work we may put in the system.

<comment><USER8> > As a side note, a JIRA board full of random feature requests in my > experience will generally become a patchwork graveyard of backlog feature > requests with little to no coherent relationship or roadmap between them.

Agreed. The purpose of these "on the fly" tickets is to document the request in real-time, so it's not forgotten. It's critical to return to these tickets to add color and file them into the proper epic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Overwhelmed Project Managers to me implies poor processes - but we all seem to accept it.

Frankly there should be no need for a PM to do _anything_ except in face of disaster -

\- plan the work \- do the work \- realise the pace of work won't hit the milestones at the dates predicted \- ok - <USER2>

None of this needs a PM - just a few hours of a team lead. (ok so maybe that is a PM). but basically if you have one ticket system, and one set of milestones, you can see everything you need a Proiect manager for (need a ops manager or a dev lead or hiring lead - yes but no not project management)

just don't do deadline driven projects and pretty much everything else falls into place

<comment><USER11> Most project managers I met were just the punching bags between customer and devs/designers.

The good one absorbed it, the bad ones kicked down.

<comment><USER12> Yes, they are the first sign that the company oversells its products/services. As soon as the customer realizes his expectations are not being met -- or never will be -- he starts punching the PM. Mature organizations would put Sales in project status calls to speak with the customer in the first sign of misaligned expectations, and that helps a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is the data being sent to and processed at a third party? Many organizations won't allow users to use something that is going to send their emails off to third parties. I like the idea of it though.

<comment><AUTHOR> no third parties and thank you for your support!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does FollowUp decide which question is important to me? (if at all)

I'm concerned about the level of access required for this app before I try it out (I am a Product Manager). Sounds like you'd be reading through all my emails and PMs. Is that correct?

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for your questions FollowUp is powered by the Loop HQ backend (loophq.com) and is in essence the task extraction functionality broken out into a stand alone product. 1\. when a user connects a platform (google for example), the Loop backend runs the metadata from the platform's content through its graph database to identify where does a specific email or file fit in to the user's world. based upon that analysis, Loop scores each contact and by association, each content item with a "Loopscore" which determines the relative importance of that contact or content. this is a continuously iterative process and is impacted by the user's continued behavior. 2\. I refer you to our privacy policy which outlines the considerable protections and restrictions we have put on ourselves in order to safeguard user information [https://loophq.com/privacypolicy](https://loophq.com/privacypolicy)

I would be happy to discuss further

<comment><USER15> cool. it's good to see a little insight into how something like this works. but you kinda avoided the question by answering "refer to our privacy policy". we should be talking about how something like this works so it doesn't look shady when (not if) people find out after signing up. Of course you will be "reading" the emails and slack messages. How else would this know about the follow-up questions? I think it would be important to state that humans will not be reading those emails but algorithms will be scanning them to know how to help the PM. Not just read a lawyer speak privacy policy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Point conceded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's a 0% chance my current company nor any company I've worked for in the past is going to allow a third-party company to access our entire email and chat history. There are far too many instances of companies doing so with the intent to repackage and sell your data, or simply shoddy security on their side resulting in everything gets leaked.

If you want this to succeed with real companies, make it something we can host on-prem and lock down so we can manage the chain of custody, while still benefiting from your product.

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you for the feedback. a couple of comments 1\. if you use cloud based services (google, office365, slack etc) which are the only services we currently integrate, your company already allows a third-party to access your email and chat history. 2\. depending on the circumstance, we are prepared to discus an on prem deployment and in fact are already involved in some of those discussions.

<comment><USER16> > your company already allows a third-party to access your email and chat > history

I'd suggest, when trying to win over a technical community, you don't speak to us like we're completely ignorant. Those "third-parties" are the service providers themselves.

I'm going to trust Google and Slack a tiny bit more than LoopHQ's two employees ([https://www.linkedin.com/company/loopscore/](https://www.linkedin.com/company/loopscore/)). And as neither of you have any technical experience whatsoever, this tells me you hired an outside team to build your products, which makes me question the on-going product quality, support, and security even more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Curious if HNers involved in management of cloud providers like 365 and Gmail actually allow users to connect random cloud apps like this to their company mailboxes? The pitch here seems oddly user-oriented rather than directed at the enterprise.

Are companies actually allowing employees to exfil entire datasets to any company who comes around with an app and privacy policy?

<comment><USER18> Most enterprises would have to allow a new app to connect. Even trying to use a different mail client doesn't work in my employer's Office365 account.

<comment><AUTHOR> long term we would need enterprise buy in short term, users have been able to use the site

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> all - thank you for submitting your comments. couple of points 1\. as per our privacy policy which I will make sure is live asap - - we do not share data with any third party and we do all the processing in house 2\. the google privacy requirements are quite rigorous and we just went through a re-approval process under their new guidelines 3\. thank you for identifying the typos...thought that was fixed 4\. regarding formalizing the request process, our experience is that its difficult to mandate that a third party only use a certain channel and even if you do things slip through the cracks

I would be delighted to continue this conversation with any and all. thanks for your input.

<comment><USER19> on the third party front, it's _you_ who is the third party. My security team would have kittens if I were to link slack/email/anything to ya'll. I think that's what's at issue, not whether you then pass data outward (which, to be clear, would also be unacceptable)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks miker64 our experience has actually not been that - and once security teams have had a chance to review there has been terrific acceptance. we are only interacting with information that is already on a cloud platform and our protections, policies and structure look to build on that security not subvert it. the common fear is that we would aggregate information and sell to third parties and that is dealt with in our privacy policies [https://loophq.com/privacypolicy](https://loophq.com/privacypolicy)

<comment><USER20> I'm sure that will be the case for certain companies. For companies who routinely deal with PII, PCI, or other regulated data the security teams are likely to be much more worried about the potential for sensitive data to be inadvertently shared outside of the company. Even if it is communiques about only business sensitive matters (e.g., iPhone 12 XXL release) that is not something very security conscious companies will be happy having in the hands of a third-party without an appropriate security review.

Having run a security program at such a company, at the minimum I would expect a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 audit of your company before I would allow my company to utilize your services as it is tightly integrated to our internal communication platforms.

This isn't to say you need that now but you should understand there are segments of the potential customer base that will not work with you without being able to pass that level of scrutiny.

<comment><AUTHOR> absolutely right. that is already on our radar given the types of customers we are currently talking to. we are also seeing increased scrutiny from the API providers who are insisting on their own security audits to allow API access.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Something about this is disturbing. Overwhelmed PMs are usually a sign of a larger structural issue regarding executive leadership or directionality. An app helps somewhat increase the volume of things that can be processed in such a rudderless structure is only going to compound the issue. In an organization where PMs aren't overwhelmed, this isn't going to be an issue.

Creating software to solve organizational problems is a dangerously seductive illusion. At worst, it could be used as a surface level token fix to allow leadership to wash their hands of addressing a hard problem.

<comment><USER22> If an app helps a PM profess more feedback in the same time (efficiency), and helps a PM process more feedback than they otherwise would have because previously they forgot it (effectiveness), then that PM will be performing better.

It might help some PMs that were overwhelmed to no longer be overwhelmed.

<comment><AUTHOR> our thoughts exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This solves a real problem for anybody in a management role, including PMs.

For requests that come in via email, techniques like Inbox Zero work pretty well--you can treat your email as a todo list, and as long as your inbox is empty, you know you didn't miss anything that your colleagues need from you.

But nowadays, many requests come in via Slack notifications. The problem is once you view the message, the notification disappears--so unless you explicitly have a very disciplined system to track requests as a separate to- do list, the default is for little things to fall through the cracks.

So nice tool!

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you I hope you will try it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think this problem is best solved by formalizing the request process. If you're fielding requests in multiple channels and they are not landing in a queue you can sort and prioritize, you're inviting chaos.

<comment><USER25> Alternatively the person getting the request could put it in a queue.

<comment><USER26> That's still a "request process".

