Everything I Wish I'd Known Before I Started Demoing SaaS - <AUTHOR> https://thebetterstory.co/everything-i-wish-id-known-before-i-started-demoing-saas-f83c1c4fad99 <comment><USER2> I've sat through probably thousands of demos in my IT career and I must say this quote featured in the article is bullshit:

        People don't buy features, they buy solutions, trust, and relationships. -Rob Gonzalez

I can't count the number of times we (various IT teams) have selected products because _they were the only one that had a feature we needed_. I'm at the point in my IT career where if I'm watching a demo I politely let them do their little spiel for 5-10 minutes and then I'm like, "yeah yeah show us feature X" (because I want to see that it works and _how_ it works).

What always destroys a demo for me:

        * Sales people that don't know the technical details.
          "I'll have to get back to you on that." (for nearly every question)
        * Irrelevant use cases.  "Schools use our product!"
        * Can't actually provide a *live demo*.  Only slides or,
          "Let's watch this 10 minute video after which I probably
          won't be able to answer any of your technical questions!"
        * Complete failure to mention anything in regards to security
          or if they do it's nebulous bullshit like, "we your data
          in transit!".  This one is becoming greatest concern lately.

Everything I've read about this sort of thing says that the #1 thing you can do to improve sales of any software product is to add new features. At least, that works once your product has been established. Selling it initially? No matter how you slice it that's hard.

<comment><USER3> I think what you're describing is the difference between a technical buyer/recommender and an economic buyer. You're obviously a technical buyer, so for you, features that solve your specific pain are important and you probably acted as gatekeeper to the whole process. But at some point in large purchases, there has to be an economic justification - and that is where the solutions/trust/relationships become more important.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure how trust or relationships let you make a solid economic business case...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sharing a bit of my own experience: I used to do a lot of demos for my SaaS (usually 1 to 2 hour long, because it ended up in some form of coaching session on cash-flow forecasting habits), but after a while I realised that I got more churn from such users ultimately.

I later replaced those demos (which I still do occasionally) by 2 things :

\- An in-app onboarding tour (fully self-service), implemented with mock data (see [https://gist.github.com/thbar/6036b30ddbc2b00b7656987a930ea5...](https://gist.github.com/thbar/6036b30ddbc2b00b7656987a930ea5b2) for a full write-up on how to implement that with Rails & Hopscotch)

\- A git-based detailed knowledge base (also self-service), [https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/lessons-learned-creating- a-g...](https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/lessons-learned-creating-a-git-based- knowledge-base-for-my-saas-product)

And I also moved from a CC-upfront trial mode, to a no-CC trial.

Applying those 3 measures slashed my "customer support time" to almost zero & fewer churn.

I suppose I'm attracting more savvy, self-service users too now.

<comment><USER6> How did the trial conversion go? Do you have a lot of in-app prompting and email around conversion?

We tried that at Cronitor in 2015 but we saw less engagement from users who started a trial without a cc and less engaged users, predictably, converted at a lower rate for us.

<comment><USER5> I have no in-app prompting at all, and I have a simple 5-email benefits- oriented email series (via customer.io).

I don't have enough numbers for things to be meaningful (it's a small-scale SaaS), but I seem to recall that removing the CC without onboarding initially was not great, and things improved with the onboarding tour (sorry if I cannot be much more specific!).

Removing the CC avoided the need to handle refunds for some people, which was a bit of hassle to handle.

<comment><USER7> > sorry if I cannot be much more specific

It's much appreciated anyway. Sharing of the secret sauce is what makes this forum so valuable to the tech community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't forget to allow an extra 30 minutes for all the inevitable tech glitches with Zoom or Adobe or whatever your remote solution is. Get ready to bash your head on the wall when you discover that they are trying to use IE 7 on Windows XP to connect to your presentation, and nobody in the meeting knows how to "load chrome" or even has permission to do it. Finally throw your deck away and do a voice-only call via someone's cell phone sitting on the middle of the conference table.

<comment><USER9> Some places, particularly government networks, have _extremely_ locked down Internet access - the tool that I've found to work the best for screen sharing is screen leap:

[http://www.screenleap.com/](http://www.screenleap.com/)

No silly viewers for people to install to watch your demo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Many SaaS websites seem to try as hard as possible to hide the actual product from you, with no screenshots, no live demo, and sometimes even no free trial, and a "demo" page that only has a form to request a demo. And according to this article, even in that demo, you're not supposed to see much of the application.

Now, I trust that this is sound advice for many (enterprise) customers, but personally I hate it.

<comment><USER11> the conversion from a trial to a sale for enterprise software is super low for two reasons: \- software only really works when you commit to it by importing all your data and your daily workflow within it \- no one wants to put that much effort in a trial

companies are also super paranoid about competitors getting a hold of your product and ripping the good features

<comment><USER12> It's only super low because people expect to sell to enterprises with relatively low-touch sales methods. If you want to sell to enterprise, with no prior customers, you need to be setting meetings with several stakeholders (engineering, financial, legal, infosec, upper-management if possible...) within that company, demonstrating to each how your software fits their specific burning need, and helping them adapt the evaluation instance to their specific needs until it becomes indispensable. In short, as a founder, you ought to be expecting to practically work out of your customer's offices, at least in the beginning of the sales process.

If the feedback you're getting from an enterprise sales meeting is "we need solution X which isn't part of your product," then either a) you're still doing market research or b) the enterprise is asking for something that doesn't fit your cost/benefit curves.

<comment><USER13> I worked for what is now a £10 million p/a turnover that didn't do this, so it really does depend on what you're selling.

They sold a document/project management system, extensible like salesforce that was generally used by the whole company.

AFAIK, they targeted CEOs and IT heads, but they targeted SMEs and gave up on larger customers because they believed it simply wasn't worth the effort for those customers, they just got mucked around too much and closing sales took far too long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Don't waste time showing [prospects] the step-by-step process of doing > something. Create a vision of what benefit they can get by using your > product.

This 100 times. This goes for many things too, it's often very easy to feel like you are being productive by painstakingly going over basics and step-by- steps but anyone who is genuinely interested will follow up themselves. Anyone else is going to get bored fast. This is why it's so important to have and show this big vision - you need to hook people to stay interested.

Great post, it's also nice to see something well over 1,000 words! Thanks for taking the time to write all this up!

<comment><USER15> This is sales 101. "Sell the sizzle, not the steak."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> You also need to account for losing internet connectivity. I had a demo before I knew what I was doing where I went to the customer site and they set us up in some sort of dead zone, essentially could not connect to either guest wifi or mobile hotspot to show the product for most of the time or when it did connect the lag was so bad it seemed like the product was incredibly slow.

Most places will not allow you to connect via a wired connection to their network for good reason.

I then started tripping all over myself because I had not prepared for this situation. I did not land the customer.

If possible, running on local host is the way to go.

It was a character building experience.

<comment><USER17> ...and when running from localhost, watch out for any resources loading from a CDN, and, of course, for your local dummy data being total crap and/or accidentally offensive (and get ready for "Why is all this text in [Latin/French/Italian/something really bizarre]?" when you use lorem ipsum).

<comment><USER18> I learned long ago that -any- placeholders confuse people. Image placeholders? "Why is it showing me just an image of some random person with the word 'placeholder' over it?! I would have images of Y!" It's frustrating, but that's reality. Figure out the sort of thing users will actually have in there, and try to put something similar. Preface lorem ipsum with "Your text goes here. Fake text follows: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..." or similar.

