How I stay motivated working on my long-term project - <AUTHOR> https://durmonski.com/self-improvement/the-three-year-rule/ <comment><USER3> That was a tedious read. Most of the article is just filler text. There is a whole page of it before the point: give yourself 3 years. Why 3 years? Because Rome wasn't built in a day. That's pretty much all there is to it.

The advice feels pretty circular. To stay motivated, do it for 3 years. If you can commit to something for 3 years, you already have the motivation.

Regardless, I disagree with this advice. Give it a month, tops. If you don't enjoy the process after a month and the goal is 3 years away, you won't get there.

From my experience, I stick to doing things because of the rewards along the way. After a month of playing an instrument, learning a language or trying a hobby, I will likely produce something that makes me want to keep going. It won't take 3 years.

<comment><USER4> Even from a business perspective, what you're working on today, if it's tech or software related, will be horribly out-dated in 3 years. Imagine how many "pivots" need to be made on a software product who's expected delivery is Fall 2023.

That's what gave rise to the whole Lean Start-up movement - spend 3 months, get a working version out there, get some paying customers, start improving the software with new features. If you can't get any paying customers with an MVP, it's a sign your idea might not be worth a 3 year investment.

<comment><USER5> > Even from a business perspective, what you're working on today, if it's tech > or software related, will be horribly out-dated in 3 years.

Here's how outdated in tech usually works across three years:

We gotta switch to NoSQL, it's the new new hot hot thing! It's going to save us money, it's going to make our service much faster, it's going to be easier to manage. It's revolutionary, everybody says so. Our competition is switching too.

Three years later: we're going to switch away from NoSQL, turns out we didn't actually need to use that. It caused more problems than it solved in our case.

Outdated in three years is mostly only true in a small echo chamber of the tech industry obsessed with chasing fads 24/7\. It's an almost entirely self- imposed form of torture by that part of the industry. There are exceptions of course, cases where things legitimately get outdated in just three years, and they're rare.

Was the NoSQL fad that so many people chased necessary? Nope. Are there great use cases for NoSQL systems? Of course. The legitimate use cases aren't fraudulent, it's the fad that is, the mania, the hype (which always implodes, then the headlines come rolling in about switching back).

That's a microcosm of the three year fad hopping that you're talking about (and there are obviously a lot of examples of it, from big data to AI/ML, to the latest framework craze). A small segment of the tech industry is like a dog that never stops chasing fad cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >When I lack immediate feedback, I begin to doubt myself/my abilities.

He believes being conditioned by social media led him to that point, more specifically immediate-satisfaction instant-result culture.

That is not entirely true in my experience. Feedback is supposed to determine strategy, not your self worth as a person. He has been programmed, by the instant result culture or whatever, into emotionally charged reactions, not an objective response.

I have been working out and I hit a plateau, I should stop this is fruitless > I hit a plateau, I need to try a new workout routine. Not "I will workout for 3 years until I make any judgement."

I have been blogging for months and nobody cares, I should stop > I have been blogging for months without any results, my current course of action needs adjustment. Not "I will blog for 3 years regardless."

Reacting - Old habits/conditioning make you react to a situation

Responding - Taking in the situation and moving forward with calculated action.

The 3 year rule replaces his current reaction with another one, when he should be working on responding to situations instead. It takes you further, but will not take you further than if you were to correct that faulty outlook altogether.

<comment><USER7> I think there's some overlap with fame culture here too.

I'm a nobody and I'm sad. If everyone knew me I'd be happy.

A finger closes on the monkey's paw; You're famous now, for getting your drunk ass taken down in a restaurant waiting area. Now everybody hates you, and they recognize you while you're grocery shopping.

I think the reason why a big fraction of success stories comes from people who built something for themselves first is not just that they have a subject matter expert, or a captive audience (which doesn't hurt!). It's that they _know_ the work is important, even if nobody else knows.

I have a project I used to work on where I got wedged on a rapidly shifting API for a dependency. I had grand plans for solving a problem for a niche that is one of my hobbies. Part of getting back into it has been trying to figure out how to be more... selfish. What parts of it would help _me_ , as a tool? Not the bits that would improve my resume (turns out that doesn't motivate me very well), but me personally. Then maybe my friends. Then if I'm still going, the groups that were my original target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the key thing is discrete deliverables that don't have too long of a gap between them. This allows you to feel there is progress, but also put the project on ice and resume because the next task isn't some huge insurmountable thing but another small piece.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Ask any successful person. Ask any experienced person. They'll all tell you > the same thing – It takes time to create something valuable. Something worth > doing.

Over time I've ended up not really understanding this advice, but only because of something I accomplished in the past.

One day I just felt like writing something. I hadn't written since elementary school and had never published a piece of writing online before. But one day I just felt like writing something. The idea just would not leave my mind and I failed to get any sleep, instead spending all of my conscious time writing.

Within a week I was more or less finished. It was a short story numbering only a few dozen pages at most. But save for some minor editing it was complete.

And I decided that since I finished something, it was a success. And I also liked what I wrote, legitimately. I don't think it was that great in the context of people with experience, but it was _mine_ , and that was enough for me to declare it a success. To me, I thought it was valuable. To me, I thought it was worth doing.

So if it's true that you must spend a lot of time to make something valuable, then in my view one of two things is true:

1\. What I accomplished in only a week was not valuable to me or anyone else and was not worth doing, and I'm just deluding myself.

2\. The advice was untrue and you can still create things of value without spending a lot of time - it just depends on what the scale is.

And if there is no way to create something valuable without spending a lot of time on it, then I don't understand why Ludum Dare and NaNoWriMo still exist, unless people believe the things they accomplish during those events are valueless, which doesn't sound right to me.

Since then I have never really felt like writing. I will either sit down and not think of anything for hours, or at most write whatever comes to my mind in a stream of consciousness and then proceed to not look at or edit it ever again. I think this is what people call being trapped by their past successes. I expect to be able to accomplish again what I actually did accomplish a single time in the past, which is not realistic. Not everything I do will turn out as well as that one time. But the fact remains that I called what I accomplished a success despite not spending much time on it at all, and on top of that it was the first thing I had seriously written in over a decade, and I seem to be unable to reconcile that with the practicalities of developing a skill properly.

<comment><USER10> I have a similar sentiment and anecdote. I'm fully aware that the OP is more about long term projects, but sometimes long term projects can be helped by a modular approach - including starting with a singular high energy event at the beginning to keep you motivated or get validation.

Anecdote: A few months ago I was speaking with a friend and I mentioned the prospect of writing a certain article for publication in a newspaper (at least a local one), but I quickly dismissed the idea. I thought "what are the chances?" I actually looked up the chances of getting published in a top newspaper, and, according to Quora, they were extremely slim.

My friend pushed me to go ahead with it anyway. I spent the next 4 hours producing and editing the first draft. My friend and a random guy sitting next to me at Starbucks helped revise it. I submitted the article to one of the top newspapers in the country/world and got published a couple weeks later.

I literally never wrote a blog or article before that, and two weeks later tens of thousands of people were reading it and it was shared in elite circles. I sent the link to random Starbucks dude to show that his 10 minutes talking to a stranger resulted in more words on a national newspaper. He got a kick out of it.

Though writing is not my profession, I would now feel more confident pursuing a long term writing project like authoring a book in my free time. This goes back to the modularity I mentioned above. This story could easily have been about a small side project that got traction on GitHub.

