Open access: All human knowledge is there, so why can't everybody access it? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2016/06/what-is-open-access-free-sharing-of-all-human-knowledge/ <comment><USER2> I think it's an issue of copyright law being ridiculous.

Nonfiction and scientific work should be treated differently than fictional works. I don't really care if Mickey Mouse goes into the public domain. But it's crazy that 100 year old scientific works can still be under copyright and illegal to distribute. These objectively have value to society, and the argument for the existence of the public domain is much stronger.

It shouldn't last indefinitely. Maybe only 10 or 15 years. I believe 99% of all works make most of their money in the first few years. Having copyright last a lifetime, let alone much longer, is just crazy.

Put a cost on renewing copyright. This is actually how it used to be. Half way through, you could pay a fee to have copyright extended. Very few people paid this fee (because most works aren't economically valuable), so most works went into public domain much sooner. Journals charge $30 to access obscure ancient papers. But I bet they wouldn't pay even $30 to keep the rights to those same papers.

Don't put everything into copyright by default. And again especially works of nonfiction or scientific papers. If the authors want that, then sure. This wouldn't fix the issues with big journals that demand it. But it still seems like a sensible idea to have copyright opt-in, not opt-out.

<comment><USER3> Fictional works are not a special case. I'd _personally_ argue copyright never made sense, but people like to say back when the marginal cost of producing duplicates of information was greater than nothing, copyright at least _functioned_.

Remember, today, there are millions of people using their computer to voluntarily and entirely charitably give away information for free, that other people want to stop them from doing. That is so absurd and insane.

I've said it before, and many of us will inevitably say it again, but this is not 1800. Charge for what is valuable and scarce, your creativity (or in the case of a scientist, their knowledge), not what is not valuable or scarce, which is bits on a hard drive.

<comment><USER4> To help categorize and understand: I'd characterize your argument as the "Stallman" argument, where the simplicity of copying justifies the moral argument against copyright.

There is a alternate vein which doesn't have to do with value or scarcity, but which has to do with _rivalrousness_ (that is a very subtle distinction):

[http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/09/culture-is-anti- rivalro...](http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/09/culture-is-anti-rivalrous/)

You may find it interesting.

<comment><USER5> I think this is a mis-representation of Stallman's point. Notice that Stallman has his non-code media mostly under a no-derivatives creative commons license.

From what I understand, Stallman is concerned about making sure our infrastructure is free (as in freedom). The simplicity of copying is almost a tangential issue. His point is that for a society to be considered free (democratic, empowered, etc.) the people need access in a meaningful way to the infrastructure that helps create that society. To me, his point is a natural extension of forcing government documents to be under public domain and providing architectural blueprints for public scrutiny.

Maybe I'm wrong and mis-interpreting Stallman's point. Do you have a reference that would support your claimed stance on Stallman's 'ease of copying = moral justification against copyright' interpretation?

<comment><USER4> I have had an extensive 10+ email personal correspondence with Stillman about patents. Tl;dr He's very much for patents that aren't software patents.

<comment><USER6> I find that sad and disappointing. Patents are a curse upon humanity.

<comment><USER4> I also had a correspondence with Eric S. Raymond, who is in general more broadly anti-IP (from what I can tell).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you're doing a startup trying to innovate in the research and academic journal space I'd love to talk to you. I've put out requests for contact in HN comment threads like this before and gotten great responses and great conversations, and one even resulted in a funding round.

I'm a shareholder and board member of SAGE Publications, which was founded by my grandparents. SAGE is about the 5th largest journal publisher and is and will remain a private family-owned company. I know it's hard to believe, but publishers aren't one homogenous evil entity plotting how to rip off the public. There are lots of fucked up things about the journal system, many of which publishers have caused or been complicit in. But there are also a lot of complicated factors that are entirely outside publishers' ability to change. Academia is a mess in a lot of ways, and much of the overall dysfunction of the whole system has manifested in what has become the hard to comprehend journal publishing system of today.

I live in Oakland and would love to meet up with anyone who happens to be in the Bay Area, or just have Skype calls no matter where you are. My contact info is in my HN profile. Drop me an email and I'd love to pick your brain to hear about how you're approaching academic publishing.

We've funded two startups in the last few years. PeerJ is an open access journal undercutting the traditional publishers AND most OA publishers (like PLOS) on price. Publons is trying to provide incentives for peer review and encourage openness in the peer review process. We'd love to find a few more good companies doing truly innovative stuff that will have an impact on academic publishing.

<comment><USER8> > If you're doing a startup trying to innovate in the research and academic > journal space I'd love to talk to you.

Make contact with Alexandra Elbakyan. She clearly tries to bring innovation to the academic journal space (though not legal one).

<comment><USER7> I emailed her to try to get her to speak (remotely) at a SAGE board meeting. Never heard back. I'd love to have her engage in a conversation with us.

<comment><USER8> This sounds fair. :-)

<comment><USER7> Considering she's being sued by Elsevier I don't fault her for not wanting to talk to any publishers. There probably isn't anything I can say that would convince her I'm not trying to entrap her in some way. But yeah, she's got an open invitation to an audience with the owners and upper management at SAGE, even if she just wanted to tell us off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminded me of back 30 years ago or more when I first was messing around with Arpanet and it was just turning into the Internet, I remember how all of my friends and I were so stoked about how it was going to change the world because everyone would have access to all the knowledge in the world and how exciting that was, the democratization of knowledge. We speculated on how everyone in the future would be so much smarter because they would have access to so much information and knowledge. Some of that is true, but sadly, not entirely. Much of the greatest knowledge is locked away. And even sadder still, so many people do not really cherish what we have and instead use it for a lot of ridiculous nonsense, which, I guess is me being Judgmental about what the internet should be used for. I guess what it really shows, is that the future often does not turn out the way you thought it would . I think this is a case like that, we thought knowledge would flow freely like from a fountain or oracle of wisdom, but instead it is filled with 140 character snotty comments and pictures of cats with fruit on their heads. Sorry for the rant.

<comment><USER10> I'm curious what happens if we would design a parallel web, ruled by a benevolent dictator that really wants to help humanity, in the wide and deep sense(and we're lucky and it doesn't turn into a bloodbath) - how would that internet look like ? and is it even a possible goal for a niche of the population ?

<comment><USER11> Sounds like China

<comment><USER12> He said "benevolent", and also "really wants to help humanity".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Ruud-v-A I try to avoid citing articles that are only available behind a paywall. Even though there isn't always an alternative source available, if enough people favour citing open-access articles over paywalled ones, that should create an incentive to publish in open-access journals, because in academia, citations are everything. (That is a problem in itself, but it is the status quo.)

<comment><USER13> I wish everyone would do this. Like a code of honor akin to a copyleft license: if you use open access references, your article should be open access too.

When reproducing findings of an openly accessible paper it's extremely frustrating when some of the references are unreachable.

I'm not in academia so for one I don't have university access to papers and for two I often need to trickle down the references to fill knowledge gaps.

<comment><USER14> It's just not always possible to do that. I know it can be frustrating to not have ready access to academic journals, but you can usually find the article one way or another. Many journals are allowing pre-print publications to reside on open-access archives ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_preprint_policy) ), some will allow 'limited' distribution of either pre-print or published papers (generally means you have to ask the author for a PDF directly), and, with apologies to John Gilmore, the internet interprets copyright as damage and routes around it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I consider my belief how this particular battle will turn out a good litmus test for my pessimism/optimism.

Some days I can't imagine a future where universal open access is implemented, at other times it seems inevitable. Seeing that I must normally believe it to be a 50/50 thing makes it a great way to calibrate my mood out of my decision making process.

More on topic: I wonder if we'll see countries take a stance in these battles. Why isn't Ecuador Hosting a Sci-Hub Mirror for their citizens? The naive observer might think there is only upsides for countries like these to such an action.

<comment><USER7> I hope you're OK with a compromise between your pessimism and optimism. I think what you'll see over the next few years is continued movement (with increased velocity) toward open access for well-funded research areas (ie bio and other hard sciences, etc). If you're getting decent grant money from the government or a funding body (like Wellcome Trust or Gates) then your research will be highly likely to be open access, and not just after an embargo period. But in disciplines that aren't well funded it's going to be a different story. Humanities and much of Social Science doesn't have the same funding situation, and so therefore the existing system is going to stick around for quite a while.

The zealots will argue that every service a traditional publisher provides should only cost $20 a paper (or whatever other number you pull form thin air). Except if that was true you'd have a bunch of startups offering compelling publishing services for that price point, which you don't. Vetting and curating scientific literature has real costs, and those who say it doesn't don't have defensible models they can point to to show that it can work without real money flowing. It's always just hand-wavey arguments about theoretical cheap costs.