<comment><USER19> A million times yes. I had a client tell me an example draft deliverable was "the worst document I've ever been handed" when I was showing them a preview of the document format in week two of a three month project. It was supposed to be documenting their entire architecture and solution I was building for them, so it would be delivered at the end of the project. They asked to see it early, so I put in placeholder data. They were not impressed, and it nearly tanked the whole project. They didn't want to pay thousands of dollars for obviously placeholder text. Problem is, none of their real information had been fleshed out yet, so I didn't have real data to put in.

But then on another client, I put in better (more realistic) placeholder text for the same document and they thought I had sent them another client's information and got real scared about their own data privacy with our company. That's when I learned to refuse a client's request to show them a document before it's (at least nearly) finished. If they want to see the format, a static picture of very obvious placeholder data serves just fine.

<comment><USER18> Good idea! If it's an image, you can watermark "DEMO" or "DRAFT" very visibly over it, and that hopefully will help them realize it's neither real, nor intended to be what is submitted.

<comment><USER17> I think a large part of the problem comes down to two somewhat related things: people only understand things based on their own experience, and people have very little imagination.

As developers, we spend all day building things that don't have the right or final (or any) content, and we understand that a box filled with lorem ipsum will look fine once the real text (which doesn't exist yet) is in there, or a screen with just a big red rectangle adorned with "PLACEHOLDER 500x300" will look perfect once the final image is inserted. But for consumers of what we build, they have no experience of non-finished products: they don't ever see placeholder images on Facebook, they don't see unwritten copy in the newspaper, and when they open up Microsoft Word, they don't type "The quick brown fox..." into it, they type the actual text they want. We know that the hard work from a development perspective has been done, and it's now someone's job to write the copy and pick the images (which is, of course, no easy job)... but to the end user who has no concept of the code whatsoever, all they see is a page where everything is totally wrong.

Secondly, imagination: if all they can see is a red rectangle, many people will find it very hard to imagine a tastefully chosen hero image there instead. We built a product a while back which, in large part, was intended to be flexible and extremely configurable - that was a really key feature of the software. When I was initially demoing it, I showed it in two configurations: one that was incredibly basic, and one that was a wild mix of various garish colours and fonts. I had anticipated that people would use their imagination to interpolate various tasteful designs between the basic and the garish, but no - all they could see was boring or ugly. Even with a careful explanation - "Of course I've used awful colours, you can easily choose from your corporate palette!" \- it just never went down well. (Now when I demo it I show off the configurability by tweaking in real-time two pre-existing designs, very different but both very pretty, and both of which are firmly grounded in real- world use-cases, which avoids nitpicking like, "Well, it looks very nice, but we'd never use it like that, we'd have another foo after the bar...")

To the guy saying to use Bacon Ipsum, just no. That's fine and funny when you're a developer sharing something within a development team, but otherwise for a surprisingly large number of clients it will be confusing and possibly seem extremely unprofessional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Be sincere and ask them how their day has been"

But, realistically, the sales guy doesn't give a shit about how their prospect's day has been - how is this 'sincere'?

<comment><USER21> Good salespeople actually do care!

<comment><USER7> I care about my family, if they had a bad day then I'll work hard to cheer them up.

How do I show that I care to the same level about some random client?

<comment><USER22> Then you should stay away from sales.

I have had people fall asleep in the middle of my presentation (after lunch- heart medication). I have had people throw up in the middle of my presentation. I have had people _cry_ in the middle of my presentation.

At that point, I _stop politely_. I'm not in sales mode anymore; I'm in _human being_ mode. Maybe they need an ear. Maybe they need a beer. Maybe their staff understands that they fall asleep after lunch and that you can continue on.

Sales is mostly empathy and education. I'm selling to you because I believe that I'm going to make your situation better. If I reach a point where I believe that is not true, I'm going to stop selling to you, refer you to someone else, etc.

Occasionally, this loses me a sale. Oh, well. I generally engender so much good will when it happens that it almost always rebounds back to me later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a backup, in case: the site internet is down/you're presenting onsite & their internet is down/ you're not running locally/ whatever - it can be useful to have a "virtual demo" ready to go, ie, a powerpoint deck of screenshots showing your intended demo flow. Not as good as the real thing but better than nothing...

</comment><comment><USER24> Advice probably applicable to more than demoing SAAS.

Also the author has clearly acquired some sales chops by reading those books on demos - the note at the end about researching and writing the post in 9 hours using airstory had me clicking on the links!

Of course they disclosed they were an airstory founder on their blog.

</comment><comment><USER25> TL;DR: Business people only listen when you explicitly talk about them and/or money.

</comment><comment><USER26> So, the linked article mentions "know your audience," but I think glosses on emphasizing that a bit.

Engineers, content creators, program directors, are going to be looking for different things and make decisions in different ways. Don't just ensure decision makers show up; make sure you're talking about the pros and cons those decision makers will care about, rather than the ones you think they should care about.

</comment><comment><USER27> [https://appear.in](https://appear.in) has been the best software for demos for me (p.s. just a happy customer)

works from within the browser excellent video/audio quality good screen sharing set up meeting with just a simple url

</comment><comment><USER28> Sitting at the other side of the table (as a regular engineer in BigCorp), that was an interesting read. One thing I recognized from too many demos and product workshops (whether they are on site in our offices or remote) is this section: > Ask lots and lots of questions. Follow the 80/20 rule: 80% of the demo content should be about your customers, and 20% should be about your solution.

Spending an hour explaining our systems, our business and our pain points to a random sales rep is usually not a good use of my time, especially if I still don't really know or understand your product yet (don't expect me to have even visited your website before the demo if I'm not the person who booked it).

<comment><USER29> So if you have a meeting scheduled for a demo, why wouldn't you check out the website? Are you actively trying to not have a good meeting?

I almost always go through materials before a meeting because it makes me better informed and we end up having a much better conversation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Anyone experience with demoing an API :) ?

Currently we have more or less simplistic demos, which also do not look shiny. And we have to highlight everytime that these demos are using just a tiny subset of the full API and much more stuff is possible. When we got more customers we were also able to point to some nice looking apps but this is also not always optimal.

<comment><USER31> Twilio has a reputation for giving a killer API demo. Check out [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11985368](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11985368) and the links in comments within.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This was very informative, thanks! I'm a software builder and this isn't my lane, but I might need to learn it soon.

</comment><comment><USER33> How true is the perception (from the buyer's side) that a self-funded SaaS company is not worth talking to?

<comment><USER20> Is that really a thing?

I would never think to check how a SaaS company was funded when looking at their products.

<comment><USER34> I dunno, but when it happened to me, it totally derailed everything. It was one of those moments when you want to argue with the prospect - "As if funded companies don't go out of business?" \- but that's probably not a good strategy. :) So I just sat awkwardly and tried to explain that we'd been approached by VCs but hadn't pursued anything.

I hope it doesn't come up that often. I worry, though, that it's actually some sort of signal to the average prospect (who's not in the startup world).

<comment><USER35> patio11 has talked about this

One approach -- besides make sure you have an answer ready to go next time -- is to talk about two things (straight up stolen from patio11, but if there are mistakes in memory, they're mine):

1 - who do you think you matter more to, some company with thousands of customers or me?

2 - I don't give a shit what their SLA says, when you call late at night, you don't get eng. If you call my cell, you get the person who wrote it all. Who is going to get your problem fixed faster?

<comment><USER33> This is a fantastic way to respond to it. But I do fear if it's a slightly emotional response and not a more assuring one. It's probably the best way to address the elephant in the room though, aside from having a kick-ass product that addresses their pain points.

