Ask HN: Looking for help (Co-Founders) - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
I need help.  Linked-In has a gap in how it handles recommendations.  Sites like http://onething.com and http://talentag.com have picked up on this and have already launched.  I have been working on my own version of this here and there for a couple of months, but I need help.  I am a back-end/database developer with crappy front-end skills, and for this to really work the interface has to be right.
If you're a Rails developer with some spare time and want to work on a startup (part time is fine, as I have a full time job), shoot me an email at maxdemarzi AT gmail DOT com and we can go from there.
My half-(ass)built prototype is at http://getvouched.com .  It's not much, but I'm just making the point that I'm not an "idea guy" looking to get someone else to do all the work.
If you don't like the idea of working on something someone else has already done... remember it's not about the idea, it's about the execution.  Both of the sites above are making what I believe are mistakes in their approach to this problem.
Thanks, Max <comment><USER2> Two links for you:

<http://thefounderconference.com> is next week and you may still be able to pitch your co-founder position there.

Otherwise, <http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Wanted-Meetup/> runs every other month.

Where are you located?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the links.

I'm in Chicago, which makes it hard to attend SV events.

<comment><USER3> Site is down. I'm in Chicago and might be able to help, refer you to some rails developing friends of mine, etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The concept reminds me of another site I ran across recently: <http://endor.se/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Clay... now they have some NICE call to actions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Clickable: <http://getvouched.com>

<comment><USER6> 504 Gateway Time-out nginx/0.7.65

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah... Out of memory Exception. Java::JavaLang::OutOfMemoryError (Java heap space):

The server has 64 gigs... but I'm on JRuby Head (jruby 1.6.0.dev) and Rails 3 RC, and the website is running in development mode...

Thanks for registering  >8-]

<comment><USER7> Way too much resources for something so basic. You can run it out of a 1GB VM, if you wanted to.

I do about 8k uniques a day out of 512MB box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just signed up, and now don't know what I'm meant to do. You need some call to actions in there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Macca. I'll add this to my to-do list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Front end looks nice and poppy actually. I'm confused as to what to do with it as well though.

</comment><comment><USER10> looks good so far. I registered, and i;m looking forward to updates via email as you progress. I think an about page with info explaining what your goals are and how you want people to interact with the site this far, or what type of feedback you are looking for would be good. I just tried to confirm my account via email and "ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid in ConfirmationsController#show' was returned. :-( also small side note, why 6 char minimum on passwords? tumblr only requires 5, just to throw that out there.</comment>


How Chinese Military stole C17 designs and much more - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/us-china-cybertheft-su-bin/ <comment><USER2> Long read but very interesting story that I had never heard before.</comment>


Project Springfield: A Cloud Service Built in F# - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/12/13/project-springfield-a-cloud-service-built-entirely-in-f/ <comment><USER2> It feels like Microsoft is starting to get more vocal about pushing F#. Worth noting that Visual Studio/Xamarin for Mac is prominently offering F# for Android and iOS out of the box now as well.

<comment><USER3> Just wish resharper would get on the bandwagon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I just wait a bit longer, more features from F# will be available in C#. Still not making the jump. So close.

<comment><USER5> ?? Would you be more likely I make the jump if C# had more of F# features or less likely.

I wouldn't hold my breath for anything approaching parity.

<comment><USER4> Nope, but pattern matching will be in vNext.

<comment><USER6> It's not the same thing.

C# "Pattern Matching" is little more than destructuring or switch on steroids.

However, much like how the compiler assists you when writing subclasseses so that you've implemented all the required methods, real Pattern Matching (F#) gives you the same guarantees from the compiler that you've handled all the possible cases appropriately. This makes real F# pattern matching much more useful than "switch with destructuring" and helps you grow your programs in a safe way. The C# way has all the same problems as the switch statement which gives no feedback about what cases you've handled.

<comment><USER4> That sounds awesome.

<comment><USER7> The Yaron Minksy talk Effective ML ([https://vimeo.com/14313378](https://vimeo.com/14313378)) has examples of using pattern matching and algebraic data types.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I signed up a while back. Still waiting for my credentials...

<comment><USER9> It's because of lazy evaluation.

<comment><USER10> This joke works better with Haskell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The comments describing the internal politics between DevTools and WindowsDev are also interesting to read.

