Streak brings CRM to the inbox with Google Cloud Platform - <AUTHOR> http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/10/streak-brings-crm-to-inbox-with-google.html

<comment><USER2> Nice writeup. We've been using Streak to manage our sales process and we're pretty happy with it - by putting the CRM in email (rather than the other way 'round) it is much, much closer to the "natural" way we work.

I'm consistently surprised that Google App Engine doesn't get more pickup among the HN community. No, it's not perfect, but it lets you build and scale a system with almost zero attention to ops. Lockin? Most startups fail because they never achieve product/market fit, not because they are unhappy with their hosting provider. Less ops means more time making features.

<comment><USER3> FWIW, App Engine went through quite long periods (as in, well over a few months at a stretch) of serious scalability problems: the latency was enormous, and even by Google's own reporting standards (they had websites you could use to monitor the environment) everything was coming up red; it got so bad once that they stopped charging for the service for a while (not a day, but a couple months) until they could get it remotely operational again.

I really do not get the impression that the people on the App Engine product mailing lists actually feel like they are able to spend less time on operations, and there are numerous alternatives that let you use more standardized stacks to get similar benefits, especially if you are serving less than a few tens of millions of users (which, honestly, it is not clear App Engine would handle in practice anyway, even though in theory it would work great).

<comment><USER2> Yes, I remember the latency problems with the old Master/Slave datastore. However, Google rolled out the High Replication Datastore almost two years ago and the M/S option has since been deprecated. The HRD has had an excellent track record; nobody complains about the datastore anymore. It's actually pretty remarkable how much appengine has evolved in the last few years, especially compared to other PaaS offerings.

When things go wrong (and they still occasionally do - on every platform), I'm one of the more vocal critics on the GAE mailing list. However, the zero-ops promise has held up pretty well. There's always something to complain about, but isn't it.

Also, that last statement is a little puzzling. GAE already handles tens of millions of users (probably considerably more) in shared infrastructure. The typical bottleneck (the database) isn't an issue because the database is already federated across every app in the system; you don't have to scale dedicated resources.

<comment><USER3> My final comment is per-user: it is clear that Google can handle tons of separated users, but their data store transaction model has some centralized bottlenecks that alternatives either don't or that can be worked around with some not-difficult work. Scalong tons of integrated users isn't a problem, honestly (and to be clear: they seem to be using less shared infrastructure over time, which is the explanation for their recent pricing changes).

The real issue is that people don understand that scaling challenges really aren't that bad until you have _tons_ of users; in the few millions of clients range you can very easily handle the traffic with one or two centralized RDBMS systems (and in fact, this is how many sites actually work in practice, even large ones you use daily).

<comment><USER2> There are only two limits you have to watch out for when working with the datastore, and they're both fairly well documented:

* You must be careful of entity group boundaries. This ends up being fairly easy to do, especially with cross-group transactions (added last year). It's definitely a design consideration, but one you internalize very quickly and as long as you don't screw up your database design, isn't a scaling bottleneck.

* Tablet splitting. If you write monotonically increasing values to one index at high rates (1k/s is what I've heard, but I haven't hit it myself) you may have to work around this issue by federating the index. It's not pretty, but it's not a common problem.

I agree that traditional RDBMS architectures can handle quite a lot of traffic before they hit a wall. It's just a lot more ops work. What I like about GAE- land is that you just have to be a little more careful in your data modeling and you can stop worrying about all the usual problems like monitoring the performance of your database server. I've built rather large sites on RDBMSes in the past, and getting the ops right was always painful.

<comment><USER3> >... especially with cross-group transactions (added last year)...

Thanks for mentioning this: I didn't know they had added this feature; that definitely makes some of the data modeling problems easier. Without this, I found it often led to situations where you had to make horribly painful decisions that affected both functionality and scalability very early on in your project lest you end up with tons of data that you now have to programmatically and mostly manually migrate (which is why, to me, I keep being surprised that you keep mentioning ops challenges for normal databases: with the ability to do global schema and index changes concurrently and safely inside of transactions, I found the amount of time and thought I need to put into managing something like PostgreSQL a fraction of most alternatives that supposedly scale better).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My biggest complaint with google appengine is that they don't send you an email when you start reaching your usage quotas. I hope someone from AppEngine sees this. Otherwise it's been great. ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> What's the state of Clojure on App Engine? I want to build a Clojure app on App Engine, but it's unclear if Clojure and App Engine play well together.

For example, in a recent blog post, Adrian Mouat said that App Engine doesn't support Clojure concurrency, such as agents ([http://www.adrianmouat.com/bit- bucket/2012/08/clojure-and-go...](http://www.adrianmouat.com/bit- bucket/2012/08/clojure-and-google-app-engine/)). However, GAE Java supports threads as of the App Engine 1.6.4 release ([http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/wiki/SdkForJavaRele...](http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/wiki/SdkForJavaReleaseNotes)).

Is the Clojure concurrency model fully supported on App Engine? ([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12772824/is-clojure- concu...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12772824/is-clojure-concurrency- support-still-disabled-on-app-engine))

App Engine Magic (<https://github.com/gcv/appengine-magic>) is a library that makes it easier to use GAE with Clojure, but it hasn't been updated since GAE SDK 126.96.36.199.

There is also gaeshi (<https://github.com/slagyr/gaeshi>), which is a newer GAE library for Clojure that's a little easier to work with, but it doesn't have much documentation or cover all the services.

Does anyone have experience on how using Clojure on App Engine plays out in practice and any advice on which path to take?</comment>


Intel Atom versus ARM Cortex-A9 - <AUTHOR> http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222200621 <comment><USER2> I am curious, given the amount of memory that we can put in smaller and smaller devices, is there a clear 64-bit migration for the ARM like the Atoms already have? It seems we will be exceeding 4GB of RAM in devices in the the not to distant future.

<comment><USER3> I don't know, but if we stick to running open-source Unix-like software, it should be trivial to switch architectures when needed. Most software I use already has actively maintained ports to 64-bit architectures since the mid 90's.

I have several mid-to-late-90's RISC workstations (I restore and collect them) that have 64-bit processors and OSs in them. 64-bit computing is news only to the x86 world.

With about 1.5 gigs on my Atom-based netbook, it hardly hits the swap partition unless I am running Windows on a VM session.

<comment><USER4> I believe the question is more to do with the hardware options. Going to 64-bit will require a great deal more silicon area with a consequent increase in power consumption, which tends to go against the ARM philosophy (indeed, the later ARM instruction sets have gone more in the direction of 16bit).

<comment><USER3> There is no real need to migrate to 64-bit unless you need to cleanly address more than 4 GB of memory. The case for the x86 migration to 64-bits was not so much the extra memory space, but the extra registers. ARM always had plenty of them.

More to the point, moving ARM to 64-bits is relatively simple - and the ARM cores are so small even if you had twice the silicon area for that (a worse than worst-case-scenario) you would end up with a core that is still a fraction the size of a tiny x86. A Cortex core occupies less than 2 square millimeters.

With cache.

<comment><USER4> Ah, Cortex ...

Cortex is the branding for the ARM implementations of the ARM v7 Architecture. A brand was chosen for the first time because historically, even numbered ARM cores don't sell well (ARM8, anyone? ARM10?), so the next core after the ARM11 would have had to skip to ARM13. But 13 is unlucky. So that's ARM15 then... In addition, it would be very easy for the ARM v7 architecture to be confusd with the ARM7TDMI implementation of the ARM v4 architecture.

The grand plan was to bring out new cores in V7 targetting three distinct market segments - Applications, Realtime and Microcontrollers (see what they did there?!), with very different performance points and feature sets. Thus, the Cortex M3 has a die size of 0.86mm2 on a 180nm process, but that's a weedy core. The A8 has a die size of a bit under 4mm2 on a 65nm (albeit speed optimised) process, without the ETM included.

So, I'm not quite sure what core you are talking about - but it is also the case that the Atom die does contain a significant number of perhiperals and busses.

A 64-bit ARM won't have a problem beating an x64 processor in terms of MIPS/Watt, I'm fairly sure.

Edit - I should have explained that the number following the A/R/M is meant to indicate performance and not be a version number. The A5 and A9 both came out after the A8, for example - the ARM market isn't about increasing performance with every design, but ensuring a good fit for a design envelope.