So I think your optimism will be proven right (or at least more right than wrong) when it comes to well-funded research areas. And your pessimism will be proven right when it comes to fields without the same funding structure.

<comment><USER16> Didn't the article say the vetting was mostly academics doing it for free? Shouldn't cost much then. Curating can be a paid service as was the case in the article. Whereas, I know what the cost is: SciHub is $5,000/mo to operate if all one does is provide a collection of papers. Distribution to a world- wide audience would cost more but could be absorbed by universities mirroring things and using storage appliances like that OSS one that shows up here periodically. Not to mention cheap boxes that cache the hot docs in RAM.

People that want fancy shit can pay for it. Meanwhile, I got 16,000 papers on IT and INFOSEC out of ACM and IEEE through my university just using a search box with titles, authors, abstracts, and PDF download button. All I need to bring cutting-edge and prior good work to Hacker News regularly. Well, summaries of it unless I find a public download that allows me to share. Esp CiteSeerX, a perfect example of what I'm proposing. It's the bomb. :)

<comment><USER17> Peer review is done for free yes, but you also need to manage that process and there's a filtering step before you send things to peer review. Then there are checks like someone going through the references and making sure they're all there, that dois are assigned and assigned correctly, etc. There's the software for managing all this process too, and then all the extra cost around hiring people like management, HR, office space, etc.

You can look at all of these and say "yes but that's not hard it's just..." but the fact is someone does work and that'll need to be paid for, so there is some cost.

Often only papers that are accepted actually pay the cost, so they're effectively paying for all the work done on papers that don't make the final cut. Nature, if I remember the figures right, accept about 5% of submissions. So for every paper, there's a certain amount of work that needs to be done on 19 others.

I'm not justifying any particular cost, but it'd be worth looking at PLOS and their fees as they're a non-profit.

> SciHub is $5,000/mo to operate if all one does is provide a collection of > papers.

Is it reasonable to put the cost of running a publication at near or under one FTE? You'd at least have to do more if you had search and weren't just piggybacking on google scholar.

<comment><USER16> "Is it reasonable to put the cost of running a publication at near or under one FTE? You'd at least have to do more if you had search and weren't just piggybacking on google scholar."

Where did you find they're just piggybacking on Google Scholar? I know nothing of the implementation outside what she spends for a specific amount of papers.

"Is it reasonable to put the cost of running a publication at near or under one FTE? You'd at least have to do more if you had search and weren't just piggybacking on google scholar."

Oh yeah, I agree. A survey of many looking at various attributes with associated costs is probably in order to help establish a baseline when predicting costs of larger activities.

<comment><USER17> Ah search appears to be down, and possibly since Feb. Most news articles talked about them using google scholar and I'm sure I remember using it and it taking me to a google scholar page but with altered hyperlinks. If you search around you'll find other people describing something similar. I assumed it was still like that but apparently google have blocked them [0]

> Oh yeah, I agree. A survey of many looking at various attributes with > associated costs is probably in order to help establish a baseline when > predicting costs of larger activities.

Yeah it'd be very interesting to know how much something like this might cost. PubMed might be a good analogy, if there was an EU or worldwide version run like that which had proper backups, etc that'd be very interesting.

[0] [http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for- science](http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For me, it's coming down to a fundamental difference or distinction: Those who believe in a zero-sum-gain world, and those who believe in a net-sum-gain world.

I fall into the latter camp. In other words, I believe that by sharing and cooperating, we all can advance.

And, I find myself increasingly thinking and experiencing that the zero-sum- gainers are my opposition. They take as much as they can get away with, and they give as little as they can get away with.

Personal advancement, versus communal.

I can't cooperate with them.

And, I no longer want to engage with them.

I cannot afford to do things that lend or provide them power. For it is only ever turned against me, to leverage further advantage.

Now... for "the community" to come to realize this, and act upon it.

<comment><USER19> > For me, it's coming down to a fundamental difference or distinction: Those > who believe in a zero-sum-gain world, and those who believe in a net-sum- > gain world. I fall into the latter camp. In other words, I believe that by > sharing and cooperating, we all can advance.

People like to say this, but they are only okay with sharing things they approve of. By your logic, aren't you morally obligated to let me have something of yours if I ask for it? I'm not criticizing cooperation, just the idealism that falls apart in practice.

The best course of action is a complex blend of the two camps you mentioned.

<comment><USER20> It depends on how you ask, what you're using it for, and of course, the reciprocal obligation on you to assist others, on request.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> At least in the EU there is some progress on this matter:

All European scientific articles to be freely accessible by 2020

[http://english.eu2016.nl/latest/news/2016/05/27/all- european...](http://english.eu2016.nl/latest/news/2016/05/27/all-european- scientific-articles-to-be-freely-accessible-by-2020)

</comment><comment><USER21> A light academic disobedience is to refuse to peer-review non-open papers.

I'm trying it for now, you could, too.

[http://www.jonaseinarsson.se/2016/only-open-access-peer- revi...](http://www.jonaseinarsson.se/2016/only-open-access-peer-review.html)

<comment><USER20> Organised collective behavior is better than individual, and much more powerful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There is a more fundamental issue - try answering questions about science with a six year old and google. Yes, they can frame their question, yes they can type it into google, yes google provides links. But, click on the links and ads, speedbumps and plain clickbait stop them dead. Very disappointing. Ok you say, put an adblocker on.. well yes but there goes the revenue that keeps many sites online.

</comment><comment><USER23> To be fair though, if I had access to all these papers I wouldn't understand a third of it.

It's the dumbed down version of them that should be more proactively shared. And if interested, one can dig deep into the subject at hand.

<comment><USER24> That's the problem, digging deep requires access to the un-dumbed-down ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> [https://openaccessbutton.org/](https://openaccessbutton.org/)

</comment><comment><USER26> First, some of the "knowledge" is _deep_ , that is, has prerequisites, and getting through the prerequisites can use some guidance, help, etc., say, in high school, college, and graduate schools.

Next, finding the material on the Internet, say, 1 trillion or so Web pages, is too often from difficult to much worse. My startup is intended to help with that.

<comment><USER27> How do you helm with that

<comment><USER26> By "helm" you mean "help"?

I've developed a new Internet _search_ engine except it's very different from any other _search_ engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) and is more for discovery, recommendation, curation, notification, and subscription. Mostly it's for discovery and recommendation.

What Google, etc. do is part of what long ago the field of _information retrieval_ characterized as just part of the problem, the part where the user knows that the content exists, knows they will like the content, and has keywords/phrases that characterize that content. For that part, Google, Bing, etc. work great. But, again, as has been known for decades, that's only part of the problem.

I'm attacking the rest of the problem, that is, where a user knows less about what they want. For that I derived some new mathematics, with some advanced prerequisites, with theorems and proofs, designed the business model, the user interface, the Web pages, the SQL database, the software and server farm architecture and the code, wrote the code, for the production code, 20,000 programming language statements in 80,000 lines of typing. The code is darned fast and appears to run as intended. Currently the code is in alpha test. Then beta test and going live.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The premise of the click-bait title is clearly false.

</comment><comment> bra-ket An article on open access without mentioning sci-hub?

<comment><USER8> > An article on open access without mentioning sci-hub

and libgen (the latter one really isn't mentioned).

<comment><USER29> Actually, both Sci-Hub and LibGen are mentioned in the article. Perhaps your ctrl+f failed because the page only loads the next section when you scroll down near the bottom of the page.

<comment><USER8> > Perhaps your ctrl+f failed because the page only loads the next section when > you scroll down near the bottom of the page.

Exactly that happened.

<comment><USER30> ...? I'm confused as to why anyone would do that, when just loading a page of HTML and letting the user scroll is a demonstrably superior solution.

<comment><USER31> The charitable view is that this saves bandwidth (and load time) for page views that never get scrolled. Also, it may allow them to count the ads in those sections as impressions without having to paginate the article, which presumably they know that people hate.

But I think it's ironic for an article about open access to make itself essentially unprintable in this way. It's too long for me to read on the screen. A "page of HTML" would be demonstrably superior for that purpose.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing - <AUTHOR> http://neat.io/blog/diary-of-a-programmer-with-no-clue-about-marketing.html <comment><USER3> Nice. So one of the things that happened to me when I came to the Bay Area was I was working at Intel and I had to talk to a lot of marketing folks (who were talking to 'the public' about Intel's chips). I realized I didn't have a clue what they did.