</comment><comment><USER12> F# needs a Phoenix badly.

<comment><USER13> Does Pheonix have a home page or a repo on github? Searching only turns up job ads in Arizona.

<comment><USER14> I suppose it refers to a web framework for Elixir: [http://www.phoenixframework.org](http://www.phoenixframework.org)

<comment><USER12> Exactly. I was exposed to elixir/phoenix and could not help but think "man, typespecs is the best we get? wish this were F#". But alas, all the momentum and mindshare is being sucked up by elixir/phoenix. If F# could replicate that somehow that would be AMAZING.

I don't mean to knock Elixir/Phoenix though. They are very cool and intersting. Erlang/beam is.. interesting. But F#'s tooling is just fantastic.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase) - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/deeper-understanding-with-metaweb.html <comment><USER2> This is huge for many reasons, but namely, this could finally lead to the "semantic web." Metaweb's video, which is linked to in the article, explains part of the "how".

The problem with the semantic web is that many need to embrace it. Many people need to tag text with these "bar codes" (uniquely identified entities). That can take a big effort and there has to be a ROI for this big undertaking. The other is that there is no standard. Well, Google just solved those. With a dominant market share, you don't need someone to agree on a standard, you just force them to--or else they lose out to competition. And as far as the ROI in tagging web pages? Well, what's the ROI on SEO? This will bring about a new form of SEO, except that Google can now undercut many of the search results and answer many of the queries directly--so that'll get interesting... and I'm sure Wolphram Alpha certainly agrees.

Google was also smart to buy Metaweb in order to give web app developers a good reason to use their entities and just FB's open graph entities.

Congrats to the Metaweb team! Freebase + Wikipedia are two of the best gifts to humanity.

<comment><USER3> The problem with the semantic web is you need a universal ontology. i.e. you need everyone to agree on the same thing. Cory Doctorow's Metacrap explains more <http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm>

<comment><USER4> That's a strawman. You in fact don't need a "universal ontology," you just need people to agree on first principles (e.g. URLs are unique, there are things called triples, etc.)

<comment><USER5> I think you do need a universal ontology if you want to make the kind of progress the semantic web people talk about. If you just have a bunch of small, separately created ontologies, the situation can indeed seem great until each expands. Then the intersections and ambiguities become huge.

Sure, if you weren't concerned exactness and lack of ambiguity, you could expand the world of triples into a giant, poorly organized collection of information. It would be kind of like the web. The approach "works" but we, uh, already have the web.

Also, the Doctorow document excellent. Anyone expected naive metadata to be extensible should have a reply to it.

<comment><USER4> _If you just have a bunch of small, separately created ontologies, the situation can indeed seem great until each expands. Then the intersections and ambiguities become huge._

Inferencing solves this problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congrats to Metaweb and Applied Minds. Those guys are uniformly brilliant and it's great to see Google sharing the deep interest Metaweb has in curating a great, accessible repository of semantic data.

</comment><comment><USER7> Imagine if we could do this with all of Google's data (A very cool search engine built on top of Freebase):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1497100>

</comment><comment><USER8> That is so cool (I think). I have been waste deep in Freebase for a few weeks for a work task.

There is a lot of cruft in Freebase, but with some manual effort and some automation, it is a good source of a wide variety of information. Depending on application, DBpedia and GeoNames are other good resources for structured data.

</comment><comment><USER9> The name didn't immediately ring a bell until I Googled it: Metaweb == Freebase.

<comment><AUTHOR> I updated the title, thx

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> When I saw Metaweb in the headline what immediately sprang to mind was the excellent wikipedia they maintained for Neal Stephensons's "The Baroque Cycle". It was called Quicksilver wiki.

I myself learned about it from Stephenson himself during a presentation he did for the book in the now defunct Cody's Books in Berkeley. After 2-3 years of active growth the Quicksilver wiki disappeared from metaweb's site. I was wondering if Google will restore the wiki too?

Metaweb briefly mentioned at the end of this article in Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksilver_(novel)>

</comment><comment><USER11> So we are going to see a lot of zero click info on Google. Like DuckDuckGo. Good.

