Apple Event 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/apple-events/event-stream/ <comment><USER2> It is very Apple to market a cost cutting move of not including power adapters with their products as an environmental decision. Like it certainly does help the environment, but does anyone actually believe that is the motivating factor?

<comment><USER3> They've spent a lot of money aggressively pursuing environmental concerns before many of their competitors (like renewable power, carbon neutrality, recycling programs, etc.).

While I can appreciate the reduction in cost likely was a factor, I wouldn't doubt that the environmental aspect was also a genuine concern.

Their ideal customer is somebody who upgrades devices frequently and then participates in the trade-in programs, but the adapters and such are not part of those trade-ins. So if you get a new phone every year for 4 years, you have 4 adapters. It's not a far stretch to imagine that their own employees said "You know, this feels wasteful" and management said "Hmmm not only is it an environmental problem, but we could also reduce costs."

But it's impossible to say for sure from an outside view.

<comment><USER4> Step 1 of reducing your environmental impact is reducing your consumption. If Apple really cared about the environment, then they wouldn't encourage a new phone every year when a phone can last for 4 years.

Reduce, reuse and recycle.

<comment><USER5> Do they encourage people to buy a new phone every year?

I don't think most people get a new phone every year, hence the "is this worth the upgrade?" Conventionally speaking, most tech reviewers tend to suggest that the latest model usually isn't worth the upgrade if you have the last model, and only in some cases is it a compelling upgrade from two releases ago.

Release a new phone every year isn't the same thing as encouraging everyone to upgrade every year.

<comment><USER6> Anecdotally, very few people I know get the newest phone. In fact, most of them tend to get second-hand phones that are at least a generation or two behind. That said, these are generally on the middle- to lower-middle-class individuals.

I'm a geek and I could afford buying the latest phones, but in practice I almost always get a phone at least 2 generations behind.

That said, looking at people in town, there's a significant number who _do_ get the latest model. I always wonder how they can afford it.

<comment><USER3> If you sell your 1-year-old iPhone as soon as new ones are available, you maximize the secondhand sale price. After that, the value you can get will decrease. (The same is true of the value Apple gives for their trade-in programs.)

So in some sense, if you replace your phone as soon as a new one is available, you pay about 50% of the new phone's cost every year. So it's not _quite_ as expensive as you'd think. (And yes, iPhones sell for a little over 50% of their purchase price after a year.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My screen has never displayed video of a higher quality. With instant load and zero lags. Stunning! Is this 60 FPS?

</comment><comment><USER8> They came up with a new Apple Watch (Series 6) that measures blood oxygen content! If that actually works as advertised, this feels like enough of a reason to upgrade.

My wife has Series 3 and I have Series 5, but I haven't seen a major difference between the two. Series 5 is slightly sleeker and smaller, but the updates didn't feel important enough for her to upgrade.

<comment><USER9> They've got to fix the battery life. I tried the apple watch earlier this year and returned it a couple of days later. After using a whoop (where I get 5 days of battery) the less than one day charge makes the product pointless.

<comment><USER3> Huh. I've got a Series 2 that still lasts nearly 2 days on a single charge.

I know sometimes something in the software update can glitch and cause aggressive battery consumption. I wonder if you were affected by something like that (which is something they should address to prevent from happening in the future).

<comment><USER9> Nope. Apple itself says the watch will last 18 hours so if you've got one that lasts for 2 days, thats great.

[https://www.apple.com/watch/battery/#:~:text=Apple%20Watch%2...](https://www.apple.com/watch/battery/#:~:text=Apple%20Watch%20is%20so%20capable,doing%20a%2060%2Dminute%20workout).

<comment><USER3> That's assuming a 60-minute workout, using apps throughout the day, and the GPS model (which is slightly more energy-consuming anyway). The workout is really what'll get you; those switch the heartrate and other bio-monitoring from passive to active, which greatly increases battery drain.

If you use your Watch more passively, all-day performance is not out of the question. It all depends on your individual use case.

Besides, 18 hours should be sufficient since you _ought_ to be getting more than 6 hours of sleep a night anyway. Somewhere in that offtime is when you can charge. I do it overnight, but plenty of people charge during their morning routine (shower, etc.) and say it charges more than enough to last all day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious how they can get an accurate blood oxygen reading while not having a sensor on the bottom of the wrist.

If I recall correctly a finger pulse oximeter requires a sensor below the finger which records the absorption of infrared light.

<comment><USER11> Some Garmin watches already have this, Garmin says...

>Accuracy of Wrist-based Pulse Ox

Pulse Oximetry (Pulse Ox) readings are available for certain Garmin wearables. It can provide an estimation of the user's peripheral blood oxygen saturation (SpO2%) at any given time the feature is accessed. The feature can also be set to track in a continuous manner during a period while the user is asleep. For certain devices, it can also be used to track periodically throughout the day along with a view of the user's altitude or elevation.

While every effort is made to ensure a high degree of accuracy, there are certain limitations that can cause inaccurate measurements. The user's physical characteristics, fit of the device, and presence of ambient light may impact the readings. Garmin may release device software over time to improve aspects of the measurements. The Pulse Ox data is not intended to be used for medical purposes, nor is it intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease or condition.

Excessive motion and the position of the device can impact the accuracy of the readings. It is important to keep your arm/sensor still for approximately one minute for best accuracy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The real question the lady should have asked about what the watch can do is play songs from Spotify without your iPhone near you, like when you're running.

Spoiler alert: You can't.

<comment><USER13> Pretty sure that's Spotify's fault, not Apple.

<comment><USER12> Pretty sure Apple doesn't expose the correct APIs to allow this on the GPS model of the watch - at least that was the case when I last researched this.

<comment><USER13> Not true as of Watch OS 6, I believe.

I'm referring to streaming via cellular. Not sure about playing offline via non-cellular though, I haven't looked into that.

<comment><USER12> I searched a bit - I think you're correct, and also offline support looks to be in beta in the Swedish version of Spotify, so maybe it's actually coming at some point.

<comment><USER14> I'm in Canada and I got a beta for wifi streaming from the watch, where did you find about the offline beta?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great to see touch id in the button - sure hope that comes to iphone this year!

<comment><USER6> Why'd they have to put the tech people in the basement though?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Say what you will about the Apple spaceship campus, that was a pretty photogenic appearance it made.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's the only thing I'm really waiting for today... the Watch SE pricing. $279... gets it into "high quality Fitbit territory".

<comment><USER15> with that, if they would let me hook it up to my ipad (I dont have an iphone) id buy it in a heartbeat

<comment><USER17> I've been thinking about getting an iPad. However, I can't imagine paying extra for a cellular model Apple Watch. Would you be able to get emails, messages, calendar stuff on a Wi-Fi only Apple Watch paired only to an iPad when you don't have your iPad on you?

<comment><USER15> hmm I guess thats a good point - I dont leave the house much so hadn't really considered that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> USB-C. 'bout time!

<comment><USER18> Agree, but USB-C seems so fragile compared to Lightning.

<comment><USER19> At least the fragile part is in the cable, so you can replace it if it breaks. Lightning has the fragile part in the phone.

<comment><USER20> I thought the fragile part of USB C was the thin part in the port than goes in between the two sides of the plug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> removing power adapter.. to save the environment. Also you have to buy it as an accessory for $30+ ....

<comment><USER3> If I remember right, Apple Watch is the most popular smart watch on the market — meaning many people have had one already. Those people don't need a new adapter. It's like the iPhone: if I already have one, I don't need _another_ adapter (lord knows I have enough of them).

It's definitely not great for new customers though, and it absolutely should not be $30, but for people like me it's a positive move forward to reduce waste.

<comment><USER22> Yea but you'll still have a cable. I'm sure you'll find some sort of USB device to plug it in to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This link crashes Edge on Windows Arm [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24483910](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24483910)

</comment><comment><USER24> What are the exact differences between Series 3 vs Series 6 ?

<comment><USER3> Off the top of my head: always-on display, additional sensors (compass, blood oxygen, ECG, more advanced accelerometer for fall detection), higher resolution display, different speaker system I think, slightly different form factor, uhhh... that's all I've got immediately but I think there's a bit more.

<comment><USER25> Better processor. Wife has series 3 and I have a 4 - the 4 is 50% faster. I wouldn't buy a series 3 as it's just a bit too slow.

<comment><USER3> Oh absolutely right, I dunno how I missed that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So will they talk about the feud with Epic and the app store?

<comment><USER6> Sure, why wouldn't they!?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> is there no new iPhone then?

<comment><USER27> The rumor is October

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not to be too cynical, but is this Apple watch "solo loop" coming in a bunch of fixed sizes a means by which they reduce/minimize the ability to buy/sell used Apple Watches?

Or at their scale does it not really make a difference?

EDIT: nvm lol, forgot that you can just swap out the loops still

<comment><USER29> The silicone material they use tends to get beat up enough after a year or two that you'd probably want to replace it anyways if you buy a used watch.

<comment><USER28> good point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Cool, a blood oxygen sensor. What a revolutionary new sensor that Garmin watches have had for only 3 years now.