<comment><USER3> "So, I'm not quite sure what core you are talking about"

<http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM_Cortex-R4F.html>

Whatever that is. I am no ARM expert.

Edit: I think this one would be better. The R is for real-time applications

<http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARMCortex-A9_MPCore.html>

This other one (<http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM_Cortex-A8.html>) is about 4 mm2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FTA> "As form factors shrink power efficiency and battery life will increasingly drive market success."

I hope it does work out like that, because cheap Linux-only hardware will only help Linux adoption! However I still think this is incorrect. You can already get a netbook with more than one useful day's battery life, which means you can always plug it in overnight. There are people who need more but that's a fairly small niche.

x86 compatibility is a much bigger deal. The percentage of netbooks sold with Linux has dropped from 100% to somewhere between 33% and 4% (sources: [http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsexperience/archive/2...](http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsexperience/archive/2009/04/03/windows- on-netbook-pcs-a-year-in-review.aspx) and <http://www.osnews.com/story/22587> ).

That's still not a bad number, especially if it's closer to 33%, but it does put ARM in the position of at best trying to win a market within a market.

On top of that there's a question of how much further form factors are really going to shrink. Keyboards can only get so small, and we are already seeing a trend towards _bigger_ net books - not smaller.

Finally, they are comparing against the old single processor atoms, not the new dual core atoms that are already available.

That still leaves ARM with a potential advantage in the tablet market, where there is a lot less space for batteries and the software stack is better concealed. But the fate of the tablet market is still in doubt.

<comment><AUTHOR> You do need to be a little careful looking at netbook market share and size statistics because Microsoft decided they could not cede that market to linux. As a result, they have distorted the market by licensing WinXP (and now Win7?) at an attractive price point and added laptop/netbook size and speed criteria to discourage low end netbooks.

<comment><USER4> "As a result, they have distorted the market by licensing WinXP (and now Win7?) at an attractive price point and added laptop/netbook size and speed criteria to discourage low end netbooks."

How is selling their software at an attractive price to the market classed as distortion?

<comment><USER5> Because in my opinion it looks awfully close to dumping that is being cross- subsidized by their profitable laptop and desktop monopoly.

"Microsoft charges local OEMs $32 for XP Home on netbooks, compared to around $65 for XP Home on desktops. Large OEMs are believed to pay much less." <http://www.crn.com/software/212902058>

<comment><USER4> Surely it is only dumping when selling below cost? I can't imagine that MS is losing money on this.

Charging differing prices for different market segments is a reasonable business practice, and it could be argued that Linux is the OS that is distorting the market, seeing that there's no licensing fee at all involved. :)

<comment><USER5> With software it's really hard to say what below cost actually is. Amortized fixed cost, or just the variable cost?

If you are talking about the latter then no, it's probably not dumping. If you are looking at the former I bet it's not so clear cut. WinXP development and all of the associated cost (such as the loss-making products like IE that help keep WinXP in it's market position) would have been pretty expensive - and the expenditure is still going on today thanks to things like security support and IE upgrades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The video is designed to convince you that the ARM system is just as fast as the Atom system. But they don't present evidence to support this. They only demonstrate that the ARM is sufficient to do basic web browsing. I want to see a demo playing something that actually taxes the CPU, e.g. Quake2. Then we'll see what's better.

If it's all about "just fast enough to view the BBC", then what prevents Intel from scaling the Atom back to 500MHz?

PS: What is the graphic "accelerator" in the intel system?

<comment><USER7> _They only demonstrate that the ARM is sufficient to do basic web browsing._

That is impressive, considering that the ARM Cortex A8 was _not_ sufficient. They have gone from "not good enough" to "good enough".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Even more notable is that the Intel-based netbook is running at 1.6-GHz clock frequency the dual-core Cortex-A9 development is running at 500-MHz._

I don't get why people keep saying this. One is x86-based, the other is ARM- based. Why should you be able to compare cpu frequency? Is it notable that a Core 2 processor performs better at 3.2GHz than a P4? And that's even in the same general CPU architecture.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the core of the power vs. speed trade-off. Since the ARM is getting roughly the same amount of work done at 1/3 the gross clock frequency, it has a _substantial_ advantage in producing a lower power implementation.

Intel has been very clever (read "spends a _lot_ of money") in their process to make it run faster at a given power level, but their legacy architecture is a major millstone around their low power aspirations.

There are two aspects of power consumption in digital electronics:

1) Static power (leakage)

2) Dynamic power (cost of switching state)

The static power is what the part consumes while sitting idle. As a gross generalization, optimizing for execution speed typically hurts static power (you end up with more leakage to facilitate faster switching speeds). Note that smaller geometries help speed, but hurt leakage. Semi manufactures, including Intel, fight this by being more clever with their process, doing things like SOI (IBM/Freescale, also AMD?) and high-K insulation (the latest "hotness", if you pardon my pun).

Dynamic power is the cost of switching transistors on and off, of toggling interconnects high and low. This is largely a capacitive charge/discharge effect. Every time you switch a transistor gate or drive a transmission line, you have to push charge onto or drain charge off of the gate or line. It costs power to do this. It costs more power to do this faster.

CPU speed can also have "knock-on" effects throughout the system. Faster CPUs (typically) have or need faster memories and other peripherals. If the memories are slow, for instance, the CPU spends a _lot_ of its time waiting for cache lines to be filled or emptied. Intel helps this by having larger caches, but caches cost power too - bigger caches have more leakage (1) and faster caches cost more for dynamic power (2).

Intel is working hard to make a low power x86 architecture and succeeding to some extent, but they have to do a lot of brute forcing to overcome their legacy CPU architecture.

Like martial arts, your strength (x86 ISA and their legacy of emphasizing raw clock rate) can become your weakness if your opponent can figure out how to use it against you.

<comment><USER6> I liked your post, but you didn't explain at all why a legacy x86 ISA has anything at all to do with either static or dynamic power.

<comment><USER4> The x86 ISA has significant complexity to it. The essence of the problem is that the logic required to decode x86 instructions (originally designed to be featureful for assembly programmers' convenience) is large, compared to that required for the ARM ISA which was designed to be decoded in an efficient manner.

That further logic certainly increases static power in terms of the extra area used, and also increases the dynamic power as more translation is required to get from an x86 instruction to the hardware control signals (I believe that the central part of the Atom effectively runs a different ISA translated from the x86 ISA via microcode).

<comment><USER6> What percentage of an Atom is devoted to decode? Atom is around 45 million transistors. The PPro which also decoded to mini-RISC had 5 million. Somehow I don't think the Atom is really burning that much space/power on decode.

You and gvb seem to imply that an ARM (RISC) chip which does less work per instruction somehow does more work per clock. I find that surprising. Otherwise, what is meant by the "emphasize raw clock rate" comment?

<comment><USER9> The Cortex-A9 executes more instructions per clock because it can decode more than one instruction at a time (2 to 4, usually 4) and execute them out of order to get more instruction-level parallelism. Atom can decode a maximum of two instructions at a time, and executes them in order.

The Atom also uses precious pipeline stages on decoding the x86 instruction set -- all of it. There are a lot of instructions there, and all but the most common require the processor to read sequences of several micro-instructions from a ROM.

Now, the Atom tries to compensate for this with Hyperthreading: they share the decode unit among two threads (hypothetically) and have those threads share the execution units on the chip. This gives Atom a boost in performance per watt if you can find two processes that need to run at the same time. For single-threaded workloads, Cortex-A9 looks like it will continue to trounce Atom pretty severely, and for multi-threaded workloads, it's not expensive to put down some more A9 cores. It's not like they have to decode x86 instructions or anything, so they can be pretty darn small.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Get a liberal arts B.A., not a business B.A., for the coming artisan economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/get-a-liberal-arts-b-a-not-a-business-b-a-for-the-coming-artisan-economy/

<comment><USER2> There are some good points here about there being a future in the job market for humans doing things that computers can't (the article defines "artisan" in terms of "personal flair"), but I think the Harvard prof being interviewed is trying a bit too hard to justify the applicability of a traditional liberal arts education to those sorts of jobs.