I set out to correct that before I started my own company and looked for a job that would let me work closely with marketing but still be engineering based. I found one at Sun which was effectively a 'technical marketing engineer' although at the time I joined the marketing folks just needed an engineer to translate what the competition was doing into something they could argue about. I too was amazed at how much more complex it was than my simplistic assumptions had been. I moved over into the kernel group later (they too had offered me a spot when I had interviewed) and have been pure engineering ever since but never forgot the lessons of that time.

Things I learned,

1) Marketing is not sales - Sales is the process by which you convince someone with money to give it to you in exchange for a good or service. Marketing is the thing that happens before that which informs you why you might want to talk to a sales guy. A guy marketing a car will tell you that the car has the highest safety rating ever, the guy selling the car will tell you if you write a check right now he will take an additional $1,500 off the sticker price.

2) Marketing is about perception, and perception is personal. The job of a marketeer is to communicate an idea so that you can see it and _perceive_ it the same way the marketeer does. That requires that you first discover the perceptual language of the target, then translate the message into that perceptual language, communicate it, and then test again for understanding. Marketing a car that smells like bacon to a vegetarian just doesn't work. If the biggest chunk of car buyers are vegetarians, and your car consistently smells of bacon, you need to translate that into something positive somehow. Not simple :-).

3) Marketing is ubiquitous - one of the interesting conversations with my daughter as a teen about what to wear, your clothes give others an impression of you, you cannot prevent that, all you can do is control it. People are constantly taking these bits of information in and reasoning about them consciously and unconsciously. To be successful you have to have influence over as many of those information channels as possible. Getting that influence can be tricky.

Basically, it isn't as easy as it looks like it should be was my conclusion.

<comment><USER4> I'd add that Marketing is about _value creation_ ultimately. You have to start with the right mindset, i.e. that you product has no value per se, and that marketing is everything you are going to do around your product/service to create the perception of its value. Your customers don't know how time you spent on it, they don't care how complex it is, they don't even want to know how it works (at least not until they are interested to buy it). You have to somehow create the need (that may be either a true need, or a perceived need) and your product/service has to be a presented as perfect fit (whether true or not) for it. Sometimes products/services create new needs as well so you need additional engagement to focus on the need itself if it's not obvious.

<comment><USER5> We operate with this mindset for each of the roles in our org:

Sales: assume the product sucks and your job is to convince customers to buy a really shitty product

Product: assume that there is no sales and your job is to create a product that people cannot stop raving about after using it for few minutes

Client Services: assume the product sucks and your job is to _still_ keep the customer satisfied

<comment><USER6> You working for Red Bull?

Edit: To clarify: Red Bull is, for me, THE epitome of marketing. They sell a tremendously unhealthy product (bacon-smell car) as something that is healthy, basically by connecting themselves with extreme sports. Red Bull IS extreme sports and lifestyle. How insane if you think about it.

<comment><USER7> Seriously, have you _seen_ what they do in extreme sports? I think a bit of Red Bull won't kill those guys, but lack of concentration might. :)

I agree with you though.

<comment><USER8> Red Bull is extreme sports, bottled for the sedentary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" So now after years of neglecting anything to do with marketing. I get it. Marketing is hard. So crushingly hard.Also I was incredibly naive in thinking that the product was so good that the marketing would just snowball itself into action"_

This right here ... a 1000 times. I've been a developer for years now and I always held onto the same fantasy of launching something so good that marketing would take care of itself. After building a couple of products and being involved in a startup or two I've found that getting software built is not usually as hard as marketing it successfully

<comment><USER10> I,oddly enough, had the opposite. Gave my software out to a few friends (wrote it for myself, as the others in its class sucked), Next thing I know I'm getting 100k d/l a month (paying for overages, fun) - and soon after have a few million users. Never have spent any money on advertising (even though the software DID make it on to a TV show in Denmark a few years later - <USER2> magazines, newspapers, etc.) Still getting downloads and new users.

Have also written tons of other stuff that this did NOT happen to :)

<comment><USER10> The Software was "StationRipper" (still IS StationRipper - first released in 2003. Holy crap, Dec 13 2003!?!?!!??!!? I'm glad I posted this, I had no idea it was almost the 10th anniversary!!!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice! Great to read your experience from creating a product to launching it. Also glad to win over another developer to not thinking that all marketing is BS ;-)

Some tips from a marketer:

+Get analytics set up! I see that you've only mentioned the top of the funnel (traffic) and the bottom of the funnel (downloads). I'm assuming you don't have tracking for the full flow (traffic > install > activation > day 1-30 retention > Sales). Get this set up pronto. It's crucial to understand where the bottlenecks are and to also segment traffic to know which efforts are working.

+Marketing starts before you launch. You'll get a far stronger reaction from blogs, sites, and other people when you contact them 2-3 weeks before launch. Creates a sense of exclusivity and plus gives you some momentum to develop an installed base from Day 1. In light of this, perhaps you should call the current app an 'alpha' and re-launch to get some buzz :-)

+Major sources for you to consider: Organic: SEO Referral: Blogs, 3rd Party App Stores, Tech Sites, Forums, Quora, Stack Overflow, and where ever people who have the problem you're trying to solve is asking for help. Partner: App stores, resellers, etc... Paid: Facebook, AdWords, LinkedIn, GDN (I advise you to do thorough research before starting. It's easy to launch poorly designed campaigns and get the misinformed idea that these channels don't work) Viral: Add any social sharing anywhere you can.

+App Review sites review 100s of requests each day. I ran FreeiPadApps.net for 2-years and received 20+ app review requests/day. Mostly from indie developers, agencies, and bots. Try instead to reach out directly to an editor or writer by email/twitter/linkedin.

+SEO: Get up to best practice (title tags, headings, kw research and mapping to content), but don't bank on it. The gold rush for SEO growth circa 2007 is largely over :-(

+Look heavily into any type of 3rd party app stores for free promotion.

+Not sure of JIRA/Github has any 3rd party app pages. Worthwhile to look into this and seeing if you can get included.

With all that said, doing everything above will get you on par with what everyone else is doing. To separate yourself from the pack, the awesomeness of the product needs to take over :-)

Best of luck!

<comment><USER9> some other tips

\- reddit can be a goldmine of traffic because it has so many subreddits that one is bound to cover your niche (IF you have a really niche product)

\- have a blog, then write interesting things that may not necessarily have to do with your product in a direct way 42floors.com is a good example to follow.

\- optimize said blog for SEO

\- make sure you get email addresses from prospects that land on your site and use them, email marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing software ... go here for how [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/31/can-i-get- your-email/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/31/can-i-get-your-email/)

\- make sure you have at least a twitter account and if you have the time, fish for people that could be interested in your product by finding tweets about competitors, or hashtags related to your product. engage these tweeters.

etc etc ad nauseam

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Your website is a perfect demonstration of your title.

A nice funky starfield with a pretty logo taking up half of the page, and a partial screen shot taking up to the rest of my screen space (1920x1080).

Nothing about what it does instantly pops out. Then I realise there's more, so I scroll - Something, something, JIRA, GitHUB, FogBUGZ, something something.

Hmm, ok, based on that probably not something I'd need. Close the page (before even getting to any of the other stuff).

Come here to read the comments, and buried away here, I found this comment by you [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6686624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6686624), which says:

"I work on contract iOS jobs and I need to track my time to invoice my clients. It sucks using my web browser to start and stop the timer. "

And I think, this, yes, a thousand times yes, and am now downloading it to try it out.

The takeaway from all this, I shouldn't have to find out about that from a comment tucked away on HN, but your website is not arranged in a way that makes it immediately obvious that I want this product.

<comment><USER12> And now, the download finishes and I run it, and it turns out it won't run on Lion. It would have been nice to mention somewhere what versions of OSX it runs on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You don't need AdWords right now.

This comes from an AdWords guy. Seriously, work on marketing to the community and with content, not with paid ads. Paid ads come in when you've identified a market, medium to reach them and what your message is. Have that nailed before you spend a dime :)

</comment><comment><USER14> This looks like something I could actually use. I've just downloaded it.

My take from the website, there is no price on the main page. I have to click 'Buy Now' with no idea whether I want to actually purchase. Which is a commitment (in my head) that I'm not prepared to make without knowing the price.

<comment><USER15> I didn't even realise it wasn't free until reading your blog listing 'sales' separately to 'downloads'. Price needs to be way more obvious up the top. Only now just seeing it'll cost $50, is a disappointment after thinking it was free.

<comment><USER16> $50?? Wow. This person needs to learn more than just marketing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm one of those people who downloaded the trial, ran it for a few days, and then deleted it. I liked a lot of things about the app, but there were a few bits that I found unintuitive—particularly around managing multiple projects from different sources.