<comment><USER31> Basically none of the technology Apple showed off in the original iPhone release was 100% brand new that no one else had, they just put it all together in a way that had never been done before.

Garmin has that, but does it integrate the same way?

<comment><USER32> Apple rarely introduces breaking tech. They release optimized tech that makes good products. Rarely first to market - they experiment, learn, adapt, and go in when confident.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Apple Watch Series 6...totally uninspired update. I was hoping we might get a glucose monitor/sensor, instead we get a blood oxygen sensor.

Apple's just coasting at this point. I was considering getting the iPhone 12, but at this point I'm expecting a similar dud launch next month from Apple, so I'd rather give my money to Nvidia for an RTX 3080.

Stop mailing it in Apple.

<comment><USER34> At this time at least, measuring blood oxygen has more consumer demand and impact than measuring glucose.

<comment><USER35> More than 100 million Americans have diabetes or pre-diabetes. Numbers are huge and more importantly the feature (glucose monitoring) is much more critical to their health.</comment></comment></comment>


The X3DH Key Agreement Protocol - <AUTHOR> https://whispersystems.org/docs/specifications/x3dh/ <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to know how this relates to Axolotl and "the Signal protocol".

<comment><USER3> This is about as clearly written as I could ever hope a crypto writeup to be! So first off thanks for that!

But I also agree with your comment, it really helps to understand the "why" to know where this tool sits on the overall shelf.

Or even just a bit more background on existing double DH constructs and specifically what problems this addresses and a use case where you choose this protocol specifically to gain some specific necessary property that you don't get otherwise with other DH constructs.

The special padding during the hashing step seemed a bit odd, not sure why it was quite so many bytes?

I would also love to see pseudo-code, some test vectors, and a sample hex encoded output of an exchange.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the point of a secure cryptographic protocol if your messaging app

a.) Sends back telemetry data

b.) Accepts arbitrary software updates without user approval

c.) Contains proprietary components with unknown workings

and d.) Forces you to send all of your messages over hostile servers?

<comment><USER5> Elaborate on a) ?

That's indeed very troubling and completely unacceptable if it's true.

<comment><USER6> That piece is called Android, actually.</comment></comment></comment>


Surprise Scans Suggest Hackers Put IMSI-Catchers All Over Defcon - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/read/surprise-scans-suggest-hackers-put-imsi-catchers-all-over-defcon <comment><USER2> Is it possible some of them were legitimate portable towers the conference contracted to have placed there by the carriers to handle the extra load?</comment>


The rise of functional programming in Banks - <AUTHOR> http://blog.oxfordknight.com/?p=269 <comment><USER2> Guys,

Not sure how it got picked up, but i don't think it's a creppy stalking of my profile...in fact i am flattered. Thank you for your feedback.

Couple of things that I think is worth adding here:

1\. This article was the first article i ever wrote for Oxford Knight 2 years ago. The date refresh on our website is wrong. My intention was to give something back to the community I serve, and also learn from feedback. Some of it does look like I am stating the obvious, but at the time it wasn't obvious to everyone. Furthermore, recruitment isn't designed to be open-source. It's all about protecting IP at the lowest level, so to open up even a little bit is a big step for us/recruiters….i hope some of you guys can appreciate that .

2\. The article was written looking at how I used to recruit in 2006. Shallow, buzz word chasing, educational profile chasing etc. I like to think I've evolved a bit since 2006, but do understand I still have a lot to learn an certainly won't let my non-technical background get in the way.

3\. If you guys are interested in seeing some of my more recent stuff I've written, it maybe worth jumping on to my quora profile where I write more actively about the technology trends in london….Quora (Abdul-Muhit).

4\. Finally, I do feel the pain of how recruitment operates now. Changing a £4 billion industry is not easy, and no technical innovation is going to make a sector of that size disappear anytime soon. I founded Oxford Knight with the view of creating a legacy not a transaction service business. For a boy that was raised by a single mother on benefits I have all the little things I need now! For me it's all about creating a legacy….something built to last. Therefore, if we have upset anyone of you guys with below par service then please do feel free to email directly, and I promise I will do my upmost to fix it.

Best, Abdul co-founder of Oxford Knight

</comment><comment><USER3> "Finally, whilst I have never coded, because Clojure/Scala is on the JVM it's very easy to pick up for a good Java developer."

I guess it's another recruiter wondering why he gets no respect from the cattle he handles...

<comment><USER4> _Oxford Knight is a technical recruitment agency. None of our consultants have written a line of code... yet._

So it seems to be a company-wide feature. It's hard to see though how technically semi-literate technical recruiters can be a good thing at all. Perhaps this explains in part this other telling quote from the article:

 _I recall the candidate in question being perfect in every aspect (CompSci from top university, sound understanding of data structures, algorithms, complexity... coupled with actual practical programming experience, and oh yeah – decent knowledge of Exotic Risk and Pricing)._

Note the order of qualifications, suggesting that having top marks from Oxford is just as relevant/important as knowing how to crank through data structures/algorithms questions; with having actual programming or domain/relevant experience as just a nice plus.

Very telling of their mindset, but also understandable if they are not qualified enough to assess the technical competence of candidates on technical terms alone.

<comment><USER5> I got the impression that this was someone just out of college. "Knowing how to crank through data structures/algorithms questions" probably means knowing how to talk about them in an interview, _not_ lots of real-world experience. If that's the case, top marks from Oxford may in fact be the most relevant fact about the candidate.

<comment><USER6> I agree - it sounded very much like someone trying to be "out there writing" rather than a real expert. It was just written like an amateur. That said, who am I to pick on someone trying to improve their online presence?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Who would design such a Web site (I'm trying to read it with Chrome so I'm not sure if it's a rendering issue specific to Chrome). What could be the purpose of squishing the content in the middle of a useless left column and gigantic, always-visible feedback form?

<comment><USER8> The space bar also can't be used to advance the content (in the three browsers I tried). I've been seeing this a lot lately in blogs and it's quite frustrating!

<comment><USER9> It can, once you add focus to that little content pane (and you have to do the same for the mouse wheel). Still baffling design, but slightly less broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Haskell logo is backwards...

</comment><comment><USER11> Is this the latest tactic of aggressive technical recruiters?

Interesting though this article is, forgive me for calling out Oxford Knight here. For those not in the know they are just a recruitment company. One of those that are a constant hassle on LinkedIn. It seems telling them multiple times that I am not interested in a job in finance does not stem the flow of "Forgive me, you must get this all the time, but..." connection requests and InMails, or creepy profile views.

<comment><USER12> > connection requests and InMails, or creepy profile views.

Isn't LinkedIn suppose to be precisely for this? Also - creepy profile views? Wat.

<comment><USER13> You can just like feel that they're looking at your profile and salivating over your qualifications. Gross!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "One major American bank is pushing a JVM based language that supports functional programming (Scala) as a firm-wide technology. Another two major banks are using Clojure for both real-time risk and pricing, and risk reporting."

Any ideas which banks?

<comment><USER15> "He then gives examples of companies like Morgan Stanley in London adopting Scala heavily. This type of adoption could be a great asset for Scala's adoption or it can be a touchstone of regret that people point to when deciding to use Scala. He fears that Morgan Stanley might have a hard time finding the right Scala developers for their projects, and Scala skills are rare. If, for example, unguided recruiters recruit nascent Scala developers, Scala projects' success could become difficult."

[http://www.infoq.com/articles/barriers-to-scala- adoption](http://www.infoq.com/articles/barriers-to-scala-adoption)

<comment><USER14> Good find, thanks. You've quoted a good part, too - it's something Scala is particularly prone to given how many ways there are of using it.

One thing I've seen is a cautious adoption of Akka in distributed systems in capital markets (grid services for analysis computations being one example). First-class Scala support in Akka is encouraging those banks to take a look for specific projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> He missed Erlang, heavily used at Wall Street.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd believe the headline "The fall of COBOL programming in Banks" but this one just makes me laugh.

</comment><comment><USER18> > Easier to write concurrent programs

Yeah, sure.

<comment><USER19> The funny thing is, they were worried about concurrent programming in the 80s too [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer)

Guess what, there was no real crisis then either...

<comment><USER2> But hasn't CPU speed peaked? Moors law? Meaning that future performance is going to come from concurrency?

Abdul Muhit

<comment><USER19> They thought that in the 80s too! Read the page...

There is nothing new in computing, every 10 years the same things come round again and again. That's why old geezers like me become cynics.

<comment><USER2> Whilst they may have thought of concurrency problems in the 80s as you outline, the problem of concurrency (and subsequently performance) appears to be a bit more genuine now. Processing power has peaked...fact. Now with most PC's being shipped with multi-processors the need for concurrent software is a real one.

I do appreciate that there is an enormous list of things that are important right now, that software engineers have to worry about such as good user experience, proper abstraction, security, encryption, privacy, reusability, reliable data storage, good recovery etc etc

However to dismiss concurrency issues in a world with peaked processing powers on a single CPU as something of a fashion-fad! Doesn't sound to me as in synch with what i've been observing.