</comment><comment><USER3> let's do the fork in the garbage disposal! let's do the fork in the garbage disposal!</comment>


Launch HN: Jika (YC S20) – Price A/B Testing for Shopify - <AUTHOR> Hi all! I'm Kennan and I recently founded Jika (https://jika.ai). Jika helps Shopify sellers A/B test their product pricing so they can make more money.
Let's say you sell shoes on Shopify for $100 and want to test $110. You'd 1-click install the Jika Shopify App and go to a dashboard where you select and start a test for $110. We then handle the heavy lifting of showing price A to 50% of your visitors and price B to the other 50%. As the test is running, Jika keeps track of revenue, conversions, and visitors at each price point. You'd repeat this process as much as you can since the optimal price for a product is always changing.
Up until now, most people have priced off competitors, but that doesn't cut it anymore with big companies getting more and more sophisticated. A prime example of this is Amazon accelerating their development of in-house brands (~640 in late 2019) and using their dataset to outprice other online sellers (2.5m price changes per day in 2013 and more today).
One recent test of a best selling product for a Shopify brand doing 1M+ monthly revenue resulted in a data significant ~10% revenue lift from a -7% price. This better price for the best selling product translates to a ~30k+ monthly revenue increase (~180k+ revenue over 6 months).
I chose to work on pricing because I love optimization. Past optimization includes dropping out of college after 1 year to be a growth (A/B testing) engineer at Pinterest for 3 years and building an app for discounts + promotions at Hulu. In high school, I also optimized enough to be a top 200 player in League of Legends.
Would love to answer any questions or comments below!
PS. If you know anyone on Shopify, I'd love to help them nail down their pricing. :D <comment><USER2> I remember people used to hate finding out they were shown a different price from other people for the same product. Has this changed?

<comment><USER3> Could that problem be solved by changing the price at different times, rather than for different people in the same time interval? I wonder if that's why Amazon is making 2.5m price changes a day like the OP says above.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately this wouldn't be a proper a/b test since it'd be comparing 1 day of 1 price to another day of 1 price. Only by splitting traffic 50/50 do you properly isolate the price variable.

<comment><USER3> Why can't the time slices be much shorter, say 15 minutes rather than a whole day?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Keep in mind that Amazon does dynamic pricing already so it's already commonplace to not always get the same price."

(from [https://jika.ai/faq/](https://jika.ai/faq/) )

"Amazon also does something" doesn't mean that's right. As one of the biggest cloud providers, AWS is widely recognized for its complicated pricing model. Does it make a complicated price model good, welcomed, encouraged or well reputed?

(Why I'm still standing to object this even when this thing seems to make sense? Because I'm a customer.)

</comment><comment><USER5> I recall seeing this blog post a while back arguing you should never A/B test your pricing strategy (IIRC it was posted on HN, can't remember): [https://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/180676/why- you-s...](https://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/180676/why-you-should- never-a-b-test-your-pricing-strategy) . I'm curious about your thoughts on the points in this post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Re point 1: in many cases people actually DO have the sample size if the magnitude of the revenue increase is large enough (e.g. double price and increase conversions - lots of stories about this).

Re point 2: in the end increased revenue from better pricing means you're capturing more of the value you're delivering to customers. but yes, there's a brand decision to be made here between 1 price that you always keep the same vs. a changing price that is more optimal.

Re point 3: companies should always be testing their pricing since external factors don't stay the same.

PS: this is also on the blog of a dynamic pricing company so they don't want the people on the fence about handing over pricing control thinking about a/b testing price haha.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1\. How are you handling statistical significance questions / ensuring the A/B test has enough statistical power to be meaningful?

2\. Same for seasonality.

Are you offloading much of the statistical concerns to the user or are you hoping to answer these for them?

Have to say, I don't really understand the hate on this thread having worked in this area. This seems like an awesome product that can really help sellers.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can you easily opt traffic out of testing based on traffic source? for instance Google Shopping(Microsoft Shopping as well) is pretty strict about the price in the ad page, matching the price on the product page.

do you plan to offer this product for other platforms? the number of Shopify merchants with traffic and sales large enough to get good significance in a timely manor is rather small, IME.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is your pricing [https://jika.ai/pricing/](https://jika.ai/pricing/) also A/B testing? :D

</comment><comment><USER9> Do most Shopify stores have enough traffic for this to produce real results? Seems like the vast majority of Shopify sites are small and are just going to get random results due to a small sample size.

<comment><AUTHOR> Depends on the magnitude of the revenue increase.

One thing that inspired me to build Jika were the stories of sellers doubling their price and actually increasing their number of conversions. I haven't had a customer like that yet, but I had one person who reduced their price 30% and increased their conversions 5x+. In that case, it's pretty clear there's a winner.

<comment><USER10> 30% might work in software, but it's is a very deep discount for most physical retailers.

If the product has a 50% margin (sells for $100, costs $50 to source) then your retailer makes $100 for 5 orders instead of $50 for 1 order.

Except they're probably keeping their own inventory, so they now have to keep $250 of inventory for that $100 in profit, rather than $100. This is problematic because a lot of online retailers are limited by their working capital.

This is a drastically simplified example, but the bottom line is that physical retailers think very differently than software sellers.

Great idea for an app either way. I wish you the best of luck with it as you learn the territory. For something similar in the Amazon space (a platform that lends itself much less to split testing) check out splitly.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Few questions:

1\. How do you determine who fits into the A cohort and who fits into the B cohort? If I refresh could I fit into a different cohort and thus see a different price? If I go Incognito?

2\. Instead of a 50/50 A/B test, can you multi-arm bandit a handful of different price points and shift a higher proportion to the "best" one? And thus be able to change over time as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Using random id + localstorage, so yes, incognito could result in a different price.

2\. I'd love to implement MAB, but focused on nailing core product for now.

<comment><USER12> How do you avoid customers changing their behaviours by observing pricing changes? Or when they share it with a friend and go "cute shirt for 10 dollars" and their friend is like "wat it's 15 dollars"

<comment><USER6> Could cohort based on geo-location instead of completely at random. Makes analysis a bit more challenging though and doesn't completely solve the problem of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Advertising prices like those in your example screenshots would be illegal in the EU.

You can't imply that the price "was" $49 and is now $39 when it's also being sold at $29 to another group of customers.

In fact, the whole thing is legally questionable according to EU price fixing laws, not to mention ethically unsound.

<comment><USER14> Would advertising $49 as the base price and a time limited offer/discount for a group of customers be acceptable?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How do you deal with search engines? The vast majority of stores have the the vast majority of their customers come in via search engines.

1\. Showing one page to the search engine spider and another to users is a black hat SEO tactic known as bait & switch. Most search engines heavily penalizes against this. How do you deal with your customers possibly losing their search engine reputation that they've built up over the years?

2\. I don't know about other people, but when I see a price, X, on the search engine result page, then get a different price, Y, in the actual store, I immediately lose trust in the store. If the merchant is willing to bait & switch me on the price, then I don't trust it not to bait & switch me on their actual product or services.

</comment><comment><USER16> This looks like a great infrastructure as a service company. Is there a way to build an AB testing tool on Shopify that finds the right price by zeroing in on it, rather than having the customer input several? Did you consider that approach?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, automatic testing will be coming soon! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If this were to become popular what would stop someone from building something to do the reverse of this, e.g. see if the item could be cheaper if you bought it as another customer/from another device/computer/location?

<comment><USER18> That's probably a good problem to have! Nonetheless, customers are still buying from the same store, so, it's a win-win. Breaking customer trust is probably the only thing that's bad here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it's a tradeoff for sure. I would say discounts that don't apply to everyone are a less organized way of a/b testing price. So a brand that does discounts all the time on certain cohorts of their users is going to have an easier time swapping over to using Jika vs. a brand that has 1 price, no discounts ever, never have changed their price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just want to point out that I like a way you describe what your product does. Simple, clear examples and result. I like when people do that instead of asking for your email just to see what your product is even about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Keeping things simple + self-explanatory is a big focus with Jika.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How does it compare to other A/B testing apps? Eg: [https://apps.shopify.com/neat-ab](https://apps.shopify.com/neat-ab)

<comment><AUTHOR> Neat A/B is a 100% daily traffic swap app. This approach isn't a valid a/b test since it isn't properly isolating the variable (price).