<comment><AUTHOR> the thinking here is that if a PM is managing 3-4 projects with 5-8 people per project at any given time, there are potentially hundreds of questions/requests that come in per day. Yes - some come in through tickets but rare is the time that is so regimented. just putting them on a list requires an assistant until now until now

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Scrolling the site with arrow keys is annoying and doesn't really work in Firefox (scroll to something: "I want to see that full line", website: "yeah nah, have the next section instead").

At any rate, does it come with a web verison? Because a mobile app for this is in instant no from me. If it does, it's not very clear from the website.

<comment><AUTHOR> there is a web version at [https://followup.loophq.com/](https://followup.loophq.com/) and just sign in at the top of the page. or you can try the full product at [https://www.loophq.com](https://www.loophq.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Unrelated to the actual product, but there may be a typo or missing word on the website under "how it works" bullet 2

"FollowUp then looks for questions in messages and extracts them into a" .... something?

<comment><USER28> You may want to email them at email@example.com about that, in case they're not looking here.

This may have been a soft launch that isn't announced yet, given that the Privacy/Terms links aren't links yet, too.

<comment><USER29> They are part of YC Startup School and have soft launched there as well. Several of the participants have made the front page of HN.

Highly recommend YC SuS for anyone looking to develop their ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> couldn't agree more. its been great

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why don't sites like this have an about and team page?

<comment><AUTHOR> what would you like to see? happy to elaborate</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why Did the Semantic Web Fail? - <AUTHOR> We were promised utopia but it never gained any traction. <comment><USER3> I think it was probably just too much extra work to expect wide adoption of the standards. It could never be strictly enforced by the time it was laid out, and the lack of enforcement meant it was a classic chicken-and-egg problem where you couldn't expect people to spend a ton of effort setting something up when no one else was doing it.

It turns out though, that improvements in NLP mean there is still hope for a slightly different incarnation of the Semantic Web. There are a lot of companies out there now, like Diffbot [1] or Google [2], that are providing semantic searching of web data with structured results. It's not exactly the same as the concept of the Semantic Web, which would've required content publishers to tag their own data, but it does move towards the Semantic Web goal of making web data processable by machines.

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

[2] [https://developers.google.com/knowledge- graph/](https://developers.google.com/knowledge-graph/)

<comment><USER4> This seems very true. Also I think the standard was just too ahead of the tools available at the time. Within the last 18 months it seems CI/CD has taken off, and obviously that is just anecdotal evidence from my life bubble that doesn't reflect what ppl around the world have been doing for years, but that is something I would attribute to "the tools were finally good enough". Especially when you consider that CI at least as a concept dates back to the late 1990's with XP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't go so far as saying it has outright failed - it has made inroads in some areas, such as biblio databases and metadata in academic publishing in general. HTML metadata, microformats, and schema.org sees lots of use in SEO. Its applications weren't just as wide as initially envisioned, simply because giving away your data in an open format isn't a money-maker, in contrast to putting up a website displaying data along with ads and tracking.

> _We were promised utopia_

That sentence reveals another aspect (a misunderstanding IMHO): that "semantic web" and XML was shovelled onto you by a clueless academic ivory-tower elite, an anti-establishment narrative instrumental in the rise of HTML5, WHATWG and the post-standards world we live in today.

What kindof sucks with W3C's semantic web tech stack is that it captured a lot, yet was impractical, incomplete, and delivered very little. Even TBL's SOLID stack for the dweb uses semweb "creatively" for discovering graph URLs offered by a remote website for replication, by enumerating files/URLs with regexp filtering and similar mechanisms. Semweb has for a long time captured logic programming and description logic; only recently are Prolog and Datalog re-discovered as much more practical means for implementing graph and logic databases.

</comment><comment><USER6> I studied semantic web for a semester during college and I found it was too complicated and confusing. I remember stuff like RDF, Owl, ontologies, sparql, triple stores and others. But I never truly understood how was all connected. Besides, from what I remember, these tools were never production-ready since they came from academia. Although graph databases are gaining a lot of traction these days so there still might be some space for semantic meaning in some projects.

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18023408)

</comment><comment><USER8> A few years ago I got really deep into semantic web. As a software engineer I had major issues understanding all the standards, jargon, and even value proposition. Complexity is not necessarily the issue here, but on top of that I found it difficult to provide a reasonable business justification to my manager.

</comment><comment><USER9> When rococode says 'It turns out though, that improvements in NLP mean there is still hope for a slightly different incarnation of the Semantic Web.' maybe the reason it failed is just another example of metacrap [https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm](https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm)

aside from that my take is that it failed at two different points - <USER2> point original RDF specs and push to add RDF, second point SPARQL.

First point reasons for failure (in no particular order) -

1\. The RDF community were sort of jerks - I can't count how many times people came on XML-DEV or other communities talking about the difficulties of representing RDF in XML and were dismissed with haughty versions of you don't need XML to represent RDF. This was not the most winning attitude to get new people onboard.

2\. RDF is hard to represent in XML and almost every tutorial that showed you how to work with RDF did it in context of XML. At the time XML was the runaway train of standards success, and it seemed like the idea was to attach the RDF car to it in any way they could. But the two things did not really attach well.

3\. Web development then, as now, has been about having to deal with lots of changes all the time, anything that requires a steep learning curve, has no immediate benefit, and is hard to do right is at a significant disadvantage.

4\. About the syntax and mapping of RDF to XML, at the time I was building a product that was supposed to handle media transformations between many XML inputs and RDF was a problem for me. I remember another of the commonly said things at the time was you don't need to worry about writing RDF because your tools will do all that for you, well I was writing the tools and I hated it.

So for these various reasons, and the metacrap one, RDF did not take off.

SPARQL not succeeding was actually somewhat surprising to me, when it first came out I thought it had potential, but I did think it was going against some things that had quite the traction at the time -

1\. I would often see tutorials with these Sparql/Linked Data URIS had all the search query in them and looked awful, this was when everyone was very excited about REST and making theirs urls meaningful to humans - the examples given just looked bad in relation to the aesthetic current at the time.

2\. RDF was already thought of as a failed technology - once a technology fails it is really hard to get management to invest in a second coming.

3\. The bloom was off the rose for W3C at the time, this was when WHATWG was being formed, another strike against from a managerial standpoint I'd think.

4\. Maybe the strains of Web Development are such that it cannot handle more than one big standard arriving at a time - this is just a feeling on my part but SPARQL and HTML5 were coming at about the same time (or is my recollection off - I think both started in 2008-9) maybe there's just too much work for people to do that.

Ok, these are of course various expressions of my personal feelings as to why it didn't work, but given our inability to really test the issue I suppose the same will apply to anyone else's ideas on the matter.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a good write-up on this exact question: [https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic- web.html](https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html)</comment>


Scale (YC S16) Raises $100M from Accel and Founders Fund at $1B Valuation - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-05/scale-ai-is-silicon-valley-s-latest-unicorn <comment><USER2> Hey everyone! I'm Alex, CEO/founder of Scale!

I just wanted to chime in that we're a YC company as well (S16), and I'm thankful to the HN community for having been supportive through our whole journey.

<comment><USER3> Congrats! Two quick questions...

Is it weird sharing the same name as a fashion icon ;)

And I'm curious about your ML "stack". Particularly the chicken and egg problem. Are you using something like Tensorflow with pre-trained binaries, perhaps from a vendor? Or is it 100% proprietary. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> Re 1—It has been a bit of annoyance growing up (for example, Google autocorrects "Alexandr Wang" to "Alexander Wang"), but we run different circles ;)

Re 2—As with most companies working on ML these days, our stack is not fully proprietary. We don't take too strong an opinion on ML framework and use both Tensorflow and Pytorch currently. We generally use neural network architectures from the literature and then iterate on top of them to suit our unique problem requirements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I saw someone on Twitter post that this was a real life "Not Hotdog" from HBO's Silicon Valley, though ironically this company doesn't actually use AI or ML at all it's just scaled human contract workers.

There's some social commentary in there somewhere.

<comment><USER2> We _do_ use AI and ML to help making the labeling process more efficient, but you are correct we do have scaled human insight that ensures very high quality.