There is a paucity of action. Just do it. I'm glad my friend told me that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Out of the side projects that I know of which made it past the MVP stage most had one thing in common: they solved a problem that the person who came up with the idea had.

Sounds obvious, but I've seen a few projects fail because the developer couldn't relate to their users.

Side note: quite often this lack of motivation is simply a matter of impostor syndrome.

The other day I managed to break out of that by looking at a "how to" of something from a field foreign to me.

It was a step-by-step demonstration of how a certain drawing was created.

My first reaction was: "this is amazing - I wish I could create such awe- inspiring things".

Then I remembered that I've been programming since I was twelve and am fully capable of creating things that might be as impressive to people who are not in my field as that artwork was to me.

<comment><USER12> This reminds me of something that happened to me the other day. We hired a developer to work with me, and he said he was excited to have a chance to work with a 'brilliant engineer' like me. I was at a loss for words and thought about it a lot for a couple days. I almost worried he'd be disappointed to find out how mediocre I am. I came to the same conclusion though, really - <USER2> feel like an imposter, and after 15 years or so I probably do seem competent to people with less experience.

I'm not a brilliant engineer but yeah, he will probably learn a bit working with me. A lot of us probably need to give ourselves more credit.

It's hard not to think so much about how our work is only possible on the shoulders of giants. I don't spend enough time thinking about what I can do, and too much thinking about what I can't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like the idea of being realistic with a timeline and start with a 3 year goal. I think the most important part of getting quick feedback for me is setting up my environment for tiny iterations (for a web dev side project), but the balance is tricky between getting more efficient and endless "yak shaving"!!

I would love to do some electronics design but I find it much harder to have smaller sessions, it takes me a least an hour or two to get into a flow where I have my mental model of the complete circuit, mechanical layout, etc.

I also want to balance being a good parent with side projects as well! Currently my kids are too small to participate in engineering, but you can bet that I am totally going to build a robot with them some day :)

</comment><comment><USER14> I started working on a long-term project 1.5 years ago. It's in cryptocurrency. People in crypto would call it a shitcoin project. Up until now, it's a solo project. I'm the only person working on it. Not much outside interest. But I learn some things along the way.

When you think about the expected or probable ROI, you'd likely give up. These projects or ideas will likely fail. You have less than 1% chance of success. You're trying to calculate the extreme tail risk. It's not worth the time to think about it. The process is demoralizing.

One trait that I found useful for these long-term ideas: curiosity. If you're curious about something, you can do it for a long time. You still do it even when you know it would likely fail. During the process, you can learn things that are not exactly applicable for your idea. But they are useful for your learning.

Another aspect to think about is to find the failure criteria. You can decide when your long-term idea is invalid. When you see X happens, you know X would invalidate your idea. X is the correct idea, your idea is incorrect. At that point, you can stop.

An example: I have a hypothesis that battery electric cars may not be the future. I work on alternative ideas. A failure criteria for my idea: When battery electric cars have more than 50% market share. This example illustrates the unpopularity of working on long-term ideas. People would call you stupid. You'll likely fail. Curiosity is the only thing that keeps you going.

</comment><comment><USER15> So the author says "stick to it for 3 years".

But that doesn't answer the question at all. The question becomes, how do you stay motivated for those 3 years?

The answer, for me and people I know, is that you have to break it down into small pieces (month-sized, then week-sized, then day-sized) and _find happiness in the progress_. In the small daily wins.

If you think you'll only be happy once you succeed (3+ years later) you'll never make it. It's trite but it's true, that you've got to find happiness in the journey, not just the destination.

Because if you don't, then you'll absolutely give up and fall back to the things that do give you instant happiness today, whether that's social media or spending time with your spouse or kids. And if you choose your family over a long-term project because the project isn't producing happiness... then that might be the right choice for you! :)

</comment><comment><USER16> > A lot of times writing, to me, feels like sitting alone and talking to > myself. I write stuff, I publish them, and nothing really happens. The lack > of feedback – good or bad – makes me doubt the work I do.

This is one place where having a co-founder/collaborator/co-worker is valuable: built-in feedback mechanism.

<comment><USER17> I also found having a mentor is helpful. The mentor can give advice and help work through next steps with you and hold you accountable to things you say you'll do.

<comment><USER18> Key is having them hold you accountable. Schedule a fixed bi-weekly or monthly time with them, and set deadlines (given to them) for the next meeting. This helps push you to meet them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think it really just boils down to doing something you like and believing in your decision to do it.

For example if you're looking at a new tech stack and after some weeks or months of developing something with it. If it's not everything you thought it would be, or you're no longer 100% on board, no amount of motivation is going to keep you moving forward to build your app. It'll feel like absolute dread every time you think about opening your code editor.

I've been consistently blogging for 5+ years (at least 1 weekly post) and I still find it super enjoyable. It doesn't feel like I need motivation because it's doing something I genuinely believe in and want to do.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm not sure I agree with this advice in its current form, since the "adjust" phase of the three-year rule is arguably the most important. My current self would be unrecognizable to myself three years ago.

I'm still learning how to be productive long-term. I started gaining a lot of momentum when I shifted my thinking from short-term impulsiveness:

      Wow, I just discovered X!  I will read everything there is to know about X today!

To long-term sustainability:

      In three months, I want to be someone who is familiar enough with X to recognize when it might be useful, and pull out that knowledge as needed.

<comment><USER21> That's a hurdle everyone crosses and usually doesn't go backwards. It sounds like it just happens to be less than 3 years in your rear view.

I don't know anything about you. But I know being young and having disposable time to dive into everything is a common trap. Using myself as an example, I got married, had a kid, work a lot, and still try to have a bit of a social life. This means I scrutinize heavily how my time is utilized on side projects. I pretty much know when I can build something. Or know i could fill necessary gaps. So I skip that and go straight to "then what?" Is it for hobby? Can I sell this? Do I want to find someone who can? Am I wanting to spend years focused on this? The fact is, I have a lot of ideas that are just- for-fun projects that I would have dived right into in my younger days. Now I rarely do that. I occasionally have an idea that I'll push forward. I read a lot and like to learn without doing if you will. I also assemble teams to do the labor intensive parts and act as a project manager when I want to build something these days. I find it just as enjoyable and usually learn a lot along the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > But there is something else entirely that's keeping you inside Facebook and > Twitter like a crackhead inside a drugstore – immediate feedback. Sadly, > this same thing, is also the reason you abandon your long-term projects.

Perhaps it's just my disposition, but I find that new ideas are more interesting than old ideas, even when I get quick "feedback". The longer a project takes the older and less exciting my original ideas get and the more I come up with new, exciting ideas.

Building self discipline / temperance + accountability have helped me a lot.

</comment><comment><USER23> My two cents. I prefer analogy with sport. Say you choose running and pick 10k distance. What might be the goal? 50min, 40min, 30min? Say you pick 50min, if you are out of shape and did not do sport in your life - it will take you 6-9 months. You will have to train 3 times a week, probably you won't hire a couch, your body won't be ready, hence you will make many mistakes and will have quite high chances to injure your self and quit. What I want to emphasize - to succeed you have to start loving the process and blend the process into your lifestyle.

I see very clearly how the goal oriented approach fails for loosing weight while the only effective thing to do is eat less.

</comment><comment><USER24> Not sure I can agree to this. Not everything that you commit to for 3 years will turn out a success.