<comment><USER21> Neat A/B Testing here! First off, congratulations on the launch. I would argue showing different prices to simultaneous visitors is an ethical gray area - not to say it's not something that shops do, or wish to do. But that's why we choose to cycle pricing. In our experience, with proper consideration of cycle timing, test length and traffic consistency, it's possible to get solid results this way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there! Thanks for the congrats. I see your point, but external factors + different cohorts visting throughout the test is a bit of a pickle. Nonetheless, I wish you the best!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> One observation: Pricing at $199, $499, $899 per month for a single feature seems interesting considering Shopify itself charges $29 $79, $299 per month.

<comment><USER23> Considering the value of Jika I'm surprised it's not higher price.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, this is totally a "charge more" kinda scenario. A/B testing is, like, THE first thing you do once your ecommerce business gets a little established, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Upsetting to see the negative reception to this. I know as a consumer this sort of experimentation might leave a bad taste in your mouth, but on the flip side I don't think you can blame a seller for trying to systematically find the fairest price for their product in a market. Overall, I think this is a cool idea with a simple but effective premise.

</comment><comment><USER26> Nothing against you personally, but I'm the only one who thinks it's weird that a Shopify A/B testing app got into YC?

<comment><USER27> I'm incredibly disappointed this was the top comment. Instead of asking whatever it is you want to know in an optimistic way, you just threw a random comment that with decent chance just makes the OP feel worse.

For starters, a really simple question you could have asked that may update your belief of how weird it is they got into YC: "How much money are they making and how much are they growing per week?"

<comment><USER26> I do think that an A/B testing platform can be a great business, and making any business work is for sure an achievement.

I just had the impression that YC tries to back more "ambitious" or "important" businesses, but may be I'm wrong about that.

<comment><USER12> ambition or "importance" don't always manifest in the early stages of a startup (they probably usually don't). Shopify started as a snowboard selling company and I'm sure that the founders here pitched YC a larger vision that was appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Small suggestion: include how contribution margin changed in that example. That's the Northstar metric for a typical ecommerce company.

Including it would sound more credible, and would prevent a typical customer from doing the math in their head of profit margin where this change becomes profitable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion! Contribution margin/profit is another metric we're going to track in the future for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Conversion rate optimization (CRO) specialist working on Shopify platform here: Why can't I just duplicate a product page, change the price and do a SPLIT instead of an A/B test? Some reviews will have to be ported/duplicated, but it is totally doable.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's better having 1 page from an SEO perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why do you think you got accepted into YC? I'd love to check out your application.

<comment><AUTHOR> tldr; Pricing is painful. Most companies leave it to chance and there's a real opportunity here to change that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Do privacy addons block this and if so, does your price tracking account for it?

</comment><comment><USER32> This seems like a great shopify app I will certainly be adding to my next store. Do you have any go to optimization resources to share? (just general stuff on how to think about optimizing things in ones own life)

<comment><USER33> Handful of good links on price elasticity testing

1 - [https://vwo.com/blog/ab-testing-price-testing/](https://vwo.com/blog/ab- testing-price-testing/)

2 - [http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2012/12/why-price- elast...](http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2012/12/why-price-elasticity- testing-is-a-must-over-the-holidays/)

3 - [https://prisync.com/blog/price-testing-how-to-test- different...](https://prisync.com/blog/price-testing-how-to-test-different- prices-without-alienating-customers/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Keep in mind price a/b testing is legal given that you aren't doing it off protected classes (the VWO post says that price a/b testing isn't legal).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there an AI(specifically deep learning) element to optimally distribute the A/B testing ratios or to suggest products/prices that may be good to A/B test? (Referencing the .ai url)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, automatic testing is definitely on the roadmap!

</comment></comment><comment> akbar-saliev If this becomes popular what would stop Shopify from building this?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a lot of things Shopify should build, but yes, agreed, I am at their mercy in many ways. Going to diversify in the near future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Congrats on the launch! Have you thought about exposing the API instead of tightly coupling to Shopify? Similar to Split.io but for product pricing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, an API is definitely on the roadmap as well. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is evil... I would immediately stop using such a shop, if I know such practices are used. Your solution is harming trust.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is dope. As close as one can be to the money, niched down and in a growing market. Good job! Keep us updated =D

</comment><comment><USER36> Are there any good browser extensions you recommend that help detect a service like yours?

</comment><comment><USER37> Hi Keenan, want to share you product by Presenting at E-Commerce Day REMOTE on oct 1? Shopify our lead sponsor, Rebecca Minkoff is keynote, 3,000 attendees expected. You'd be a great fit...email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER38> Awesome product and love the landing page. Super simple and clear.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Jason!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Congratulations on the launch! Curious why you went with venture funding over indiehacking/bootstrapping?

Heard this podcast a while ago[0] where they discussed main dishes(who new platforms) and side dishes(github apps / shopify apps). At the moment Jika looks like a side dish, which seems well served by the bootstrapping community.

Edit: Add link to podcast

[0][https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/152-tyler-tringas- and-j...](https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/152-tyler-tringas-and-justin- jackson)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the congrats!

Yeah, Jika probably would've been a profitable side project, but one of the goals here is to completely change pricing. It's super broken for most companies right now and needs to be fixed asap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> did anyone else do a double take and think the name was Jira?

</comment><comment><USER41> May be it's just me, but the first thing reading that name reminds me of is the Zika virus. I wonder why would you choose a name for the startup that's so close to something with horribly negative connotations. Especially, in today's world scared to hell by viruses.

</comment><comment><USER26> > In high school, I also optimized enough to be a top 200 player in League of > Legends.

Sorry but that's super obnoxious. No one in their right mind would use the verb "optimize" in this context.

Feel free to downvote, but sometimes you need to call people on their bs.

<comment><USER24> I play the game, so maybe I'm biased, but that's legitimately a huge accomplishment. Use whatever verb you want I suppose, but that's literally top 0.001% in a game renowned for being incredibly difficult/competitive.

<comment><USER26> I play esports myself and of course it's a great achievement. But the word "optimize" just triggers me when used in this context.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best language for CRUD app? - <AUTHOR> What is your go to language for CRUD apps, and why?<p>I am looking for something will a really easy to use DSL or framework with a low learning curve. <comment><USER2> As steven_braham pointed out, every language has a (almost) clear winner framework. I'd use the one in the language you're most comfortable and familiar with. For example, there's no reason to use RoR if you're already familiar with PHP. In that case, just use Larvel.

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably every major popular framework has good crud support. Most of these frameworks contain a orm that will the heavy lifting.

I don't think anyone has a specific language or platform for crud. Most people pick the one they are most familiar with.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've heard Laravel is pretty good so going by that the best language would be PHP.

<comment><USER5> You notice that Laravel isn't in any way unique and basically is a Rails clone?

<comment><USER4> Sorry, I didn't know that since I have no experience with Ruby or RoR. Anyway since you have experience with both, are you sure it's just a 100% clone in PHP and doesn't bring anything unique?

<comment><USER6> Why should it? I don't get this "clone" issues.

RoR was excellent idea, everyone copied it and now you can write MVC in language of your preference be it PHP or C#.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> RoR would be the easy one to get along with.

</comment><comment><USER8> PHP. If you don't want to use a framework, just use a WAMP/LAMP stack and you will be fine.

</comment><comment><USER6> Choose the most popular framework for the language you are comfortable with.

</comment><comment><USER9> Rails, Django, Laravel, etc etc

</comment><comment><USER10> CakePHP (PHP) and Ruby on Rails (Ruby) both has very strong CRUD generator.

<comment><USER11> Web2py by far. Nothing comes close.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> PHP or Node, take your pick.</comment>


Open-source your startup's code in 60 days - <AUTHOR> https://blog.wallaroolabs.com/2017/11/open-source-your-startups-code-in-60-days/ <comment><USER2> Hello, I'm Chuck Blake from Wallaroo Labs. I was involved in all phases of the process of open sourcing our software, and I'm happy to answer any questions.</comment>


Karmalytics – Free tier terminated - <AUTHOR>

In order to continue growing at a sustainable pace, we've decided to shut down the free tier of Karmalytics. I understand this may be inconveniencing to some users who have come to rely on this service.
If you'd like to upgrade to our basic package for $12/mo you can do so from the Account page (https://karmalytics.co/app/account). To keep your sevice intact, we recommend you upgrade by the end of the week.
We'll be sending a few more reminders before shutting the free tier down. If you'd like to opt out of those reminders you can use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of this or subsequent emails. If you have any questions or concerns, simply reply to this email. <comment><USER2> Founder here. Thanks for posting.