<comment><USER35> In my limited experience selling things, sales are all about emotion. Yes, there are a few actual deal-breakers, but things like a willingness to learn new things or adjust their workflow or deal with a mildly suboptimal workaround depend entirely on emotion. And the same suboptimality or problem in the hands of a person who wants a deal to work vs someone who doesn't swings in two different directions entirely based on the potential customer's emotions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Great read. Very much follows the "people buy pain relief" mantra that I was taught in sales classes.

</comment><comment><USER37> Such a good post. I learned a lot of valuable insights here, right when I needed them! :)

</comment><comment><USER38> This is a very practical and insightful post. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is good advice, beware of seeing this as the whole story though.

Once you play with the big kahunas, your prospects will be tightly controlled and briefed by their procurement teams. Which means most of the question techniques outlined in the post will fall flat as the proc guys have read the same playbook.

This is where the side chats during coffee breaks, etc become the core. Be ready to show your software to anyone, anytime. The literal elevator pitch. Anything to outmaneuver the proc team.

Good luck :)

<comment><USER40> Depends what you mean by "the procurement team". People with procurement in their actual job title are glorified paper pushers who's job is to make you _think_ that you need to offer a better price but are actually entirely subordinate to the people who've made the decision to recommend to buy your software.

On the other hand, the level of upper management that tends to make the decision is exactly the sort of person this demo advice applies most for: the people who really don't care about the flexibility of your search function or UX (because they're probably not using it themselves) but are quite impressed when you use it to highlight a solution to a problem unique to their company/sector, and don't actually have time to watch a walkthrough of Feature X but do remember the story about how it saved a company facing similar issues $100k

<comment><USER41> The article covers a bunch of different stuff - some of which I'd expect buyers to try and dodge, some they won't be so concerned with.

For example, when I hear this bit from the article:

      Sales rep: "So, currently your company is losing out on
      sales opportunities because leads are falling through
      the cracks. [...] how much revenue do you think you're
      missing out on just because of ineffective lead
      management?"
      [...]
      Sales rep: "So we're talking hundreds of thousands of
      dollars in lost deals every year.

What I hear is a sales rep asking "What is the highest price you'll ever pay?"

Revealing this strikes me as an unconventional approach to price negotiation.

I would imagine senior executives at major companies would know such things - be it from their procurement teams, their education, or elsewhere.

<comment><USER40> You'd be surprised how often they don't!

Though it can be much easier if you're asking the more sensitive questions as a plausible part of a demo rather than grilling them at the beginning.

e.g. "So this is how you track your lost deals from each month, and we allow you to use different ways of handling bulk leads and smaller volumes of high value leads. So what sort of number do you think might be falling through the cracks in a typical month?"

[...]

"that definitely sounds like something you'd want the ability to monitor individually. Particularly as _earlier_ you mentioned your typical deal size was at least $10k, so that's over $50k each month that our better lead management system could help you with accurately tracking and following up"

[Eureka moment!]</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hello quantum world - <AUTHOR> https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/hello-quantum-world <comment><USER2> "Serious quantum computers are finally here."

What does "serious" mean in this context? Do we _actually_ have usable, _serious_ quantum computers?

<comment><USER3> "We have this device that is more complicated than you can simulate on a classical computer, but it's not yet controllable to the precision that you could do the algorithms you know how to do."

It doesn't sound like it's usable yet. It's just a serious computer now. Maybe it means that they consider it as a seriously potential machine but it have not acquired any usability in actuality yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In every article about quantum computers I have a hard time distinguishing what's reality and what's pure fiction, or simply put journalists who don't understand what they're writing about.

<comment><USER5> To this day, I still don't understand if "spooky action at a distance" is a thing and if there is actually any sort of connection between entangled particles. People vehemently, dramatically claim one side or the other with no support...or I don't get it.

Was just reading this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMB_cold_spot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMB_cold_spot)

And how it's "proof of a parallel universe that is quantum-entangled with ours." Don't understand any of it.

Someone on here explained quantum radar to me - that's about the only "quantum" thing that made sense to me.

<comment><USER6> The short answer is that statements like "spooky action at a distance" are an attempt to shoehorn quantum mechanics into a classical framework. It doesn't have any meaning in that sense.

The long answer is here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Eeuqh9QfNI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Eeuqh9QfNI)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Help me review my new photo hosting startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.simplebucket.com

<comment><USER2> I noticed these problems on Firefox on Mac OS 10.5:

1) Upload form still asks for an email address even if I'm logged in.

2) No way to change my screen name or url (e.g. <http://www.simplebucket.com/p/mdc1oa> compared to <http://flickr.com/photos/hoyhoy>)

3) Page view counter doesn't recognize a session_id so reloads advance the counter even for myself

4) Have to enter in name, email, and CAPTCHA when commenting a picture even though I'm logged in

5) No interface to find tagged pictures

6) Tags aren't hyperlinked

7) Allowed me to add a note outside of the image on Firefox e.g. (<http://involution.com/images/simplebucket.png>)

8) Note text can overlap the image when a note is inside an image

9) Hit save multiple times on a single note and it made multiple copies of the same note all over the page.

10) HTML Embed link shows note text in the input box located under "Photo Options"

11) When clicked, the "Photo Widget" link shows note text in the input box located under "Photo Options"

12) Attempted uploading 5 images from the upload page, but only one uploaded

13) Added a comment with no text, no error message, and nothing was displayed

14) Added a large comment with 5K of text. Nothing was displayed and no error message was given. Can't you just limit the number of chars in the TEXTBOX?

15) Clicked "Add From Address Book" went to Plaxo, and then added myself, but the email showed up in what looked to be a message box. Why do you need to ask for my name and email again when it's already in "My Settings"? The email did arrive though.

16) Went back to upload, added two more images via browse, clicked "Let's go" and nothing happened.

17) Clicked "Add" then "Browse" on the upload page, and the nothing happened (Browse window not displayed)

18) Left an open table tag in a comment and totally busted the page layout.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good to see this. I have a photo-sharing site myself, and the world needs more of them, as I wrote here: <http://ourdoings.com/2007-12-19>

Mine caters to people with tons of photos to share and little time to organize. Yours seems more for people dealing with individual photos to use on myspace, ebay, etc. Still there's overlap. A few tips:

When the upload starts, gray out the "Let's Go" button.

Learn about EXIF orientation information and make use of it.

Keep an eye on Disqus. It's not ready to replace your comment system yet, but when it is ready it will be a lot better than what you have.

Make it clear whether the 10-cent tip is going to simplebucket or to the photographer.

<comment><USER4> _"... Learn about EXIF orientation information and make use of it. ..."_

Try <http://search.cpan.org/~ccpro/Image-EXIF-1.00.3/EXIF.pm> or <http://johnst.org/sw/exiftags/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1) I tried it in Safari and the Browse and Add buttons are unclickable, unless you click in the left corner.

2) Uploading without entering an email sends me to a login page, although I obviously don't have a login.

3) 1020px is quite wide, especially when you don't make any good use of all that space.

4) I don't feel the very tiny labels with very large inputs.

5) You use 5 different fonts on the homepage.

6) The word "photos" is rather small, while the "upload share and organize" text is huge. Upload, share and organize what?

</comment><comment><USER6> Just a few observations.

1.No explianation of what the secret URL is. I uploaded a photo and was unable to add tags straight away. Confused I went to My Photos but was told I needed to login "Hmm I don't have an account...", so I put my email addess into the forgotten section just to see what happens and got an email (In which the link wasn't clickable) from which I pasted in the URL. Then I was in "My Photos" and could edit and tag my existing stuff. But...

2.Users are able to upload photos under the guise of other users?!? Seems that even though I now have an "account", anyone can just use my email address and upload photos into my area. I opened up a different browser and could upload photos without it asking me to authenticate my "account".