The quoted Matt D'avela video featured 2 Austrailian podcasters who committed to 5 years. They just released their 800th episode, and the average view count is in the hundreds: [https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDailyTalkShow](https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDailyTalkShow)

I'd rather follow Noah Kagan. I forgot the source but I think he said you should place much more effort into deciding _what_ to work on.

In our hustle culture this is underrated. It's mostly deciding on what, and related to that: timing.

</comment><comment><USER25> Set yourself intermediate goals, rather than aiming for a big payoff. On the way to $10k MRR: prototype, first user, first paying users, first 100 users, etc. Every milestone is enjoyable!

I also disagree with "doing what's fun". Hard problems aren't fun in the beginning, but once you achieve mastery, you will enjoy the task. Seen this for programming or in others for pottery. Once you get good at something you enjoy it more and have access to new options and a new perspective.

The last part is summarized from "So Good They Can't Ignore You" by Cal Newport. Still works.

</comment><comment><USER26> Great advice, thank you for sharing!

I'll comment too that it also applies to things that can't be measured with number of users/readers/dollars in bank/etc. I'm not a naturally outgoing person and making new friends can feel like _work_. But if a relationship is something that you've decided to value, then (to paraphrase the article) the only way to make it happen is to commit, prioritize, and respond to feedback. That applies to friends, spouse, kids, etc.

</comment><comment><USER27> An alternative interpretation of the point could be that one can stay motivated by framing one's projects in a way that allows one to get feedback often, but I understand this is easier to say than to do. Nonetheless, it's something that I'll definitely look into.

</comment><comment><USER28> A lot of filler in the article, but the basic premise is something I've often done when wanting to accomplish something significant. View it on a 3 year time horizon from the outset.

Its not an appropriate technique for everything you tackle, but for certain things it's great.

</comment><comment><USER29> I disagree with you on certain things.

I read you blog on "Lack of Feedback: The Main Reason You Quit".

Only certain things need feedback, not all things. If you are building an app which you want to sell in that case it need not have all features, only essentials first, see if it works and extend it.

Blogs, articles, posts or even sometimes app, if you ask for feedback, when you get it, you might start to work on the feedback rather than completing the things you planned, some feedbacks can be negative, it can get under your skin and can be depressing or uninspiring. So sometimes to do a lot, don't put that comment box on every post, just have a common feedback or put your email somewhere in "aboutme".

Lack of feedback is sometimes good.

Commitment, Say no and adjust doesn't match up.

I am doing a side project for 3 years, it's a bit of analysis work and a web project. No word to anyone on that subject. To get more time to work on my project, I moved closer to my office to save time on travelling but rents bit high, not changing my work even if other offers are good, why ? Fine with work life balance at current work, which I might not get in another company ( previous experience ). I am a moviebuff, stopped watching so many movies and TV series, now I just read spoilers and learn oh that's the story. I know movies will be available online now always, I can watch it anytime I want later.

I sort of believe, the concepts, the ideas which you get in the head, if you have time you should work on them or should put efforts actually, sometimes, till you action that idea another one might not come or that idea could be trigger for something else(like a seed).

Ads are there to get more people to visit, if you are product based.

www.bobbydreamer.com

Is my site, consistently i get 41 users per month(guessing those are all bots).

I just pretend, my site is like a ninja, no one knows it exists but it does.

Persistence is the key.

There are lot of people who do 100 days of coding challenge like 100 posts, Today I Learned, I cannot definitely keep up with them. That's fine. I just know, I have to do atleast one thing in my side project per day. On a very tiresome workday, I will just update comments.

Keep reading your to-do list and check things off. Write things in paper rather than a app. Later one day, your scribbles will look funny.

Keep pushing yourself.

</comment><comment><USER30> so... the secret to keep up with year-long projects is.... to keep them up for three years. Thanks cap'n!</comment>


Trump budget to include funds to restart Yucca Mountain process - <AUTHOR> https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/nevada/trump-budget-to-include-funds-to-restart-yucca-mountain-process-1615397/ <comment><USER2> FTA

Both the Trump budget and the Yucca items are likely to be treated as dead on arrival at Congress, where such spending outlines have been routinely rejected for decades.</comment>


I.R.S. Cracks Down on Hedge Fund Tax Strategy - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/business/dealbook/irs-cracks-down-on-hedge-fund-tax-strategy.html <comment><USER2> In my opinion this is a much better article on the subject.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-21/renaissanc...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-21/renaissance- avoided-more-than-6-billion-tax-report-says)

Essentially the US has a few different taxes you can pay as an investor. There is a short term tax on trading profits and a longer term holder tax for "investors" which is lower.

This obviously creates a situation where people will do their best to make their trading fall into the later category.

What Deutsche did was to sell hedge funds an option on a basket(collection) of stocks that was held longer than a year. Not surprisingly, a year is long enough to qualify for hte lower long term investment tax on capital gains.

The IRS has called shenanigans on this and the below quote is probably the biggest reason why:

> "Illustrating how rapidly the contents of the "baskets" were shuffled, one > option reviewed by the committee had more than 129 million underlying trades > in a single year, the subcommittee said. Many of Renaissance's stock > investments lasted mere minutes or seconds, it said."

<comment><USER3> The rules are deeply arbitrary, and goes to the nature of financials as being rather abstract concepts with arbitrary definitions.

I buy stock in a firm, that firm makes a lot of profit, but I don't liquidate my position. How is that different (short-term vs long-term gains) from me selling their stock and buying another stock?

It's even the same word: A retail business sells its stock (product), and sells it's stock (shares)

Ultimately, taxing "realized" gains can never be logical, since "realization" is a fictional concept not grounded in reality. Taxing _consumption_ is relatively straighforward to describe (but hard to implement), and taxing _wealth_ is slightly harder (since it's hard to mark the value of some assets)

<comment><USER4> > Ultimately, taxing "realized" gains can never be logical, since > "realization" is a fictional concept not grounded in reality.

Trading an asset vs. holding it is a non-fictional concept very much grounded in reality.

Attributing significance to it is, in a sense, arbitrary in the same sense that any assignment of significance is, but its definitely _not_ a fictional concept divorced from reality.

<comment><USER5> "Trading an asset"

What exactly are you trading? Bits in a database that mark ownership of a fraction of a fictional entity?

<comment><USER6> Not a 'fictional' entity; a legal construct (perhaps multilayered) that groups ownership of real assets and/or obligations of real people.

<comment><USER5> The fiction is to believe that 'a legal construct (perhaps multilayered) that groups ownership of real assets and/or obligations of real people' is an entity.

<comment><USER7> You're basically saying that contracts are fictional. Try entering into a contract, then behaving as if it's fictional by ignoring your responsibilities in the contract, and you will quickly find out how real they are.

<comment><USER5> >You're basically saying that contracts are fictional.

Nope (although, that may be true, in some sense), I am not saying that. I am saying the thing many refer to as an 'entity', as in, 'the corporate entity', is a fictional thing. It has no real, inherent or independent physical existence apart from the people that choose to represent it.

<comment><USER7> There's no fundamental difference between a corporate entity and a contract. Just because it has no physical manifestation doesn't mean it's a fiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8>
      U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 9:
      No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

How does that square with the article's

"The new I.R.S. guidance will be retroactive, applying to all transactions as far back as Jan. 1, 2011."

?

<comment><USER9> 1\. In the US, the supreme court has repeatedly held that the ex-post-facto clause only applies to criminal laws (See Calder v. Bull, which was decided in 1798).