I decided to pass, but I bookmarked it so that I'll be able to find it again in the future if I ever find that I really need a quick way to access my Jira issues from the desktop.

The $49 price is entirely reasonable considering the breadth of the feature set and the target audience, but it does put it outside the impulse purchase comfort zone. It might have been helpful to put it on sale at launch with a discounted price in order to build some traction and lower the barrier to adoption for people who are on the fence.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is the second or third post I'm seeing today where a dev person could use some help with marketing their product. This is what I consult in, so I'd be happy to try and answer any questions you or anyone wishes to ask. Fire away!

If the answer requires more information then I'll ask you to email me instead.

<comment><USER19> Oh man nobody replied, guts

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hrm... random impressions I had:

1) The above the fold stuff sort of showed me what it describes itself as, but not what it really is. A looping animation or video would have been really helpful.

2) The below the fold stuff originally came across as separate products. Like I thought it was your catch-all page for a few other products you've made. So maybe you could make it clearer that they are all components of Bee.

3) Just my own reaction that I noticed - when you demonstrate compatibility with several outside services, there might be a weird disincentive to try it out if the potential customer doesn't use _all_ of those services. Like I immediately had a suspicion that since I use Jira but not Github or Fogbugz, that the other focuses of the tool would get in the way or make it feel unwieldy. (I didn't download it to disprove that feeling.)

4) Time/task tracking is a REALLY crowded space, and I imagine it is really difficult to convince someone to try out a new tool, partly because of switching costs. For instance, for me, I use Quickbooks on the Mac, and I'm pretty married to Intuit's "My Time" since it's the only tool I know of on the Mac that will automatically transfer time records to Quickbooks, which I then use to make invoices. And then if someone asks me why I create my invoices from time records in Quickbooks, then... heck, I dunno, I made the decision at one point and it works for me. I could do a whole first-principles analysis I guess that might lead me to a completely different way of working that might lead me to being able to using a different time-tracking app like Bee, but... I don't like going that low on my e-Maslow's hierarchy very often.

5) No obvious mention of price on the front page... no obvious indicator of what clicking the "Buy" button will do or where it will take me. I moused over it, looked for an info tip, and didn't click. (I'm one to just buy rather than deal with download/try/maybe-buy.)

</comment><comment><USER21> Basil - beautiful aesthetic. A few thoughts for you:

1\. You are currently marketing the features of your application. Consider instead marketing the problem that you're solving. Demonstrate that you understand the problem and then show why Bee is the solution to it.

2\. Which value proposition are you competing on? Clayton Christensen suggests that often markets move through functionality, reliability, convenience, and price. For software professionals, that probably looks like functionality, usability, reliability, convenience, and price.

3\. As a gut reaction, your price to feature set seems off. How did you originally come up with the price? It's one of the hardest and most difficult things. If I were you, I'd set up an intro price of $19 while you're on HN front page, and advertise that right on the landing page.

</comment><comment><USER22> Nice work. I've also recently released my first Mac app [0] and I'm working on getting the word out about it by making it free, the idea being that if it's known by people, it can be spread through word-of-mouth, especially if it becomes indispensable. GitHub's API currently reports 600 users, and I'm working on increasing that to 1000 before making it a paid app and marketing it.

Nice to see both approaches here; I wonder which truly works better in the long run.

[0]: [http://issuepostapp.com/](http://issuepostapp.com/)

<comment><USER23> Really liking the app. Also enjoyed the "free for a limited time", adds a bit of a time component where you download it quickly and then maybe get hooked to it for when you have to pay later on.

<comment><USER22> Thanks! Totally agreed, I think that psychologically, 'free for a limited time' makes people have to make a decision on whether they want it now or not, which is an interesting behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've been using Bee for the past week to avoid interacting with Jira's slow interface and it's been absolutely excellent. It's a polished app, and the one bug I encountered was fixed within a day. Just waiting for the trial to finish.

</comment><comment><USER25> > Are people waiting for the trial to run out (14 day trial) ...?

People who buy your software usually do so during the first few days of a trial. Only a small percentage of those who let the trial go to the end will buy.

Source: My (and fellow [m]ISV's) experience over the years.

/edit: Oh, btw: A search in the mac app store for "github issue tracker" (and other similar terms) won't show your app.

</comment><comment><USER26> What I would like to read is why the OP put his time into building a task app. Not because the world doesn't need another one (I'm not being sarcastic here...)...but if you don't have much talent or time for marketing, then _something_ must have been guiding you, right? I would think that without any other external guidance, it's the programmer himself who finds the product useful and uses it everyday as he develops it.

So, did the OP find his own product useful?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes.

I work on contract iOS jobs and I need to track my time to invoice my clients. It sucks using my web browser to start and stop the timer. I also wanted quick access to all my tasks, past and present without going through a slower web UI.

Also the app comes in handy when I need to jot down a quick note or remember something.

Maybe I should incorporate some of that ^ on the site.

<comment> w0rd-driven Forgo the maybe and do it. We use a redmine clone at my current employer and opening a tab or a billion is still rough. I've always preferred clients. If I could live in visual studio like I wanted when I started, there's a decent open source one for that. Also tortoisemine helps with respect to linking checkins but I'm still on a text file keeping track until I get around to putting stuff in. Its never exciting or useful.

There does seem to be a saturation of apps on my platform: windows phone to where just another makes no sense. Mostly devs make it for themselves and since we're all unique, these things are like snowflakes too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> One small tip - your page links to the app page, but doesn't otherwise say anything about what it does, just calling it "this thing". That diary page is marketing too, include a summary of what it does there!

<comment><USER28> And it talks in the end about how users can't provide feedback, but the blog entry doesn't let you comment or even give a way to email, just a link to his twitter account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Congrats on your launch!

Be careful about your plan to "…keep pushing out updates to the app to fill out the feature requests existing users have". It's easy to fall back to strengths – adding fun features, responding to tangible requests from existing customers. But clearly your priority should be getting the word out.

Maybe commit to yourself: no new features unless you're certain they will close new sales?

</comment><comment><USER30> I recently read the book "Cashvertising". It's very good at breaking down how to sell in print. I recommend you read it. For example, your headline "Better task tracking on your Mac" offers no real benefit. What is good about task tracking? What is the benefit it offers? Make that answer your headline.

Read the book. It helped me immensely.

</comment><comment><USER31> Reason dev-ing a software is not that hard = computer is consistent and feedback is instantaneous.

Reason marketing is effing hard (for us programmers) = human is fickle and feedback is sporadic.

</comment><comment><USER32> It looks like a great tool, but like others have mentioned, I just can't justify a $50 price point in my head. I don't really "need" a new app to update my issue tracker, I've already got the browser open which I'm using for other concurrent tasks (and a browser tab with a familiar HTML interface > learning a new tool and remembering to keep it open).

However, if you could pull out the "flight path" feature ONLY into a separate app at say a $10 price point, I would probably jump. Something unobtrusive in the menu bar that tracks my time on task AND automatically pulls up what I should work on next, quickly and easily, would be great.

</comment><comment><USER33> Coincidentally just the other week I got stuck using Jira and it's abysmally slow/buggy interface.

FWIW I was very excited to see Bee but haven't done the work to setup a password for my account on our Jira ondemand instance.

I wonder if some of the slower adoption for you has been people like me using a google account to log into Jira and simply not having a real Jira credentials.

I'll get around to it but I suspect I'm not the only one that didn't feel like mucking around in the Jira account settings to setup credentials for Bee to connect with.

I assume there's no way to access the Jira API otherwise?

</comment><comment><USER34> Came across an insightful video and presentation given at the Konsoll 2013 conference on "marketing indie games on a $0 budget" that might be of interest to folks. It was given within the context of indie game development but its really addressing a common problem.

video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkEQtMP2CuA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkEQtMP2CuA) slides: [http://www.indiegamegirl.com/konsoll-2013/](http://www.indiegamegirl.com/konsoll-2013/)

</comment><comment><USER35> This is exactly why I've been writing "The Hacker's Guide to User Acquisition" (first chapter: [http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-the- first-1...](http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-the- first-1000-users-twitter/), next chapter will be about getting press). I would point out a few things.

1\. The notion that you "build a better mousetrap" and people will beat their way to your door is true maybe 1% of the time. Many more companies have had to fight a little to become successful than just said, "This is so awesome that everyone loves it." That being said, no amount of marketing can make up for a crappy product.