3\. Seens "My Photos" is just a link to the login section, until I specifically go to "My Settings" and set a password. No where is this clear.

I think it's getting there, but needs a lot more work when it comes to directing users with what to do next. A lot of people who would be using this service will have little clue as to what to do next.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great comments! It definitely gave me some ideas as to what I need to work on. Yea, it doesn't render ok with Safari and IE.. so far its only FF friendly.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate any feedback and suggestions for Simplebucket. Good or bad, anything ... I will take it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Did you test it using ie? Doesn't look like it to me.

I'd love to give you feedback, but I'll wait until you get it to render properly in ie.</comment>


How Roam Research analyzes product design and team building - <AUTHOR> https://thetwentyminutevc.com/conorwhitesullivan/ <comment><USER2> I've been using Roam some, and it feels mostly like a personal wiki with markdown, and the pages generate automatically based on the notes entered. I like the functionality, but it's not optimized for the way I take notes or think about most concepts.

I've spent years trying different tools to organize information, and none of them feel tailored to my note taking approach. I want something that is light weight, works on every device, syncs immediately, works offline, and functions more like a traditional notebook (focus on creating notes as quickly as possible) while providing just enough tagging and query support to easily find what I need later. Nothing strikes that perfect balance for me, so I started on my own platform.

I plan to launch soon, but if anyone is interested in alpha access and would like to give me feedback prior to launch, I would love to hear from you. Contact info in profile!

<comment><USER3> I've been using Roam daily for the last month. What I like about Roam is the markdown, the ease of creating bidirectional links, and the automatic daily notes. The daily notes feature particularly eliminates friction for me. I just start writing.

What I don't like about Roam is its slow load time. Also writing does not feel snappy enough - if that makes any sense. I feel a slight delay at times between typing a key and seeing the character on screen. Every time that happens I like Roam a little less. I've never experienced that with an app like iaWriter, and as a result, even for all its lack of features, every time I use iaWriter I like it a little more.

I think what Roam is missing for me, besides improving the writing performance, is a weekly email digest somehow summarizing my notes. This could use the bidirectional links and give me a quick overview of what I wrote for the week. That would help improve my memory and be more introspective.

<comment><USER4> Every time I read about Roam it sounds like the same note-taking system I've built for myself. I just use a couple of Bash scripts with light text editor integration on top. (The Bash is so I can quickly add the same features to whatever text editor I'm using, today that's VSCode and Vim, but I setup Emacs at one point too. It's mainly just keyboard shortcuts that call the Bash scripts.)

The basic features are taking a default Markdown mode and adding:

1\. Follow a link to a relative file at the cursor

2\. Make a link to a relative file out of the selected text (e.g., "my big idea" becomes `[my big idea](my-big-idea.md)`

Daily notes is just open a text file with the current date. (This doesn't include back links or transclusion, but I don't think those are make or break features either?)

All in all this is pretty trivial to add to an existing text editor, and if you do, you get all the power of that text editor: E.g., the best search, comparison, and split view systems anywhere. Plus the longevity of plain text.

I can see the appeal of Roam, especially for audiences that aren't already using an extensible text editors. But for people that do already use extensible text editors, I'm surprised there's not more discussion about how easy these features are to add.

<comment><USER5> > This doesn't include back links or transclusion, but I don't think those are > make or break features either?

I thought this at first as well, but automatic backlinks make a bigger difference than you may guess. It basically turns each document into _two_ things: 1. the document itself, 2. an automatic query of all references to this document that renders automatically as soon as the document is opened. Just like you can have a document with content but isn't referenced anywhere, you can also have a document with _no_ content whose purpose is only to be the place where everything is linked back to, and persistent filtering per document means that you can make it behave exactly how you want. There is no difference between the concept of a saved search and a document, they have been unified.

The biggest value proposition to me is that you maintain each document by itself, only changing things in one place, and other documents/views automatically reflect that. Automatic backlinks with persistent per-document backlink filtering is one way Roam enables this pseudo-DRY thing where you only edit things in one place.

The other big thing it does to enable you to avoid repeating yourself is document embedding: where one line of a document or whole sub-document is referenced and looks like it's _embedded_ in the middle of some other document. Interacting with an embedded document works the same as editing any section (you can still tell it's linked, there are read only modes etc) and the edits actually go _through_ into the original document. Combined with fine-grained sub-document references (e.g. a paragraph or a single todo checkbox) this allows you to create things like temporary daily task lists where when you check off items they actually get marked completed _in their related project where you created them_ , and you don't have to manually synchronize any edits. It's like you get to have your cake and eat it too. For example: do you want to organize your tasks along with the project they're related to, or do you want to organize them in the order you want to do them today? YES.

Not having to repeat myself is by far the best feature for me, and back- references combined with sub-document embedding both enable that to a very large degree. I despise having to maintain the same collection or list in multiple places, or the friction of renaming a document because now you have to fix all the references to it, or even keeping the name of a file in sync with the document header. These are things that I find pure files on disk grates on me enough to abandon the affair.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for this great explanation! This definitely helps me see the advantages of those specific features. Just to be clear, I think Roam is a great and interesting product, I didn't mean to diminish it. Frankly, I'm just thankful they've rejuvenated the note-taking conversation.

But there's a separate point I'm still trying to make: What surprises me is that there's not a separate, parallel conversation happening about the features that can easily by applied to plain text. E.g., the fact that default Markdown supports simple Wiki links like `[A Link](a-link.md)` appears to be lost on an extraordinary number of users of Markdown. These days I come across someone asking for "Markdown with Wiki support" literally almost daily, now that Roam has popularized the feature.

To put it another way: If people were already managing their notes in Markdown Wikis, and then Roam came along and added some additional valuable features that are more difficult to add to plain text, like back links and transclusion, then that would make sense. But what we have is people lamenting that Markdown doesn't support Wiki links, when in reality, it already has its own form of them...

<comment><USER6> This conversation is absolutely happening. Athens, for instance, is a clone of roam that is open source. It reminds me, however, of the conversation that happened about IRC vs Slack.

<comment><USER7> Athen looks like the first clone I've seen that understands the stack that makes roam viable

I hope they do well

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 1) How come this one app in particular seems to permeate all the media I consume (even though there is no way to try the app out right now)? In the same week, several podcasts and friends recommended it to me, and now HN. Kudos to whoever organized this launch.

2) I decided this year my personal notes are too long-term and important to me to keep entrusting to every new cloud startup that pops up.

Right now my notes are mostly in markdown files, synced by Dropbox. More developed thoughts that need to link to each-other I do in Trello (I like their UX and how it helps me think).

I'm looking for a system that has these features, but:

\- where I will always be in control of the data (open source?)

\- syncs & backups reliably

\- seamless on mobile

<comment><USER9> 1) because VCs invested in it

2) I highly recommend Ulysses for this, which has the best writing experience IMO, can open /save external .md files like a txt editor, and is polished and mature across devices.

<comment><USER10> +1 for Ulysses. It's got all the features I was asking for: markdown, tagging, folders, offline, beautiful UI, a go-to-anywhere (omnisearch), saved searches, and the company has a history of over ten years (not VC backed).

Been using all kinds of writing apps / tools since the 90s: AskSam, Netmanage's ECCOPro, IdeaMatrix on my Blackberry, Emacs+Org, my various own tools, Evernote, Joplin, Notion and a dozen other tools.

In the end I settled with simple, plain markdown text, some Python + bash scripts, and a nice markdown editor like iA Writer or Ulysses, which is the current editor I am using. Its target audience seem to be writers of all sorts producing large texts. But it is actually a pretty good Zettelkasten tool as well.