This is actually consistent with the history of the clause (It was understood to apply to criminal laws. Motions were made to change the wording to say it also applied to civil cases, they were turned down)

2\. This is not a law, and may not even be administrative rulemaking (depending on what exactly they issued)

Of course, even if it was, you have a mechanism to challenge it if they hold you to it: the courts.

<comment><USER8> If the IRS doesn't think I've paid my taxes, I can go to prison.

Doesn't that make this particular case a criminal one?

<comment><USER4> > If the IRS doesn't think I've paid my taxes, I can go to prison.

No, if the IRS doesn't think you've paid your taxes, they can attempt to collect the unpaid taxes.

OTOH, if the Department of Justice can prove in a criminal prosecution that you've violated the criminal provisions of the tax law, you can go to prison. If the IRS thinks you've done that (which is different from just not paying your taxes), they can refer you to the DoJ for prosecution.

This change to IRS guidance doesn't change the criminal provisions of the tax law that would apply were the government to prosecute you, therefore, the change is not a change to criminal law, retroactive or otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This made my jaw drop: "Its Medallion fund, which now manages money for its employees only, was the most prolific user of basket options. The fund has earned an average annual return of more than 35 percent for two decades."

$25 billion is all employees money; Even if we exclude Simon's money ($14 billion) it is a ton. 35% avg annualized returns for 20 years. Simply stunning.

<comment><USER11> Actually the Medallion fund is only about $6 billion I believe. The rest of the money is managed in funds which are open to non-employees (and those ones don't make anything close to 35% annualised returns).

<comment><USER12> One other wibble: the 35% isn't the average, but rather the smallest annual return.

<comment><USER13> "average annual return of more than 35 percent"

I don't think they meant every year was greater than 35%, I interpreted it as the overall average is more than 35%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The fund [Medallion] has earned an average annual return of more than 35 > percent for two decades.

OK, can someone explain this? Most people say that "you can't beat the market in the long term", "market is efficient", etc. So how can these people have done so well over more than 20 years??

<comment><USER15> There are several plausible hypotheses.

My personal favorite is, "They trade on non-public information, and use a complex trade algorithm for the purposes of plausible deniability."

Another is, "They got lucky."

Another likely one is "The reporter did not calculate average annual return correctly."

One that I find dubious: "They actually are that good at investing."

For giggles: "They are using hedge funds to launder drug money."

I'm sure there are other ways to explain it, but that return just sounds way too good to be true.

<comment><USER16> Or maybe they move the most successful trades from client's funds into this employee fund, and move the unsuccessful ones out to client's funds?

<comment><USER15> Oh, I like that one too, but how would they cover their asses in the event of an audit? Retroactive accounting?

<comment><USER16> If they can move ownership for a year, they'll certainly have no problems moving it for a few hundred milliseconds...

I think they'll probably use a database that's "eventually consistent" ;-) I

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If we didn't use the tax code to create bizarre incentives, we'd arguably have more honest behavior.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think the most interesting part is not the tax, but this:

 _The options also were attractive because they limited the risk of loss to the amount paid for each option, Renaissance said. "No other investment structure of which we are aware provides both high leverage and loss protection," Renaissance said._

<comment><USER18> Anyone else find this kind of "scammy" sounding?

How can they have a 35% average annual return over the past 25 years and guarantee that you won't take a loss at all?

Reminds me of Madoff.

<comment><USER11> I think the most likely explanation is that they were just shifting all the tail risk to DB and Barclays, who didn't know any better or thought the portfolios would never experience losses beyond the option premium.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe all cap gains should just be taxed at the same rate. 1 year threshold his so artificial.

<comment><USER20> There's a massive difference between the long-term and short-term gains rates. And, hedge fund folks aside, long-term capital gains are also the taxes that apply to retirees drawing income from years of investments. Raising those rates would cause serious problems for folks who have already done all their financial planning and investing, and cannot afford to pay higher taxes.

<comment><USER4> > And, hedge fund folks aside, long-term capital gains are also the taxes that > apply to retirees drawing income from years of investments. Raising those > rates would cause serious problems for folks who have already done all their > financial planning and investing

Raise them prospectively based on the date of asset purchase, starting some specified time after the date the change is adopted. Problem solved.

<comment><USER20> That would only solve the problem of not penalizing existing retirees. It would force all people currently saving for retirement to save 10-15% more to pay this new pile of tax. And what, precisely, do they get in return for that added tax burden?

<comment><USER4> > And what, precisely, do they get in return for that added tax burden?

They get the relative burden of taxation shifted off the of other sources of income, including the source they are using to get money to pay for retirement. (The specific effect depends on _how_ that relative shift is used.)

In any case, if the current favorable treatment of capital is inequitable, there is no entitlement for people to expect it to continue going forward.

<comment><USER20> Alternatively, if the goal here is to stop hedge funds from taking advantage of long-term capital gains, perhaps it would make more sense to cap the _amount_ of gains exempted as long-term and make the rest short-term. Set a cap well above what the vast majority of individuals would hit, and below what any aggregate fund would hit. For instance, "long-term capital gains can only be applied to the first $150k of gains per year; gains above that are always taxed at the short-term rate".

> They get the relative burden of taxation shifted off the of other sources of > income, including the source they are using to get money to pay for > retirement. (The specific effect depends on how that relative shift is > used.)

You say that as though an increase in taxes here will be used to decrease taxes elsewhere. That does not match the reality of changes to tax law; tax revenue will simply increase, with no changes to taxes elsewhere.

> In any case, if the current favorable treatment of capital is inequitable, > there is no entitlement for people to expect it to continue going forward.

There is no entitlement for government to apply arbitrary taxes and expect people to bear it, either, without providing a commensurate improvement in value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _> The new I.R.S. guidance will be retroactive, applying to all transactions as far back as Jan. 1, 2011._

Regardless of the particulars of any taxation expectations, there's something about retroactive policy changes that seems to defy the spirit of law to me.

</comment><comment><USER22> what if a hedge fund bought an at the money call option on the underlying security and sold an in the money put at an arbitrary price such as a dollar in order to convert the short term capital gains to long term capital gains

</comment><comment><USER23> Hedge funds adding value.

</comment><comment><USER24> Long-term investments provide stability to the economy and should be encouraged through the tax-code.

Renaissance pursued a strategy of tax avoidance and should be punished.

</comment><comment><USER24> Long-term investments stabilize the economy and should be encouraged through the tax-code.</comment>


California Street: Learning to surf in the sixties - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/07/24/california-street/

<comment><USER2> To me surfing feels like running - you spend most of your time in that meditative state you reach when running, sitting on your board going up and down on the waves, watching the ocean and waiting for a good one.

The difference of course from running is that there's no feeling like when you see a good wave coming and you start prepping, lay on your board, start paddling, and then catch the wave. It's almost more like hunting.

I used to live in Ventura and surfed almost every day but now I live in a landlocked country - Switzerland. I run almost every day and get that meditative feeling, but I only get that excitement here of catching a wave that I had in Ventura during the winter when I ski off-piste.

<comment><USER3> i met a few people who've river surfed in Switzerland and Germany. Every time i asked them which river and where, the answer was "Can't say".

Kind of like Palos Verdes or Mendocino, but there's some good footage e.g. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdEcIYwl_H8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdEcIYwl_H8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh, thanks for this. I will read any thing by William Finnegan, especially if it has _surf_ anywhere in the title.