One difference from "Not Hotdog" is that our data is used to power the algorithms of other AI/ML companies like OpenAI, Waymo, Lyft, etc., so it's imperative that we have impeccable quality. That necessitates humans to ensure accuracy, particularly in safety-critical applications like self-driving cars.

<comment><USER5> I consider this a good thing. I hope the next few years play out well for your company. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand startup valuations well, so would appreciate someone more knowledgeable throwing some light on how these valuations are made. Would I be in the ballpark in assuming that they have a Sales ARR of $125M. At a sales multiple of 8x (for SaaS cos) makes them worth $1B.

The $125M is around 12 large customers with contracts of $10M each, which buys them services of 2500 labeling contractors for 2000 hrs/year at $2/hr ($4K/yr).

At some point they will stop being a services company which carry a low multiple and switch to automated labeling without contractors (ala self driving cars) or develop some unique IP that they sell as a service?

<comment><USER7> One major risk is that their customers simply build teams in-house. Microsoft has had a very large team for years (and MSR / Ofer Dekel has actually published a lot of useful research on how to handle "crowdsourced" labels). Companies have been building productive off-shore labeling / moderation teams since the early days of Crowdflower. At some point, it's not just the cost that makes sense, but rather the Product team wants a reliable workforce that they can control.

Another risk is that the well-funded self-driving customers go belly-up. However, one important facet is that dead players don't release much data. MobilEye has a vast dataset (including images from not just Tesla but other automakers) but that data isn't going anywhere. Neither is Nvidia's 180PB of HD recordings. (Release or transfer in part requires dealing with PII of the people in the recordings. Now if only the offshore labelers weren't handed PII for free...).

The valuation is likely a forward-looking bet on AI as whole versus the current suite of contracts. Anybody using an off-the-shelf model will want some labels after their first proof of concept. I wouldn't argue that the math makes sense but rather that demand does look underserved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > It's built a set of software tools that take a first pass at marking up > pictures before handing them off to a network of some 30,000 contract > workers, who then perform the finishing touches.

Machine learning indeed.

<comment><USER2> To be clear, there is _real_ machine learning that makes the labeling more efficient.

You can see some videos of what this looks like in this Twitter thread: [https://twitter.com/BW/status/1158407524216909826](https://twitter.com/BW/status/1158407524216909826)

<comment><USER9> Very similar to the Magic Wand tool in Photoshop which gives a good starting point and can be improved on manually in the problem areas where colors are ambiguous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Congrats on the recent purchase of scale.com. Can you share how much was the domain cost or some words about this acquisition?

</comment><comment><USER11> Bit of an AI novice here, I did Norvig's course a few years ago and never worked in the field, but how can a machine take a "first pass" at labelling without being trained? What information is it using to apply labels to the first set of data? How does this approach differ from a conventional classifier? Would the initial guesses essentially be random?

<comment><USER12> The business model is, initially, selling human labeling services to owners of data (like Uber or Google), using third world cheap labor to keep costs low. This is very much like a call center service.

Once a sufficiently large corpus of human labeled data is available (across clients and datasets probably), that labeled data is used to train a 'first pass' labeling system.

It then becomes a virtuous cycle. Now the labeling is done in two phases. The first pass system makes its best guess, which is then reviewed by the existing human work force. Over time the first pass labeler gets better and better, till only very tricky/borderline cases need human intervention.

The end game is anyone's guess. Pretty clever biz model hack.

<comment><USER6> like Google Search using human raters to verify their updated algorithms improve results

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm a little confused about what the business model here is. It sounds like they are selling labeled data to companies, and doing this by "label[ing] most of the objects automatically" and then having humans review these labels. So does this mean they are using some unsupervised method to label data, and then selling that to people who want to train supervised models? Why aren't they instead just beating out the people they sell to by solving the same problems without labeled data?

<comment><USER14> Presumably they have a supervised model that they've trained on all their labeled data so far (possibly pooled across clients). They'd use this to estimate labels for their data, and then have humans correct it. They're basically doing the standard supervised data training loop.

If I had to guess, the long term plan probably is to move up the stack and sell the models to their clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I used to train AI to help researchers find more relevant papers at [http://iris.ai](http://iris.ai) This was nothing more than just classifying. Would this kind of opportunity be available for data remotaskers at Scale. Best regards for groundbreaking work

</comment><comment><USER16> Hey @ajw, congrats on the growth. Quick question for you: How does Scale's labeling speed and quality compare to Hive?

<comment><USER2> We have many clients who have switched from Hive. There's usually a step change improvement in quality and scalability—up to 10x improvement in error rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reminds of Sleep Delaer: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer)

</comment><comment><USER18> So what is your competitive advantage? I.e. what cannot be replicated?

From a technical perspective, can someone just post labelling task to mechanical Turk? what is the difference here?

<comment><USER19> Today: The $100M war chest that lets them undercut the prices of mechanical turk

Tomorrow (Maybe): Huge corpus of previously solved cases by humans, that can be used to train a custom model to replace the humans

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Congrats Alex! It's been amazing watching your journey from the first pivot to Scale to now.

<comment><USER21> What was the first pivot?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Human powered AI for the future! Because artificial intelligence is not.

</comment><comment><USER23> whats made you more successful than other players in this space?

</comment><comment><USER24> I really dislike this sort of journalism. Theranos was founded by a 19 year old too. That one didn't work out so well. Was it because the founder was so young? The board so oblivious? (a bit of both if you read the book)

What does it really matter how "old" the founder is, does the business have a workable business plan? Can it be profitable? Do people pay enough money for its goods and services to return a net income? Those are interesting questions. That it was started by a teenager is not, to my way of thinking, particularly relevant.

I'd much prefer that the article focus on these things which helps us understand the value that they bring to the market and what makes them unique.

<comment><USER25> Incidentally this frame is what got the most upvotes, compared to more neutral framing of the new valuation.

[3 points] Scale AI (YC S16) raises $100M at $1B+ valuation to go beyond AI data labeling: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20615657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20615657)

[11 points] Scale (YC S16) Raises $100M from Accel and Founders Fund at $1B Valuation: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20614672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20614672)

<comment><USER26> We merged this thread into the latter, which was posted earlier and has the less baity title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In essence, the company pays third worlders a pittance to transfer humanity's skills to the machine. The skill transfer is limited to what can be done with a mouse and screen, but since that's where most human ability is currently manifested, it's hardly a limitation. What happens to the serfs once the transfer is complete? Do they realize they are exchanging temporary wages for eternal futility?

I like how the investors rationalized this devil's deal and the usurpation of the poor: "If you could be pulling a rickshaw or labeling data in an air- conditioned internet café, the latter is a better job."

<comment><USER27> I'm an American who began doing online gig work (for a different company, not Scale) while homeless. It allowed me to pay down debt and get back into housing under circumstances where a normal job was out of the question.

This worked in part because my income was portable, so I was able to take a train to a more affordable area to get a place within my limited budget. This ability to move at will and take my income with me was historically largely limited to the Jet Set and comfortably well-off retirees.

For many people, doing gig work is a tremendous opportunity with a very big upside. It can be a huge improvement in both their standard of living and quality of life.