Karmalytics was my first SaaS project and I learned a lot along the way, from both a technical and marketing point of view.

I think freemium was the wrong route to go here from the start. I ended up giving away 95% of the value and trying to monetize the other 5%. Maybe you can get away with that if you have a VC behind you, but its really hard for a solo founder to pull off.

To my current users, I apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for trying us out and providing invaluable feedback as we grew.

Cheers, Aakil

<comment><USER3> Freemium is the wrong route far more often than not, and I'm only going to cheer you on for making the decision which lets you continue to develop a stable business around your services.

It sucks to have to change your stance after the fact. There will probably be vocal opposition to doing so. But your odds of still being in business three years from now just shot up.</comment></comment>


Reddit Hits 1.2B Monthly Pageviews, More Than Doubles Its Engineering Staff - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/15/reddit-hits-1-2b-monthly-pageviews-more-than-doubles-its-engineering-staff/ <comment><USER2> Non-blog spam: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2658592>

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder what the guys who founded and sold Reddit must be thinking of the site's continued success. Ever since Digg went down Reddit seems to have completely taken over the social news category.

<comment><USER4> I am pretty sure they are thrilled. They are doing great for themselves with Hipmunk.

<comment><USER5> I'm so thrilled for reddit! And yes, hipmunk has been going quite well :) thanks.

<comment><USER6> I totally forgot who made that video on youtube that showed the creation process of the hipmunk logo, but tell them to do more videos like it. I don't have a design bone in my body but found it awesome to watch someone go through the process.

<comment><USER5> Thank you! Yes, that one was me. I asked our designer (he does all of our infographics and random designwork for me) to do a few of his own and it was a blast to watch a real artist at work: <http://www.youtube.com/thehipmunk#p/u>

(He's the other 2 "making of" videos not about the hotels logo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lies, damned lies, and linkbaits.

Sensationalist title: "Reddit more than doubles its engineering staff!!1!"

Actual event: Reddit hires three new programmers.

<comment><USER8> I think the point of the title is combining two pieces of interesting information: A) Reddit has come a hell of a long way with a tiny engineering team and, B) Reddit has hired 3 new engineers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This story is from 3 months ago, it's changed a lot since. As a user of reddit, I suspect that the page views have risen even more.

edit: wait the URL just changed again, it was pointing to a story that was listed as being from March and all the comments were from March too, how strange?

Also straight from the source: [http://blog.reddit.com/2011/06/reddit-levels- up-with-three-n...](http://blog.reddit.com/2011/06/reddit-levels-up-with- three-new.html)

<comment><USER10> [https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?#site...](https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?#siteDetails?identifier=reddit.com)

Daily UV's are growing pretty well. Interesting to see the age skews higher then I would have assumed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've recently passed the 5 year mark on Reddit and watched my on-site time drop to minutes a week over the last few months.

Not sure why, unlike some people who complain, and have been there less time, the quality of submissions and comments is not really any worse than it has ever been. But then it has always just been a time wasting diversion. It did manage to kill my use of slashdot 5 years back. Maybe my Reddit time has been killed by techmeme/river.

<comment><USER12> I've been on reddit since 2007 under various names. I think the quality has declined quite a bit if you view /r/all, the front page everyone sees by default. Its really bad.

Individual subreddits are pretty good still though. /r/netsec, sysadmin, wearethemusicmakers, gamernews, philosophyofscience, etc. Smaller ones are still pretty quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Perhaps this is a naive (or dumb) question, but what will all those new engineers do? Reddit is doing what it has always done why does just scaling up require so many more engineers?

<comment><USER14> There is a law of diminished returns at some point in scaling websites. A while ago Reddit hit a scale where a move to Amazon's services seemed like the right thing to do. At that time the argument was solid. Since then the site has outgrown Amazon's services at Reddit's price points. Spinning up new services has an extremely low ROI.

The preverbial wheel of scalling solutions needs to be re-invented, yet again. Not all services are created equal so no one is truly re-inventing anything, just applying unique solutions to unique problems. That takes manpower.

Heck just to move from Amazon to a dedicated will take a team larger than they had a month ago. That's right from the horses mouth. Don't have the energy to fish out the link, though.

<comment><USER15> As a former reddit engineer, I confirm everything you say.

Note: Please don't edit your comment to make me look foolish. :)

<comment><USER16> I still remember the discussions. It inspired this Ask HN submitted by me, for example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358079>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Law of small numbers- way to exploit that for a headline

</comment><comment><USER18> From 1 to 4...

</comment><comment><USER19> Great that it's a success. But since it's a pool of cheap memes I'm not about to unblock it on my computer's hosts file.

<comment><USER20> No, it's not. Sure _by default_ the frontpage is full of rubbish, but if you spend 10 minutes looking you will find a trove of useful stories and information about whatever you're interested in. As an example, my favourite Australian radio station (Triple J) has a great subreddit where things relating to music etc is discussed. Not a meme in sight.

You can tune your frontpage as you please, so it's easy to have a great experience with reddit.

But if you've got it in your hosts file (why?) you must really hate it, so I'm probably wasting words. But your post as akin to saying Hacker News is just full of "I'm a startup!" posts, which it's not.

<comment><USER21> The problem I have with the subreddit system is that it's an all or nothing thing.

Let's say I like video games, and one of those games is Minecraft. If I subscribe to the Minecraft reddit, it seems that about 1/Nth of the posts on my front page will be about Minecraft (where N is the number of subreddits I have).

I'm pretty conservative with subreddits (added linux and apple, removed politics and atheism, that's pretty much it), so suddenly I have _a lot_ of Minecraft.

Some sort of slider would make subreddits for specific games, programming languages, etc. much more appealing to me, so that I could say, "I really only want to see the _best_ Python-specific stories, but I'll take all of the general programming stories".

<comment><USER6> > The problem I have with the subreddit system is that it's an all or nothing > thing.

Agreed. /r/programming used to have discussions much like HN does. But I've had to remove it from any subreddit I have as its just full of random programmish related stuff, barely.

Out of curiosity, what does everyone on HN think of ways to fix the subreddit problem? Its obvious voting doesn't provide any sort of filter, and tagging would likely only end up with the same problem.

Or are we just condemned to constantly have to flock to new sites for good technical discussions of things?

<comment><USER12> You fix the problem by realizing editors where in place for a reason. People like crap and without editors to filter bullshit we get a continuing stream of fecal matter.

In theory moderators on Reddit should be some sort of quality control, but usually they just say "well if that is what the community wants..." and let the most ridiculous pandering submissions slide.

Someone needs to blend user submitted stories with editors and find where the sweet spot between the two is.

Until the two systems can be blended in an awesome hybrid, then yes, we will continue to flock to new sites as the old ones fall prey to eternal September.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great to see they're still hard.

<comment><USER23> Phrasing.

<comment><USER22> meh... it was "working hard"... anyway...</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing the Microlecture Format - <AUTHOR> http://www.openeducation.net/2009/03/08/online-education-introducing-the-microlecture-format/ <comment><USER2> I've been waiting for people to figure this out.

It's not just kids who have shorter attention spans. Though I am blessed with friends who still call me "young man", I'm no longer a kid, and I'm a veteran of many years of lecture-based courses. But that era is over. There's no longer any technical reason to deliver lectures in uninterrupted fifty-minute blocks. And it turns out that they only reason I ever liked that format is that I didn't have alternatives.

I've attended so, so many physics lectures. They break naturally into chunks: Some scene-setting ("let's talk about conservation of momentum in two dimensions"), proposing a problem ("here's an ice rink with two hockey pucks that collide"), a derivation (equation, equation, chalk dust, erasure, equation, more chalk dust, fix the sign error), a summary ("look, momentum is conserved! And we can draw the following general lesson..."), questions from the audience, and finally a bunch of homework problems.

How great it would be to have each of these chunks be recorded as separate bits of video. You could play through the scene-setting and the summary multiple times. You could play through the derivation at higher speed, slowing down or repeating the bits where the prof makes a subtle point but speeding through the parts which are obvious to you. You can skip the student questions that you already understand but play through the subtle ones more than once.