Playing Doc's Games ([http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/08/24/playing- docs-ga...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/08/24/playing-docs-games- part-one)) is an amazing article.

</comment><comment><USER5> My youth in rural Texas was punctuated by a two year stint in Florida during middle school. This article really resonates with the memories of my time spent there in the 00s learning to surf and skate with my buds. Great read.

</comment><comment><USER6> this just makes me want to surf, and regret staying in Chicago for work</comment>


How do you use static analysis tools? - <AUTHOR> Can you help a team of university researchers investigate how you and your team use static analysis tools? It takes ~10' to fill in this survey.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdDxYPbhBzk5bOPEwWjkOUpr33WvsFfWyksrINWZME6yQ_uxw/viewform
Our eternal gratitude is on the other side of the survey! :-) <comment><USER2> FYI -- it forces you to select a build tool, even if you don't use one.</comment>


Show HN: SoS Notebook – Using multiple kernels in one Jupyter notebook - <AUTHOR> https://vatlab.github.io/blog/post/sos-notebook/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just a bit more background. We are bioinformaticians who routinely analyze large datasets using tools and libraries in many different languages. Jupyter Notebook supports a large number of kernels but it does not allow us to use multiple kernels in one notebook. As you can imagine, using multiple notebooks for an analysis has caused a lot of trouble in the book-keeping, sharing, and reproduction of our analyses.

SoS Notebook relaxes this restriction and allows us to use a different kernel for each cell of the notebook so that we can use the most appropriate language (tool, library etc) for each step of the analysis. More importantly, SoS Notebook provides a mechanism to transfer variables among live Jupyter kernels so that we can, for example, clean data in Python, analyze them in R or MATLAB, and plot the results in JS.

We have also tried to improve the Jupyter frontend to create a more comprehensive work environment for interactive data analysis. For example, SoS Notebook provides a side panel that allows you to execute cell content line- by-line using shortcut Ctrl-Shift-Enter. It also provides magics to, for example, render output from any kernel in Markdown or HTML, and clear non- informative output after the execution of the cells. We are very excited about our work and would really love to get your feedbacks.

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

Maybe should look at collaborating with BeakerX:

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

I personally prefer the legacy "beaker notebook" which did similar things in (I think) a nicer interface than Jupyter.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are well aware of the Beaker Notebook and BeakerX and appreciate the great work they are doing. We however decided to develop our own tool because of a few specific reasons such as we needed support for MATLAB and SAS, we needed a more powerful data exchange model for (almost) arbitrary data types, and most importantly, we were creating an interactive data analysis environment backed by a powerful workflow engine, which is well beyond the scope of Beaker. The combination of SoS (workflow engine) and SoS Notebook is what makes SoS Notebook a powerful environment for (bioinformatics) data analysis.

I agree that all other notebooks (e.g. BeakerX, Zeppelin, R Notebook) have nicer interface than Jupyter but Jupyter excels at its simplicity and JupyterLab (to which SoS Notebook will be ported eventually) is making great progress there. With the frontend enhancement that SoS Notebook provides, especially the line-by-line execution feature, we are pretty satisfied with the frontend and do not really miss the fancy frontend of other notebooks.

<comment><USER2> That's a really interesting idea about backing it with a workflow engine. I can't recall something that did that before - though there are obviously plenty of workflow engines for python and other languages. Definitely interesting to look at. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, multi-language notebooks solve the "multi-language" but not the "large- scale" problems with bioinformatics (or data science) data analysis. However powerful other notebook environments can be, they are rather limited if they can only execute the notebooks on a single machine. However powerful other workflow systems can be, they are counterproductive if they require you to develop workflows in another environment and in another language. Backing up SoS Notebook with the SoS workflow engine provides a single environment for both interactive data analysis and the development and execution of workflows. This topic definitely worths a separate blog post so I will just list a few features that SoS enables here:

1\. Extended from Python 3.6 to make SoS an easy and yet powerful workflow language.

2\. Embedding workflows in SoS Notebooks allows you to annotate the workflows with detailed descriptions (markdown cells) and results (of demo runs).

3\. Supports both forward (sequentially numbered) and makefile style (patten matching) workflows.

4\. Execution signatures to avoid re-execution of long steps.

5\. Magics to execute workflows in SoS Notebooks so you can, for example, execute cells of a notebook conditionally and repeatedly.

6\. A task system that sends parts of workflows to remote host (a more powerful workstation), cluster (PBS/Torque/LFS/Slurm systems), or RQ task queue, even if the remote systems are on different file systems (SoS automatically maps paths and synchronize files).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a newbie Jupyter user, I don't even understand all these complains. I still think it is really cool to have an scriptable document. My greatest complain is just when I need to tweak a graphic and I have to scroll up to see my modifications instead of having directly feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are in the same boat, and that is why SoS Notebook allows you to execute parts of scripts in the side panel. Basically, you will need to select the graphic-generation part of the script and press Ctrl-Shift-Enter to see the output in the side panel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> SoS notebook as a name not so good

However the idea of multi-kernel is useful.

I am going to have to try this out.

Can you explain what is the architecture of SoS kernel?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comment on the usefulness of the multi-kernel setup of SoS Notebook. Please feel free to try SoS Notebook on our live SoS server (click the rocket button on the top right corner of the SoS homepage).

The architecture of the SoS kernel, if we ignore the SoS workflow engine part, is just a Python3 kernel that sits between Jupyter and all other kernels. The SoS kernel starts the subkernels, collect user inputs (interpolate them if needed), send them to the subkernels, and collect and display outputs from the subkernels. Data exchange between subkernels are implemented by executing hidden statements in SoS and subkernels, with assistance from SoS language modules for supported languages. This simple setup introduces minimal changes to Jupyter users: they can use multiple languages in a SoS notebook but can also use the SoS kernel as a wrapper to their kernel for an improved frontend, and they can enjoy all the tools that Jupyter provides (e.g. JupyterHub, template, conversion tools) with SoS Notebook.

Finally, the name SoS Notebook comes from the fact that it is a frontend to the SoS (Script of Scripts) workflow engine. We know it does not sound great and places SoS well behind the real "SOS" in a google search, but let us just hope that some day SoS would appear in the first page when you search for SoS. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1) Is data exchange accomplished by packages such as `rpy` or `R.matlab`?

2) Will it support `JupyterLab`?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1). No. As explained in the post, the data "exchange" is accomplished by creating another variable of similar type in the destination kernel so the resulting variable is independent of the homonymous variable in the sending kernel. No third-party modules such as rpy or R.matlab is used.

2). That is certainly on our radar after JupyterLab matures and provides a stable API. The core of SoS Notebook (namely the data exchange model) should be easy to port but the entire frontend would need to be rewritten.</comment></comment>


Facebook's Avarice – The Least Responsible Company on Earth Tries Banking - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@TebbaVonMathenstien/facebooks-avarice-6bfcf9300450 <comment><USER2> Just say no to zuckbucks.</comment>


To Learn Programming, Do Projects You Actually Care About - <AUTHOR> https://datarebellion.com/blog/to-learn-programming-do-projects-you-actually-care-about/ <comment><USER2> Good points, applying what you love could make learning more fun. Maybe going forward part of the exercises should be to apply the code learned to something you do in every day life.</comment>


A Look At Vimeo's 'Pencil To Paper' Development Process - <AUTHOR> http://www.junglejar.com/2009/01/17/vimeo-development-paper-level/ <comment><USER2> Sox is the guy who makes those sketches and most of the design stuff at Vimeo. His tumblr has tons of Vimeo sketches. Sometimes he matches them up with the final product. <http://soxiam.com/></comment>


Apple admits iPhone 11 Pro still collects location data even when told not to - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2019/12/04/collects-location-data/ <comment><USER2> Other discussion with more comments [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21699576)

<comment><USER3> That one could have used a more descriptive submission title. (I would prefer an HN policy, FWIW, of favoring submission titles being informative over them being faithful to the original article's title.)