</comment><comment><USER12> This seems very significant to me. So far, there has always been this opposition between algorithmic extraction of meaning and modeled structed data. It never made sense to me, because using both leads to so much better query results. I've been doing it for years and I was starting to wonder why the idea isn't catching on. It's been a really tough sell. I hope this is going to be a real breakthrough. Managing spam will be difficult though.

</comment><comment><USER13> How much?

</comment><comment><USER14> If they unlock the Freebase data and associate UPCs/EANs/other bar codes and structured data around it (which Freebase has done in a hap-hazard fashion), they could really do some pretty awesome stuff.

</comment><comment><USER15> For those of us who have worked closely with Metaweb's products and had a professional relationship with them (Powerset, my previous employer pre- acquisition, was fairly close to them back when we started out) over the past few years, this is great to see. Metaweb has been providing several invaluable services to everyone interested in NLP, Search, and smarter software in general.

Glad you got your payout, guys. Hopefully now the full power of Google's infrastructure can make Freebase fast and enormous.

</comment><comment><USER16> err interesting note Freebase powers some part of Bing Search

</comment><comment><USER4> Definitely a big congratulations to these folks. They've done great work and it's definitely a great day for the promise of the Semantic Web.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is great news - Metaweb always had pretty good APIs that made a friendly kid in the block. I can see this being immediately useful everywhere for google's offerings. Man, YouTube would be friggin awesome metadata for say music videos or a few hundred more layers for google earth. Sweet!

</comment><comment><USER18> Are there anyone here that downloaded and played with their data set (PG dump). I have fiddled with one of their table to process their Wikipedia data. I think Google bought it for their supposedly wicked-fast GraphDB.

<comment><USER19> I haven't downloaded the data set for the fact that it doesn't look like the accompanying MQL server is available for download. Am I correct on this?

MQL is sweet (e.g. give me all of Tom Cruise's movies since 1995 that have cost over 10million dollars to make), but what good is the data dump if all I can do is resort to simplistic SQL queries? MQL support is just as important as the data itself.

I'm sure that I'm overlooking something simple as usual (shameless self- deprecation reference in an attempt to hold myself less accountable in the event that there's an easy solution available but I was just too lazy to find it).

<comment><USER18> AFAIK you need to process that data - put it into a graph db or a RDF store. SQL/MQL/RDF/OWL are all just query languages that can query the data. BTW there is no open source MQL implementation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> wow I was interested in joining Freebase, now I need to join google!

</comment><comment><USER20> Maybe a smart pre-emptive strike against twitters annotations?

<comment><USER21> I have no idea what you mean by this. Twitter is not trying to become a database or Wikipedia. Tweets are short communications and signalling, which they want to enrich with more data for specialized applications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Most amazing one:

<http://www.freebase.com/labs/parallax/>

</comment><comment><USER23> Another try to compete with wikipedia? This time it might be successful. Wikipedia lacks structure and API to fetch different content types.

</comment><comment><USER24> Search. Monopoly.</comment>


Cloud migrating production first in 12 hours or less - <AUTHOR> Cloud migrating production  without a plan, and how it made me a better programmer ;)
We have a b2b webapp product in cloud_provider_a which started having trouble serving requests, timing out.
My team (supporting another product in cloud_provider_b) was tasked with setting up a duplicate of prod in cloud_provider_b. I can't even remember why mgmt thought that would help.
By the end of the day, by hook or by crook the call was made to switch PRODUCTION traffic into a newly made stack in a different cloud than where that application was currently hosted. Despite protest from the engineering and QA teams.
Its all a blur now. Things went horribly wrong for two days. On the third day my team (with no prior knowledge of how this product works) found that the docker containers running the app had an nginx config with a low worker_connections setting.
We changed that one line and the app is back up. But the cost has been high, our customers had a far higher level of disruption these 3 days. Our engineers feel burnt out and disrespected, and our QA teams are appalled.
AMA I guess <comment><AUTHOR> I read here a while back that as Engineers we have an ethical obligation to only present good options to management. That when pressed for more options we need to be careful on what we present.

I think I have gained a lot of understanding around this now, and have pushed back time and time again to prevent management demanding dangerous and risky changes without even quantifying the impact of those, positive or negative.

If only I had that before this mess began.