About the only disadvantage of this way of learning is that it's kind of isolating. It would be nice to combine it with lots of lab-type gatherings where all the students can join together and feel like a team.

\---

[1] I had a few professors who avoided using chalkboards. They would provide handouts with the day's derivations and equations on them, then use an overhead projector with slides. (This was all before Powerpoint was widely available in academia.)

This was a mixed bag. It worked okay, but it wasn't an obvious big win over chalkboards. One advantage of the chalkboard is that it is very flexible: you can gesture at it, redo it on demand, or scrawl circles and arrows all over it. Another advantage is that it is typically _huge_ , offering you lots of opportunity to, say, write Maxwell's equations in a box to the left and leave them up through the whole lecture for reference. Finally, chalkboard derivations go up slowly (sometimes _really_ slowly, if the writer is not well practiced), which can be bad, but which also makes it easy for the professor to interject meaningful comments.

But I think the availability of digital video playback, cheap cameras, and nonlinear editing changes this problem a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am the type of person who prefers written text to video... I can envision the following:

1\. Scene-setting --> introductory paragraph

2\. Proposing a problem --> video/animation of the problem at hand

3\. Derivation --> written and recorded in something like EtherPad, so one can see not only the result, but the process of writing it.

4\. Summary --> summary paragraph

5\. Questions --> nested comments a la HN/reddit/etc. As a bonus, add the ability to highlight and right-click on any part of the text, and add a comment there.

<comment><USER2> I also prefer written text to video. But I'm prepared to admit that there are certain things that come through better on video, that there are quite a few learners who learn better via video, and that great lectures have a wonderful charm that complements written material nicely.

Feynman's transcribed lectures are great, but videos of Feynman's live delivery are _extra_ great. The Long Island accent alone is worth the price of admission. Feynman sounds like a human being, a guy who lives down the street, not like some disembodied Platonic ideal of genius.

I've also been in quite a few classes where the textbook was simply useless but the lecturer saved the day. [1] (And the opposite, as well.)

And your ideas all sound great. Obviously there will be lots of room for experimentation. It's going to take many years to fully explore our new genres.

\---

[1] I would pay cash money for a video of Neil Ashcroft's graduate stat mech lectures. Or Roald Hoffmann on the band structure of solids -- although _his_ textbook, written by him, isn't bad either; they complement each other perfectly, by design.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I'm prepared to admit that there are certain things that come through better > on video, that there are quite a few learners who learn better via video, > and that great lectures have a wonderful charm that complements written > material nicely.

Same here... there's no reason one can't have both for each of the 5 points (both text and video)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Who killed the futurist in you? School or you? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/7d8210000eaf

<comment><USER3> _> We are either too smart or too dumb to find god and tell him problems of our world_

The correct reaction to the world being awful is not to seek the help of a bronze age deus ex machina. The problem is not that we are too smart or too dumb for deities to help us, it's that they can't really help us on account of being fictional.

The premise of futurism being dead seems conveniently modern because there is a lot of perceived (and actual) downturn economically. But the conviction that we can design a better future for ourselves is not coupled to that.

At the core of our desire to improve ourselves as both a civilization and a collection of individuals is still the one big revelation from the Age of Enlightenment: that in the absence of the supernatural the universe is ours to discover and understand and that we can by virtue of our intellect become vastly more than what we are today.

Nobody killed the futurist in me, although school and society at large certainly tried. Life is already better in the Western world than it used to be. All we have to do is to go forward. There are times when progress seems to be in serious danger but I'm still hopeful that we can and do find the motivation to keep marching. Which, again, is really all we have to do. Even at our current glacial pace, we'll get there.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, as Warren Ellis wrote in Transmet, _"the world is, generally and on balance, a better place to live this year than it was last year."_

Of course, it's easier to believe this when I'm not part of the 40% of young unemployment in my country.

<comment><USER5> > "the world is, generally and on balance, a better place to live this year > than it was last year."

On average, yes. The standard deviation doesn't look as promising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I think about futurism, I'm always reminded to this quote (apparently by billg):

 _We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction._

On the other hand, in some ways, life today isn't much different than life 30 years ago. Or even 100 years ago. Or since the advent of the Industrial Revolution at least. People wake up, go to work, come home, eat, sleep. In between they go to church, seek mates, sing songs, drink, etc. The details change, but the basics don't.

When I try to think about the future, I usually start from the idea that tomorrow will actually be more like today than we expect. Even the wildest advances in technology (to date) don't change human nature or basic patterns of human behaviour. So ask yourself how technology and change will affect out ability to go out, seek mates, drink, seek spiritual enlightenment, find food, earn income, etc.

If you believe the evolutionary psychologists, a lot of our basic psychological responses evolved 30,000+ years ago, and we - as humans - <USER2> fairly poorly adapted to the world we live in. Human nature may be fundamentally at odds with an urbanized, technology driven, fast-paced society. I find myself wondering if we _can_ "fix" most of the problems we have in our world anytime soon.

So I guess I think we can make incremental improvements, but I'm not convinced we can, for example, "end war" across the board, etc.

<comment><USER7> I like how you put forth a routine, so I'd like to postulate some ways to modify it with future advances in the next 50 years (hypothetical, but optimism is great):

Waking Up and Sleep go together: Neural implants that reduce the amount of sleep needed drastically by stimulating the brain into REM sleep immediately, or by outright replacing parts of the brain (or body) that need the recuperation time. I don't think it will be healthy for a while to avoid sleep (unless you replace a significant portion of the human body or endocrine system), but we should be much better at letting people do it.

Work: Since we are moving to post-scarcity, I easily see us having automated transportation of goods, automated farming (or even better, molecular printing that fabricates food from carbon and friends), automated mining - and we should be able to easily automate construction to just taking an input design and having a machine crew do the work. Robots that can maintain their peers and themselves, communicating their defects so they can be serviced. No human involvement. People could then commit themselves to either constant leisure, artistic pursuits, or the sciences, and only if they want to, since they would no longer have to.

Eat: Soylent and its ilk are even right now aiming to change this, and if the above considerations happen, you don't need to work to feed yourself, and can print any food you want. Though it will be some time before humans start replacing their digestive tract with 3d fabricators so they just plug themselves in to electricity to "eat".

Church: Already dying in the newer generations, due to the pervasiveness of knowledge and freely available information. If anything is the death knell for religion, it is the Internet and its ability to distribute knowledge anywhere instantly. It makes rationalizing the unknown less about guesswork and superstition and more about googling it.

Seek Mates: I think this will be around because human beings are stubborn and set in their ways, but beyond 50 years I expect us to transition away from sexually partnered couples with children to a system where everyone is sterilized and children are grown (with perfect genetics) as needed and raised in public institutions where (through rigorous study) we (collectively) have figured out how to best promote creativity and open minds. It is one of the greatest weaknesses in modern society that because everyone is in their developmental years bound to the behavior of their parents they can have vastly different advantages and disadvantages throughout life.

In the absence of the superficial need to spawn being bound to romantic relationships, I expect people to be more fluid and have sex with various acquaintances. I also have a feeling that, biologically, humans are inherently much more bisexual than anyone wants to admit, and we are culturally driven into a singular sexual preference (usually the straight one - I'm asexual, and I feel it was because I was never pressured into having relationships I didn't want), but I have no idea how true it is. Just an intuition.

Sing Songs: I hope so!

Drink: Would be nice if people weren't so depressed and sad they needed to lose their ability to cognitively reason and lose their ability to recall what is happening.

I'm all for changing the basics. But I agree, we have this culture that is very resilient to change that will take fundamental changes to bend to something more fulfilling for people.

<comment><USER8> Many of the changes you propose -- all of them, actually -- would tend to make me less happy and less satisfied with my life than I am currently.

We may have the capability to do all of these things within 50 years, and some of them much earlier. But I'm skeptical of whether these sorts of cultural "innovations" will see widespread adoption if they don't improve quality of life.

We've had the ability as a species to have sex without physical consequences for more than half a century now, and yet most people, once they reach a certain age, still seem to derive more satisfaction from a stable, monogamous relationship than any other arrangement. Maybe we're just wired that way.