<comment><USER4> That title is better imo, this one is kind of misleading, insofar as it overstates the problem.

<comment><USER5> Debatable. Currently the only way to disable location tracking is to disable it entirely for all apps.

For example I can't restrict it to one app without enabling Apple to collect location data.

<comment><USER6> At the risk of seeming pedantic:

There is a difference between "Apple" and "your device". If there is evidence that Apple is collecting/using location data for some purpose not detailed in their privacy policy and granular settings, then yes, that would be a problem. But that isn't what the info currently available says. It says that the system (device itself) is periodically accessing location data IF location services (globally) are turned on. Seems to me that should be expected...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Misleading headline - if you disable location services everything works as expected:

> To be clear, completely turning off Location Services does work

The only issue is that there are some system location services that cannot be toggled individually, like you can for individual apps. So if you want to turn them off, you have to turn location services off entirely.

This is still not great of course but much less dramatic than what the headline implies.

<comment><USER8> I think this particular point is what the article wishes to drive home. It seems awfully convenient that Apple is the only entity that can still obtain the user's location after giving them a user experience that makes it seem they have complete control over every possible feature that could access that information...

<comment><USER9> Convenient system services such as "Find My iPhone"... this title is dramatic.

<comment><USER10> Find my iPhone is toggled off though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's more nuance in the article than the headline would suggest, but this is still pretty bad IMO, particularly in the context of Apple's privacy-first marketing.

> Someone who wants Location Services switched on for Maps but off for > everything else cannot achieve this, despite both Apple's privacy policy and > the Settings app implying that they can.</comment>


WHO admits China never reported the existence of coronavirus outbreak - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/who-admits-china-never-reported-the-existence-of-coronavirus-outbreak <comment><USER2> Reading between the lines, what I gather happened is that the WHO learned about the outbreak and started to work with China before China notified the WHO through the formal notification procedure, at which point there was no longer any point in practice of using that procedure.

China may have tried to downplay the problem at first (and maybe not only at first) but this is a political game by US politicians.

To insist on referring to the "Chinese Communist Party" instead of the "Chinese government" is also a transparent rhetorical trick.

<comment><USER3> December 21: Wuhan doctors begin to notice a "cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause."

December 25: Chinese medical staff in two hospitals in Wuhan are suspected of contracting viral pneumonia and are quarantined. This is additional strong evidence of human-to-human transmission.

December 30: Dr. Li Wenliang sent a message to a group of other doctors warning them about a possible outbreak of an illness that resembled severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), urging them to take protective measures against infection.

December 31: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission declares, "The investigation so far has not found any obvious human-to-human transmission and no medical staff infection." This is the opposite of the belief of the doctors working on patients in Wuhan, and two doctors were already suspected of contracting the virus.

January 1: The Wuhan Public Security Bureau issued summons to Dr. Li Wenliang, accusing him of "spreading rumors." Two days later, at a police station, Dr. Li signed a statement acknowledging his "misdemeanor" and promising not to commit further "unlawful acts." Seven other people are arrested on similar charges and their fate is unknown.

January 3: The Chinese government continued efforts to suppress all information about the virus: "China's National Health Commission, the nation's top health authority, ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease, and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them."

Roughly one month after the first cases in Wuhan, the United States government is notified. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gets initial reports about a new coronavirus from Chinese colleagues, according to Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar. Azar, who helped manage the response at HHS to earlier SARS and anthrax outbreaks, told his chief of staff to make sure the National Security Council was informed.

<comment><USER2> OK. What point are you trying to make with respect to my comment?

<comment><USER3> China actively covered up what was going on, going so far as suppressing information from doctors involved by using the police.

Dr Li was made to recant his statements about the disease, and was punished by the police, and eventually died of the disease.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang_(doctor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang_\(doctor\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So in short - Trump was right?

<comment><USER5> No. He dismantled the CDC apparatus for discovering and reporting such outbreaks. If WHO is unreliable and politically influenced, the USA has enough money to fund a few people doing pandemic forensics, or whatever it's called.

Magical thinking doesn't make you "right".</comment></comment>


Melinda Gates interview - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/04/news/newsmakers/gates.fortune/index.htm#=rss <comment><USER2> Wow, what an incredible article.

I have to remember to downplay the connection between Bill Gates and the faults of Microsoft as a software company. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the Gateses, more so now than before I read the article.</comment>


Sell to Teachers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jarredsumner.com/2011/09/18/sell-to-teachers/

<comment><USER2> As kind of an omnibus response to this and the comments:

1) A portion of teachers will spend money on software. Reports of teachers being universally poor and stingy have been greatly exaggerated. You may know a stingy teacher. I do, too. I also have credit card numbers willingly given by thousands of her coworkers.

2) Average sales cycle for districts is 9 to 18 months. You can close a teacher in 9 to 18 minutes a non-trivial portion of the time.

3) There exist many, many businesses which have sold more $$$ to teachers than BCC. 5,000 paying customers is rather modest, as there are over three million teachers in the US. I'm always happy to be mentioned but please don't think I'm the upper bound for success here.

4) Contra article, making money is a perfectly valid reason to go into education. Teachers get paid on Friday, too. Also, some judicious capitalism would help redress the severe resource misallocation between education software, which is probably societally important, and mobiphotosocialgames. (We could also quibble with the misallocation between education software and education salaries, but that will not endear you to the main customer group here.)

<comment><USER3> Teachers may not be universally poor _but wait a few years_ \- at least in the US.

If we're talking about teachers as a consumer group perhaps we could at least think for a moment where that group is going...

I will admit that I don't know for certain that total disposable income of all US teacher finally reach zero in N years. But if a person is thinking of getting a teacher to buy their product out of the teacher's own pocket as a sales strategy, that person should keep in mind the number of US politicians who essentially say all public servants should be fired or live on starvation wages.

<comment><USER4> What? Can you expand? I'm a graduate math student looking to go into academia. :/

<comment><USER5> Academia is a bit different than K-12 education, though not without its own set of issues. The main problem there is the move towards a semi-freelance "research manager" model, where technically you have a research position, which also comes with responsibilities like teaching classes and serving on committees, but _also_ the university expects you to bring in external money to pay for at least part of your own salary, plus ideally a lab of students and post-docs. So the prof-job is really more about the management & grantwriting than about the research (the research is what the people you pay do). Math is probably a bit less far along on that transition than other areas of the sciences & engineering, though. The actual existence of the jobs (outside humanities, which is under more pressure) is probably stable for the medium-term future, though.

<comment><USER6> Math professor here. We are definitely expected (or at least encouraged) to write grants, but this is not such a big deal and most of my time is, as promised, devoted to teaching and research.