Most people decrying such labor arrangements aren't doing anything whatsoever to offer a better alternative. Color me unimpressed.</comment></comment>


Death of 'Caveman' ends an era in Idaho - <AUTHOR> http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/04/23/1164899/death-of-caveman-ends-an-era-in.html

<comment><USER2> Sad to learn of his death. NPR did a show and interview with him some years ago--but I have not been able to find it online.</comment>


MP3's Loss, Open Source's Gain - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/news/culture/music/0,72785-0.html?tw=rss.index <comment><AUTHOR> The patent system is completely insane. At this point in history, does it accomplish anything?</comment>


How to Architect a Web Scraping Solution: The Step-by-Step Guide - <AUTHOR> https://blog.scrapinghub.com/architecting-a-web-scraping-solution <comment><USER2> Great overview and intro to the process.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice!</comment>


Ask HN: Which security vulnerability feeds should I Monitor? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I'm building a security vulnerability alerts service (details below), to use myself, and I'll make it available to others too. For server and client side (incl. Javascript) vulnerabilities, and dev/ops' operating systems and tools (e.g. IntelliJ, Chrome) vulnerabilities.
Which vulnerability feeds would you recommend that I monitor, to get to know about "all" vulnerabilities and exploits?
I've found these feeds:
1) https://nvd.nist.gov/download.cfm#RSS (a "National Vulnerability Database" feed, which I found via https://cve.mitre.org/cve/data_updates.html)
2) https://snyk.io/vuln/ (I'll need to find out / ask if their license allows my intended usage)
(then there's https://nodesecurity.io but they don't seem to have any data feed)
Is there any point in monitoring mailing lists like Bugtraq and the NVD feed mentioned above? Or are all important vulnerabilities posted in Bugtraq also included in the NVD database?
( Details: The point with this service is: """Security vulnerability alerts. For the software and services you use — instead of everything in the whole world.""" You can read more here: https://www.exploits.social/ — feedback about the idea, is welcome. Or if you happen to know that what I'm building, already exists. I know about: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/25557/how-to-subscribe-to-information-about-new-vulnerabilities-in-selected-products — but the answers mentions either hard-to-use things and/or rather expensive things. For example, the top answer suggests subscribing to one "product" / "vendor" at a time, here: http://www.cvedetails.com/product-list.php — but the user experience at that site, isn't the best. And the 2nd answer is a commercial product, which seems expensive, because apparently I need to contact the company and ask for a quote. )
(I asked at Reddit 20 days ago, https://www.reddit.com/r/security/comments/4wun43/which_vulnerability_feeds_should_i_monitor_for_a/, and got some helpful replies, but about other things.)
Best regards,  <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Take a look at some of the links on this page:

[https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2016-4448](https://security- tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2016-4448)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

This gives me the impression that the NVD RSS feed, or alternatively the cve.mitre.org changelog (they contain the same vulns, I think), is an okay vuln list to monitor, and that that one alone will be enough, now initially, when getting started.

Because: The main source mentioned on the Debian tracker, seems to be cve.mitre.org. And at cve.mitre.org, there's this page: cve.mitre.org/cve/data_updates.html which recommends NVD or MITRE's own change log.

More things that came to my mind, when looking at the sources linked from the Debian tracker:

      - NVD: lots of details on the vulnerability. In a format that looks easy to parse for a web scraper.
      - LWN.net: There's an email about the vuln, but it seems time consuming to read it and understand what to do with it (the email).
      - Vulnerability Notes Database (CERT): Found nothing about the vuln.
      - Exploit Database: Nothing.
      - Metasploit: Nothing.
      - Red Hat / Ubuntu / Gentoo /SuSE / Mageia feels a bit too distro specific to monitor now initially.
      - Full Disclosure & Bugtraq: Nothing, vs "too many" detailed emails, sometimes about individual product versions.

B.t.w. how kind of security-tracker.debian.org to include all those Source links :-)

Ok, initially, it'll be NVD's RSS feed, or MITRE's change log, e.g.: [https://cassandra.cerias.purdue.edu/CVE_changes/CVE.2016.08....](https://cassandra.cerias.purdue.edu/CVE_changes/CVE.2016.08.html)

\+ some other Git repositories not yet popular enough (?) to be included by MITRE, and some Javascript + Java & Scala stuff that I use.

<comment><USER2> Some more possible sources:

[https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/secure-testing/check- exter...](https://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/secure-testing/check- external/sources.ini?view=markup)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, via that link I found: [https://nodesecurity.io/advisories](https://nodesecurity.io/advisories) which is what I was hoping for (for client side vulns).

Not all the vulns in that advisory list get CVE numbers, so that list should be monitored in addition to CVE/NVD. And to me those JS vulns are important, for example, there was recently an XSS bug in a HTML sanitizer I'm planning to use.

(I actually went to [https://nodesecurity.io/](https://nodesecurity.io/) a while ago, looking for a vulnerabilities feed, but didn't see / react-to the Advisories link at the top of the page, so I thought they didn't have any advisories list, or vuln feed.)

(The other lists seem to get CVE numbers (and will thus be included in MITRE and NVD, right). Or if they don't, they seem a bit too niche right now + I don't use them myself, so I'll skip them, for now.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> BTW, it would be great if you could post your final list of feeds here when you are done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. Currently this is what I have in mind:

NVD: [https://nvd.nist.gov/download/nvd-rss- analyzed.xml](https://nvd.nist.gov/download/nvd-rss-analyzed.xml) — but initially only for software I use myself. Otherwise there'll be too many vulns. In the distant future: a web scraper that analyzes the CVEs/NVDs automatically.

nchan: [https://github.com/slact/nchan/blob/master/changelog.txt](https://github.com/slact/nchan/blob/master/changelog.txt) (an Nginx module)

And some JS libraries: markdown-it, sanitize-html, React.js, + more. Perhaps I'll track them via [https://nodesecurity.io/advisories](https://nodesecurity.io/advisories) if their terms-of-use allows this.

Play Framework. (via email list. It's a Scala web framework)

Silhouette. (via email list. It's an OpenAuth lib.)

In the future: More stuff. I'll try to remember to post an update, if I add/remove something that seems "significant". But this page will probably become read-only long before that.</comment></comment>


There's Not Enough Time - <AUTHOR> http://blog.karthiksthings.com/2017/03/16/clean-toaster.html <comment><USER2> I think the main problem with the author of the article is that he's still essentially reacting passively to the world around him. He's acting in response to things that bump up against him -- maybe he's trying to assess whether they're important or worth doing, but he's still fundamentally passive.

The difference between him and his friend who does the triathlon is -- there's no one who looks at the clock early in the evening, glances around their apartment, then checks their phone real quick, then says, "I guess I'll train for a triathlon." That's the sort of desire or goal that comes at a different moment in time, perhaps while you're doing something else, or you're caught between things. And you think, "Shit, I should run a triathlon".

Once you've had that thought, when you get home from work your first thought is, "when do I train for my triathlon?" And once that's done, you fit the rest of the crap in any which way.

The point being, start out with one or more positive, active goals. Prioritize them (as acconrad has said). Everything else just sifts in afterwards. It could be raising your kid, or volunteering for local politics, or playing the piano. Do something first and foremost, something you have _decided to do_ , and you'll find you somehow still have time for all the other crap. (Or you'll find that you don't, and it doesn't matter.)

<comment><USER3> > you fit the rest of the crap in any which way

This is really the only relevant thing here, and effectively amounts to "spend less time on these things", "half ass them more", or "don't do these things".

Which is fine, and I think the subconscious point of this article is that if you focus on what a "proper" person should do, you'll run out of time real fast, and generally people need to cut corners.

And that advice that adds a daily time drain is questionable. I don't really know anyone who does it all.

<comment><USER4> Alternative strategy, get really fucking good at doing those things. Then you can get them done in a quarter of the time (compared to someone like the author), and you'll have a decent box of time to fill with doing things you love.

<comment><USER3> Sort of, but a lot of these things are either time bound or not in your control. I think if they were so easy to optimize, most would have already optimized them.

Exercise is often time gated. It's not something you want to rush in many cases. Definitely not foam rolling. Exercise also often incurs logistical costs (i.e., getting here). [no, your optimization techniques for at-home body weight are not welcome here]

Meditation is not really prone to that.

Doctor visits you can't control. Or haircuts.

Calls and visits to bureaucracies you can't control.

Social time fundamentally is not something you want to squeeze.

There's also a danger with getting spazzy if you optimize too much.

I think the bigger issue is too much crap for a person to take care of. Too many things to remember and schedule when they should just happen. I think it's an externality that is being captured by no one and it will get worse with time and we won't notice because we'll just call people who fail inferior.

<comment><USER4> > no, your optimization techniques for at-home body weight are not welcome > here

Body weight exercise is not all you should be doing, but it's certainly helpful. Don't be close minded. Running is possibly the best exercise you can do, and you don't need to go anywhere.

Meditation can absolutely be fit into short segments throughout your day (and if you're overwhelmed, yes, it's probably a good idea).