2\. Marketing should be baked into the product itself. If you're figuring out "now how do I get this out to people" after everything is finished, except in some rare circumstances it's too late. Explosive growth almost never happens by virtue of a product being _so good_ that everybody shares it and it goes viral. Yours might, but you can't count on that happening. So how can you leverage your existing user base to create more users?

3\. Getting press is more than emailing a couple of bloggers. And emailing bloggers has to be done in a very specific way to get their attention. It's difficult, because you only have one shot: Think about having to run some code and if there are any errors it all falls to pieces. That's what emailing bloggers feels like. But when it works, it works. And when one place picks you up, the others jump on board really quickly (they're kind of like investors in that way).

4\. A lot of the "marketers" you've talked to might suck. It's a lot easier to pretend to be a marketer than it would be to pretend to be a programmer. And just as a non-technical person would have a difficult time trying to figure out if a programmer is any good, it will be hard for you to tell the difference between a good marketer and someone who has no idea what they're doing

5\. You need a critical mass of users to determine if your product sucks. When I started marketing my first product, I couldn't pay people to use it. It wasn't that people were saying, "I don't like this," but I couldn't get anyone to try it to say whether they liked it or not. Then after months of grinding and trying to figure things out, we found the sweet spot. Thousands of users per day jumped on board, to the point that our biggest problem became scaling. (A good problem to have, but certainly a problem). If I had given up one day earlier I would have thought that no one cared, but really there was no one _to_ care. There's a difference.

6\. 99.99% of the time doing marketing is spent figuring out what works. Once you know (and it's different for each client/customer/app), it's really easy. Don't discount it when someone says "Oh you just do this and this, and boom, users." The same as you wouldn't look at a designer and say "Well you just designed that really simple logo, that can't be hard," you can't just look at the work they're doing -- you have to consider the work they _have done_. And getting to simple is hard.

So the moral of the story: Don't give up yet. It's too early to know if anyone will care about what you built; you have to get it out to more people.

And the next time I hear someone say, "You don't need a marketer, it's all about the quality of the product," I'll point them to this post. Thank you for your honesty, and best of luck to you.

<comment><USER36> Exactly! Well said austenallred.

Most startups fail because they aren't hitting their target growth rate, not because they failed to build a product that works.

You have to fight to grow. Evaluate how much time you spent building your product, and then invest just as much time in growth-related activities.

<comment><USER37> that's exactly the conclusion i've reached, at least for b2c apps. marketing needs the same amount of time/money as software development.

<comment><USER38> I would go a step farther: In many cases (esp. SaaS solutions) marketing takes even more time than the development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Just sent you an email with wording "marketing" that can help. I'm interested to see that good things don't languish and I am a strong writer--happy to give.

</comment><comment><USER40> For your web design, which is part of marketing - namely perception and eye- grabbery - there's too much white space. Too much white space, to me, equals yawn.

I'd make the starfield extend further down the page, past the first screenshot. Then I would somehow frame the other sections of the page. Maybe by adding an interior border or some sort of texture.

Marketing is a cousin of visual design.

<comment><USER41> I, for one, enjoy the liberal use of white space. No academic reasoning for it. I think it's a pleasing aesthetic in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> First impressions are good, the main additional thing I would have done is to create a "video" overview. Most people just don't have the time to download, install, work out what is going on, etc etc. I do have 5mins to watch a quick video to see if this is for me. You can just do a screencast, voice it yourself. Keep it simple.

</comment><comment><USER43> Start collecting emails using autoresponder courses. Think of collecting emails as asking a girl for their number. If you want a date, you're going to call them, talk to them, get to know them, and ask them out. If you want a sale, you need to develop a relationship with a customer.

Collect email from potential users on a landing page. Then, send them email to let them get to know you and you know them. After a few emails, say 5-7, you could say "hey I have this great product that makes doing X way easier!". A number of potential users who get to say the 5th or 7th email will then trial or purchase your product if you ask them to. That's like getting the first date. Your product ultimately still has to be good for it to be a long term relationship.

Pretty much any email newsletter software worth anything supports some kind of autoresponder series functionality.

</comment><comment><USER44> Try hitting up Reddit. The Reddit community is one of the most active and engaging communities out there. The only challenge is that they are brutally honest so only use Reddit if you're ready to hear the truth.

You could also try getting a promotion from apple in the App Store.

Another thing you should do is incorporate some sort of analytics in your app. Most users wont tell you ANYTHING about your app. I'm running Google Analaytics and I can tell that the average user spends ~7 minutes in my game which lets me know that each session is pretty engaging. That's also 7 minutes that they are getting hit with iAd's if they didn't upgrade. Metrics are key, so add something to track app usage.

Your application is niche so you need to target spaces where people that use your the services that your app integrates with hang out.

</comment><comment><USER45> What most programmers/writers/innovators often forget is that unless they spend time/effort and money on getting the word out about their products, the world will never see it. It surprises me how often I come across people that believe their product "will sell itself" and totally ignore marketing. Computers world wide are filled with great projects that not more then a handful of people will see. Whatever your idea is, make sure to spend as much time as you spend creating it, thinking and planning out your marketing of same product. Without it, your idea will still be "the best in the world" but nobody will ever know about it.

</comment><comment><USER44> If anyone knows some good iOS game marketing techniques/tips, please drop me a line--My email is in my profile. I'm trying to market: [http://appstore.com/xo9](http://appstore.com/xo9)

</comment><comment><USER46> Downloaded, installed, tried. Created a new task and drag'n'dropped it inside the another one. Couldn't drag it out again. Closed the app. Seems very nice though, I'll give it another try after a while.

</comment><comment><USER47> Shortfalls: 1\. Didn't implement metrics to detect delete, trial to get that feedback.

2\. Giving up and ranting too early! Marketing is perception, so make sure you make whatever N users happy then tell them to share (it's as simple as this), rinse and repeat. After a ~100 happy users, you'll have a good sample of customer base and it should steadily grow to market potential from there.

3\. First release is just the beginning. Your idea is but a hypothesis. As long as they're is still legitimate feedback to work on, the product is still not reaching it's potential (again, ranting too early!).

</comment><comment><USER48> Don't just "try AdWords", "try social", "try inbound marketing" or any of those things you think you're just supposed to do for some reason. Think of a strategy and then come up with an offer that presents a compelling value proposition. How will you show your product to your customers before they decide to buy? Who are you customers anyways? Come up with a few customer profiles.

One you figure these things out, creating campaigns that accomplish your marketing objectives will be more natural and less like a stab in the dark.

</comment><comment><USER49> Bee seems awesome and while Basil might not get marketing, he gets it now: after a week of resultless marketing efforts he writes a blog post about it, posts to HN and scores the #1 position. Kudos.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'd love to follow your journey of marketing your product.

If you intend to go hard on marketing this app and exploring ways to do that, can you put up an email form, so I know when your next blog post is?!

<comment><USER51> I'd also be interested in following your work; it's a great product to learn marketing from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Getting to the top of HN should fix a lot of your user issues. I like your UI Style, but maybe the product is not very clear to me. Im not a pro perhaps, but you could still work a lot on your product site, make it more concise and easy for an idiot like me to understand too? Are you on the Mac App store? If I were you and If I had a product half as good as this, Id relentlessly blog about it with gorgeous screenshots till around 500 people bought this-Takes patience. Marketing ooutput = Intensity* Focus

</comment><comment><USER53> I for one will thank you for your admittance that marketing a product or service to a prospective target audience is indeed hard, and for along time here on HN, many would say oh your just the marketing guy what do you have to offer or bring to the table if it's not marketing and programming then why do I need you on the team? I'm just glad that both sides of the table are seeing that we should all work cohesively to our strengths to reach the end goal of a particular project or startup.

</comment><comment><USER54> There you go - your article doesn't really provide any value to us, yet you are on the frontpage of HN. Nailed it, now do the same thing over and over again.

</comment><comment><USER55> One of my biggest takeaways from WWDC, as a student, was that even really great products don't launch themselves; they need an immense PR effort to get them off the ground — however, this doesn't mean a big budget.

In my opinion (of limited authority), a lot of 'spin' can be spun, mostly for free, that can generate a great buzz pre-launch.

It's something I'm going to invest a lot of time and effort in next time I do a launch.

</comment><comment><USER56> This is really awesome. I'm almost at the beta point with my own side project, and I'm realizing it's time to do some marketing (virtual pet game for FireFoxOS/browsers - goal is to be interesting to smart people). I'm realizing I simply don't know how to do this marketing thing (yeah, emails, landing page, etc, but those only work when people get there.)