Would be nice to hear from others on this1

<comment><USER19> Ask yourself this: why is removing the GIL a very low priority for the Python community? Or why has the GIL not slowed the adoption of Python, esp. in financial services?

<comment><USER2> A. Because it's not easy to remove GIL according to Guido van van Rossumn. It's an issue and the fact the python community are talking about it means concurrency is an issue.

B. Your last comment points to one language and the complexity of adapting it vs ignoring wider argument that there is a greater need for concurrency to add performance than what there was in the 80's when CPU's got faster ever year.

c. You almost indicate that despite the GIL banks are using python and therefore must be less concerned with concurrency. This is not the case because GIL in no way stops concurrent programming from happening in a single Python process. The only constraint the GIL places on multi-threaded applications is that a single Python process cannot execute multiple threads _simultaneously_. You can still run multiple threads.

<comment><USER19> a) it's a nice to have, but the lack of it hadn't hurt the adoption rate of Python. So that's not it.

b) computers nowadays are insanely fast - so fast that we use high level languages like Python instead of assembly. So that's not it.

c) that makes no sense. There is no point in threading without concurrency! So that's not it either.

There is no multi core crisis now, just as there was no transputer crisis back then. Only people trying to sell stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm flagging this as recruiter spam.

<comment><USER21> I don't think it's spam. Insight into tends in technology adoption are pretty interesting to me. Shouldn't we also encourage recruiters that give any kind of a shit about the tech they recruit for? If there was more of that around maybe I'd get less of the monkey "I see you haz teh skillz" type spam I get in my inbox all the time!

<comment><USER19> Of course it's spam - normal people wouldn't capitalise Banks like that. Also no one says high freq when they mean HFT. And most HFT shops aren't really hedge funds, they're prop traders...</comment></comment></comment>


Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building - <AUTHOR> https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/17/im-walking-away-from-the-product-i-spent-a-year-building.html <comment><USER2> I read this, and all through the article I kept waiting for the part where the author would talk about his own experience using his own product.

What I'm getting at is that, its really difficult to get people to love something you build unless you love it yourself, Seth Godin touches on this in his book "This is Marketing"

I like the data driven approach to product development, but sometimes passion trumps data, if you build something you yourself cannot live without, it's much easier to slowly win people over to your way of thinking.

And if you say to me "well he was the only one working on it", then my answer to you is like that punchline in the Famous "Coming to America" skit ...

"aha!"

It is infinitely better to work on problems that you have a firsthand understanding of/experience with otherwise you're always going to be depending on others for product insight, which is not terrible, but much much harder than when those insights come from you directly.

<comment><USER3> > What I'm getting at is that, its really difficult to get people to love > something you build unless you love it yourself

This reminded me of a quote which is totally the opposite, and imo more accurate: "Most entrepreneurs fall in love with the wrong thing. They fall in love with their products and their business when they should be falling in love with their clients and customers" -Jay Abraham

Both sentiments are however; worthy food for thought.

<comment><USER4> Best case scenario: you are the customer. In this case, both sentiments can be true.

<comment><USER5> Turns out that the real productivity hack was learning to love yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The gist is that it's tough to get unbiased feedback during customer validation." \- I wish this was taught along with lean startup content. Too many times I have heard founders say they validated the idea when all they have done is gotten biased feedback while asking self-fulfilling questions.

<comment><USER7> Yep, it is extremely hard. Lean Startup makes it sound trivial when it's almost impossible. Almost nobody is going to clear up their day to talk to you about their problems, answer your questions, give you feedback, be your guinea pig, etc.

The ideal way to validate it is to be so immerse in the industry/problem such that you understand most of the pain points. Do the job that your ideal customer is doing. Attend the conferences they're going to. Visit the forums they're visiting. Read the websites they're visiting. Analyze the reviews they're posting in TrustRadius/G2Crowd. Look at their Linkedin profiles to see what their day to day involves.

<comment><USER8> I agree overall but it's not that hard to get people to talk to you if done a certain way. If you are trying to sell them while talking, yes that will be hard/impossible. However if you approach it as learning from experts, then I find people are much more receptive because most people like to help and feel important/useful. I always say I want to learn from them and offer to pay for their time which shows them I understand they are busy. I still get some NOs but that's okay. BTW I've never had someone want me to pay them, but I would if they did.

<comment><USER9> Pay could be a fancy lunch while discussing the issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Paul Graham essay on start up ideas comes to mind [1]. Everybody kinda wanted this product but they didn't _need_ the product. This paragraph sums it up:

> The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with > pets, they don't say "I would never use this." They say "Yeah, maybe I could > see using something like that." Even when the startup launches, it will > sound plausible to a lot of people. They don't want to use it themselves, at > least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum > that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users.

Granted, it's not like I possess a magical "good startup ideas" power. And I don't have a successful startup under my belt. But still, I find it curious that many people haven't read this essay.

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)

<comment><USER11> The problem I see, from briefly looking at the landing page is that you can achieve what you want on Slack by disabling notifications and then checking slack every hour or so, when you've just committed some code and feel like your mental cache can be flushed. This is what I do. There isn't a big enough problem being solved, especially to move away from the slack ecosystem. Even if the 'other' product had all the things slack has, the cost of getting another tool and getting used to it seems too high when that effort could be put into swapping a different tool for a different reason with more upside for the team. The cost of the product itself in this equation is almost irrelevant.

Having said that no one wants to be the "Dropbox is just rsync " guy. Or Lily Allen turning down thousands of bitcoins (although she's successful anyway so she probably shouldn't care). If you see what I mean ... no one wants to say an idea sucks before hand, and if they do you can just say "well they said that about Dropbox".

<comment><USER10> If there's one thing Hacker News lacks, it's biting criticism and pessimism :P

Kidding aside, I see your point. I guess it's important to distinguish between criticism and dismissal of an idea. "Dropbox is just rsync" seems like a dismissal, not a critical look at the validity of the idea. And Lily Allen turning down bitcoin? Well honestly I'm a little with her on that one. "Oh yeah can you perform and we'll pay you with a totally legit online currency we swear." Not exactly a great sell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Slack has a staying power that the author didn't catch: once you've got all kinds of apps reporting data directly into Slack, and all kinds of rooms set up for specific data purposes, it's even more sticky than email.

Before a Slack-using company would switch, the competitor would need to support many/most/all of the integrations that the company is using. You've really only got two chances to win Slack's customers: the point before they seriously adopt Slack, and the point in the future where Slack does something stupid like jack prices way up or suffer a serious breach.

<comment><USER13> Author here. Slack is undoubtedly sticky, although I challenge the assumption that all integrations need to be replicated in a niche play. Those who did adopt Level were willing to give up a number of integrations that were low- value to them or were just causing noise that proved unnecessary.

<comment><USER14> I was struck with " They recognize that Slack is not suitable for meaningful conversations, so they automatically delete chat messages older than a few weeks to discourage relying on it for long-term archival." in your article.

It's something I feel quite strongly about: chat should not be archived. There should be no backscroll; being not around when people are talking means not being part of that conversation. Chat messages have no value beyond the moment. Any chat implementation that assigns importance to messages beyond the current conversation is wrong.

For the rest... It was like peeking into an alien world. I've been maintaining an open source application since 2004, and I've had various day jobs, but managed to build it out into my day job the past couple of years. I've never had the startup itch :-) Just let me build up my userbase, my income stream and my contributor team, and I'm happy.

<comment><USER15> > being not around when people are talking means not being part of that > conversation.

Persistent chat is one of the biggest values of Slack or Discord or Mattermost, and one of the big reasons I'll take it over IRC any day.

Persistent chat that you can join and read the backlog of is _incredibly_ valuable. It becomes an asynchronous communication medium, rather than a synchronous one. And it's much richer and lower-friction than email.

<comment><USER16> With people having the expectation of chat to be instantly replied, like a chat in a real life (someone walking to your desk and saying something) it is not asynchronous in any way.

<comment> iso-8859-1 You seem to suggest people have that expectation, but I think it might be very culture specific. Where I come, people will not freak out if it takes you a day to respond to an SMS.

<comment><USER16> SMS is NOT chat.

<comment><USER17> That's also culture-specific.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Every large team I spoke to had an exceptionally high bar and was unwilling to entertain Level until it was significantly more "mature.""

They all made the right decision, as it folded only a couple months later.

<comment><USER19> That kind of circular reasoning is only more maddening because it makes sense. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy combined with a prisoner's dilemma.

<comment><USER20> I don't think it does make sense. Funded businesses die all the time. Google cancels products all the time. companies are acquihired and products end of lifed.

Even within organizations there are critically important employees.

So, no, it doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER21> At this point in time, Slack is a billion dollar unicorn that can magic money out of wherever it needs to keep going as long as it wants. It's not going away any time soon. The worst case scenario for Slack is acquisition and long slow death over a decade.

<comment><USER22> All it takes is one information leakage scandal, and customers will abandon Slack at the drop of a hat. It's just a chat app, so it's very easy to replace.

<comment><USER7> I am willing to bet that 99% of users will not blink an eye if there was an information leak. See Equifax, Facebook..