You're right about most of the rest. You can obsess about what you're missing, or appreciate what you have. Either way, you'll be absolutely right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "As you're Ubering down the road of life, if you're ahead of schedule and there are no other productive activities you can fit in before your next appointment, don't forget to stop and smell the roses."

There are a lot of very sad comments in this thread about optimising life and being productive and efficient. Don't have kids. Don't cook. Don't watch television or play video games, or at least save them until everything else is done. Buy other people's labour to free up more time for working to pay them.

This is an unapologetic value judgement: living your life that way is a waste of time.

There's not enough time, and that's okay. Let a few things go. You don't need to be optimally productive.

<comment><USER3> > There are a lot of very sad comments in this thread about optimising life > and being productive and efficient. Don't have kids. Don't cook. Don't watch > television or play video games, or at least save them until everything else > is done. Buy other people's labour to free up more time for working to pay > them.

Maybe you're over aggregating? :)

I don't want to have kids in part _because_ I like my video games and they and other activities I enjoy will have to go poof due to kids^t. Basically, you can only pick a few things before your time runs out.

I think you're vying for a time where people wouldn't feel so short of time, but I don't think it's bad, in the moment, if people do successfully optimize their time for their situation, and I don't care if it makes some idealizer of the human condition unhappy.

I do not owe it to anyone to fit some mold of the perfect human being who finds all the time to exercise, eat healthy, socialize, cook, AND have kids. It's all draining enough for me as it is.

^t there are other much more advanced and depressing reasons why I actually don't want to have kids, though

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My wife gets frustrated with my attempts at ruthless prioritization and my efforts to remove future potential time sinks from my life. I would like to achieve financial independence before having a house, dog, and children (well, I did own a house briefly before moving across the country). This is unlikely to occur, so I'm trying to figure out the next best path for the future: a small, well-built house with a simple yard, a breed of dog that is easy to train and requires little grooming, and as for children... well I just hope I get lucky.

I don't want "free time" in order to lounge around and watch TV (I don't even own a TV). I want free time to be able to research topics that interest me and start companies. It's difficult for a middle class or even upper-middle class person to simultaneously maintain a full-time job, family, health, and extremely productive hobbies. And I would say it's next to impossible for someone who came from a below-middle class background.

<comment><USER7> I found this approach was leading to depression. My attempt to have "extremely productive hobbies" just made me feel bad about them when they were neglected. It also led me to taking on too many things that interested me (garden, car, reading, tech, and so on). I found that when I quit prioritizing and just did stuff I enjoyed doing without worrying what the long term outcome would be, I was happier. If you've ever read Shop Class as Soulcraft [1] or Mastery (by George Leonard, not the Robert Greene book) [2] you will have some idea of what I mean. I began to pursue things for the sake of pursuing them, not because there was an end goal in site.

I realize that this is a purely personal anecdote and I realize this is not how people get rich, run a triathlon or change the world, but maybe I just can't do those things.

[1]: [https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as- so...](https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/shop-class-as-soulcraft) [2]: [https://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-Success-Long-Term- Fulfil...](https://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-Success-Long-Term- Fulfillment/dp/0452267560)

<comment><USER4> "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It's gonna take awhile. It's normal to take awhile. You've just gotta fight your way through." -Ira Glass

I think some of the frustration comes from not sticking with any one thing long enough to get meaningfully better at it.

<comment><USER7> This assumes getting better is necessarily the goal, which it may not be. For example, I like to play soccer. I'm not terribly good at soccer, nor do I spend much time outside of playing to improve (i.e. doing soccer specific workouts, drills, etc.). I have the self awareness to realize that my ceiling is limited and my enjoyment would not be greatly impacted by "fighting my way through." I just want to play. In a twisted way, I feel I achieved a sort of mastery just by doing the thing for the thing's sake.

This isn't to say that it's not good advice, but when I spent my life relentlessly trying to optimize (a trap I still fall into frequently, I'm reading these comments after all), I just got frustrated and felt like a failure. I decided it was OK to watch a TV show I enjoyed, to read books that had nothing edifying except a story I enjoyed or to simply waste time.

I think regular self assessment and awareness are possibly more important that optimization or improving.

<comment><USER4> Getting better at soccer is so much fun though! Watch a little pro soccer (try the EPL or Champions League) and see how the pros can do more with less effort. Force entire defenses to rotate by changing the angle of your body. First touch the ball into space instead of nowhere. Make the tight cut at the right time to slice through a defense.

<comment><USER7> Oh, I watch soccer, though less now since I did the above self assessment and decided the hours I spending watching it were probably not really making me happier. And I can admire Robben cutting in diagonally from the wings on his weak foot to create an opening or even Suarez's almost instinctive genius. But firstly, I will never be Robben. Secondly, the level I play at has limited tactical sophistication (the traditional 4-4-2 formation has given way to more of a 0-5-5 or 5-5-0 depending on where the ball is). Thirdly, I'm "good enough" for my level.

Off topic, but if you're interested in sports theory and writing, Suarez always makes me think of John McPhee's "A Sense of Where You Are", a profile of Bill Bradley when he was at Princeton. Probably one of my top 5 favorite sports books or articles.

<comment><USER4> > I will never be Robben

And that's ok! And neither will I. I think some of my enthusiasm comes from picking up soccer later in life. I've found learning things as an adult is a totally different skill from learning as a child. By accepting that my goal is improving myself, and not competing with the world's best, I've found great joy in the smallest steps towards being a more perfect player.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If someone feels like that already, I cannot recommend having children or being responsible for a garden or home maintenance. You will be swamped.

That said, optimising your routine can be rewarding. Morning and evening routines with your children can be great fun. Something like cooking, which can be a chore to some, is a treat to others (myself included).

IMO, it's helpful to prioritise important things for the morning while you're sharp, and leave non-essential things for the late evening when feeling tired or falling asleep barely matters (watching a movie or playing PS4).

Pay bills/etc or check your stocks during your lunch break. Minimise your grocery shopping trips - keep a stock of staples and then do a weekly shop for meat, milk, etc. Exercise in the morning. That should start to free up your evenings.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's plenty of time — you just have to focus on the things that really matter. I have a 30 minute commute, so I'm away from home for 9+ hours every day. My wife is a stay-at-home mom and we have two children who aren't old enough yet for school (not that mamma is ready for them to go). I do most of the cooking (we rarely eat out), she does most of the child rearing. We pretty much split the cleaning. I fix the house as it breaks, and do some home improvement when I can fit it in (just finished a set of bunk beds for the kids). We do something fun at least one day most weekends (beach visit, fishing, zoo, etc). I have a couple of beers most nights and just enjoy my family as I cook or get the kids ready for bed in the evenings. Before I go to work in the mornings I get in a short exercise routine (stretching and some push/sit/pull-ups for maintenance). Still manage to get 7-8 hours of sleep a night. I perform regular maintenance on our vehicles.

I don't watch any TV or mindlessly browse the Internet during the week (OK, I'll check up on some webcomics once or twice). Honestly I don't do much of that on the weekends, either. I don't read fiction much. I don't check my IRA or 401(k) regularly. I don't worry about my health — we eat fantastically healthy in my house and I'm not sedentary.

I work to live; I don't live to work. My family is the most important thing in my life and I enjoy every minute I'm with them.

It would be nice, though, if we were on the galactic standard 25 hour day. I could use that extra hour every now and then.

</comment><comment><USER10> Much of what is on our list isn't really important. And I have personally identified Time as my #1 enemy in my quality of life.

There are a few resources that provide a different perspective. One I would suggest is The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle. As thinking, analytical people, we should (grudingly?) realize that there truly is nothing other than this moment. And this moment usually doesn't care about your time on a foam roller... unless it does, in which case you get on the foam roller.

I think there's a problem for highly creative or mentally busy folks. We see so many possibilities, and perhaps we excel as many things we try. That brings a feeling of unrealized possibility that nags on us. We could be a good this, or that, or whatever. In some cases it might matter to the world if we accomplished it (assuming that ultimately even matters). But quite often, perhaps, the unrealized potential may not be worth much. So the worry about the time we should be spending to realize that potential can be dropped.