Re RoamResearch: I would never entrust my personal data / notes into an online only service (that was just created!) I am old enough to know that products come and go, the most important thing is my personal data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> =Meta=

With the rise of this new breed of knowledge management apps, I have started a repo. to track tools, open-source projects and pros-cons of the Zettlekasten methodology.

It's slightly opinionated and I try to update it regularly. If you'd like to stay updated in this space, you can check it out at [https://github.com/krimlabs/z](https://github.com/krimlabs/z)

<comment><USER12> Slight rant: Those tools are not new, it's just a new wave of old methods. Roam for example is just a personal wiki, which were

Another rant: There is no Zettlekasten methodology. This is just a cargo-cult. It's also called Luhmanns Zettelkasten, after a famous scientist and write who was using his notebox with some system. Zettelkasten is just the german word for notebox and there are several well known in history, which all did not use Luhmanns system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish more of these note taking apps were fully encrypted. I know RR can encrypt parts of notes, but it's not the same.

It's probably paranoia, but if I'm journaling my life, business ideas, thoughts on contacts - I just want it to be encrypted on my devices before it goes into the cloud. I want each device to sync and decrypt locally.

<comment><USER14> For an online-first service (where all your notes aren't living on your device at one time necessarily), encryption makes it impossible to do a full-text search of your content.

<comment><USER15> "Encryption makes it impossible to do a full text search of your content" (where all notes aren't necessarily on your device at one time)?

And yet Apple Photos does full image library search for your friends' faces, while not having to have all photos on your device.

Two common ways to do this: (a) bring each piece of content to the client device just long enough to add it to an on-device index, (b) let the clients update and re-sync an encrypted global index as content is added locally.

As Apple puts it:

 _"One of the best things about Photos is how it protects your privacy. iOS and iPadOS are designed to take advantage of the powerful processor built into every iPhone and iPad. So when you search your photos, for instance, all the face recognition and scene and object detection are done completely on your device."_

With Photos, Apple scans and builds the index locally on device, per method (a). If you enable iCloud Photos, it will also sync the index of fingerprints to labels in (b) style so your names, favorites, and key photos match across devices.

Apple's quite tickled at making this available to you as a dev:

 _"On-device intelligence: Apple uses machine learning to enhance your experience — and your privacy — by using on-device processing so other people don't see your data. We've used it for on-device image and scene recognition in Photos, predictive text in keyboards, and more. For example, the A13 Bionic chip and the Neural Engine in iPhone can recognize patterns, make predictions, and learn from experience, similar to the way you do. So your device can create personalized experiences without having to analyze personal information on Apple servers. Developers can use our frameworks, such as Create ML and Core ML, to create powerful new app experiences that don't require your data to leave your device. That means apps can analyze user sentiment, classify scenes, translate text, recognize handwriting, predict text, tag music, and more without putting your privacy at risk."_

<comment><USER14> Fair point.

Impossible was too strong. Very, very difficult is more accurate. Tagging faces is much easier than FTS as well, as photos don't change (or you assume they don't change in terms of "who is in this photo"), where as your notes might be changing quite frequently.

Also you're gonna have 1-5 faces per photo max, where as with FTS you're gonna need to store a lot more than that per "note".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My antivirus went red.

>> We blocked this phishing page for your protection:

>> [https://thetwentyminutevc.com/](https://thetwentyminutevc.com/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Roam Research is awesome. The lack of pretension around structure and hierarchy of your data is so refreshing. I have used Notion extensively and still think Notion is superior as a place to house canonical unstructured data for groups. But for individuals, RR is A+. Coming from nvALT + Drafts which I still use on mobile and then copy into Roam later.

</comment><comment><USER18> For me, the biggest problem with all of these note taking systems is they are clunky. If I want to quickly write something down, or find a piece of information, I have to page through tabs in chrome which totally ruins my focus.

To solve this, I built [https://mmap.it](https://mmap.it) \- a short cut driven note taking tool that allows you to save and search without context switching.</comment>


CV Dazzle: Camouflage from Face Detection - <AUTHOR> https://cvdazzle.com/ <comment><USER2> I haven't seen this in science fiction before. That's exciting.

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of similar looks I saw around 8th St. and CBGBs in the 80s. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't fool thermal imagers, and other imaging technologies, but it's a start. I'm not going out looking like that though ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Relevant: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bRScmwXJ4s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bRScmwXJ4s)

It's a presentation from Defcon 18 about the capabilities and limitations of facial recognition.</comment>


How to Land the Space Shuttle from Space - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb4prVsXkZU <comment><USER2> Very informative! I especially liked the animations and comedic delivery. Both of these methods really made the information relatable and memorable. Excellent stuff. Thanks for the post.</comment>


PC-NFS 3.0.1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.os2museum.com/wp/pc-nfs-3-0-1/ <comment><USER2> PC-NFS let us do our DOS/Windows builds on our Sparcstations using a cross compiler. We did our builds on SunOS and could keep our source repository on SCCS.

I still have the retail box and manuals!</comment>


PySceneDetect – A tool for detecting scenes in movies - <AUTHOR> https://pyscenedetect.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/command-line-params/ <comment><USER2> My PhD (before 10+ years) was in video search and one of the proposed methods for video comparison was using the shot durations of the video. Notice that with _shots_ I refer to cuts in the camera flow, IIRC hollywood movies have a such a shot cut every 4 seconds as an average (for example when two people talk the camera will move from one person to the other).

I remember that I used two techniques for extracting scene cuts:

* Difference in the brightness (Y) histogram of the YUV video between frames; when that difference is more than a threshold there's a scene cut

* Counting the number of Intra macroblocks per frame on an H.264 encoded video; if that number was more than a threshold then there's a scene cut

<comment><USER3> Author of PySceneDetect here. The current implementation does exactly what you hint at, except instead of YUV, it considers deltas in the HSV domain (specifically differences in hue and color).

Other techniques being considered for future work include use of optical flow, background subtraction, and analyzing histograms.

<comment><USER2> From what I remember the Y (luma) component in a YUV video has more information than the other two components and it could also be extracted without the need to fully decompress the video (in mpeg compressed videos). Of course this info is more than 10 years old (I don't really do any video research any more) so I guess there should have been progress in that area.

<comment><USER3> This is indeed correct, I'm just using HSV instead of YUV, but the primary source of information is the luma/brightness component (although currently all 3 of the HSV components are averaged, so perhaps a better weighting may improve precision).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can the link be changed to the home page of the docs instead of the CLI params one? [https://pyscenedetect.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://pyscenedetect.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

<comment><USER5> Am I stupid, or is it really hard to get from a readthedocs page to the github repo it is generated from.

It seems like the only way to do it is click edit, get an error message and then hit backspace in the url to get to the root of the repository.

<comment><USER3> Author of PySceneDetect here. Sorry about that, this is one thing I never figured out how to fix with the generated documentation yet.

Now that you mention it, I might ask the Readthedocs folks to see if they have any idea why this is happening.

<comment><USER6> Even if that is fixed, a link to the repo on the left column[1] would be nice. Maybe you don't want to edit that page, just encountered the docs first, e.g. from HN :D. This project sounds pretty interesting, I'll take a look!

[1]See e.g. docs of requests: [https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/master/](https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/master/)

<comment><USER3> Great idea, will give that a shot - thanks for the suggestion! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Author of PySceneDetect here: Thank you all for the thought-provoking discussions, and the attention you've given my side project. There are some specific cases where PySceneDetect achieves great accuracy (like fast cuts or fades), and some where it's currently not so good at (like sudden flashes or large obstructions). That being said I do want to track these things and come up with solutions to improve the robustness of the content detection algorithm over time.