<comment><USER23> Equifax is a consumer product with uninformed customers, wherein the 'blowback' can't really be had by individual customers, rather, it has to pick up as a media storm.

Slack contains a world of sensitive corporate information.

Oddly though I don't recall any major email company losing gazillions of emails to a hacker either, but I could be wrong.

It's an existential risk for Slack, but not unlike most other SaaS companies as well, so it's just part of the cost of doing business a per the industry.

<comment><USER19> It's important not to forget that this isn't about whether Slack is something a company should adopt. Any such risk you can attribute to using Slack will be multiplied a million-fold with a nascent service being developed by a single person or startup. All of these are reasons to _continue_ using Slack instead of switching to Level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Level is a pretty well designed product. Tried it briefly and I really did like it. My team was already using other communication tools (not Slack, but email and other options) and using Level might have become an eventuality if I or someone else on my team pushed for it harder.

That said, as someone who also creates and launch products, I think it's hard to MVP into a space like this. It's better to wedge yourself into some aspect of that space and eventually branch out once you have a paying user base that already likes your product.

Good luck on your next endeavour.

<comment><USER13> Thanks so much

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I built and ran a groupware/crm system from 2001 to 2009. But didn't get the traction I needed and couldn't afford the co-located hosting any longer. I spent 3 years developing it full-time myself and very part time on it the rest of the time. While also supporting a wife and two kids.

I moved it to very cheap hosting, told everyone it was closing, but then never closed it but didn't accept new signups. Checking now there is still a little usage in 2019 (although the majority of usage stopped in 2016).

It costs me $20 to keep alive, using GoDaddy. It was $14 a month but GoDaddy keeps raising their hosting price with no notification.

Eventually I will re-design the UI to Boostrap to make it modern and relaunch it.

What I am trying to say is if you made something nice that you like, you can keep it alive and work on it sometime in the future. You never know when Slack is going to bought out and then eventually die. You could be the DuckDuckGo to Google but for Slack. If you had a million dollar marketing budget things would be different.

<comment><USER26> This is sensible. Nice point of view

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've been listening to The Art of Product podcast since the start and Level really didn't make sense to me as a solution even though I understood the problem.

Most issues are around context and focus when moving from an individual contributor to a lead. If a programmer I'm leading doesn't implement a feature in a way that I expect it is because the context that is in my brain hasn't been transferred to the programmer's brain. If a feature isn't being worked on then I having communicated focus and priority.

A solution would focus on revealing context and focus by:

1) Deeply integrating with Slack, JIRA, Github, etc. The tools that we already use. A new product can't be a silo.

2) Mobile or GTFO. Leads are in meetings, on airplanes, in transit, etc.

<comment><USER16> #2: it depends on the kind of team you have. My team of developers never had any chat client installed on their mobile for work use, they were either in front of their computers or away and not available. We did not discuss in airplanes as we were trying to focus when we had discussions, not to board and block the other passengers because we were busy chatting in the middle of the embark flux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> My take is that this was a case of hubris. Can happen to the best of us. Where it really derailed was here:

"Others were not decision makers, so I had to take their feedback with a grain of salt."

Most users of this kind of product are not decision makers, at least when it comes to selecting the product. But they are the ones that have to use it and their opinions are critically important.

<comment><USER29> The idea of soliciting feedback before building a start up really doesn't make sense to me. If you like your idea ("this is something I've always wanted"), are willing to dedicate yourself and have the means then you should try it. Otherwise you'll never find out. If the creator of the automobile had listened to people they probably would've thought it was a dead end because unlike horses cars can't reproduce. The idea that you can explain your vision to people who will spend one minute thinking about it with you and get useful feedback is also not obvious. Build the product or you'll never know.

<comment><USER30> > If the creator of the automobile had listened to people they probably > would've thought it was a dead end because unlike horses cars can't > reproduce.

Actually, a true story: Ford said that if he were to listen to what people want better than a horse, he would have built a carriage with hitch for 6 horses :)

<comment><USER31> It's not a true story. People wanted less manure and fewer horse corpses. They were thrilled with the automobile because it neatly solved their top two transportation complaints.

<comment><USER29> Not sure about my particular anecdote, I can't verify that to be accurate or attribute it to Ford (I have heard it on many occasions, and even once saw a clipping from a newspaper but can't find it now), but [https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse- americ...](https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse-americas- skepticism-toward-first-automobiles/)

<comment><USER31> Skeptical at first, but came around quickly. The quote is apocryphal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Sorry but the outcome seemed obvious from the get go. Of course you weren't going to be able to single handedly replace a platform like slack, while improving upon the pitfalls it's creating in cross-team communication. The insight into your experience is great, but it's really the type of thought that is born and dead within a few minutes of most developers minds. Especially when we think of the effort and consequences of such an endeavor.

</comment><comment><USER33> > "Ugh, Slack distracts me so often. You're right; everything feels urgent > even when it's not. I'm super interested in what you're building here. We're > pretty open to change at my company – I don't see switching being too big of > a deal."

This is such a common mistake. When doing customer development, do NOT stick to asking "would this be of general interest to you?". In fact, you can get away with not asking this at all. Instead ask: "how much would you pay for this?" And if you like the price tag, also throw in: "can we set a date to sign next week/month/quarter?"

<comment><USER23> Though 'would this interest you?' may not be the way to start, neither would 'how much would you be willing to pay?' either.

Consider that even for established products 'willingness to pay' may be zero until there's a sales process i.e. they trial it, they like it, they discover some things, then the sales person starts to do a 'close'.

The problem with the 'how much would you pay for it' kind of discovery is it misses the opportunity for the company to determine in a material way why it's valuable to them.

There's a similar problem in consumer land as well, you can't hardly establish price points by asking how much people will pay.

Also - price isn't really the big concern. It's not going to be a margin issue, it'll be a volume issue if anything. The price for such a service would probably be very low per-person, to the point of not being that important. Price is not the big point.

And since companies will pay for stuff they find valuable ...

The 'real' question you want answered is: 'will they find this thing useful' in one way or another, or better yet 'what problems near my product do they need solved' so the maker can add that functionality or even pivot a little bit.

I think it's possible to rationalize the process of getting to that point, unfortunately it often takes industry experience beforehand, and probably a longer dev curve up front with some willing pre-customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have a lot of similar thoughts about Slack and also had the idea to go head to head with it a couple of years ago. I partnered with a PHD researcher who had expertise in the area of focus.

Before I started building I launched a paid sales campaign to see if people would be interested with a mocked up website looking like we already had the product. I had a lot of website visitors, but nobody signed up for a demo. Not one person. At that point I realized that whether or not the product was a good idea, I didn't know how to sell it, so I ditched the idea, deleted the test website and moved on.

</comment><comment><USER35> I recently had to do this with [https://chart.ly](https://chart.ly). We've had great success doing data visualization service projects, but building a product in this space just became untenable due to the market's maturity and my teams lack of resources.

Better to cut the cord than keep kidding yourself. Thanks for sharing!!

<comment><USER36> Not hosting my data in Libya!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think for things like business chat, since the purchasers of the product are different from the users, and not completely aligned with them 1:1, VC-backed companies with the connections and credibility to said stakeholders may have a much easier go at getting paid users. You can also trade profitability for growth, which is something bootstrapping precludes.

P.S. I read @rwalling's "Start Small, Stay Small" a few months back, and it was a phenomenal read. Highly recommend.

<comment><USER38> Agreed! I think products where the purchaser and the user are different are an enormous graveyard for startups. There's a big difference between building a _product_ and building a _business_ no matter the sector. But when the purchaser and user are different, it can be way worse. Good designers and engineers want to focus on improving the user experience, but that may not translate into sales at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Great post, Derrick!

I learned almost precisely the same lesson in the same way over the same amount of time (a year) a few years back.

It was _incredibly_ helpful to have those insights going into my next startup, and I approached customer development entirely differently.

Lessons learned can be quickly applied!

<comment><USER40> I'm guessing you're referring to this part at the end:

"In hindsight, I took on an unreasonably audacious endeavor with Level in part because of my internal "this might get big if I play my cards right" dialogue. It would have been far better to either deliberately go for the big idea (and probably seek venture funding to make it happen), or start far smaller and build my way into a sustainable company of one."

I appreciate this passage... a thoughtful reflection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Great post - it really resonated with me, having personally tried to do an overambitious startup that failed with a small budget. I agree with you that doing a 'lifestyle business' and getting to really zero in on a niche group's needs is an ideal area to be.

Thanks for sharing, and hope you find what you're looking for in your next venture (and keep sharing details!).

</comment><comment><USER42> On a more abstract level I feel he was trying to enable/enhance deep work, just this particular implementation didn't fly the way he expected it to. Instead of targeting people who are somewhat annoyed by slack and the like I believe the whole value proposal should be more along the lines of promoting the concept and benefits of deep work.

I've actually been following Derrick and the development of level on GitHub. The code is open source. It's remarkably well engineered and I use it as a source of reference for my own codebases.