Not to belittle the "average guy", but we all probably know the guy that has had the same job for 10 years and who is SO happy to go home most night of the week - and especially to be there Sunday - to watch whatever game on his big TV. He's got the deadly but oh-so-tasty snack that he's blissfully unaware shorten his life with each mini-sausage. He's got a wife who appears to actually like sports and who provides the snacks for him and his buddies (not being sexist; just painting a typical American Dream picture). His big Ford F250 4x4 parked outside is only 1.5 years old. Life is good. If he's really rich and bad-ass, he's got a new Harley in the garage for his every-other- weekend-warrior needs.

Meanwhile, the HN crowd is browsing high achiever Github projects, considering their own many ideas, and feeling like underachievers. And eventually we die, or we set off on the ocean like Jim Gray ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gray_(computer_scientist)#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gray_\(computer_scientist\)#Disappearance)) and never return.

<comment><USER3> > Not to belittle the "average guy", but we all probably know the guy that has > had the same job for 10 years and who is SO happy to go home most night of > the week - and especially to be there Sunday - to watch whatever game on his > big TV. He's got the deadly but oh-so-tasty snack that he's blissfully > unaware shorten his life with each mini-sausage. He's got a wife who appears > to actually like sports and who provides the snacks for him and his buddies > (not being sexist; just painting a typical American Dream picture). His big > Ford F250 4x4 parked outside is only 1.5 years old. Life is good. If he's > really rich and bad-ass, he's got a new Harley in the garage for his every- > other-weekend-warrior needs.

I think this is actually an ideal.

But I don't think this ideal is as easy to reach as "average guy" would imply. A lot of these "average guys" hate their job, their relationship, or both, and the happiness evaporates, the Sunday game the only thing really keeping them afloat.

What you describe is contentment and stability and I honestly think most people don't have that. Even the really well off engineers still have to worry about their job and the sharpening of their skills. It's very hard to just sit back and not worry about it all, because you have to continue to do work to keep it up, and therein lies the rub.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is generally why I don't cook much and don't really plan to. It shortens my evenings and the tradeoff just doesn't seem worth it.

<comment><USER11> I've found meal prepping to be a fantastic solution. I can make 5 meals in about an hour with my 4 burner stove. These meals are cheap, help me eat a lot of vegetables, and allow me to easily hit my macronutrient goals for strength training.

<comment><USER12> It's definitely better to batch stuff, but even then, an hour of your time is probably worth a lot more than the equivalent of buying those 5 meals already made.

Not to mention, I assume the one hour doesn't include time to clean up, which for me is one of the biggest drawbacks of cooking.

<comment><USER7> They say that money can't buy happiness. That may be true, but it can buy a dishwasher, which is much the same thing. Easily one of the best material purchases I've ever made.

I only mention this because I only realized this _after_ I purchased the dishwasher. And so I spend time researching and "optimizing" in hopes of finding the next dishwasher in my life, which is how one falls into the trap this article describes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can relate to this, but there are things you can do to at least limit the time-wastes. Here's a breakdown of his list and how I solve some of those problems.

* eating: eat while you work or do something else; plus it also allows you to skip your lunch break at work, get more shit done and go home early.

* cooking: don't. If you live in a major city there should be a few healthy (not fast-food crap) takeaway options available. Just order while on your way home and dinner will be there shortly after you arrive.

* bills and bank related activities: switch to a bank that doesn't suck. I use a fully-online bank called Monzo since more than a year and I honestly can't remember the last time I actually had to spend more than a handful of minutes for "banking" activities. Ditch suppliers/utilities that waste your time for those that get out of your way.

* budgeting: again, try to find a bank with an app that does it for you or makes it easier.

* cleaning: outsource it.

* car upkeep: if in a major city ask yourself if it's worth the trouble to own a car. In my case Uber works out fine.

* pet upkeep: don't get pets? I love cats more than anything else and yet even I don't get one because I barely have time for myself, let alone the cat.

* general repairs and replacements for things breaking or going obsolete: outsource it, order online, etc.

* religious activities: don't?

* home upkeep/renovations/gardening: outsource it?

But I'm definitely interested in others' perspectives on this and how they solve this problem.

<comment><USER13> I agree with most, but not the cooking, make enough for 2 or more meals at once, you can amortize the time over them, reddit.com/r/mealprep has a lot of ideas for people making large batches at once. Plus a lot of cooking can be things like roasting chicken which takes a long time but it's hands off so barely counts doesn't matter. For more hands on stuff I listen to audio books so entertainment time and cooking time overlap. I'll add

* shopping: This doesn't have to be an hour long ordeal, for me it's a <5 minute stop on the way home 3 or 4 times a week.

* exercise: Build it into the daily commute, IME a 30 minute drive will translate to a 30-60 minute bike ride, then you can scrap the car upkeep.

* shaving: only shave every few weeks.

* hair cuts: No 2 all over takes about 10 minutes and your good for another 3-6 months. Can even do this yourself in theory (in practice I can't).

Now if I could just stop procrastinating with all this free time...

<comment><USER8> Could feasibly get the shopping trips down to 1-2 by freezing meat, eating vego later in the week after you've used the meat, etc. If you use milk, time buying that with a petrol/gas stop if you run short. Daily grocery runs strike me as pretty wasteful unless it's en route or part of your walking/exercise routine.

Great suggestions otherwise though.

<comment><USER14> I walk to the shop every day, which takes around half an hour. For me it's nice to just stretch my legs and get some fresh air.

Between walking to/from work and the shops, I get a nice hour outside every day.

It also breaks up the monotony a bit. I go crazy if the only 2 places I spend time at all week are work and home. I specifically try to spend time away from home in my evenings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Less electronics, own less things (or store almost everything), Build habits so upkeep is automatic. What I do.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't know how I've done it, but somehow I've reached a zen-like state where I just don't worry about this shit. I haven't ruthlessly optimised my day, I just deal with shit when I deal with it and everything works out fine.

I usually have time to watch some TV with my flatmate, or head to the pub for a couple of pints with a mate.

How does it take 2 hours to cook dinner? It takes me at most 15 minutes of engaged time to cook dinner. Apparently it takes 2 hours for the author to go to the gym too.

I think the author just needs to chill out and stop worrying about shit.

</comment><comment><USER16> _How do you even clean a toaster? Do you have to take that shit apart with a screwdriver or something? That's a good thirty minute investment. Fourty-five, if you count the fifteen minutes it'd take me to find a screwdriver._

Toasters typically have a trap door on the bottom for emptying the crumbs and for ease of access for cleaning the inside.

Once you know how to do things, lots of things aren't that time consuming. Eating right is also vastly less time consuming than being sick all the time.

</comment><comment><USER17> The first paragraph is so relatable. I feel ya man.

</comment><comment><USER18> I relate to this. Anyone have any solutions?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think we just have to cut corners and not take recommendations too seriously.

The easiest way to get more time is just to work for a large company that provides meals and doesn't make you clock-in and be hyper-efficient with your work so you can slide out after six hour days, but that's easier said than done.

Realize that people who are really physically fit treat it like a hobby, so if you think something is more worth it (writing, guitar, binge drinking with your friends), then don't stress about not accomplishing everything-- it was an intentional trade-off.

And the not really solution-solution is to have enough serotonin so that you're perfectly happy doing things like cooking, running errands, and working out-- which is a big goal of mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The next time I move jobs this is going to be a fairly high priority for me while negotiating. Either 7 h/day work or 4 days/week. I love doing things on my free time like programming, robots, and learning Japanese and cooking, but I don't have free time anymore.

</comment><comment><USER20> One thing that's really helped us save time is grocery delivery with peapod. It saves so much time and if you value your time in any reasonable way, you'll almost certainly come out ahead.

</comment><comment><USER21> "five and a half hours of precious free time" \- as a parent of two young children I read this and started keeling over with laughter.

</comment><comment><USER22> Now imagine it with kids. Honestly, I have no idea how I was ever stresser about time before I was a parent.

<comment><USER3> From what I've seen most parents effectively cease to exist once they get kids (i.e., drop hobbies) and their life revolves around their kids, so I am not really convinced that the time problems doesn't exist and parents don't just flag it as "OK" in their heads due to hyper-focus on their kids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wake up at 6am, not 9am and you get another three hours in your day.