<comment><USER5> > once they reach a certain age, still seem to derive more satisfaction from a > stable, monogamous relationship than any other arrangement

Polygamous relationships are, roughly, O(n^2). You may not want to go there. ;-)

<comment> loup-vaillant On "polygamy": I have seen a nice gender-neutral term on LessWrong: "polyamory".

<comment><USER9> "polygamy" is already gender neutral; the gender-specific forms are polygyny (having more than one wife) and polyandry (having more than one husband).

<comment> loup-vaillant "Polygyny". I just learned something. And so did my spell checker by the way. "Polygamy" may have become gender neutral in technical circles, but I doubt the general population have caught up yet (though by the look of the relevant Wikipedia pages, they will soon).

Also, "polyamory" doesn't have the notion of marriage in it. Maybe that could be a useful distinction.

<comment><USER9> > "Polygamy" may have become gender neutral in technical circles, but I doubt > the general population have caught up yet.

The thing is that virtually all polygamy that has existed in the real world is polygyny, so the distinction between that gender-specific form and the general form (as well as any reference to polyandry) is of almost entirely of theoretical/technical/specialist interest.

> Also, "polyamory" doesn't have the notion of marriage in it. Maybe that > could be a useful distinction.

I think it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Engineering school killed the futurist in me. When I was a kid, I read books projecting that we'd have manned missions to Mars by 2025. I went to school to be an aerospace engineer and work on stuff like that. Then I realized that the reality of the field was spending $1 billion to improve the fuel efficiency of a commercial airliner engine by 1% every decade so that the airlines could stave off bankruptcy just a little bit longer.

I learned that the nature of technology is rapid development, followed by plateau. Thus, while new things might surprise us, the basics are pretty much here to stay. I don't foresee that, 50 years from now, the existing mature fields will be all that different. E.g. I doubt medical technology will advance meaningfully for the median person. I plan to live a healthy life of 75-80 years, just as my grandfathers did in Bangladesh who were born early in the 20th century. I will almost certainly be living in a house that looks more or less like houses do today. My car might drive itself, but as an urban dweller the only meaningful difference will be not having to make smalltalk with a cab driver.

<comment><USER11> _"I doubt medical technology will advance meaningfully for the median person."_

One way that I see meaningful medical change (which we probably have the technology for right now) is in _any_ kind of visual test (such as x-rays, CT scans, various types of blood tests) basically anywhere you have a highly paid human who uses their eyes to scan an image/microscope for a pattern that determines if you have some disease, fracture, something in your blood work is off, etc.

At the moment, these test are time consuming (days minimum, often weeks or months) and very expensive because those highly paid humans can only scan so many samples in a lab every day. Once we turn computer vision algorithms onto the task (trained to spot visual clues for disease over thousands or millions of positive and negative samples, similar to how Google trained an AI neural net to recognise pictures of cats[1]), the time & costs of any type of visual medical scan will fall dramatically. Imagine getting the results of an x-ray back in seconds, with a result accurate to 99.99% certainty of a fracture.

Of course, that main obstacle to widespread adoption of this type of technology will be political. Radiologists and other professionals won't take too kindly to being displaced.

And of course then you will have AI technologies like Watson, which should allow doctors to get much more productive, so they get to see more patients in less time and reach a diagnosis with great accuracy than before. This will mean you need less doctors (lowering medical costs) but you get better outcomes.

I think AI tech like Watson and computer vision will have a dramatic impact on medicine in the near future.

[1] [http://www.dailytech.com/Googles+Unsupervised+SelfLearning+N...](http://www.dailytech.com/Googles+Unsupervised+SelfLearning+Neural+Network+Searches+For+Cat+Pics/article25025.htm)

<comment><USER10> That might make certain kinds of medical care cheaper, sure, but what will be the value to the average person? Are they going to live a longer, healthier live because a CT scan costs $500 instead of $5,000? I don't think that's really the bottleneck. For your average person, what's gating quality of life at older ages is things like bad knees, bad backs, etc. Are we going to see cheap, convenient, safe, knee replacement by the time I hit 60 (30 year from now)? Considering that 30 year ago was 1983, and old peoples' knees are just as bad today as they were then, I'm not optimistic.

<comment><USER12> Arthroscopic surgery has advanced significantly in the last 30 years.

<comment><USER10> Fair point, though it's still not that great as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER13> Isn't that a point in favor of it rapidly improving down the line?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > What I'm worried about the Techcrunch reading me is, somehow we all are > programmed to think short-term, too short term; 5-8 years.

This is a consequence of the financial world, but in the world of science it's a different story. Many, many long-term projects are in progress and it will be like that for a long time.

One of the things overlooked in this article is that we live in periods of time where certain things dominate the world we live in. The 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s were periods of European settlement in the Americas, the 1800s and early 1900s were focused on developing modes of transportation (trains, planes, and automobiles), and the past 50 or so years has been centred around the computer which has pretty much transformed the world from typewriters and paper to devices that were only thought to be in the world of Star Trek just 30-years ago.

Just because every day you and I still go to work more or less the same way we did decades ago does not mean that we're stagnating. Human behaviour hasn't caught up with technology fully and we're still trying to get used to what we have in front of us.

I think that the author in the article is thinking too short-term really.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd posit that the great leaps that occur don't happen because of one individual thinking 50–100 years into the future, but due to masses of individuals thinking 5 years ahead.

The computer revolution came about because of many, many people working on _slightly_ improving transistor technology, whilst others built compilers that were _slightly_ better than their predecessors, whilst others still were working on very basic computer graphics, and so on. Added up over 50 years, those 'short-sighted' individuals' accomplishments added up.

I guess I'm trying to say maybe the future will happen as a result of typical human behavior, not despite it.

<comment><USER16> IMO long-term vision is great and all, but only if you can concoct a realistic vision. This is why we are in a 5-year mode; nobody can effectively predict things like our manufacturing capabilities or even which countries will still be around 50-100 years out, so any plans you make would be worthless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Because others are replying with their futurist fantasies, here is mine:

[taken with a large pinch of salt...]

Humans are not trying to save the Giant Panda. They are using the fluffy harmless critter as a convenient smokescreen for the development and testing of large-scale genetic engineering to implement the (inevitable) eugenics program that will create the stratification required for a colonial species.

Systems incorporated into our world on the basis of "security", "healthcare" and "culture" will be used to analyse the population for weaknesses using social media databases, soft-tissue scanners, genetic screening and routine psychological testing. And as this conscious stratification continues, the human species will fracture and contract upon a few very highly advanced/specialised branches.

Essentially humans have gone from voracious, highly specialised, hunter, to a doe-eyed herd, to a full scale hive. The Internet is the persistent storage medium that humans use to transmit colonial orders, like ants use pheromones, and various testing grounds exist the world over to develop the next generation of technologies that will internalise our virtual world and extend our senses so that humans no longer understand a world without it.

Priority is being given to nano- and quantum-technology as this will allow humans to harness their genetic inheritance and use the natural world as they see fit - taking solutions developed over many millions of years through trial-and-error evolution and implementing them for intelligence driven engineering, improving on them and turning them to situations never before experienced in the physical universe.

This will begin with the advent of the Techological Conflagration, a war to make all previous aggression look like a fart in a hurricane. In this battle, nation states will effectively dissolve as they will be unable to adjust to the rapid pace of development of those super rich individuals capable of amassing a small private army with a weapons infrastructure built on intense iteration (I call this The Batman Hypothesis). I suspect the testing grounds for this future are already well known: places like North Korea and Afghanistan offer a sandbox environment where the powerful can play.

But the chilling part of this is that you have long ago sold yourselves down this river as Plutocracy has taken over the entire world and created a global hegemony that amorally seeks it's own stability and advancement. International consortia offer fronts for the production of infrastructure that will support the transition to this bleak view of our future (modern airports and stadiums are little more than vast crowd management systems and prisons are gulags in all but name) and people are constantly fed subliminal media that prepares them for the changes that are to come. It will begin with your military, but soon things will begin to be outsourced as more and more private entities flex their muscles.

More than likely Homo Sapiens will not survive and if it does it will be as an augmented slave species to the Meta Sapiens (no longer affiliating with the branch of humanity) that will have attained god-like powers...

<comment><USER18> But I am confident we'll somehow manage to shoot Khan and his henchmen into space in the end.