I'm most open to any feedback or feature requests/ideas/suggestions; feel free to checkout the issue tracker on Github, or create a new entry:

[https://github.com/Breakthrough/PySceneDetect/issues](https://github.com/Breakthrough/PySceneDetect/issues)

Some ideas being considered/researched for future releases:

\- looking at changes to image histograms

\- using edge detection to improve robustness

\- camera flash / foreground object suppression

\- automatic threshold detection using statistical methods (currently is just a heuristic)

<comment><USER7> So this is likely beyond the scope of your project, but I've always thought a really good project would be a website to host scene indexes for movies and TV.

Eg. Let's say that you wanted to watch a prerecorded football game or baseball game without all the commercials, timeouts, commentators talking about the fans, etc.

Or... Let's say that you wanted to re-cut a movie in a certain way, by re- ordering the scenes, you could just generate a new scene data file and let the encoder/player use that.

<comment><USER3> This is still relevant I think :) What you mentioned is very similar to an edit decision list (EDL [1]), of which I only learned recently. I had a feature request [2] to support EDL as an ouptut format, and upon further investigation, it seems like the format is very similar to what you're talking about. The Wikipedia page also indicates that VLC supports xspf files, but I haven't done much research into that yet ("XML Shareable Playlist Format").

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_decision_list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_decision_list)

[2] [https://github.com/Breakthrough/PySceneDetect/issues/101](https://github.com/Breakthrough/PySceneDetect/issues/101)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So I can look forward to a "Next scene" shortcut in my video player of choice soon? (Without needing embedded "DVD" chapters) While also getting nice thumbnails for them?

Pornhub et al often show scene markers, but I have assumed they're manual or extracted in the same way as DVD chapters.

</comment><comment><USER9> Tested it out on an anime episode to see if it could detect accurately when the opening and closing credits play. It seemed to be able to detect the ending of both even with a high threshold, but it didn't really detect the start. And with a low threshold, it gave me like 350 chapters for a 22 minute video, which seemed a bit excessive.

<comment><USER3> Hi Hamuko;

Would you be able to share a small sub-set of the episode, in particular the area where you're unable to detect the starting segment? (If not, no worries!)

There's a few issues with PySceneDetect currently that may lead to false or missed detections, but these are things that I would like to solve in the long run:

\- threshold is heuristic/fixed right now, but I would like to change it to an adaptive/statistical method which can dynamically change

\- single-frame events can trigger false scene changes

Thanks for your feedback, and feel free to share any other suggestions you might have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Little off topic..

I'm trying to help a friend in media industry. His requirement is ability to identify different voice in a movie and have the output time stamped - Ex. Voice A: 00.00.00sec - 00.05.30sec, Voice B: 00.05.31 - 00.06.30, etc.

It would be very helpful if anyone can point to any tools that exists that can do that (open source or otherwise).

<comment><USER11> AWS offer this for $1.44ph

<comment><USER10> Thanks. Are you referring to Transcribe? [https://aws.amazon.com/transcribe/](https://aws.amazon.com/transcribe/)

Transcribe seems to be more for speech-to-text irrespective to who is making the speech.

Here the requirement is to identify the unique voices. Ex. if "Mary had a little lamb" is voiced by two different voices then the engine should identify Voice A said "Mary" at 00.00.00sec-00.00.01sec and then Voice B said "had a little" at 0.00.02sec-00.00.03sec, then Voice A again said "lamb".. etc.

<comment><USER12> From your link:

 _Recognize Multiple Speakers

Amazon Transcribe is able to recognize when the speaker changes and attribute the transcribed text appropriately. This can significantly reduce the amount of work needed to transcribe audio with multiple speakers like telephone calls, meetings, and television shows._

So they claim to be able to do it. However, having to do speaker diarization doesn't exactly make speech recognition easier, so you should adjust your expectations regarding the error rate accordingly.

<comment><USER10> Duh. It was right there.

But thanks; on doing little bit of search on 'speech diarization' saw that Google Cloud has that service. [https://cloud.google.com/speech-to- text/docs/multiple-voices](https://cloud.google.com/speech-to- text/docs/multiple-voices)

And then came across this comparison between various cloud transcription service, which should be helpful for evaluating on diarization aspect as well.

AI-POWERED TRANSCRIPTION SERVICES SHOWDOWN: AWS VS. GOOGLE VS. IBM WATSON VS. NUANCE [https://www.armedia.com/blog/transcription-services-aws- goog...](https://www.armedia.com/blog/transcription-services-aws-google-ibm- nuance/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've used this tool for breaking up movie trailers and old Vines. I really didn't like the output quality.

I ended up using optical flow and key frame information instead.

<comment><USER3> Hi genp;

Just curious, what didn't you like about the output quality? What version of PySceneDetect were you using?

The latest version (v0.5.x) uses ffmpeg instead of mkvmerge for output by default now, which produces significantly more accurate and higher quality output than before.

That being said, you are correct in that optical flow and keyframe information is currently not being used during the detection phase. There are several proposals to incorporate this into a future release, however, along with several other techniques: \- histogram analysis \- edge detection \- background subtraction \- automatic or dynamic threshold detection

Thanks for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This was my assignment in the "artificial intelligence" course I took at my University in Naples (Italy) in 2003. My NN could recognise scenes cuts with about 50% probability :)

</comment><comment><USER15> a Film is a collection of shots, scenes and sequences. Shots are fairly easy to detect. Most editing software comes with built in shot detection.

This approach promises to detect scenes. I'm not enough of a coder to know if it is valid, but I can certainly imagine that it is a solvable problem. Most scenes are defined by location, and movies makers like each locatation to be distinct from the preceding one.

To my mind, sequences are where the action is at. Sequences are defined by narrative development... These can usually be defined by a trained human, but are probably tough to computationly define.

There is also a huge difference between film genres. The scenes and sequences of Finding Nemo are pretty easy to define. But you try the same approach on an art house film like The Scent of Green Papaya, and see how far you get.

[https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/movie- storystruc...](https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/movie- storystructure/finding-nemo/)

<comment><USER16> Detecting scenes seems incredibly difficult to me. Even in a basic edit you could have back to back shots looking at very different parts of a single set. Take the "Jack Rabbit Slims" scene from Pulp Fiction - Vincent Vega walking through the diner, the car table head to head scene about the milkshake with linking cuts around the diner when they discuss the two Marilyns, and the beginning of the Twist competition are three scenes that use the same location, actors, background, etc. Finding the boundaries would be very hard.

<comment><USER17> One approach might be to estimate the intrinsic parameters of the camera based on keypoint tracking. Assuming the camera was adjusted between shots, you might be able to get that to work.

Or you could make some kind of generic feature vector from each frame that includes contrast, etc. The interiors are the same, but the camera focus/fov will likely be different.

Nowadays just take an annotated movie and throw it into an encoder/decoder network to assess if a frame is from the same scene?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Odd, scene differentiations often seemed like arbitrary slices just meant for trying to get to a certain point in the movie, long ago when I'd look at them on DVD's. Not something where you could objectively say "this is where one scene ends and another begins" and others would come to the same conclusion on their own.

</comment><comment><USER19> Can it detect subliminal frames? Would an adequate threshold also lead to many false positives (triggering on any brutal massive change, for example a blast- inducing explosion)?

<comment><USER20> You could differentiate single-frame inserted "subliminal" (like the ones in Fight Club) images from other flashy things like explosions, by the fact that the frames right before _and_ after the flash should be nearly identical or very similar. While after an explosion, things usually changed a bit.