So while probably unintentional, he's already helped others by building it.

</comment><comment><USER43> Original post about "The Madness"

[http://justinvincent.com/page/951/the-madness-the-all- consum...](http://justinvincent.com/page/951/the-madness-the-all-consuming- obsession-of-new-projects)

</comment><comment> nathan-io "It is not the function of the artist to be the critic. The winnowing out, the deciding what is good from what is bad, comes later. That is a community process. The community decides what is good and bad art. But the individual should pour this forth." \- Terence McKenna

What I take from this as an entrepreneur is: Have a vision and bring it into the world. The market response, and the financial outcome, are irrelevant.

If you disagree, it's probably because you feel that the ultimate goal of entrepreneurship is wealth. I used to believe this myself, and I can certainly understand the perspective of those who do.

As for the article, this line is pretty telling:

> make a bold statement about the problem (without too many specifics about > the solution) and gather email addresses of people who wanted to join the > movement

This particular journey seemed a lot more "tell me what to build and how to make money from it" than "here is my vision," and there's already some grandiose idea of a "movement" before even some vague outline of an actual solution/product have been conceived.

There's also a strong whiff of the toxic "fail fast" mentality. Oftentimes, tremendous persistence and radical care are the difference between success and failure. I shudder to think how many fantastic products have died under this type of thinking, when the real issue was some deficiency in execution, positioning, etc.

I say this in part because a year is not much of a sacrifice, at least from the perspective of an entrepreneur, and especially when you have the financial runway to do it. Any sane person would probably disagree, but it's neither the job nor the nature of founders to be sane.

</comment><comment><USER44> It seems like one of the main problems is that their target market was too large, and they were directly competing with slack which dominates that market. A better approach might have been to target a more niche market in the business communication tool space, and be the best tool in that space, before broadening to the wider market.

<comment><USER16> If you target the business communication space you are dead in the first second: you cannot compete to Skype for Business, for example, that is backed up and supported by Microsoft (and that matters a lot) and it is already feature-complete. Not unless you have a product that can compete on features and backed up with guarantees you will offer upgrades and support for many years, this is what companies want first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> The way I see it, it's not that people don't like Slack, it's that people don't like online chatting in general as the official way of communicating inside a company. I don't think that the solution to that problem could ever be another chatting tool.

<comment> grey-area Yes I honestly have no idea what problems in our workflow chat would solve, but I can think of loads of problems it would introduce.

I have no idea how other programmers tolerate chat as a communications medium for work. Why would you prefer chat over other async mediums?

<comment><USER46> Chat is just as async as email or any online communication platform - there's no obligation to respond immediately, and you can disable notifications for as long as you please.

<comment> grey-area In practice, people expect a response in a relatively timely way, it is after all chat, not email. It does seem a lot of companies treat it explicitly as ephemeral (and therefore requiring frequent checks). Even slack deletes old messages for free accounts, and the search is pretty poor IME. It is also full of chatter irrelevant to the topic at hand as far as I've seen in the slack groups I've participated in (though I have avoided it for work, so have not experienced it working well in a work environment).

I can imagine it is very useful for responding to a live incident for example, so perhaps people use it for that sort of thing. For a developer working on product though it seems crazy to me to have a chat window open for any significant part of a working day. People work differently though I guess and perhaps I just haven't seen it used well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Thank you sincerely for not contributing energy to realtime chat, FOMO, and the "constant inbox".

I personally find amazing productivity when I turn my phone to DND (helps with robocalls too) and quit all chat apps. On most phones you can configure who can call you in DND.

</comment><comment><USER48> > I spent the next six weeks building. By that point, my customers were loving > the product – even my largest customer that started out highly skeptical of > the paradigm. Everyone who had converted so far applauded the user > experience and agreed Level was a beautiful product.

I wonder why they switched to Level and loved it when most were fine with Slack. Is it because they were fans, or do they have some real pain that drive them to action? Maybe the author accidentally hit a niche?

If it's me, I'd find that out before giving up. So most people are fine with what they have and won't switch, so what? Isn't that to be expected? Aren't you supposed to find some earlier adopters and grow from there?

</comment><comment><USER49> I walked away from mine only after 8 years. It was difficult realizing it had to go. Taking something that was a part of your life for so long out behind the metaphorical barn with a rifle is tough...

</comment><comment><USER50> > If people were ravenous for a solution, why weren't most people even > attempting to pilot Level?

This is _not_ purely the "everyone is lying" problem, i.e everyones lack of ability to quantify the actual importance of a problem... The original questions were deceptive to both parties because they are unwittingly framed with the assumption that a "solution" in the form of a product or technology is a _valid_ form of solution.

Not all problems deserve or need technical solutions, but the subjects are denied the opportunity to consider this aspect. If you identify a problem everyone will likely agree it exists, which is useless, this doesn't qualify it for a solution let alone a solution in the form of a product.

I'm not very trusting of market research, but if I had to, i'd try to make this possibility intuitively clear by offering alternatives for comparison e.g: Do you think problem x would be better solved by a workplace policy or a technical solution / product?

<comment><USER31> I attended a UX seminar once. We split into groups and were assigned a scenario: improve the check-in experience at a fictional hotel (acted out by the organizers). Literally every other group began their presentation with, "We built an app that..." Most involved checking in by phone.

Meanwhile, our group noticed a number of basic inefficiencies and suboptimal interactions, and proposed about 5-10 improvements to policies and staff procedures.

We all watched the same skit. I thought the solutions were so obvious as to be on the nose, but evidently not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I mean I've done this with things I spent 3-4 years building :/

<comment><USER52> Same here. I am in the process now of checking out The Mom Test book and seeing how we failed in getting soft interest.

<comment><USER53> Hope it's helpful somewhat. Give me a shout if you have any further questions or issues with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I would assume that switching team tooling would have a social credit cost/risk. Didn't see that mentioned in the article. People don't want to appear incompetent if the new thing doesn't work out. It has to be really good. Maybe it has to have a certain momentum on personal projects...

</comment><comment><USER55> I think product development takes a bit of madness - a leap of faith, something that you believe that others don't ...... yet.

I don't think any amount of asking people what they want is a replacement for building something and putting it in front of people - only then do you get a true reaction.

</comment><comment><USER56> If you like the idea of Slack alternative that promotes focus and reduces distractions, I recommend looking at [https://twist.com/](https://twist.com/).

I used it briefly and really liked it. It's created by the same team that makes Todoist.

</comment><comment><USER57> I work on something that would be a competitor to Level, so I'm sad to hear this, not only because of market viability, but also because I share the belief in Slack being anathema to any sort of focused work. There's a lot to unpack here, but briefly:

— The amount of effort, design expectation and polish everyone expects from a product is exponentially increasing. 'I'm one guy, Google is 75,000 people' is no longer a valid argument. Arguably it never was, but especially now you cannot ship a product that does not do what it says it will do to a very high degree. That effectively makes for longer product development processes and probably makes bootstrapped competitors to Slack unviable. At least, this was the logic I ended up going for institutional venture capital: it buys me the time to make it _work_.

— Non-real-time communication is useful when the team size grows above a certain point, however when that happens the companies grow and have higher expectations of their tools. So this market is an interesting one in that it largely forbids scrappy, _just-alpha-don 't-mind-me_ kind of products. Trying to sell to smaller (less than 5 people) startups will fail since they do not _yet_ have a problem with Slack, and anything above, companies get increasingly desperate, however, the tool space rapidly diminishes as companies grow.

— This sort of non-real-time communication requires a lot of trust in other people in your company, in that they will see and eventually respond. In real- time, you can know if somebody hasn't responded in a few minutes. Your delay risk from a single question moves from a few minutes to a few hours, to a day, or larger if your team is distributed across the planet. It requires a certain type of team with this kind of trust to make it work. It's a cultural issue as much as a tools issue, and a good designer not only builds the tools to make things work, but also builds them in a way that they _shape the team culture_ so that the tool can work. In our specific case, our main goal is to make your team a more trusting, more efficient one, not just to make you focus by reducing notifications spam.

— Derrick is a bit of a known person, with a podcast and all, and I think in this case it worked against him somewhat. He mentions receiving interest from his fans, this (fans of your personality) is an audience that converts especially poorly.

— Slack is a complex tool serving a variety of needs, so it is very hard to replace it without being Slack - and if you try that, you'll end up with just an inferior copy. However, what one can do is to handle a subset of tasks it does better than it. However, even this will take multiple years for a team that has no runway problems because of the expectation of polish mentioned above.

— "Everyone is lying", as a designer, I do take a bit of an issue with that: it's not that everyone is lying, but that everyone has different incentives. And when you're a known person, those incentives align with keeping you happy, so that you'd become their acquaintance for potential use in the future. This is not conscious, this is just human nature. This happens even when you are just a nice person that they don't know. Empathy from your users is a powerful thing. It is also your enemy.

They are not lying to you. They want you to be happy. I won't blame users for that. It is your (our / mine / other designers') job to counteract that.