</comment><comment><USER2> I see same too often recently. There is too much printed money on tables. Quality assurance degrades, business in scoping histeria, management micromanaging everything ad-hoc aka flat but same old structures, engineering forced to deliver over weekends and cut every corner.

This bubble has to crash or people will go mental en masse.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why aren't you interviewing for another job right now instead of sharing on HN? ;-) haha

Joke aside. "No pain no gain" as they say. So what's one thing that was painful today but eventually is learning / growth / wisdom for you?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am. I think others in the company are now too. To be told that our knowledge and expertise isn't respected was a real blow.

I did also learn a lot about cloud architecture though.

<comment><USER3> Ah yeah nothing like the most barebones PoC to learn a lot about something. Bird's eye view and all that.

Good that you're already thinking 'next'!

The blow you speak of is common unfortunately between different types, and there is always a sorta 'dominant' type in every business. Sometimes it's the engineers, sometimes it's the marketing, sometimes it's sales, sometimes it's c-execs. That's one piece of info worth having to make more informed career choices, depending on your goal — you usually thrive as part of the dominant type, i.e. "ethos" of the company. Look at the CEO and background of the managing backbone. It usually says a lot about a company's culture, who _matters_ and who's recycled perpetually.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's definitely engineering that get recycled, and our C level is made of people focused on sales.

Now I know what to look for in a company, this event paid out in wisdom coins for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That is great! You are doing system administration now, enjoy!

I believe people should be doing that more often, you know, just moving stuff around.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder for how much longer?

If my team was asked to spend a day investigating instead of migrating we would have found it and solved it without any overtime and midnight call outs.

At least I've grown a pair over the last few days.</comment></comment>


Top Rift Experiences Right Now - <AUTHOR> http://www.oculusriftinfo.com/top-5-rift-experiences-right-now-august-2013-edition/

<comment><USER2> I strongly disagree with placing Minecraft as the #1 Rift experience. In Half- Life 2, aiming and looking are entirely discrete but in Minecrift (Rift extension for Minecraft), looking and aiming are bound together and you can't even aim upwards (mouse/hydra control is limited to horizontal movement only) to mine tree blocks directly above you without looking 90° straight up and having your headphones fall off.

It's not game-breakingly-bad, but it surely is bad enough that I wouldn't even mention Minecraft in the top 5.

<comment><USER3> I've tried several demos, and Minecrift has been the only one I've gone back to several times. When I tried HL2, there were perspective and latency issues to the point that I couldn't play for more than 15 minutes.

<comment><USER4> What do you mean by perspective issues?

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure either (don't have one to play with), but I'd suspect the FOV being wrong could cause what some people would call perspective issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised War Thunder isn't on the list. Has native Rift support already built in, multiple views to choose from (pilot's eyes, virtual cockpit, etc), and is ridiculously immersive.

It's one of the main demos all my friends flip out about, and has them talking about for days after coming to my place and playing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I put it in as an honourable mention. It's a spectacular demo, but the actual gameplay I've found is pretty hard to get into, not helped by the "it's online so you're terrified of the League of Legends effect" problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> At Greylock HackFest two weeks ago, someone built the Oculus Drone ([https://github.com/feross/oculus-drone](https://github.com/feross/oculus- drone)) which was a quadcopter-drone that could be controlled by the Rift. The Rift would see what the camera mounted on the drone could see. I think that made for an awesome experience!

</comment><comment><USER8> We got two rifts this last week. They really are incredibly immersive. First law is definitely on my list to play - we just didn't have an extra controller around the office. Some other good ones are the Unreal Dev Kit (seems it needs a special build though) and another called Titans of Space.

<comment><USER9> First Law dev here - I'll have a new build coming out soon that has better support for more controllers and keyboards. Hope you enjoy it!

<comment><USER8> That will be amazing - I was just reading your blog earlier - I like how you're going about things and it really seems you're on a great track. Let me know if you need a beta-tester! Keep up the good work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > "what? I've been in here for an hour?"

I think the "in here" is key. As everyone has been saying, this is a whole new way to think about HMI.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely.

It's very telling that my girlfriend and I have both started to refer to Rift time as time "in the Rift".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Show HN?: [http://www.vendetta- online.com/h/news_27833.html](http://www.vendetta- online.com/h/news_27833.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link! I'll check it out for next month's column.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My good friend Teddy (who I co-project managed the HL2 mod Dystopia with) is the guy behind the Cover Shooter demo.