<comment><USER3> This is definitely a good idea, and something that I'm most open to considering for a future release of PySceneDetect. Admittedly the current version does not handle single-frame "upsets" like this, but this does seem like a logical and reasonable approach to a first attempt at filtering them out.

<comment><USER21> I would do an exponential smoothing of pixel values over some timescale, say, 0.2 seconds, before further detection of scene changes. That should do the trick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Testing with some older black and white shows, results aren't accurate to catch fades-to-black. Any options I should be playing with?

<comment><USER3> Thanks for giving PySceneDetect a try. Can you share what you're using as the command line arguments?

For detecting fades-to-black, you want to make sure that you're using the detect-threshold command (not detect-content). For example:

        scenedetect -i somevideo.mp4 detect-threshold -t 12 list-scenes

Where -t specifies the threshold to use (the default being a value of 12). Full documentation for the detect-threshold command:

[https://pyscenedetect- manual.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cli/de...](https://pyscenedetect- manual.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cli/detectors.html#detect-threshold)</comment></comment>


Meego is being subsumed by Tizen (LiMo, Samsung and Intel) - <AUTHOR> https://meego.com/community/blogs/imad/2011/whats-next-meego

<comment><USER2> This is a pretty bad way to abandon a project.

They didn't mention Qt once in their announcement despite Meego including a: Easy to use, flexible and powerful UI/app development environment based on Qt

Just read the comments to feel the anger of the developers. It is just really disrespectful to obviously not address/acknowledge the concerns of your own developer community. Shame.

I'm glad I'm not in that boat.

</comment><comment><USER3> From GTK, to QT, to HTML5. I'm noticing a trend here- spend several years developing a platform, and once it is starting to show some promise switch toolkits and restart from scratch!

</comment><comment><USER4> Maemo -> Meego -> Tizen

When will this end and we get a 'finished' product instead of starting from scratch again and again?

Maybe iteration is just too slow and results in the current project being completely outdated before it's even done.

<comment><USER5> It's worse than that. Maemo was a complete, working system, with pretty damn nice dev tools, multi-paradigm, multi-language, with several devices on the market, each iteration bringing huge improvements. It had a living, active community that kept on building cool stuff. Meego had a single half-hearted device release and hardly any support for developers, other than what the maemo community could provide. And now Tizen is all-vapor, no community, no code, and seems to restrict development into an html+js model, which, while nice for some people, alienates all other forms of development. Also, no device support (intel and samsung are muttering that they'll do something with it, but nothing to show so far) and no future perspective. The Tizen website does not mention meego (or maemo) once, signaling again it's more of a departure than a continuation.

So every "iteration" has ended up with a smaller community, less devices, less substance, less support and less perspective. I miss maemo.

<comment><USER6> Well, as I have written in other comment Harmattan =! MeeGo. Nokia has started shipping N9 yesterday - you can still have your maemo.

P.S. N950 is great as well but it is quite hard to get one I guess :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hope that Canonical fork Meego so it can live on in some form.

</comment><comment><USER8> It seems like a reaction to boot2gecko

</comment><comment><USER9> Samsung wanted webOS, but they didn't want to pay for webOS, so they go to Intel and persuade them to dump Meego to build "a web OS". I remember reading somewhere that Samsung was interested in "a web OS". Instead of going to the OS that has a million devices, start from scratch for cheap. Great.</comment>


Origin of Quake3's Fast InvSqrt() - <AUTHOR> http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/

<comment><USER2> when you use code that obfuscatory, wouldn't you want to give a comment explaining its origin and where to go for further info? i never understood why the origin of any piece of code that shipped in a major game from a high- profile development team would ever be hard to track down.

you should know who added it, when, and why (the code should be self- explanatory, or be refactored, or a comment should be provided for cutesy performance hacks like this).

<comment><USER3> This code was written when the software industry looked very different. Particularly, the teams were super tiny, and cleverness won out over code clarity every time due to the relatively weak computation power that was readily accessible. I would have been surprised to hear that any of the dirty/genius hacks found in apps written in the 80's and early 90's was well documented.

That good sqrt code made it into Quake 3 from previous codebases is also not surprising. If it ain't broke...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a short follow up that identifies the author too: <http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/15/></comment>


Clive Thompson on the Death of the Phone Call - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/st_thompson_deadphone

<comment><USER2> Bring it on. I hate phones.

I make very few phone calls, and if only my crazy-ass plan wouldn't charge me for SMS when the phone calls are free, I'd make even fewer.

<comment><USER3> ATT accidentally turned off SMS on my phone. I use Google Voice (android), so I just enabled SMS checking. Saves me up to $20/mo, though I do need to be somewhere with data service to get a message through.

To me, the phone is a mobile data platform that has a neat voice feature my grandma likes to use sometimes.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Equity and Funding - <AUTHOR>

Jack launches a startup, incorporates it and issues 1M shares, all of which go to him since he's the sole founder. He approaches VC firms for funding and a firm agrees to fund the startup in exchange for 30% or 300K shares. Does this money go to Jack (since he owns the shares)? Shouldn't it go to the company?<p>How does this work exactly? <comment><USER2> When a VC firm funds a company, they aren't buying existing shares -- they're buying newly created shares. Before being funded, the company has 1M shares outstanding, and Jack owns all of them. After funding, the company has 1,428,571 shares outstanding; Jack still owns 1M shares (which is now 70%), but the VC owns 428,571 newly issued shares (30% of the total) which it bought from the company for $300k.

In reality it's a bit more complicated because VCs employ a swindle called an "options pool", but that's not the issue in question here.

PG runs through a simple example of how this works in his How to Fund a Startup essay: <http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank You! Finally, a reply. Any resources online where I can read up on this process?

P.S. Since you mentioned it, what's an 'options pool'?

<comment><USER2> _Any resources online where I can read up on this process?_

Stick around on HN and you'll see lots of links to angel investors, VCs, and other startup people explaining all this.

 _what's an 'options pool'?_

The idea is that you give your employees options (or often restricted stock) so that they have a stake in the company's success. For legal reasons, the creation of any new stock must be authorized by the board of directors, and they don't want to meet every time someone new gets hired; so instead they authorize a pool of stock and tell the CEO to go ahead and hand it out. So far, so good.

The swindle comes here: VCs usually insist on the creation or expansion of an options pool before investing, and _count the unissued stock as part of the valuation_. Rather than paying $300k to buy 428571 shares and ending up holding 30% of the company, a VC might insist on the creation of a 20% options pool, with the result that Jack owns 1M shares (50%), there are 400k authorized but unissued shares in the pool (20%), and the VC gets 600k shares (30%) for his $300k.

Because those shares _don't actually exist yet_ , the VC actually owns 600k / 1.6M = 37.5% of the company, even though he nominally only bought 30%.

<comment><AUTHOR> But when those 400K shares are created and issued to the employees, won't the VC's share get diluted to 30%?

<comment><USER2> Yes -- just like they would diluted in the next round of investment. (And really, employees working for sub-market salaries in exchange for stock options are just another type of investor.)

But the founders get diluted too. In the no-pool case, the founders have 70% of the company post-investment, whereas in the 20%-pool case, the founders have 62.5% and get diluted down to 50% as the pool is handed out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah. So the time of creation of the options pool doesn't matter, since eventually the founders get down to 50%. It's a matter of whether the options pool should be created in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The company almost always issues new shares. Investors would want the capital to be injected into the company as working capital, not to enrich the founder.</comment>


Show HN: My first Web App, Doubles As An Internship Application - <AUTHOR> http://www.ascend17.com/heyibec.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, guys looking for feedback on this one, I thought it would be pretty funny, and demonstrate a lot of my new, self-taught skills, but I was wondering what HN thought. I know the timer function is a bit askew - <USER2> on it. But I just did this over the weekend and some spare hours this week. Any bug reports would be great as well...IE Explorer people -- im sorry.