IMHO the most two important drawbacks are (1) you will make less money than in the private sector and (2) unless you are really outstanding, you will probably eventually have to move to whatever random city to happen to find a job in. A large proportion of tech jobs are in places like SF Bay Area, Austin, Seattle, Boston. The same is not true of academia.

<comment><USER5> Interesting; I'm a CS prof., where you can _sometimes_ get away with that, but increasingly the expectation is really that you'll be funding several students out of your grant money, and at some schools, funding a portion of your salary. Baseline to get tenure at a research-oriented university seems to be about $500k-$1m of grants during the 6-year assistant position (i.e. enough to fund an average of 2 PhD students per year over that period out of non-TA/dept money).

It could be less in math because there isn't the same "lab" concept, where to be considered a "successful" professor you're supposed to oversee a lab of 3+ (better if it's 5+) PhD students, a post-doc or two, research scientists, etc.?

<comment><USER6> Yeah, thankfully this lab concept is absent, although it is always good to be advising grad students and postdocs. Most universities have tons of students who need to brush up on mediocre math backgrounds, which makes for a lot of paying work for math grad students.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I can get behind the general sentiment of this (marketing towards the people who will make the purchase) - I think it overlooks one unique problem with teachers: traditionally they don't have money for purchases like this. My wife is a teacher in a fairly good school district - and she was only given $100 for _all_ of her purchases for the whole year (paper, supplies, etc.) We have an iPad that she occasionally uses in the classroom... and even with the relatively cheap apps (<$5 range) - she sometimes second guesses purchases and is quite hesitant to buy an app.

I just think the primary and secondary school system is a very rough market to target a paid app/software towards.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm suggesting that teachers will pay for it out of his/her own pocket if it's done right.

Just like any other purchase (i.e an iPad)

<comment><USER8> I taught for a few years in a fairly-sized school district. Even the best teachers I knew in my department--ones who were very internet savvy and technological proficient--admitted they wouldn't pay for an application in the classroom. They just didn't have the money. They constantly look for free things, such as Google Docs for teaching students how to collaborate and edit papers together.

Target to teachers, yes, but there are other ways to do business with them than to take from their tiny bank accounts.

<comment><USER9> We have found the opposite - teachers will pay for software if it is made well and makes their life easier. The price point obviously still needs to be set appropriately.

Life was very busy when I was teaching, anything that saves time on busy work is appreciated.

<comment><USER10> My experience and market research echos yours, just to get another tally mark here. Differenct schools allocate discretionary budgets differently, and there is some variance also between elementary, MS, and HS in the same district. A good time to reach for discretionary $ is near the end of the school year, after they've spent 7 months being frugal but don't want to "underspend," in part for fear that they won't get the full budget the next year if they don't spend it this year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I teach math at a high school (and have taught CS in the past, before budget cuts got rid of the program). This article is good advice, but a couple things from my own experience:

1\. Anything to be used in-class is a _much_ harder sell than out-of-class. The cost of a wasted lesson is much higher than the cost of your product.

2\. As in #1, the most important thing to a teacher is time. We'll probably trade some of our own money to save time. We'll definitely try to convince our bosses that the department needs a subscription to "Bob's Keyboard Accelerators" if we think it is a good product. On the other hand, though, that means you have a daunting design challenge. What's fast and easy for a 25-year-old teacher isn't necessarily fast and easy for a 55-year-old teacher, although we do help each other out.

3\. Do it out of altruism, do it to reduce stress in people's lives, and do it for the students, but please do it for the money also. If you make a good product, I'd like to keep using it.

I'll try to answer questions downthread when I have a few moments between tasks, if it helps people.

</comment><comment><USER12> If the author sees this as a way to get product market fit, his points make sense. If a teacher with such a limited budget likes the software enough that he / she is willing to pay for it, then you are probably on to something. However, banking on teachers spreading the word and having a sales force focused on teach outreach seems like a terribly unscalable sales strategy.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow. That sounds a lot more positive than my experience of investigating the market here (UK) - I presume this article is US focused.

Here school IT is generally centrally managed by an IT team who are not generally receptive to ad-hoc software installs. SaaS models fail due to firewalls and network access restrictions. Preferred/accepted bidder lists are rife. Teachers have NO budget for software.

I looked at selling to teachers here and decided that it was more hassle than it was worth - the market barriers to entry and borderline corruption/incompetence just made it a non-starter.

<comment><USER14> My experience of working in 3 different UK schools:

IT teams in schools are normally small, over-worked, and underpaid (as is the default in education generally). Machines tend to run from a single source image rolled out once or twice a year. The time and resources it takes to create, roll out and support departmentally-customised builds is not worth it. Software is generally dictated by overpaid IT managers who are disconnected from both the teaching staff and the IT team. It's not uncommon for tech teams to have a small percentage of the IT teaching budget rather than their own, so decisions are based on that too.

I'm glad I got out of educational IT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> 'Selling to Teachers' is important because they are the ones who will be using it, so ultimately they should appreciate/approve of the product prior to purchasing it. However, very few teachers actually shell out their hard-earned cash - whether they're too poor, too cheap, not tech-savvy enough, etc. can be a long-winded debate in itself. I feel we should be having technology related discussions in the education field on a National level. We need to keep the big picture in mind! We are being outpaced by the rest of the developed world <[http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-12-07-us- student...](http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-12-07-us-students- international-ranking_N.htm>); and we are reticent to address the fundamental causes of this issue: our under-paid workforce of non-technical teachers are forced to teach in stressful environments and our solution is to inject standardized tests <[http://bigthink.com/ideas/40118>](http://bigthink.com/ideas/40118>); into our Public Education System, letting the test results determine whether a teacher is rewarded or fired. We hope this will stop us from falling behind the rest of the world... (shaking my head)

What we should be doing is getting technology into the hands of our children as soon as possible. They need to be exposed to it at an early age; not only will computers be a huge part of the rest of their lives but we are also beginning to see the overwhelming effects of technology-designed solutions to education problems <[http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_khan/>](http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/07/ff_khan/>). The sooner we embrace this idea and make efforts to accommodate a rapidly changing world, the quicker our students (soon-to-be workforce participants) will be capable of contributing in this ever-increasing, high-tech society.

We need to be thinking outside of the box when discussing technology and education. It's time to revamp our National Education System, embrace the benefits of technology, and design software intended to make teachers more effective. So, you're right when you say 'Sell to Teachers', however, I think we need to take it a couple steps further and address the fundamental issues in the Technology & Education domain if we want substantial progress.

</comment><comment><USER16> Teachers indeed very often spend their own pocket money to buy things that they feel are useful for class. Paid Dropbox is quite popular among teachers these days.

Very few of the sites that I've seen tackle my key pain and time points. These are test correction, writing correction, and parent communication.

Why isn't there a cheap smartphone OMR program? Of course we all waiting for the Internet and fairies to take over testing, but until then I'd like to have a decent way to make, grade, and store data for paper quizzes. There's not really anything designed for teachers to buy out there.

Writing correction is a hard problem (since handwritten work is privileged in K-12) but perhaps not impossible with OCR advances. If I could unload some of the more mechanical aspects of this it'd be wonderful.

There is a cute and secretly useful free utility called Teacher's Report Assistant. This is the sort of thing that teachers will pay for, and for anyone who plays with things like chatbots its a natural extension. Huge masses of teachers all over Asia are churning out this sort of blather weekly. We could use help.

It's worth mentioning that there are masses of private schools in Asia and in the western world that have much more open policies about reimbursing for software and the like. It's not a bad path to bigger things.