<comment><USER17> Or at the very least: McPanda Burgers. Yum!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen Prices. I was really into drones in 1998, when I was in the third grade. I wanted one so bad...I figured I could get one (a $600 remote control airplane) if my Golden Retriever had a few $400 puppies. But lo, it was out of reach. So were remote control helicopters. My mother told me about a remote-control sailboat, but I didn't care...it had to move around in 3-D, like a submarine, to catch my attention.

So, yeah, prices. Right now, I'm eyeing a Physical Random Number Generator from ID Quantique for mathematical experiments, but those are like $1500 dollars. Nuts.

I think the big plus in technology is that yesterday's expensive impossible is today's affordable plausible. I remember tiny remote control helicopters going for $20 recently.

</comment><comment><USER19> I stopped having that thought when I realised only thing I could see was war and servitude. These days I try not to think about the future.

It was all very well for Turner, he was painting from the vantage point of an empire on the ascendancy.

Is anyone else here terrified by the feeling of geopolitics shifting under their feet? I think it's a bit too specific for a support group...

<comment><USER20> The feeling of geopolitics shifting under my feet always cheers me up, it's one of the few things about the future that gives me hope. Yesterday's ash pile is today's hegemon. It adds long term fairness to the international system (every nation gets it's 15 minutes of power). The question is how long can this constant table turning last, it probably will not survive once 90% of the nations reach parity of development.

What gives me nightmares is what a competent authoritarian state, corporation or network could do with present technology. Think Stalin with the capabilities of the NSA or Hitler with a first rate human genomics and sequencing program. Such a power could actually accomplish their insane ideas of racial (kill everyone that has these three SNPs) or ideological purity (kill everyone that thinks the government is doing a bad job).

<comment><USER19> _> What gives me nightmares is what a competent authoritarian state, corporation or network could do with present technology_

This is what I'm actually talking about. Of course I don't begrudge china their time at the top (not that they haven't been there before...) but rather I'm scared by the uncertainty. Of course the future is uncertain by definition, but it particularly uncertain now. I'm not sure that even makes sense... As you can tell I'm very confused.

This kind of rambling 24/7 in my head was basically what caused me to stop thinking about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What's this guy talking about? I think there are always way too many futurists and too few people doing solid and useful work.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is there an option for "other people?" Speaking with people about the future is difficult when they don't really have a full perspective on what we've accomplished in recent history. If technology continues to move at the rate it's moving (which it won't, it will only move faster), we are in for some really cool shit in the future;) I can't wait to see what the future brings..but I do plan on putting my 2 cents in and making it kick ass.

<comment><USER7> This, everyone focuses on the negatives, their fears, and the what ifs, not the near-guaranteed and positives. We should have fully functional (and available) bionic limbs _this decade_ , with the ability to get them 3d printed to your exact proportions. It is the future!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any attention to (all three of them) have been slyly declaring that the Future is over... I think they're talking about the capital-F Future, which in my lifetime has been a cult, if not a religion. People my age are products of the culture of the capital-F Future. The younger you are, the less you are a product of that. If you're 15 or so, in 2010, I suspect you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now.

"The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or a radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely more stuff... Upon arriving in the capital-F future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now."

\- William Gibson, 2010 Book Expo speech

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ5duD15P9s>

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm not entirely sure what he means in his question, but I think I'm more futurist, not less. That is I'm more convinced and engaged by futuristic ideas like the singularity, simulated universes, techno solipsism and immortal (or less mortal) humans. I'm very ready to believe that our grandchildren could be be snowboarding at 90. I fully expect international culture to eventually melt national barriers. Educational opportunities will transcend the birth lottery. We will sire generations of smarter people, better people than us. Grandsons of industrial peasants will be intellectuals by the standards of the past.

For the most part I'm positive about the future, excited by it. Jealous of people in the future. Sometimes I'm fearful of it, focusing on scary trends and consequences of a technological world. I worry that our cultures can't adapt fast enough. I see strain on our social/familial institutions. The loneliness of so many people, living outside of these institutions. The fear that future totalitarianism will have more tools at its disposal. The mental health and depression trends. Obesity. The fact that the world is so competitive and many people clearly lose the competition. The resilience of religion and the worst ideas contained within it.

If I were an artist, I think I would be depicting these ideas in some way. I don't know how though. I guess that's what makes me not an artist.

</comment><comment><USER25> School gave me the tools to enable me to build the future I dreamed of as a child.

Who said the futurist in me ever died?

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm from the future.

I came to your era to bring you this detergent.

</comment><comment><USER27> Watching the science establishment block almost all progress in "real" Drexler style nanotechnology for a quarter century after the publication of _Engines of Creation_.

<comment><USER28> Didn't it happen because Drexler style nanotech is hellish hard to create?

Really, I don't get how any kind of establishment can block that kind of research. It's somewhat cheap (at most at semiconductors level price, not at astronomy or high energy physics level), enough to lots of companies to afford and maybe individuals (there is only a ceiling estimative to costs, there is no floor). And it has a huge potential for short term revenue.

If there is nobody researching that, I'm willing to bet that it's because nobody knows where to start. Not because anybody is blocking them.

<comment><USER27> It sounds like you're contradicting yourself, how can it be both "hellish hard to create" and "somewhat cheap"? It's only the latter when compared to some of the most expensive science artifacts in history, "one of a kind" ones.

The way they could block _direct_ progress on it was to make sure it got no government funding, which also influences industrial and private funding (see how NASA blocked private space efforts for decades because their people, or people in big companies that supplied them, were the only ones who could vet alternatives; that private space is finally getting somewhere is only due to the (early) retirement of the Space shuttle). So they claimed a lot of their projects were nanotechnology and since they by definition control the purse strings....

If you want some hard evidence, if you're familiar enough with Drexler's proposals, look at the first round or two of Nobelest Richard Smalley's "debate" with Drexler. Smalley was making strawman arguments, a very good sign he didn't want to debate what Drexler was actually proposing.

Anyway, it needs government or Bell Labs style "pie in the sky" funding right now because it is "hellish hard to create" and a lot of basic R&D remains to be done. Although as Drexler pointed out in _Engines of Creation_ it's going to happen sooner or later, natural progress in various fields such a semiconductors and molecular biology will keep pushing the state of the art closer to what's needed to execute his vision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Economics - a company with Apple's cash pile might be able to look toward the future, but they still need to build things for today and tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER30> The alienation of work I guess...

</comment><comment><USER31> The Economic System we have killed it. I got bills to pay right now.</comment>


Firefox for Android enters maintenance phase as team prepares new browser - <AUTHOR> https://www.xda-developers.com/firefox-android-maintenance-new-browser/ <comment><USER2> Firefox for Android definitely has some rough edges compared to Chrome, but it is also one of the very few mobile browsers which supports extensions I really hope that whatever they've got coming down the pipeline is up to the task, because it'd be a shame to lose yet another outlet for user customization.

</comment><comment><USER3> The only reason why I prefer chrome over firefox on android is because of the touch gestures on the address bar. Slide down to browse through the hundreds of tabs I have opened, slide left to switch to next tab, slide right for the previous tab. Also, the tabs are represented as a card stack, and browsing it from last to first tab is done through the same gesture as getting into this view. So if I'm looking at a page and want to switch to the first tab 2 or 3 hundred tabs back, I just have to slide my finger fast 3 to 5 times from the address bar down.

If it weren't because of this, I'd probably move to firefox for the ability to have extensions.

<comment><USER4> > Slide down to browse through the hundreds of tabs I have opened (...)

You have hundreds of tabs opened?

Man, you're doing something wrong. At this point learning how not to have hundreds of tabs opened seems like a bigger improvement than choosing one browser versus another.

<comment><USER5> It's a weird thing to me too. I've worked with developers that have hundreds of tabs open (not using 99% of them), and they whinge and moan about performance.

Just stop opening so many tabs?

<comment><USER6> I do that all the time. I research something broadly, resulting in a reasonable tab tree. Then I use one or a few of the results, pinboard some of them and keep them open in case I need to reference them again.

Why not? I'm using Firefox. A couple of hundred tabs is no big deal it seems :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is a new library called GeckoView being worked on, and Firefox Focus is being rebased on it.

Perhaps Fennec itself will be replaced by a GeckoView-based browser. And in the longer run, by a ServoView browser.</comment>