<comment><USER3> Opera user here. Site looks quite torn apart here as well. I always have sympathy if there are design elements that are challenging, but the layout looks quite straight forward. So you better have a good reason not having invested $5 in some guy for fixing your Css ;) Plus the timer jumps back and forth to random numbers such as "2:1:17:10" or "15533287:1:13:47". Switching to Firefox and still there are some odd layers linking to some Fonts site plus some embedded YouTube video? Bid Now button seems to be not working. And is there any way to "experience" your skills without pulling out my credit card? Otherwise neat idea but you should be able to polish it up more. And I assume you are sending some CV along with the site?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, thanks it's supposed to be a bit fun, and the payment gateway was only implemented to demonstrate that I could implement one, although Stripe made that really easy to do.</comment></comment></comment>


Gem Versioning and Bundler: Doing it Right - <AUTHOR> http://yehudakatz.com/2011/05/30/gem-versioning-and-bundler-doing-it-right/

<comment><USER2> Found out that this is critically important when using Padrino 0.9.29 and Mongoid 2.0.2</comment>


A Tesla Model X beat a Lamborghini in a drag race - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1058488/a-tesla-model-x-p100d-beat-a-530000-lamborghini-aventador-sv-in-a-drag-race-and-may-have-set-an-suv-speed-record-in-the-process/ <comment><USER2> On short straight line teslas will leave most combustion engine cars in the dust, but it seems that Teslas can't handle more than a lap or two without overheating.

[http://www.thedrive.com/news/5207/this-video-reminds-us- that...](http://www.thedrive.com/news/5207/this-video-reminds-us-that-the- tesla-model-s-is-an-awful-track-car)

Anyway, 99% will never race a car, so it is not that important. Lamborghinis are probably used in the track more by their owners than your average Teslas will be.

<comment><USER3> Isn't there software on the Tesla that throttles back performance if you launch it enough?

<comment><USER4> There used to be, but it was removed after customers found out about it and complained. Now you get a warning and big disclaimer, but it isn't limited.

Source (and plenty others if you google): [http://insideevs.com/tesla-remove- launch-power-restrictions/](http://insideevs.com/tesla-remove-launch-power- restrictions/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've yet to come across a situation in normal traffic where > 100 HP wasn't wasteful.

If you want to see electric cars beating ICEs in drag racing look no further than White Zombie:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rVTIpS5zb4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rVTIpS5zb4)

Which makes for some very comical footage. I'm quite sure White Zombie would absolutely smoke a Lamborghini and maybe it would do the same with a Tesla.

Takeoff is around 0:40 in that video, blink and you'll miss it.

</comment><comment><USER6> A couple of points worth highlighting:

1\. The Lamborghini can sustain this level of performance whereas the Tesla can't. So even if the Tesla can beat the Lamborghini within this particular set of constraints, it won't beat the Lamborghini in any sustained racing environment.

2\. The Lamborghini Aventador SV weighs roughly 3,800 lbs, whereas the Tesla Model X weighs roughly 5,300 lbs. Really impressive for such a heavy car to beat a much lighter car even in a drag race.

3\. There's a conversation to be had here about the practical value of acceleration over ability to reach top speeds and sustain them - especially on normal roads and in daily life. One can argue that rapid acceleration and a top speed of 90 is far more valuable/useful than slower acceleration and a top speed of 200.

<comment><USER5> Rapid acceleration isn't all that important. In daily driving nobody floors it as if they're in a drag race simply because there is other traffic to contend with and guys in cars with flashing lights that will make your life miserable if they see you doing the same to others.

Most acceleration in traffic is quite gentle, better for occupants (kids, grandma, spouse) and it makes your car more predictable to other drivers.

<comment><USER6> I like your point about making the car predictable for other drivers. I hadn't considered that but intuitively it makes total sense to me.

Maybe the reality is that all of our cars are overpowered for 99% of usage. But if there was an attribute that could be put to use on the road, acceleration makes sense because you legally can't go above 90mph in most places.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, did anyone look at the time slip?

Slip #1: The Tesla showed 11.468 and the Lamborghini showed 11.307 on race one;

Slip #2: Tesla hit 11.418 while the Lamborghini shows 11.281.

A the bottom, the "Left 1st .2764" indicates the Lamborghini driver had over a quarter second slower response time.

Basically the Tesla beat the Lamborghini because the driver was slower. The second time slip shows the Lamborghini only 0.05 seconds slower response time and beating the Tesla in elapsed time.

I don't see how this is a win or am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER8> The difference is that the Lamborgini isn't only fast for a few seconds in a straight line.

</comment><comment><USER9> Only in the US is a drag race important for anything.

<comment><USER9> and i say this as a huge fan of roadkill

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a great headline for Tesla.

The point isn't whether a Tesla could beat it in a real race, etc, this is just a "brand" moment for them.

</comment><comment><USER11> Good thing "nobody" buys Tesla's for racing...

</comment><comment><USER12> How much battery drain does such a race cause?

<comment><USER13> When drag racing, the question is not how much fuel is used up, but how much car ...

<comment><USER12> so what you're saying is, regardless of gas or electric, drag racing is going to ruin your car.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Memory and Mimicry Are the Next Big Frontiers in AI - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/12/04/next-ai-frontier/ <comment><USER2> What's the difference between mimicry and supervised learning?

<comment><USER3> The method used for mimicking is not the same as the learning method in supervised learning.

From this article (which OP's article links to): [http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-12/uow- url120115...](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-12/uow- url120115.php)

> research has shown that children as young as 18 months can infer the goal of > an adult's actions and develop alternate ways of reaching that goal > themselves.

> In one example, infants saw an adult try to pull apart a barbell-shaped toy, > but the adult failed to achieve that goal because the toy was stuck together > and his hands slipped off the ends. The infants watched carefully and then > decided to use alternate methods -- they wrapped their tiny fingers all the > way around the ends and yanked especially hard -- duplicating what the adult > intended to do.

I think the idea behind mimicry is goal identification (i.e.: see human wash a single dish, and identify the goal of 'getting all dishes clean'), not 'learn the way humans would perform this task and then do it'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Relevant: Cognitive Biomimicry [http://sumve.com/biomimetic- cognition/in_silico_cognitive_bi...](http://sumve.com/biomimetic- cognition/in_silico_cognitive_biomimicry.html)</comment>


Google Will Collapse - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/forwardtick/how-google-collapsed-b6ffa82198ee <comment><USER2> Good points here. I always find it humourous when people suggest that Google is some kind of innovative tech company. Selling ads and spying on people isn't innovative tech but it is nearly the sole source of Google's income.

</comment><comment><USER3> Title should be, "This Is How Google Will Collapse (2017)"

<comment><USER4> It also says at the end : _This article was updated on May 5, 2019_</comment></comment>


United Will Not Allow Lowest-Fare Passengers to Use Overhead Bins - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/united-carry-on_us_582b3a6be4b02d21bbcab640 <comment><USER2> It's brilliant, really. You will always be the best fare when sorted by price, and most people won't realize until it's too late that there's no carry-on and the checked luggage fee makes it more expensive than the next cheapest price.

Kayak et al. need to start automatically adding the price of a checked bag to these no-carry-on fare classes.</comment>