[https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2915](https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2915)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSoj9EU7pWs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSoj9EU7pWs)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CaUoAVck6g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CaUoAVck6g)

I'm definitely eager to see what the specs are for the initial mass market release of the Rift is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool - it's a spectacularly cool idea and a great proof of concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't the Rift not out yet? I mean, not even close to out? Why are people worried about the experiences?

<comment><USER14> Because lots of people (e.g. me) have the dev kit and want to get a grasp and what new experiences it can offer.

<comment><USER13> Oh, the dev kits are out? How is it?

<comment><USER15> Yeah, kits shipped in March. The hardware is incredibly polished for something that popped up on Kickstarter 7 months prior.

It's comfortable, tracking works wonderfully. The only downside is the relatively low resolution - which it's said will change significantly by the time a consumer version ships.

Still, I place it on a very short list of truly remarkable experiences involving technology.

The impact of the experience is hard to compare, this video [0] might give you an idea how convincing it is to put it on for first the time.

I'm very excited about what will come about as we move out of the stage of cool tech demos and existing games + head tracking to experiences fully conceived with the rift in mind.

0: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oqazo3ZEnY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oqazo3ZEnY)

<comment><USER16> Is the poor resolution just the first generation devkits or does it still seem low on the updated 1080p versions?

<comment><USER15> As I understand it the 1080p Rift is a prototype for demo purposes only [0].

Also, I wouldn't say the resolution is "poor". Again, it's hard to describe, but it 800x640 presented through the Rift is a lot nicer than it looks on paper.

0: [https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=3...](https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=3259)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would've thought TF2 would be on that list..

<comment><AUTHOR> I like playing TF2 on the Rift - the "I AM SHOOTING WITH MY FACE" aspect is fun - but it's just too vomit-inducing for me, and most people we've tested it on.

Great fun if you don't get motion sick at all, otherwise... not ideal.

As the comment below indicates, it's also very similar on and off the Rift - no real "wow, VR" moment.</comment></comment>


Why You Should Think Twice Before Promoting Your Next Employee - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3055025/lessons-learned/why-you-should-think-twice-before-promoting-your-next-employee <comment><USER2> It is so true that sometimes a promotion does not mean it is good for the employee. His ability suits his current position dose not mean he can perform well in a higher position. Management level should give them an "internship period" to test their ability when making this decision.</comment>


Rails: We need to talk - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dickeyxxx/rails-we-need-to-talk-d6e5ca1d748

<comment><USER2> This was a really well written opinion piece that was a lot more in-depth than I honestly expected. It does a great job pointing out the growing irrelevance of Rails, once the darling of the startup world and all of its many issues (especially when it comes to performance).

<comment><USER3> Growing irrelevance? Fortunately Rails is still getting better and better day by day, and its performance it's too, thanks to improvements in Ruby. It's no way near to leaving the scenes, and possibly your nightmares...</comment></comment>


SeedCamp Finalists Chosen (The European Y Combinator-like seed fund) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/30/seedcamp-finalists-chosen-battle-to-final-five-next-week/ <comment><USER2> As a little experiment, here are some predictions:

ArtFlock - "ArtFlock.com aims to be the foremost online destination for the sale and promotion of original art and craft by the worlds' freshest artists and makers". _Fail._

Avenue7 - "An online community for 12 - 17 year old girls to share ideas on the latest fashion trends & products, as well as their own personal styles". _Great chance of success. I'd put all my money on this one._

Buildersite - "Buildersite is a web-marketplace for construction services. We aim to provide homeowners and tradesmen with the largest and most trusted venue for transacting business online." _Fail, people don't go to the internet to build a house._

Content Syndicate - "Helps content providers and buyers commission, distribute, buy and sell content, that's exclusive, customised and personalised for their requirements". _What? Epic failure._

Debatewise - "Debatewise will enable people to compare the collective wisdom of one side of a debate with the collective wisdom of their opponents, to help them make up their mind about anything". _Fail, people don't care about other people's opinions, except to argue about them._

Facecontact - "Facecontact.com is a simple and effective tool for referral tracking and reward administration for referring job candidates, clients, investors and other prospects". _I don't know, but I'm leaning towards fail. It would be hard to get enough people to start using the service for the service to be useful._