</comment><comment><USER57> Wow that's the first non-crappy Mac app with JIRA support that I've heard of. While I'm really glad that I found out about Bee now, you should really dig into this pain point, IMO. JIRA is terribly slow, and in times of faster tools like Trello or Blossom people are really getting fed up with that. I imagine that marketing it mainly as JIRA client could work well.

</comment><comment><USER52> Continuing..

1\. Use Cases- If your product aint selling, you need to illustrate use cases for your product. If you manage to showcase a very contextually relevant use case, it could literally explode. Like Youtube instant- Its a relatively unused but incredibly useful feature that got its share of sun because it came quick on the heels of Google Instant.

</comment><comment><USER58> Have you tried using google news api to find articles in your market? You can turk out compiling a authors contact list and prepare a press release package for the few hundred writers to publish. Some will not respond but some my write for established sources or even many. This will help get attention and increase your ranking.

</comment><comment><USER59> People do not want to know who made it but they just think how they enjoy it. In this world, there is no second place or second champ, the world is a kind of binary system, 0 or 1, we just choose death or life. "quote on Hackers 3 [2011]

</comment><comment><USER60> Did anyone else have their display get corrupted by opening this site, opening Chrome dev tools, and closing chrome dev tools? My screen started putting up random squares of color and other artifacts and I lost keyboard control.

</comment><comment><USER61> I want this, it looks awesome, but I can't justify $50 on it. A shame.

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm with you dude. This shit is hard.

</comment><comment><USER63> so if nothing work out. blog about it and submit it to HN about your failure and hurray you are a success :)

</comment><comment><USER64> Don't forget to update us with the results of getting to Hacker News Front Page!</comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite JavaScript charting libraries? - <AUTHOR>

Requirements:

  * Line plots with time-based x-axis
  * Free to use
  * Mobile friendly
 <comment><USER2> I like Dygraphs.

The documentation could be better but the library is very feature-rich and customizable.

[http://dygraphs.com/](http://dygraphs.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> In addition to chartjs which has already been mentioned, we like [http://www.highcharts.com/](http://www.highcharts.com/)

Free for non-commercial, $99 per website, and about $500 for most other uses.

The API is clean and easy to learn. Their support has always been top notch for us.

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.chartjs.org/](http://www.chartjs.org/)

</comment><comment><USER5> If an option like HighCharts is on the table, it is worth checking out [http://www.zingchart.com](http://www.zingchart.com)

Free branded version and a variety of licenses available. Flexible styling and no plugins required.</comment>


London YC/Hacker news Meetup - <AUTHOR>

Following up on this item: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1094828<p>Is this still on?  Is anyone arranging anything?  It's very close, perhaps too close, perhaps we should pick a different date ... <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1094828></comment>


Kindle Economics - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/11/kindle_economic.html

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised that no one mentions newspapers and magazines. These seem like the obvious win for the Kindle. No more dirty, bulky newspapers to carry around or dispose of. There is no DRM issue since the content has a one day shelf life. And the payback from a potentially lower subscription cost could justify the cost of the Kindle. As with books, it is obviously nice for commuters.</comment>


DigitalGlobe satellite imagery launch for OpenStreetMap - <AUTHOR> http://blog.digitalglobe.com/news/digitalglobe-satellite-imagery-launch-for-openstreetmap/ <comment><USER2> The blog post is... not so much misleading, but it doesn't clearly communicate the impact of this. It's a press release that's light on facts and is worded such that the reader will assume the best.

A better source is the OpenStreetMap Wiki page on DigitalGlobe [1], which is linked from the article, and has been updated by DigitalGlobe with new info.

 _As of May 9th 2017, DigitalGlobe has just announced availability of satellite imagery directly through a newly launched imagery service.[http://blog.digitalglobe.com/news/digitalglobe-satellite- ima...](http://blog.digitalglobe.com/news/digitalglobe-satellite-imagery- launch-for-openstreetmap)

DigitalGlobe-Premium is a mosaic composed of DigitalGlobe basemap with select regions filled with +Vivid or custom area of interest imagery, 50cm resolution or better, and refreshed more frequently with ongoing updates DigitalGlobe- Standard is a curated set of imagery covering 86% of the earth's landmass, with 30-60cm or resolution where available, backfilled by Landsat. Average age is 2.31 years, with some areas updated 2x year._

 _DigitalGlobe Satellite EULA: DigitalGlobe, Inc. is pleased to provide its high resolution satellite imagery to OpenStreetMap in support of its mapping initiatives. By using our imagery in the OSM editor, you understand and agree that you may only use our imagery to trace, and validate edits that must be contributed back to OSM. You cannot download our imagery or use our imagery for any other purpose. We retain all right, title and interest in and to our imagery. We provide our imagery "as is," with all faults and as available; we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, to the extent permitted by applicable law. You can recover from us only direct damages up to an amount equal to the fees you have paid to us to use our imagery on OSM, if any. We are not liable for any other damages, including consequential, lost profits, special, indirect, incidental or punitive damages. Happy mapping!_

Still, this is beautiful and recent imagery and will help greatly for OpenStreetMap contributors to trace up-to-date features.

[1] [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DigitalGlobe](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DigitalGlobe)

<comment><USER3> I wonder if, now that the costs of satellite launches are starting to come down and camera-equipped drones are commonplace, it might be feasible in the near future to start building up a truly open collection of satellite and aerial imagery for use in projects like OpenStreetMap.

<comment><USER4> > and camera-equipped drones are commonplace

In Germany, flying drones over occupied areas is expressly forbidden by law to protect the occupants' privacy.

There are already too many idiots and creeps flying around with drones, we don't need to add Internet publication to the mix.

<comment><USER5> How high up does the drone need to fly before taking pictures and publishing them is acceptable? I mean that's basically what these mapping satellites are: very high-flying drones taking pictures of the ground to be published online.

<comment><USER6> Person taking a photo out of an airplane: Allowed.

Person remote controlling a camera on an airplane: Not allowed.

We shouldn't be making laws saying a human can do something but a machine cannot. That leads to humans having pointless jobs simply because laws prevent the use of automation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a long time contributor to OpenStreetMap, this is hugely appreciated. Getting direct support from Digital Globe is important and hopefully helps signal that OSM is worthy of people's time and contributions.

<comment><USER8> love this feedback, thanks! At DigitalGlobe, and many other tech companies we work with, there is a growing understanding of the value and importance of OSM. It's a database of the Earth's features and nobody should "own" that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> At first I thought it was a data donation, but it seems like it's only API integration with support.

Still pretty cool as an alternative to Bing satellite data, I guess it's pretty unlikely we'll have open-licensed satellite data in the near future.

<comment><USER10> Most of the EU satellite stuff is open licensed, lookup Sentinel II. Various wavelengths and new data every 5 days (so if it's cloudy you can try again).

It's not the most user-friendly though, you have to download large swathes at a time.

<comment><USER8> NASA Landsat program is a great example of Open Data. It's important to remember that US taxpayers funded the creation, launch and operation of the satellites. EU Sentinel is similar. So the imagery is paid for, as users we just don't have to pay twice.

<comment><USER11> DigitalGlobe's GeoEye-1 was also partially funded with taxpayer money in exchange for unlimited military access and exclusive use of the highest resolutions. It is time the general public got to reap the benefits too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Darn... Doesn't look like this is in a JOSM [1] release yet. Really, really looking forward to this. (Mapping areas near my house, especially parks, is something that I find to be a great way to relax in the evenings.)

[1] [https://josm.openstreetmap.de/](https://josm.openstreetmap.de/)

<comment><USER8> yes, coming to JOSM soon. I have been working with the JOSM developer team. Stay tuned.

<comment><USER12> Excellent; thank you! JOSM / OSM is the basis for a lot of mountain bike trail mapping work that I do. Another source of imagery will just be cake. (GPS traces only go so far...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This will make a big difference for the rural area I moved to. I was able to trace many of the houses around the outskirts of my village from aerial imagery. However, on the day that both Bing Maps and Mapbox shot their imagery, a massive cloud blanked out the center, the place where most outsiders would be bound for and where most of the POIs are located.</comment>


Ask HN: How best to stay informed whilst not following 24 hour news cycle? - <AUTHOR> I normally read online news several times every day, however I am starting to realise that a lot of what I read does not really add any value to my life. I do not gain much by following the latest outrage on social media that has been converted into a news story, for example.<p>What can I do to keep up-to-date with national (UK) and world affairs without wasting so much time reading inconsequential "news"? Something like a short weekly digest would be ideal. Even via email is fine. <comment><USER2> I disagree one can stay informed while following the 24hr "news" cycle. In fact, I would recommend staying away from so called "news" to stay informed.

This 'old' book from last century (that is year 1999) sums it up well.