I have a lot more, but I'll leave it here since this is already too long because I think about these all day every day. If you think this is interesting, though, happy to chat. (Email in my profile.) We're launching pilots in a few weeks. The core idea, I like to say, is that Slack is a _marketer_ 's idea of what a good comms tool should be, while Aether Pro is an _engineer_ 's.

</comment><comment><USER18> The buyers of a Slack for an enterprise organization wouldn't be developers doing "Deep Work". The buyers would be executives and managers, ie: the people pushing the content that causes the annoying notifications, anyway.

<comment><USER58> I am a product manager and basically live in slack. My job is basically to communicate all day. On the flipside I've spent the last couple years learning to code in my free time and I can't imagine being interrupted by slack while im in a groove. It's def made me better about waiting to talk to my devs in our daily meetings despite being right next to them

<comment><USER59> Paul Graham's essay "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" should be required for anyone working with developers.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)

<comment><USER60> Thanks for recommending that, well written and gives clarity to something that can be a source of misunderstanding and friction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> IMO there's a ton of untapped potential in good old email still, with chat being last resort when realtime response is really necessary. There were a few startups years ago that tried to tackle some of the warts of email UX (e.g. Xobni) but nothing came of it it looks like.

Slack is cancer. I'm working with a client right now that uses Slack, and I bill every single minute I have to spend on Slack, so I know exactly how much time is wasted there. It's an open invitation to just shoot wind all day never accomplishing anything, which is, unsurprisingly, how people use it, mostly. Especially people who get paid a fixed salary.

</comment><comment><USER62> Great read.

The thing is Slack wouldn't be as successful as it is without some merits. I think understanding why it is so successful could be a very interesting exercise for anyone wanting to get into that market.

We actually have the opposite problem where I work. We have Slack and only a handful of people out of 50 use it regularly, all of which are remote devs such as myself. The only communication that works is face to face meetings or casual corridor conversations, so remote people are basically excluded from everything that happens. Email is generally useless too. Writing skills are not abundant here, when the emails do get answered.

</comment><comment><USER63> The problem is that a product like Slack does not wear down, you do not have to replace it every second year, so there's no good opportunity for a competitor to sell a replacement product. It either have to be an order of magnitude better, or you have to sell it as an alternative, not a replacement, to customers that not already have their needs fulfilled. So when people search for a team chat product, first you need to make sure people know that your product is an option, but not only that you need a very good explanation of why they should pick your product and not the most popular one.

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm not sure I understand the business model Derrick was pursuing, but the objective seems very interesting. Maybe instead of shutting it down he should consider pivoting Level to a FOSS approach modeled on something like lichess. Maybe a set of early adopter companies would be interested in joining in to help build and support the product. There would obviously be less or maybe no immediate financial incentive in it for him, but he would be continuing with a very constructive aim. In my experience, that kind of involvement in a growing project usually pays dividends, one way or another.

<comment><USER65> I agree. It seems like he pulled the plug a bit early but honestly he would know better than all of us if it makes sense or not. Perhaps he have found a better project to sink his teeth into...

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> It's good to see that the author had early feedback and performed interviews. However, looking at an early post at the interview methodology, it seemed like there was the lack of validation around the product. The author successfully validated the problem, but not necessarily what he wants to build. A good read is the "Customer Driven Playbook" \- which details a hypothesis driven model in product development to get more measurable outcomes. I think he should keep at it - but set more specific outcomes and look at smaller sets of things to improve within the larger space.

</comment><comment><USER67> I dislike immediacy of chats, so one may imagine I'm the perfect match for the product. But no, for people like me, I think, email works just fine. Level.app webpage says about its alleged superiority above Slack which looks a lot like returning back to good old email traditions (inbox, which you can check when you like, no presence status etc.) Fine, but... er, I already have it, as well as a variety of trusted tools, and everything based on the open protocols. So maybe the guy was solving the wrong problem all the time.

</comment><comment><USER68> Powerfully familiar. I have learned similar lessons. In my mind "The Mom Test" is the most important business book for high-tech entrepreneurs, and I wish it existed a few years before it was released.

<comment><USER53> Hah, me too, but couldn't write it till I had taken my knocks first ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> > An engineer at Stripe told me about their careful balance of email, forums, > and Slack. They recognize that Slack is not suitable for meaningful > conversations, so they automatically delete chat messages older than a few > weeks to discourage relying on it for long-term archival. In retrospectives, > team members often reflect on whether they chose the right medium (email, > chat, or forum) for various conversations.

This is bad news for Slack's freemium economics. I'm going to recommend we don't upgrade with this in mind.

<comment><USER70> if slack becomes your hub and you start adding in integrations the app limit (10) can hit you pretty quickly as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I've never heard of this product before, but it definitely does sound interesting. I know exactly how hard it is to get a small / medium sized company to switch to a new product, its definitely not easy.

That aside, I wish Slack was more customizable (or open to allowing some customization) that would enable it to function more like what Derrick was trying to accomplish with Level. That would be the best of both worlds.

</comment><comment><USER72> Why is there no screenshots of the level app on the homepage or Github page? A picture of the app would help me decide whether I want to use it.

<comment><USER73> I was curious also, but found some in the docs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> This was a really interesting read - it's so difficult to walk away from something you've put heart and soul into for so long.

This also sounded familiar:

"The gist is that it's tough to get unbiased feedback during customer validation. I already knew this to be correct, but I underestimated to the degree to which everyone lies"

Has anyone found effective strategies for getting honest customer feedback?

</comment><comment><USER75> I walked away from a product I spent 10 years building. My advice: don't look back. It's easier and more profitable this way.

</comment><comment><USER76> As a listener of the Art of Product podcast I am a little sad with this announcement. But rationally I don't think I should be. The founder was very aware and honest about the challenges of his product; and this decision, at this time, seems very mature and right.

Good luck on your next endeavor, which, I guess, will be a developers'tool :)

</comment><comment><USER77> Great read, and also a strong bull case for Slack no matter how unbearable it gets at any significantly large organization.

</comment><comment><USER78> Very hard to do front end build out and UI tweaks and backend and product planning and customer development as a one man shop. Consider finding a motivated offshore dev to hand over the non-core bits and pieces - the net time it frees up can be dramatic, speaking from experience.

</comment><comment><USER79> Great article. Thought the author sounded really bright, practical, mature, customer focused and motivated, did a lot right. Seems like someone I'd love to found a company with. But the simple truth is startups are hard, most of them fail even if you get a tonne of things right.

</comment><comment><USER80> I'm a bit sad. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to make my company switch to something like this, but if I were ever in the position to make that choice myself?...

The problem is the decision makers don't mind being interrupted all the time.

</comment><comment><USER81> So. Will you open source the code?

<comment><USER82> [https://github.com/levelhq/level](https://github.com/levelhq/level)

<comment><USER83> No screenshots as far as I can tell?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> I've never been more annoyed by a basic website. Center your content!

<comment><USER85> It's one of those subjective things with design and why we have so many cars/etc to choose from. To each his/her own. I personally like the design.

<comment><USER62> It's not subjective.

We usually sit right at the center of our main monitor for a reason. Reading that website on a large 32'' monitor is annoying.

<comment><USER54> > It's not subjective.

Oh, please. You may have some rationale that makes a certain kind of sense, but clearly a lot of others don't care, or value other things. So ... subjective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> A year is pretty short.

</comment><comment><USER87> this is the toughest thing ever

</comment><comment><USER88> Too dark; didn't read.

</comment><comment><USER89> You only spent a year building something, thats nothing.

I've spent years building products, the first year is alpha at best.

<comment><USER90> Depends on the products, some can be final polished version 1.0s in a year or less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Is "a year" supposed to add a lot of impact here?? I frequently spend multiple years on more dubious endeavors, and have zero regrets about it. That's life.

Edit: Okay this came out pretty harshly, but what I am poorly trying to express is that most people spend more time on worse things, so "a year" doesn't parse as the intended intensifier for me.

<comment><USER92> There's no need to be so judgemental of a well written article describing someone else's experience, even if it isn't as grand and wonderful as yours.

<comment><USER83> Thatcs actually supposed to be read as encouraging, as he said the guy did something better than him and in a shorter time. And thus he should feel less remorse than he does, which he doesn't. If that makes sense...</comment></comment></comment>


Seer: Leveraging big data to navigate the complexity of performance debugging in - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/05/15/seer/ <comment><USER2> Cool application of ML in systems instead of systems for ML for once :)</comment>


Stupid Simple Things SF Techies Could Do To Stop Being Hated - <AUTHOR> http://dashes.com/anil/2014/01/stupid-simple-things-sf-techies-could-do-to-stop-being-hated.html <comment><USER3> None of this will work. The hatred of tech has nothing to do with techies themselves. It is a channeling of people's anger about high rent towards an easy-to-demonize group of outsiders. The political organizers fanning the flames are largely the same people who caused the situation by demonizing (real estate) developers and making it hard to build.

Techies can volunteer until they are blue in the face, and it will only ever be seen as an empty, fake gesture. The real estate situation in SF is a hard reality and volunteering will not diffuse it.

"Look at these techies, they make so much money and sanctimoniously act like they are saints for deigning to volunteer once a week."