<comment><USER24> I think there have been enough HN articles for us to know it doesn't work like that. Wake up at 6am and he's not going to bed at 1am anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> And this guy doesn't even have a kid.</comment>


Solar Roadways Awarded DOT Contract to Pave Roads with Solar Cells - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news171545860.html <comment><USER2> $6,900 per panel adds up to about $3 million per lane-mile.

Typical rural highway costs for new highway are $3 - $9 million per lane-mile, with urban highways costing $5 - $20 million per lane-mile. (per [http://www.railstotrails.org/resources/documents/whatwedo/po...](http://www.railstotrails.org/resources/documents/whatwedo/policy/07-29-2008%20Generic%20Response%20to%20Cost%20per%20Lane%20Mile%20for%20widening%20and%20new%20construction.pdf))

The estimated 7.6 kwh per day per panel mentioned in the article, if you assume it gets that every day, adds up to 3.344 mwh per lane-mile, which at average US retail electric rates, adds up to $120,000 per lane-mile per year. According to their website, these panels will supposedly be designed to last 21 years, vs. the 7 typical for asphalt roadways. That would bring the lifetime electricity production per lane-mile up to $2.5 million. (not accounting for inflation nor electric price changes over 21 years)

Frankly, I find their 21 year projected life absurd, but then again I live in a state with yearly freeze-thaw cycles shortening the life of roadways. Other than that, it seems like if they could meet their claims, it would be financially feasible to build roads using this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do we have a lack of unused space, which isn't crossed every day by tons of heavy cars? If we're going to build these panels, there's no need to build them in distant places that often get damaged, like highways - better put them in unused land near a city to minimize power transportation costs.</comment>


Inspired by Genius: How a Mathematician Found His Way - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/inspired-by-genius-how-a-mathematician-found-his-way/?WT.mc_id=SA_TW_MATH_NEWS <comment><USER2> 'I want teachers and parents to recognize that when you do see unusual talent, instead of demanding that these people have certain test scores, let's find a way to help nurture them. Because I think humanity needs it. I think these are the lessons we learn from Ramanujan.'

So well said, can't even comment on the line!

<comment><USER3> Please don't separate children based on what you perceive their intelligence to be.

<comment><USER4> Really? What's the alternative? Have really smart kids suffer through lessons that are menial to them?

I was lucky enough to be in a school that had lots of programs for gifted kids and let them do their own work or work in small groups among themselves. Those moments were by far the brightest of my compulsory education.

<comment><USER3> I'm glad for you

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Both my parents will tell you that you only get to live once, so you might as well be the very, very best that you can be at whatever you choose. Which I don't necessarily agree with, because if everyone lived that way, there would be nothing but a whole bunch of unhappy people in the world. But that's how they brought us up. They taught me to be competitive. They taught me not to falsely believe I had done well when I hadn't._

As a parent this is something I struggle with. How much should I push a 7 year old child to be their very best? How important is it really to be your very best? Is it more important to push yourself to be happy while maximizing happiness around you? Yet, I'm not really sure what that means outside of trying to be your best at something you enjoy.

<comment><USER6> I'm not a parent, but for me the scary thing is not how important is it to be your very best. Rather, it is the question - can any (otherwise healthy) child really become an olympian, nobel prize winning scientist, grammy winning musician, or great political leader, if only his or her parents raised them right?

Depending on how you answer, if you don't push your child, you could be ruining his or her chances. That is something I would struggle with as a parent.

<comment><USER7> Is raising right necessarily pushing?

I decided that I don't have the energy to force my kids to overachieve at things they don't want. But... If they are interested in anything, I will help them find the best instruction. For one this is foreign languages, the other it's chess and programming. But if they weren't interested, I wouldn't make it my mission to push. It's their life, and achieving "potential" is ultimately on them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ono is the most self-promoting mathematician I've ever seen. He's done some outstanding work, but he certainly enjoys the spotlight.

<comment><USER9> I agree with that and I wavered about buying the book because of it. In the end, I decided to read it and was pleasantly surprised. It's a nice book. It helps explain, but perhaps not excuse, his self-promotion.

Your username should not exist :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >> "Both my parents will tell you that you only get to live once, so you might as well be the very, very best that you can be at whatever you choose."

You only live once means you only live once, nothing more, nothing less.

</comment><comment><USER11> Previous submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11853721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11853721)</comment>


Ambient weather display for your home - <AUTHOR> http://www.tempescope.com/

<comment><USER2> This is pretty cool! I would love to see a better "consumer product". The one in the video doesn't appear to be sealed very well.</comment>


Be a Prolific Commenter - <AUTHOR> http://www.mkrecny.com/entry/12/

<comment><USER2> And your evidence is...?

I leave what I think are pretty high quality comments on some blogs. You know how many click-throughs Google Analytics puts them at? A bare handful. I get more visitors from a random external link on an obscure article in the _German_ Wikipedia.</comment>


Spatial Audio in VR - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/vr/concepts/spatial-audio <comment><USER2> This is actually quite amazing and one of the fields I'm most interested in.

Spatial audio / 3d audio is much more immersive and less gimmicky than 3D video, but I feel like people don't really care too much because they were so underwhelmed with 3D video. It's one of those things with high fidelity audio you can't tell a difference between what is real and what is fake.

Edgar Choueiri, a Princeton professor, was the first I know of that tried to commercialize his algorithm for spatial audio. I believe he got a deal with Jawbone to put in Jambox as a feature called "live audio mode". He did try to sell some hardware for audiophiles to build out home systems, though I'm pretty sure they were insanely expensive (10-100k range). [https://www.princeton.edu/3D3A/index.html](https://www.princeton.edu/3D3A/index.html)

There's also a great podcast that tells stories using only spatial audio. They're really immersive and sometimes I can't tell if the audio is happening in the podcast or outside my room. It's called The Truth: [http://www.thetruthpodcast.com/](http://www.thetruthpodcast.com/)

Makes me happy to see tools like this are open to developers now. I expect to see a lot more content featuring this technology now.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to hear a great example of spatial audio, check out The Quiet American [0] and be sure to use earbuds. He records his environment using two in-ear microphones to get all of the effects discussed in the article: sound shaped by the external parts of the ear, timing differences between the left and right ear, etc.

I remember listening to one recording where he is at the edge of a lake or ocean, and listening while standing with my eyes closed I almost expected to feel the waves around my ankles. It's incredibly immersive, and will work wonders for VR.

[0] [https://www.quietamerican.org/introduction.html](https://www.quietamerican.org/introduction.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Back in the day 'spatial audio' was excellent for what it was in VRML, as played through the SGI viewer. I was sad VRML never happened as I quite enjoyed worlds where you could play different songs in different virtual rooms able to mix albeit not to the beat between different tracks by moving around. A fantastic music experience could be had.

This new take on 3D audio just makes me want to go back to 1998 and what was achievable then in 3D on the web if you were willing to do a 20Mb download over a modem to get the plugin required to 'see' VRML. The actual hurdle was use case, instead of a 3D web we ended up with a 2D flat table web. If you got good at VRML and used all of the features and built significant sized worlds then you soon realised that you were on your own, few others in the world had got that far, their models were more like Duplo Lego rather than Lego Technical.

The alleged 'bar' back then was the download for the plugin, that allegedly prevented VRML from catching on. The authorship tools were awesome - Maya like - and yet there were few takers. CosmoWorlds was awesome, has to be said. The lack of content creators was the problem, 2D Flash was the way people went, nobody was thinking in 3D.

So when can we start doing cool 3D just on the web in a web browser that you don't need specialist hardware for? With 3D spatial audio working too?

</comment><comment><USER5> I've never really been impressed by HRTFs compared to true Binaural recordings (e.g. virtual barbershop) There's something happening in the binaural recordings for positioning that just isn't captured in HRTFs it seems.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice to see audio finally getting the attention it deserves! And seems like VR is the driving factor. I wonder how this compares to NVIDIA VRWorks Audio[1]?