KillSushi - No description. _Uhhh.._

Krogos Software Development - Software development boutique. _Erm.. Consulting? Possible success if they do it correctly, but consulting doesn't scale._

Kublax - "Online personal finance management service". _Too little information given, but a system to manage micropayments would be great, if that's what they're doing._

Maple and Leek - "A social networking site aimed at inspiring like minded over 50s to build an online community of friends and fellow explorers". _Fail. You can't build a social network from "X subset of myspace" and have it succeed without a niche goal._

OpenEra - "Online real estate information systems provider and the developer of the new and exciting Reavia portfolio collaboration service". _Cut away the market speak. Fail._

Project Playfair - "Our game is hypernumbers which will do to numbers what hypertext did to text". _No, it won't. Fail._

Price Delivered - "The place for consumers to discover and share genuine bargains". _Bargains change too fast for the site to be very useful. Have to go with fail._

RentMineOnline - "Trusted online rental market". _Anything over the size of a movie is extremely hard to rent through the mail, plus this requires a huge amount of capital to start, so fail._

The School of Everything - "The place to come to find independent teachers and classes in anything and everything". _When many adults don't even read books, getting them to watch online lectures seems futile. Successful only on a very small scale, and only at music, art, and writing classes._

Tablefinder - "Tablefinders' mission is to aggregate the world's online bookable restaurants through an awarding and open community". _Fail, too many moving parts. It won't be useful until everyone participates, so it won't happen._

Tickex - "Tickex is a search engine for tickets to live events - concert, theatre and sports. In one search, Tickex aggregates results from all the major primary and secondary brokers". _I'm not sure this is very useful. People buy tickets by hearing of a specific event first, not by randomly looking for events to go to. And since they already have a specific event in mind, it's very easy to get tickets for it. Fail._

Wall Street Docs - "A provider of a sophisticated web-based document automation solution for complex capital raising transactions with a feature set tailored to the needs of issuers and banks". _Only successful as enterprise software, so it depends on how good of salesmen they have. Since they only get $50,000, I'm going with fail._

Zemanta - "Content intelligence platform to automatically enhance content, making it web-ready". _What? Fail._

It seems like SeedCamp may be going about this the wrong way. Instead of collecting good teams and iterating until they get an idea correct, they're banking everything on the idea and hoping the team follows.

What're your predictions?

<comment><USER3> These predictions are spot on mostly

But... I have to disagree with your artflock prediction, I think there is a market for this. A few weeks ago I was trying to buy art from local artists on craigslist for my new apartment, it was a pain though, because I had to click on each link to see the painting, I couldn't search very easily on genre or artist, and I had to wade through a bunch of postings for van gogh posters people bought from posters.com etc

Not sure if this is where they are going with that service, but a craigslist for art would be helpful to both artists and buyers.

<comment><USER4> There is also <http://www.etsy.com> which is for anything handmade, which includes art.

I browsed Artflock and saw an artist saying "Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com so we don't have to pay the Artflock fees." That's a bad sign.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If this is seed funding, why are they announcing what all of the companies are doing a priori? So competitors can be aware and get a one-up on them before they release? I would feel uncomfortable with that personally.

<comment><USER6> Yeah. This appears to be a very bad sign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What SeedCamp does is merely getting hype in hope to succeed as a investor2startup intermediate and promote its <http://www.opencoffeeclub.org> network.

So they pick up ideas that will draw most of attention.

Just my thoughts. source: <http://blog.seedcamp.com>

</comment><comment><USER8> These guys aren't the finalists, they are invited for a one week interview only 5 get the cash.

</comment><comment><USER9> These are really, really terrible ideas.

</comment><comment><USER10> a poorly executed knock off of the eminent Y Combinator</comment>


SMS over IRC - <AUTHOR> https://mndrix.blogspot.com/2018/06/sms-over-irc.html <comment><USER2> An interesting alternative to SMS over XMPP/IRC over Twilio is SMS over XMPP over your Android phone. This lets you send and receive SMS on the computer and share the history with the phone. For this I'm using MAXS ([http://projectmaxs.org/](http://projectmaxs.org/)), an open source modular system available on F-Droid and Play store where each module is installed separately and provides a specific service over XMPP, such as receiving new messages, reading old messages, querying location, etc.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I looked at MAXS once, but couldn't find anything about encrypting or signing messages, which kinda killed it for me.