We're talking about people who demonize shuttle buses here. Shuttle buses unquestionably reduce congestion and help the environment. This is not about who the techies are, or what they do. It is about the xenophobic scapegoating of a group of socially awkward outsiders by political organizers whose previous shortsighted outrage campaigns have screwed up SF's real estate market for decades to come.

<comment><USER4> Rattling off excuses for why "that will never work" and not even attempting will not solve anything either. Funny how design is all about problem solving until it forces people out of their comfort zone and challenges them to meet people who are not like them.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, right out of high school, I spent 3 years digging ditches, pouring concrete, and putting up drywall before getting into tech.

For me at least, this has nothing to do with "meeting people who are not like me". I have found the tech community to be very diverse and much more tolerant than my colleagues in the construction industry.

<comment><USER5> Is this a claim that your colleagues in construction are the same housing activists your OP is demonizing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm from SF. People should realize that politics in this town (and Berzerkeley) are infused with an entire cottage industry of lunatics and freaks. Watch SFGOV public access to see what I mean. People sing songs, rant, dress up in weird costumes, it's a little slice of a Fellini movie.

Even if tech folks suddenly got bit by the community bug they're not going to be able to dialog with people who have basically NO interest in real working politics because they are simply using the public sphere to project their hang-ups and obsessions. Crazy people who want attention make up too much of the political scene out here. Basically SF is one giant open-air insane asylum. This is where you end up if no place else in the country (or world) has a niche for you and your particular weird.

Now all these fresh-faced, well-scrubbed tech workers are flooding in and displacing the nuts, who have nowhere else to go. Of course the nuts (and brother/sister/sophont I am one of the nuts) are upset.

Unless the techies can somehow develop the compassion for and tolerance of, say, Mother Teresa, for weird freaky shit they just aren't going to be able to engage with the old school Bay Area culture. And I don't think it's fair to expect them to.

Unfortunately, this means that the "gentrification" will proceed apace until SF has become the new, uh, Portland? Seattle? San Jose? Some other not-so- weird city anyhow.

</comment><comment><USER7> _The employees who ride the buses could put up simple signs at the stops: "[X] out of the 300 people who ride this shuttle each day have pledged to volunteer once a month at a city shelter or facility..._

This is kind've offensive from the outset, and curiously enough, the paragraph doesn't actually suggest those shuttle riders _actually_ volunteering, or how does an employer entice its employees to volunteer for unrelated stuff in their free time.

Not to mention that it doesn't matter how many of the 300 realistically volunteer, it will always be seen as 'not enough'. 10 out of 300? Embarrassing stat to put up. 260 out of 300? What's wrong with the other 40?

Also, I can't speak for SF, but here in Melbourne I had a friend rejected for volunteer work from several charities because she wasn't skilled. Volunteer work they have in spades for monkeywork. What they needed was management and organisational talents, to organise the volunteers and events, make orders etc

<comment><USER8> In my time volunteering, I've never found a charity that would accept volunteers for any skilled, technical, interesting, managerial or decision- making tasks. Anything important is only entrusted to paid employees. Volunteers are used for unskilled work that would be minimum wage if paid. I was also surprised at the high number of my fellow volunteers who were actually 'volunteering' only because it was part of their court ordered sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Look, I'll be the first person to express my dismay at tech people throwing money around and essentially saying "fuck you I'm rich" to the rest of the city. However, expecting them to do charity work, give free daycare and fight for civic changes that are almost diametrically opposite to their own needs is completely insane. Why does it have to be the people who work at startups? Why not the bankers? Why not the actual CEO's of these money making startups? How on earth did we decide that the people we should target are the workers at a company that is rich, why not the stockholders or executives? I mean go throw rocks at buildings on Sand Hill Road, not at the people who are just working their first job out of college.

</comment><comment><USER10>
      startups which provide deluxe on-site benefits could extend
      their daycare, meal and on-site walk-in health care to
      people who have WIC or EBT cards and can show that they
      live in the neighborhood. The bonus here? You can meet
      actual people in your neighborhood.

I really, really, really want Anil Dash to try this with his own startup on Market Street in the middle of the Tenderloin. Send us the video. Show us how it's done, Anil! Practice what you preach.

</comment><comment><USER11> 1\. I'm not sure that the premise is true and that people "hate" techies. Outside of a few, small media precincts, does any of this actually exist?

2\. To the extent that any of this actually is true, it seems like a failure of voters and public policies to a) allow enough housing to built ([http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/10/san- francis...](http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/10/san-francisco- exodus/7205/) or Matt Yglesias's _The Rent Is Too Damn High_ ) and b) to build better public transportation, which is related to a). To the extent that tech company buses mean anything, they mean that the current system works so poorly that people are routing around it.

<comment><USER12> The transport thing baffles me. Here in the UK, improved public transport would be funded either by levies on new development (known as Section 106, being replaced by the Community Infrastructure Levy), or by supplemental business rates (that's how London Crossrail is happening). The commuters to the new developments get the transport they need, and it benefits everyone else as well. Why doesn't that happen in SF?

<comment><USER13> B/c politics in SF are nothing like politics in London.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, the last round of gentrification is mad about this round of gentrification and thinks these new folks should make these token gestures to gain better acceptance? Sounds like a perfect plan.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm a lifetime nerd and a tech startup founder. Some of my best friends work at Google, facebook, Apple, etc., but I'm very sympathetic to the folks who are angry about the situation in SF.

The industry culture in the valley is extremely insulated from the real world, and it shows in everything. At bars and cafes, the conversation is the same old echo chamber; re-affirming the world changing nature of the next Snapchat copy. In a world with so many huge problems, so many smart people exerting so much effort and spending so much of other people's money on trivial things is the rule not the exception, and it's sad (of, if it doesn't make one sad, it makes one angry). You can't escape it. It's actually one of the reasons I bought a motorhome and hit the road...I've only been back to the valley once since I left four years ago. The valley is depressing to me, for all the reasons so many find it full of optimism. I'm not optimistic when some of the brightest minds are expending their efforts on imitation of trivialities.

America is looking like a class war again for the first time in a long time. And, the folks comfortably in the middle don't realize they're siding with the folks up top, either through inaction or through conscious choice to serve those interests (even if they're only middle class by SF standards and have much more in common with poor folk than with the .1% that effectively own everything). This is why there's so much anger. San Francisco has always been expensive and most regular folk there have always been renters. But, it's becoming impossibly expensive for huge swaths of people and the hope of surviving in SF as anything other than a wealthy white (or Asian) male engineer is fading fast.

This article has some good ideas. People in the valley _should_ get out of that echo chamber regularly and do something real in their community. Come up with something else to talk about now and then. But, I don't think it will solve the underlying problem; lower and middle class people are realizing the world isn't what they thought. The odds are simply stacked against poor folks in America (and stacked against escaping being poor), and they're worst in places like San Francisco and NYC. The churn in wealth that is supposed to happen in a market economy _isn 't_ happening anymore, if it ever did. It's been locked down hard by a very few, and the rest of us are merely renters and debtors, with no real say in the system. And, the idea I see that "they should just move" is missing the point...this problem isn't a San Francisco problem. It is nationwide, and San Francisco is just the canary. It's happening in every major city in the country.

<comment><USER16> _At bars and cafes, the conversation is the same old echo chamber; re- affirming the world changing nature of the next Snapchat copy._

I hear this stated as fact all the time, but is it really true? I can't speak for cafes, as I'm not a coffee drinker, but I'm in a lot of SF bars, very often, and I very rarely hear talk like this. Certainly not in my friend groups, and rarely (if ever) from adjacent conversations that I overhear.

Sure, this is anecdotal, but pretty sure all the reports I've heard of the opposite are anecdotal as well. Or maybe I tend to frequent bars that don't feature a tech-douche clientele.

Widening the net a bit, my conversations with friends and acquaintances does _not_ include this sort of vapid tripe. The nature of the next Snapchat copy is a topic of derision, not re-affirmation. I wouldn't consider myself to be the most extroverted person in the world, but I do tend to meet and converse with a decent variety of people.

So really, _who_ are these people all over SF who talk like this? I just don't encounter them regularly, or even non-rarely.

<comment><USER17> He has no idea what he's talking about. He said in the very same post that he's only been to SV once in the last four years.

<comment><USER15> I lived in the valley for three years. If it has changed dramatically in the four years since, I'll be surprised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What BS. There's no such thing as affordable housing - there's only housing you can afford. If you want to live in the Valley and can't afford it - <USER2> you can't afford it.

<comment><USER9> Yeah this argument just kills me. I used to live in a $2k apartment across the street from Google SF. My rent got raised to $4300 because they knew Google employees would pay it. Did I go throw rocks at Google buses? No. Did I move to a place I could afford? Yes. The idea that me, as a startup employee making a decent wage can't afford to live there, yet thousands of people who are things like "artists and poets" are upset they can't afford it is absolute madness. The reason housing is expensive is because lots of people desire it, the idea that we should make sure to reserve places for people who can't afford to live there makes no sense at all.