Edit: link to the book > [https://www.amazon.com/How-News-Makes-Dumb- Information/dp/08...](https://www.amazon.com/How-News-Makes-Dumb- Information/dp/0830822038)

Excerpt from desc of the book:

 _Sommerville argues that news began to make us dumber when we insisted on having it daily. Now millions of column inches and airtime hours must be filled with information--every day, every hour, every minute. The news, Sommerville says, becomes the driving force for much of our public culture. News schedules turn politics into a perpetual campaign. News packaging influences the timing, content and perception of government initiatives. News frenzies make a superstition out of scientific and medical research. News polls and statistics create opinion as much as they gauge it. Lost in the tidal wave of information is our ability to discern truly significant news-- and our ability to recognize and participate in true community._

</comment><comment><USER3> When I cared about staying up on current events, I subscribed to _The Economist_ and read it cover to cover each week [a non-trivial commitment]. Though I'm American, my typical mainstream news source is the BBC website on my phone. Mostly for I'm there for football though.

I've discovered that just about everything important makes it into my bubble through other channels. Except local news and my beloved follows that.

</comment><comment> noir-york I came to the same realisation that most daily news is just ephemeral content and not worth my time a few months ago. Now my daily routine is to log in once or twice a day to a select few news (bbc/nytimes/guardian mostly) and just skim the headlines.

Reporting is commoditised, but analysis is worth paying for in terms of money/attention. For that I read the weeklies: Economist, Private Eye, NewYorker, Foreign Affairs, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> In my experience, you will hear the most important things from your friends, family or coworkers, so you could just try to not read any news at all. If you feel like you are missing important things, than I would try to go with a short daily or weekly digest of the news you care about the most.</comment>


Someone created an account on GitHub to add hey.com to spam lists - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1277805249147752449 <comment><USER2> I think Hey is going to succeed, regardless of how well it differentiates with email, simply because we're at the point where almost every single tweet from DHH is getting posted to HN.</comment>


Against DNSSEC - <AUTHOR> https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/01/15/against-dnssec/ <comment><USER2> Please don't use things I wrote as a coatrack to hang advertisements of your blockchain DNS replacement.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> DNSSEC has long been incomplete. Whoever had control of DNS essentially could backdoor the entire system [1].

However, now with Handshake [2], DNSSEC has become incredibly useful. TLSA records can be served directly from the blockchain which means provability [3]. This is in contrast to the current CA system wherein any CA can generate a valid certificate.

[1] [https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2016/10/27/14-dns-nerds-dont- con...](https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2016/10/27/14-dns-nerds-dont-control-the- internet/)

[2] [https://handshake.org](https://handshake.org)

[3] [https://github.com/handshake- org/hdns/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/handshake- org/hdns/blob/master/README.md)</comment>


Domain Logic and SQL - <AUTHOR> https://martinfowler.com/articles/dblogic.html <comment><AUTHOR> 'One of the first questions people consider with this kind of thing is performance. Personally I don't think performance should be the first question. My philosophy is that most of the time you should focus on writing maintainable code. Then use a profiler to identify hot spots and then replace only those hot spots with faster but less clear code'

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another article on the same: [http://www.vertabelo.com/blog/notes-from-the- lab/business-lo...](http://www.vertabelo.com/blog/notes-from-the-lab/business- logic-in-the-database-yes-or-no-it-depends)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 'multi-user scenarios often cause surprising changes to the way queries behave, so real profiling has to be done under a realistic multi-user load. You may find that locking issues outweigh anything you can get by faster individual queries.'</comment>


50 Deployments A Day and The Perpetual Beta - <AUTHOR> http://www.developsense.com/2009/03/50-deployments-day-and-perpetual-beta.html

<comment><USER2> Worth noting there are a few "comment follow up" posts on the blog as well. Especially one in response to Timothy Fitz from IMVU's comment:

[http://www.developsense.com/2009/03/more-imvu-comment- follow...](http://www.developsense.com/2009/03/more-imvu-comment-followup- timothy.html)</comment>


The Monster That Ate Wall Street - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/id/161199

<comment><USER2> "Like Robert Oppenheimer and his team of nuclear physicists in the 1940s, Brickell and his JPMorgan colleagues didn't realize they were creating a monster."

Comparing a JPM MD to oppy? huh?

This is why I don't read newsweek. argh!

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's the bit I don't quite understand. It seems to me that CDSs are fine as long as you only have one degree of separation.

Example: if JPM loans Ford $1B, it can buy a CDS from AIG for that loan. However AIG cannot then buy a CDS for for the loan that JPM owns.

Doesn't this solve the issue?

<comment><USER4> Maybe it does, but then you would be pissing off the 'free market'.

\- AIG should do whatever it wants with its papers! Why do you hate my freedom?

Kidding aside, it's easy to think back and see what went wrong. But the truth is that a LOT of daily financial transactions, small to large, have several layers of buyers, sellers, lenders and buyers.

For example, in your example, why did Ford needed $1B? To sell cars to people and companies. And where do all these people and companies get money to buy cars? They borrow.

So what's the last layer? How many are allowed? What's its depth? All this stuff is interconected. Maybe it's one degree from a financial institution... what's a financial institution? Hedge, pension, banks? A company doing 49% hedge and 51% consumer savings is what?

And believe me, not matter how many locks we put, the finance people will find holes. They will do it because that's where new money is. It's their jobs to find it.

The issue then becomes how to identify, mitigate the damage, and close these holes. Which has its theories 100% in economics and its practices 100% in politics. Awesome.

But I ramble...</comment></comment>


Breaking Grooveshark's encryption - <AUTHOR> http://lgms.nl/blog-1 <comment><USER2> This almost feels like legal cover more than anything else. At least they "tried" to protect the music files from easy duplication & piracy. I wonder if circumvention of XOR is illegal under the DMCA. It feels just about effective as renaming the file extension from _.mp3 to_.shh

<comment><USER3> IANAL, but the DMCA does not make any distinction between strong encryption and mild obfuscation. They're both "technological measure that effectively controls access to a work"

I'm not sure the DMCA provides any "proof" that they're going after privacy. But it does afford them legal tools to go after people who publish Grooveshark decryptor scripts.

<comment><USER4> I think the word "effective" might be interpreted to exclude ineffective measures like this one.

<comment><USER5> That's subjective.

Any strong technique, once broken, is not effective anymore: is it then legal to use such technique, due its ineffectiveness?

<comment><USER6> Also IANAL but from what I know the law has not been interpreted to use (in my opinion) a reasonable definition of the word effective. The law requires 2 things here for a covered protection to be "effective":

      #1 That the protection on the copy is "sufficient" to protect the rights of a copyright holder of the original work, and

      #2 That the copyright owner is satisfied with the protection provided by the copied work.

To me at least, this seems insane. You can theoretically claim DCMA based relief for anything forever by taking its bitstream format and flipping every bit once. That coupled with the knowledge of the copyright owner will be enough to be covered under this reading of "effective".

The linked court decision states on page 28:

98\. To prevail on a DMCA claim for violation of the copy-control provision, plaintiff must show that CSS "effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under" the DMCA. 17 U.S.C. § 1201(b)(1). Under that section, a technological measure "effectively protects a right of a copyright owner . . . if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of a copyright owner under this title." 17 U.S.C. § 1201(b)(2)(B). For the reasons articulated above, the court finds that CSS technology is an effective technological measure to prevent copying of copyrighted DVD content by the average consumer. That CSS technology has been hacked does not disturb this conclusion.

The RealNetworks case where this was decided is linked below. The case basically went "There is this program that uses freely available code that technically breaks your DCMA approved protection method, CSS, but because CSS still works to protect rights due to the breadth of it's implementation, it is not sufficiently broken by your program or the freely available knowledge you used to make it, and the Court finds for the Plaintiff." (my interpretation from reading page 56)

See: [https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/RealDVD/real_v_dvd- cca_pi...](https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/RealDVD/real_v_dvd- cca_pi_order_081109.pdf)

Pages #28 and #56

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> tl;dr they xor'd the files with 37 (ASCII '%')

<comment><USER8> the post was more complicated to read than the encryption they used

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A few years ago, there was an article posted to Hacker News about some site that sold DRMed anime shutting down and how people who bought anime from the site would no longer have access to the things they bought. As it turned out, the special Flash-based anime viewer they provided just did a per-byte XOR with 0x42 on PNG files.

</comment><comment><USER10> Slightly off topic:

Why is this site _more_ readable without the stylesheet?

</comment><comment><USER11> This "coding scheme" seems to be "unkillable" (don't know, if the wording is correct, the spell checker does not like it).