When you think about it, 3D audio has many similarities to 3D video: rays of sound(/light) traveling through open space and attenuating in the process, bouncing off surfaces whose material filters different frequencies. From this point of view, in hindsight, the accelerated sound cards from '00s seem a bit of a misstep – isn't this something that's better computed on a GPU?

[1] [http://www.roadtovr.com/nvidias-vrworks-audio-brings- physica...](http://www.roadtovr.com/nvidias-vrworks-audio-brings-physically- based-3d-gpu-accelerated-sound/)

</comment><comment><USER7> So, are we going to revive A3D for mobile/VR? Have any of the patents expired?

<comment><USER8> If Creative ever used A3D to improve their own product -- after lawsuiting Aureal into oblivion and buying the company -- I never noticed.

For readers who aren't familiar with the story:

[http://www.roadtovr.com/sightline-chair-goes-binaural- develo...](http://www.roadtovr.com/sightline-chair-goes-binaural-developer- shares-thoughts-3dception-integration/2/)

[https://toni.org/a3d/](https://toni.org/a3d/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's the difference between this and OpenAL? It has 3D audio for ages, but not many games really use it.

<comment><USER10> Pretty much every third party sound library for games implements 3D audio support (commercial ones probably for the last 10 years or more) but in order to use more than just the spatial sound source location/user facing vector requires inputting the material types/locations/sizes/audio properties for everything in the game world (to calculate audio propagation loss/occlusion) and using a certain percentage of cycles per frame to this - not everyone chooses to dedicate this much work to audio or has the extra CPU cycles to do this after graphics/physics. Also they have to be able to support simulating the head transfer function via speaker (many possible configurations) or headphone so that's doubled or tripled the amount of QA for audio sfx instead of relying on a VR headset for a standard setup for VR, in addition to possibly adding some sort of customization for each individuals head transfer function. If your games don't really use it, it's because the developer didn't have the time/money/CPU budget for it because it probably wasn't a key feature.

Not sure what is different about Google's offering in VR space versus tradtional game audio engines here.

<comment><USER11> > Also they have to be able to support simulating the head transfer function > via speaker ..

Do you mean head _related_ transfer function ? As in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head- related_transfer_function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head- related_transfer_function) ? HRTF would be practically impossible to do with speakers in a room.

<comment><USER10> yes, HRTF, just typing hastily. If one enables HRTF support for instance, as this quick googleing finds support in an eight year old query on FMOD, [http://www.fmod.org/questions/question/forum-29423/](http://www.fmod.org/questions/question/forum-29423/) one needs to support/not support/test all the cases, with the HRTF enabled/disabled, user deciding to use headphones/speakers with whatever configuration they have. Maybe one will decide it sounds better with HRTF on with speakers or decide that's not a good idea and not allow it or not even support HRTF. It's up to whomever made the game to determine how to support whatever the user decides to use. So in the general case of games not just VR, one might have a console version and a PC version and may need to support headphones/2 speakers/multiple speaker set ups and enabling/disabling features on demand per configuration. So back to the original query this requires signficantly more QA/testing than supporting just HRTF with VR headphones.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unbounded Robotics to Shut Down Due to Willow Garage Spin-Off Agreement - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/unbounded-robotics-shut-down

<comment><USER2> This is sad on so many levels. The founders worked so incredibly hard. They put together a groundbreaking, extremely complex, price shattering robot in less time than it takes many software projects to launch. The idea that an accomplishment of that magnitude might be lost due to a contract dispute is heartbreaking.

The only positive thing I can think of here is that I look forward to seeing what they do next, I'm sure it will be awesome.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> About a year ago, I got to play with a UBR-1 prototype. It seemed to be very well-designed. It was smaller and lighter and the PR2 and had some design improvements. For example, the base was more maneuverable, and the torso and grippers were much faster. The main appeal of the UBR-1 was its low cost -- 50k for the UBR1 vs 400k for the PR2, or thereabouts.

Some of the most technically innovative robotics startups were acquired by Google last summer. Unbounded seemed like the only company left in the realm of mobile manipulator robots, who could continue Willow Garage's legacy of providing technology that runs on open-source software (ROS), is open to tinkering, and benefits robotics researchers. (And plenty more research is required before robots are intelligent enough for the vast majority of menial tasks.) I hope that Google will give back to the research community, but I won't get my hopes up, since they've been extremely secretive so far.

So I'm quite sad to hear the recent news that Unbounded is shutting down, and I'm hoping that the excellent work of Melanie et al. won't be buried due to the legal issues they're facing. (I have no inside info about what is going on.)

<comment><USER3> Well there are other companies that are making manipulators. Kinova for example looks promising with a polished robotic arm. They don't have the mobile base tough, which is sad.

<comment><USER4> An integrated mobile manipulator is a very different beast from a standalone manipulator bolted to a generic mobile base.

For example, UBR-1's lift torso means that it can pick an object up off the ground and place it on a tabletop. The placement of sensors is also key, with having a depth cam ideally placed for both looking around and supervising a grasp operation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Willow Garage somehow pulling the rug from under Unbounded Robotics is a backwards move for this industry, which has always struggled to get decent forward momentum (being innovative electro-mechanical hardware, looking for early adopters, etc)

On a possibly related/speculative note, it seemed to me (when looking over the list of robotics companies acquired by Google at the end of 2013) that Google has been organizing a 'getting the band back together' thing. Obvious connections included Redwood Robotics and Industrial Perception, both also Willow Garage spin-offs. That, and one of the original founders of Willow Garage (Scott Hassan) was ex-early-Googler himself.

<comment><USER6> As far as I can tell, Scott was _the_ founder and sole benefactor for Willow Garage. He's also the CEO/founder/funder of Suitable (another WG spinout) that was alluded to in the IEEE article. If there were legal issues with Unbounded... then they probably start and end w/ Scott.

Very weird, indeed.</comment></comment>


Automatically Editing Videos with JumpCutter - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/carykh/jumpcutter <comment><AUTHOR> Time code to the cliffnotes:

[https://youtu.be/DQ8orIurGxw?t=522](https://youtu.be/DQ8orIurGxw?t=522)

Basically instead of speeding up the entire video by 2x for a speed review, he created a script with variable speeding, where the silent bits are speeded up much faster than the talking bits, which means that the end result is much shorter.</comment>


EA's Madden '13 Kickstarter Makes 8.5 Million in Five Hours [joke... for now] - <AUTHOR> http://www.dinofarmgames.com/?p=949

<comment><USER2> People are so damn stupid sometimes. Like 15,000 is so extravagant for a game budget.</comment>


ASCII art animations in the URL bar - <AUTHOR> http://glench.com/hash

<comment><USER2> Really interesting but I hope this doesn't become popular and appear in every site. A few comments:

* Wave2 is broken in Chrome (in Windows)

* The title should change, it's always "I'm sorry".

* I'd prefer that this doesn't destroy the history / back button.

* Add a stop button / link.

* I like the diy. Can I send one to my friends?

</comment><comment><USER3> bar har har! Serious LOLs were had after playing around here using Google Chrome then viewing history later to find something else.. 10 pages of Chrome History telling me 'I'm Sorry' because Chrome Records Every URL Change To History!

Well played with project... and the I'm sorry page title.

</comment><comment><USER4> THIS!...It's so cool, wait how is this done?

</comment><comment><USER5> very impressive, but it feeds history so much, and breaks back forwards buttons

<comment><USER6> exactly! for this reason, this can't be used for production.</comment></comment>


How Sublime Text can make an extra $X0,000 - <AUTHOR> https://fman.io/blog/finally-understanding-sublime-texts-pricing/ <comment><USER2> It's an interesting idea. It occurs to me that it may not be profitable (or interesting) for Sublime to have customers who have paid $25. My experience has been that people who pay a low price are often more demanding and harder to work with than people who pay a higher price.

While the gross income is the same, if you sell 2500 licenses at $10 each or 25 licenses at $1000 each or 1 license at $25,000, your experience as a vendor will be very different. In particular, paying 1/100th of the price doesn't mean that someone has 1/100th of the expectations, or takes up 1/100th of the time of the higher-priced customer.</comment>