<comment><USER19> While technically you're correct, it doesn't mean you're right. It's not so easy to uproot a family from their home and start new somewhere else. It's been stated several times in each of these discussions that many of those who can't afford the housing increase are the ones who've spent generations in the area. Pushing out area natives and alienating the poor for not 'living where they can afford' is no way to build a community.

<comment> jack-r-abbit I consider this to be little more than a testament to owning rather than renting. If people have spent generations in the area but are renting, then they were always living on borrowed time anyway. If you've lived there for years and own your flat, it makes zero difference what the housing market looks like today.

<comment><USER20> That's not really true. Property taxes are usually assessed based on the value of the property and that rises with the housing market. People are sometimes priced out of areas even when they own their home.

<comment> jack-r-abbit > _when real property is purchased, the county assessor assigns it an assessed > value that is equal to its purchase price, or "acquisition value." Each year > thereafter, the property's assessed value increases by 2 percent or the rate > of inflation, whichever is lower. This process continues until the property > is sold, at which point the county assessor again assigns it an assessed > value equal to its most recent purchase price._ [1]

If you have owned your home for awhile, your property taxes are not changing that much. Your assessed value starts with the purchase price and increases, at most, 2% each year. This house[2] listed on Zillow is a great example. It sold in 1973 for $32K. For the passed 40 years they've been paying property taxes based on the $32K plus ~2% increase each year (I'm not sure how far back that 2% max increase goes). In 2013, the assessed value was still down at $72K... meaning $997 in property taxes. That same year the house was sold for $875K. Now the assessed value resets to market value and the new property taxes will be like $11k rather than the previous year's $1K. So even though the housing prices skyrocketed around them, the previous owner of the house wasn't really effected by that increase.

[1] [http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2012/tax/property-tax- primer-1...](http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2012/tax/property-tax- primer-112912.aspx) [2] [http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3245-Anza-St-San- Francisco...](http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3245-Anza-St-San-Francisco- CA-94121/15095502_zpid/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Doesn't anyone else find it ironic that now it's rich people who ride the bus, and poor people who are forced to drive their own cars?

<comment><USER22> Not particularly. The saying "time is money" applies here: the argument could be made that the "rich people who ride the bus"'s time is worth more, and putting them on a bus where they can do some work instead of driving is a more efficient use of their time.

Of course you could argue that the poorer people "forced" to drive their own cars could use that time, but they might not be knowledge workers, which means that time wouldn't be productive to their employers anyways.

And this also is entirely dependent on how you perceive value to be created, and the model you choose to use.

<comment><USER21> People riding the bus have always been able to do things like read, study, write, etc., whether or not they were knowledge workers.

<comment><USER22> True. But is that productive for their employers? Which was my main point...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't know, I work close to the Twitter HQ and the other day I saw some Twitterites (I could tell by their badges) half assedly walking down the sidewalk while on their phones occasionally plucking up a piece of trash with one of those trash picker-uppers...it seemed like it was 100% for show and actually made me hate them a little more.

<comment><USER24> "made me hate them a little more"

It seems like your whole perception of the situation is skewed by your preexisting disdain for these folks.

<comment><USER25> Maybe that's the point. The people protesting have the same preexisting disdain.. so why would they be anymore convinced than schraual?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> These are all fantastic ideas, though I find it fascinating they're all about sharing the benefits of enormous wealth with the greater community, so that everyone can be happier and healthier.

One wonders when America as a whole will realize the benefits of doing so and catch up to the rest of the Developed world.

In my experience, Americans would rather "get mine" than share.

<comment><USER27> Americans are ranked as one of if not the most generous nation by numerous stats [0]. Americans donate more of their money as a percentage of their total income than any other citizens on earth.

Now, there's a lot one could say about why. I imagine it's a mix of the wealth and importance of religion uniquely in that developed country.

There's a lot the US could do with social programs, that's for sure but the individuals are certainly more charitable than certain European countries. Greetings from Copenhagen :)

The ideas presented in the blog are trite and solve nothing.

[0][https://www.cafonline.org/media-office/press- releases/2013/w...](https://www.cafonline.org/media-office/press- releases/2013/world-giving-index-2013.aspx)

<comment><USER26> > _Americans are ranked as one of if not the most generous nation by numerous > stats [0]. Americans donate more of their money as a percentage of their > total income than any other citizens on earth._

I wonder if that's because the society they live in requires them to do so. For example, Australian's know that employed people have plenty of money from welfare to live on, so there really isn't any need to "give" money to them.

Americans know that the "have nots" are in serious trouble, so they give to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> crw-rw-rw If these idiots hadn't agitated for laws limiting development in the first place, then housing wouldn't be as unaffordable as it is now in the Bay Area. Instead of attacking tech workers earning high five-figure salaries, which is hardly makes them "rich" by Bay Area standards, why not relax laws restricting development?

Much of this outrage is actually manufactured, and by Gawker no less: [http://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick- de...](http://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-dentons- phony-hypocritical-class-war-against-tech-workers/)

</comment><comment><USER28> The entire premise of this is flawed. I posted a huge ranty comment on Anil's page, but the TL;DR:

* Tech companies have no expertise providing social services.

* It is a very bad idea to have public services delivered at the whim of private companies.

The answer to this is _taxes_. You want to criticize Google? Criticize them for using offshore tax shelters.

There also seems to be a longing for Google to swoop in and somehow fix politics, but really, unless money or technology solves the problem, Google is not the answer.

<comment><USER29> The buses fix the Bay Area's bad public transportation problem. Now unless the Bay Area city and county govts and its residents are open to the idea of having tech companies use imminent domain and straight up pay for everything (like Google's municipal wifi initiative), I don't understand the hate for the buses. You don't hear this in NY.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The "solution" will be an exodus from SF to other communities. SF has eaten itself before, and it will doubtlessly eat itself again.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think the "backlash" is a symptom, not the cause.

The cause likely has a lot more to do with an unnatural supply constraint imposed previously as well as very little in the way of a public transportation infrastructure that would better enable workers (both tech and other) to live where they would like, at a price they want to pay.

<comment><USER32> Transport infrastructure is one of the issues I'd think would be a no-brainer for support as far as public or even shared private projects go.

Providing transportation to your workers isn't a core function that you want to be working on yourself as a business; it's a problem you'd _prefer_ to externalize or share. And the better the transportation infrastructure of a city functions, the more likely the city in general will be a desirable place for workers to settle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> There are two problems that need to be fixed.

-Housing prices. Supporting affordable housing isn't the solution here; there needs to be more supply. Given all the money invested in tech, surely the bigger companies could invest in some real estate. Or announce that you're ready to do so, when the city finally allows it - now the city's the villain.

-Fix Transportation so you don't need private shuttles. Either force the city to improve transportation or support startups that can do it instead.

</comment><comment><USER34> Simplest thing would be to build apartments and shops for all their emploees on company land.

</comment><comment><USER35> It says something about the level of intelligence of Silicon Valley people that it has taken this long for someone to point out that there are LOTS of things that local people could do to defuse the situation and improve the situation. In fact, given the number of people who live in SF and work down in the Valley, one wonders why on earth they started running private buses and did not go straight to the city and demand new routes on the city bus system. As for wifi, that could have been installed on the new routes for all riders, not just privileged Googlers.

Great coding ability is not enough to get by in life. You need creativity as well, and some understanding of social, business and political issues. Because life does not end at the edge of the CPU chip.

</comment><comment><USER13> The author came up with 5 original ideas(not even very good ones) and then accosted tech companies for having not implemented them before he/she thought of them.

Wat.

</comment><comment><USER36> The entire premise is flawed. Who hates techies in SF? A tiny, tiny minority of people.

</comment><comment><USER37> People dont change wholesale until they are forced too. The backlash hasnt affected the individuals, only the collective. Until people start to feel unsafe or targeted the only people who will organize improvements will be their employers because public opinion of big companies affect the bottom line.

<comment><USER38> > Until people start to feel unsafe or targeted

The implicit threat, made explicit once again -- it amazes me how blatant some people are in HN comments on this subject!</comment></comment>


Why do people still use paper work orders? - <AUTHOR> Someone came to fix my garage today. The garage repairman issued me a paper work order and I asked why they don't do this on a phone or tablet. He said everything is done via paper. Are there startups solving this? <comment><USER2> Oh, it's been solved, many times. But consider the advantages of paper: \- low battery usage \- high contrast; easy to use in direct sunlight \- rapid bootup time \- you drop it, it still works \- cheap \- low training time (for simple forms) \- error-tolerant in many ways

Now, there are problems as well, for sure, like no data validation and expensive harvesting of that data. But, in many cases, the above advantages outweigh the disadvantages, not because there's not good software to replace it, but simply because there are things that paper is very good at. If you don't particularly benefit from the advantages of software for your exact use case, paper can be absolutely the correct choice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Paper does not have downtime. It is robust, does not require licenses, charging, updates...

A cheap scanner get it useable elsewhere.

Simple, cheap is why.

</comment><comment><USER4> When you say solving 'this' what exactly problem are you noticing?</comment>