Schools almost universally have overloaded and unreliable networks, so you have to have a reasonable offline path.

</comment><comment><USER17> An interesting piece of ed tech to think about is lesson planning software. Most teachers put a tremendous amount of time planning their lessons, but still write their lesson plans using word processors. There are all kinds of problems in effective lesson design that stem from relying on word processors. Good lesson planning software would lead a teacher through a strong design process, letting them choose which pieces to include, and in what order. Lessons would be easy to revise. A teacher could change the format of their lessons, and instantly have all their previous lessons available in the new format. The use of word processors for lesson planning is like an architect using ms paint to design a building.

Yet every example of lesson planning software I've seen has a serious flaw. It might have a bad ui, it might not be based on sound pedagogical principles, it might promote vendor lock-in. It's hard to do it right; to do it well and for profit you would probably have to charge too much to get a significant percentage of teachers using your product.

You can sell a niche product in the ed tech market. You can build a piece of software and convince a bunch of districts to buy in, and rake in some cash. But making a piece of software that truly makes education better, and doing so in a way that does not contribute to the already huge education gap between those with resources and those without, is tremendously difficult.

<comment><USER18> I don't think "Lesson Planning Software" offers anything useful beyond Word, until it has a useful, curated bank of starters/activities/homeworks/etc attached to it. There are a few of those kinds of "marketplaces" (some with money involved - i.e. teacherspayteachers, and some that are free - i.e. TFANet, BetterLesson) - and I think a better version of one of those needs to be the backbone to any truly successful lesson planning tool.

<comment><USER17> I agree that good planning software would offer the ability to tie into a curated bank of resources. The ones I have seen are spotty, and understandably so. Wikipedia works, in part, because there can only be one article about any given topic. But in a bank of lessons, you'd have to allow multiple lessons about the same topic, if they approach the teaching in a different way. Curating such a bank is an interesting problem, and I have not seen it done well yet. I would argue it has to be free to be done well - any such bank that sits behind a paywall would not build enough lessons to be complete, and it would not reach enough people to make education better overall.

Tying in to a bank of resources is not a requirement, though. You have to think in terms of unit planning, rather than just lesson planning. A unit might consist of three investigations. So on the first page or screen, a teacher gives a title, unit description, and one-sentence description of the three investigations. In a word processor, the teacher has to copy those descriptions onto separate pages to describe each investigation in more detail. Planning software would do that automatically for you, so changing the description of the investigation in one place would change it everywhere in the unit plans.

I am still trying to decide how I feel about the role of non-profit and for- profit organizations in education. People should definitely be paid for their work. So a team should be able to propose a solid solution to this issue, gather funding from public resources, and make the final product available to everyone while paying themselves a fair market rate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Our strategy at Quizlet.com has been similar... make something that teachers and students both directly want to use, and they naturally spread it to each other.

</comment><comment><USER20> Education is like enterprise with crapy cycles and the lack of pressure from public market ownership.

What Jarred is getting at is the education corollary to the consumerization of enterprise.

This shift is propelled by two recent developments:

1) Internet services often offer a free "single-player" or freemium option. \- This reduces the value of the procurement person/intermediary in negotiating price \- This increases the propensity of individuals to try a service themselves because of decreased financial risk.

2) SaaS: these services are now hosted and can be initiated immediately, no longer requiring time spent acquiring a physical license or installing \- This reduces the value of the intermediary in "setting things up" \- This this reduces the time expense in trying something

I think relevant differences between enterprise and education are budget, average age, and different incentive structure.

There is definitely opportunity in pursuing this bottom-up approach to distribution in education and I think at the moment it is a largely unexplored path.

Would love to discuss more - best way is @hhorsley or firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER21> I like this strategy. To me it's reminiscent of someone writing a software dev tool, book, or screencast and pricing it low enough for an individual to purchase it themselves rather than try to get their employer to purchase it for them.

While this strategy may not be as profitable as selling to entire districts at once, it'll have a more passionate user base and hopefully much shorter sales cycles and selling overhead.

</comment><comment><USER18> If you haven't read it already, the 2007 paper "K-12 Entrepreneurship: Slow Entry, Distant Exit" by the founders of Wireless Generation is excellent. It lays out the barriers to selling to districts, as well as some ways around them.

<http://www.aei.org/docLib/20071024_BergerStevenson.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't know why anyone would doubt this could work. It worked for patio11 [1]. His empire was pretty much built on selling bingo card software to elementary school teachers. In fact I'm surprised for all the author's citations he doesn't cite Bingo Card Creator [2].

Granted, patio11's overhead was extremely low. But who isn't trying to validate businesses quickly before dumping unnecessary money into them these days?

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11>

[2] <http://www.bingocardcreator.com/>

<comment><USER23> It really depends on what you're doing. Blackboard is notorious for patent trolling companies who try to enter the education space. Patio makes a product that teachers happen to use, but it's not exactly in the education space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've been thinking about this exact approach for a while, so it has been immensely useful to read the discussion taking place in this thread.

There's obviously a lot of value in word-of-mouth sales; but I'd like to know more about about approaches to advertise directly to teachers in the first place. There must be schools where no teacher is looking at tech news sites :) Any advice about advertising to teachers?

</comment><comment><USER25> This makes as much sense as saying "it's really difficult to sell shoe polish to corporate CEOs, so you should sell to their receptionists instead."

<comment><USER26> I don't think that's quite an apt metaphor. At the end of the day, the CEOs are the ones who use the shoe polish. Maybe their secretaries do the polishing, maybe not, but at the end of the day the CEOs are the ones who have to cope with a mediocre polish.

The entire point of this article is that it's the teachers, not the administrators, who have to deal with educational software on a daily basis.

<comment><USER25> This is exactly my point. Teachers don't have purchasing authority for very much besides construction paper and glue sticks (and then, they're increasingly paying for that stuff out of their own pockets). You can't sell stuff to people who can't buy (even if they do happen to be the end users of your product).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We focus on this strategy for Termites (<http://termitesapp.com>) and it works well.

The purchase process at the school or district level can be glacial slow.

<comment><USER27> Is this short-termism though (sp?).

If you sell to the district then you've got an order of thousands of units likely to repeat for several years. If you sell to individual teachers then you're selling units at a time and probably having to resell those units (or face more competition) if you've got a good product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Worth noting: many teachers are given budgets from their school to spend on technology, so there is a good chance that the money they spend won't be coming out of their own pocket. Win - win situation.

</comment><comment><USER29> Parents who are home schooling are another great entry point for educational software. This approach also passes the same set of checks and balances as selling to teachers.

</comment><comment><USER30> "My former Spanish teacher buys chocolate regularly for the class. She gives them out to people answering questions. A single bag of chocolate doesn't cost much, but giving out a few chocolates per period, with five periods in a day, over the course of 180 days adds up to several bags of chocolate."

hilarious

<comment><USER31> Made me wonder about a website handling student incentives for teachers. A modern equivalent of the gold star sticker. Little cards with short URLs or QR codes on them. (That's as far as I've bothered wondering for now...)</comment></comment>


Irish Startup Raises $230,000 Using Only LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/irish-company-raises-230000-using-only-linkedin-2010-1 How an Irish startup raised $230,000 on linekedin <comment><USER2> Interesting - the article isn't quite fair with FaceBook though - it's pretty easy to raise an interesting number of virtual beers or pokes through FaceBook.</comment>