I thought, after Microsoft made a bad name about itself by using this in its "Access" product ten years ago or so (they "encrypted" passwords this way), some people should have been warned. May be it is was just to long ago ...

Within seven years or so (of operating), somebody could have come up with a different algorithm ...

<comment><USER12> Well, there are tons of different DRM algorithms, but none of them are backed by secure cryptography since you cannot logically restrict people from "saving" but not from "viewing". There's no mathematical backing to the idea. This is probably why Grooveshark didn't bother using a complex algorithm... they already know that DRM is fragile and will be broken by someone who's determined enough. So the performance cost of a real encryption scheme just isn't worth it.

As for storing passwords with something like that: that's terrible. We have great hashing / salting algorithms, and tools like bcrypt make them very easy to use. Of course, in this case you're not letting anyone (including yourself) _view_ the password (you're just checking for correctness against a known hash), so the solution is very different and is theoretically secure (unlike DRM).

<comment><USER13> > Well, there are tons of different DRM algorithms, but none of them are > backed by secure cryptography since you cannot logically restrict people > from "saving" but not from "viewing"

Actually you can, but this requires smart viewer. You sending encrypted data into viewer where data is decrypted. Secret keys storing inside viewer and retrieving them is hard task. Of course that requires DRM-enabled display, participating video card, drivers, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can you explain further how the key is used in the mapping? Maybe with a doodle? Thanks & well done btw

\-- mixing the file with a single byte (0x25, or ASCII 37, or a percent sign)

</comment><comment><USER15> Cryptography rule #1: Don't make your own.

I guess that AES (or some other standardized cipher) was too overkill, insufficient, or mainstream for them?

<comment><USER16> It's clear they didn't really care whether you got to the files or not; I think they were just covering their legal asses. (Didn't matter in the long run, it would seem).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had a Tidal trial and was trying to see how encrypted their lossless music was. It uses some Chrome NaCL executable to decrypt, then play the music. In any other browsers, you cannot play HiFi music since they do not support NaCL.

That seemed like a good solution to DRM encryption.

At the end of the day though, people can just record the input on their sound card if they really wanted...

</comment><comment><USER18> So, a whole article just to explain it's a single-character XOR encryption. Smooth.

<comment><USER19> He definitely tried too hard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Can confirm: you're right.

But I did learn a lot and will surely try this first in the future.

Should I have written on top that, if you're into crypto, you may want to skip to the summary?

<comment><USER19> A tl;dr is always nice!

<comment><AUTHOR> Well there is already a summary at the bottom, but I guess I should refer to it at the top. Thanks :)

<comment><USER14> I enjoyed the article, it was well written

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "...after quite literally being sued to hell."

[http://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally)

<comment><AUTHOR> They weren't sued "anywhere": sued to hell just means they were sued out of existence -- and that is, _literally_ , true. Or that's how I, as a non-native speaker, see it, and why I thought it was correct.

<comment><USER21> If they were literally sued to hell, that means that hell is a real place, and they are now actually in that place.</comment></comment></comment>


It's totally reasonable to chalk it up to cosmic rays (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/219983/ <comment><USER2> ECC is indeed a pretty important feature.

But I guess people need first random RAM bit flips to cause trouble for them. That's what happened to me about 10 years ago, I _nearly_ lost 200 GB of encrypted backup data.

I've been using ECC ever since. Random userland crashes, kernel panics and blue screens have become extremely rare occurrences. Pretty good for just $100-200 higher system cost.

It feels risky to use a computer without ECC for anything remotely important.

I just wish laptops with ECC support were more available.

</comment><comment><USER3> There was an article where they showed how to dump the image of the application from memory and compare it to disk image. On linux. And it was just one bit flipped.</comment>


(draft) John Furrier on the Coming Entreprenurial Counter Culture - <AUTHOR> http://siliconangle.com/ver2/sabackchan/2009/08/26/an-entrepreneurial-counter-culture-is/ <comment><USER2> The mention of $250k at the end is, I believe, telling. This size of deal isn't really available, yet it could well be the most useful to modern startups, especially as a seed round.

YC, despite being compelling to young entrepreneurs, presents too high an opportunity cost for a season professional, yet a megabuck is too much for an initial build.

<comment><USER3> For technical folks bootstrapping say a iphone or fb app is very little money and 25-150k could be used for market validation - another very important part of the startup cycle. If the entrepreneur is say a business person who can't code anymore then a prototype cost will be roughly 25k or so just to get an initial build this still isn't enough to launch. So getting a customer immediately is very important and working capital to service and grow.

There are only two ways to get money for a startup: 1) top line revenue from a product or service or 2) sell equity or do a debt note. That's it.

I've estimated that the required amount for a "real" seed round in today's open source environment for tech ventures is about 200-300k. That is unless you are young and can do the coding yourself. However technology isn't the driver any more for startups. The scarce talent is business model engineering and product marketing - building for scale isn't the problem anymore. I can build a hack protytype that works well into the "validation" stage to establish a funding event or customer revenue stream then use the new capital to rebuild, hire and grow.

<comment><USER2> Obviously (I hope, based on my original comment), I don't disagree with your estimate, but I'm curious as to what it's based on.

I think YC has demonstrated that a $10-$20k initial seed round is enough for a software-only prototype in a few months, assuming technical founders. Presumably there's a comparable cost to your "rebuild," though please correct me if I'm wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> John's jotted down some thoughts on how VC is breaking - he and I had a phone conversation on it this morning - I agree with a lot of what he's saying.

If you have any thoughts or quibbles, I'm interested in hearing them - we're trying to get a wide array of input before we do a long-ish post on it.

<comment><USER4> One thing about the post that seems a little odd is that it talks about an alternate view of wealth creation - some company that presumably could never IPO though is still valuable - yet ends on a note which yields to the assumption that a company is not a success unless it becomes an Apple or HP type behemoth.

<comment><USER3> I was just making the point that the possibility of creating a huge "home run" which is the desired VC outcome (eg like an Apple or HP) is difficult when VCs "pass" on what looks like a few guys making an iphone app or something.

My other point is that many entrepreneurs need more than 25k to build their prototype yet fail to do it do to the clutter in the funding market hence two guys building in a garage for a customer project might not get funded in today's climate.

To me if an entrepreneur can create a product get it to market and get profitable they are a success and possibly could be a big "home run". If the investment thesis is to get the home run then it most likely will overlook two guys in a garage.</comment></comment></comment>


Incredible weather information UI - <AUTHOR> http://weatherspark.com

<comment><USER2> Wow. Very nice!</comment>


Claiming Bitcoin's Bug Bounty - <AUTHOR> http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/27/bitcoin-leveldb/

<comment><USER2> The Darwin man page for munmap has more detail: [https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man2/munmap.2.html#//apple_ref/doc/man/2/munmap) See _DIRTY PAGE HANDLING_.

      If the mapping maps data from a file (MAP_SHARED), then the memory will eventually be written back to disk if it's dirty.  This will happen automatically at some point in the future (implementation dependent).

The XNU source may be useful: [http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/ident?v=xnu-2050.18.24&im=excerpts...](http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/ident?v=xnu-2050.18.24&im=excerpts&i=munmap)

<comment><USER3> Does this mean it's a bug in Darwin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has it been verified that the bug is fixed as in no further database corruption? I'm confused what you mean by this "sample" you got from Gavin.

<comment><USER5> I assume he meant one of the log/database files that contains the corruption.

<comment><USER4> That's what I initially thought, but then I missed the part where they've confirmed that this fixes the bug. Has this been tested?

<comment><USER6> People were reporting it only happens on some installs and takes up to five days to present itself. Considering that this was only released today it seems too premature to confirm that.

<comment><USER4> Whenever I fix a bug I wait for confirmation that the bug has actually been fixed before I submit the patch. Sometimes, especially when fixing race conditions that occur unpredictably, it takes a while to confirm that the bug has been fixed. Not that I'm skeptical - it seems like they're pretty confident that they've fixed it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Notes from a 1984 Tech Talk about Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> https://codesmithdev.com/notes-from-a-1984-tech-talk-about-programming-languages/ <comment><AUTHOR>
        "When you discuss languages it almost becomes like a
        religious argument. But really a language is just a tool.
        It's like arguing, well, which one is better: a hammer or a
        screwdriver? You tell me what you want to do with it and
        I'll tell you which one is better."

But isn't this comment from a time, like 1984, when programming languages were quite domain specific. Can we not have coherent discussions about General Purpose languages, where we can actually say some languages are better than others, and while specific use cases should be taken into account; that it isn't _quite_ like arguing which is better a screwdriver or a hammer?</comment>