<comment><USER3> I use JMP.chat but I'm not exactly sure it is what you are looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unless I'm looking in the wrong place, this seems like a good way to ring up a massive bill. 10,000 messages/month doesn't seem like a stretch. At $0.0075/message that's $75/month. Not exactly cheap just so you can SMS from your favorite IRC client.

<comment><USER5> Is there somewhere in the world that still charges per SMS?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Like the author, I also rolled my own SMS-over-XMPP solution a few years ago. One central ongoing frustration is that a lot of what people think is SMS really ends up being MMS. Not only do I miss pictures, but people send group texts that silently miss me, and messages over the SMS character limit are also sent over MMS. It sends 160 characters over SMS, and the rest is chopped off if you don't have MMS. Some (many/most?) messaging apps don't give you a character count any more, so I can't even tell people to watch the characters...

I believe Twilio has some sort of MMS support, so maybe this could be made to work with their service. My VoIP provider doesn't support MMS, so I may have to migrate to Twilio some day.

<comment><USER7> > messages over the SMS character limit are also sent over MMS. It sends 160 > characters over SMS, and the rest is chopped off if you don't have MMS

I've never seen my phone switch to MMS automatically because of the length. I've had old black/white Nokias support concatenated SMS

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

<comment><USER6> I see. It may be that Concatenated SMS is what my VoIP provider is failing to support. (I saw some talk once about fallback to MMS for long messages, but maybe that was just speculation or an uncommon scenario.) I guess I'm in the same boat either way. :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Using google voice and hangouts connected I have a libpurple connection for hangouts in Bitlbee. I can send SMS through that connected interface via voice/hangouts. Works well for me (especially when in China on business) I also live in Japan and travel to EU about once a month. Keeping in touch with my family/friends in US via my one phone number I've had since google voice launched is quite useful...

</comment><comment><USER9> The author says in another post from 2017 that they had to abandon Google Voice when they moved to Europe. I had no idea.

I'm in Europe and I've used Google Hangouts to audio and video call people with Android phones for longer than 2017 so I have no idea what the author is talking about. Clearly Google Voice must be something different because Hangouts most likely "dials" over data.

Quick googling says Google Voice is PC to PC so no mention of SIP or GSM being used.

Either way I think using IRC seems a bit outdated, especially when you're trying to accomodate non-technical people.

XMPP would give more support for modern clients like Conversations for example. And it's just as easily scriptable as IRC imo. You don't actually touch XML, you use client libraries. So even if IRC is simple on the protocol level XMPP is just as simple to script with.

<comment><USER10> The fact that google voice _works_ in Europe is not the authors' qualm. His qualm is that you cannot get an european number from google voice, nor call european numbers for free, nor send sms messages to them, etc.. It just "doesn't work" when your life is european-centric.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice to see old protocols used for new purposes - I'm using nntp for some things it wasn't designed for (mailing lists, RSS/Atom-feeds), but which fits nicely.

I understand the wish not to be dependent on a third party - but isn't Twilio such a dependency?

<comment><USER12> In my case, it's not wanting to avoid external dependencies - it's how hard those dependencies are. An external that you can swap out in an afternoon is a perfectly healthy vendor relationship. But if, eg, some machination flagged your account out of the blue, and your only recourse is to stare blankly at the screen in disbelief, this is not a healthy dependency.

So as long as other sms gateways/delivery services are available, his dependency isn't "Twilio", it's "an sms gateway/delivery service".

<comment><USER13> > So as long as other sms gateways/delivery services are available, his > dependency isn't "Twilio", it's "an sms gateway/delivery service".

That depends of the depth of Twilio-specific integration and the ease of abstraction of course. Author mentions converting custom statuses and the like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love this. Won't some distro'ers please just make a boot'n-play variant that puts all this together into a single image, let the rPi crowd have it (i.e. mass syndication at personal, inexpensive scale), and we can be done with the The Problem™ forever...

</comment><comment><USER15> Why choose SMS today given it's message length limitations? Also there's the lack of security: SMS isn't encrypted and can be sniffed. It's expensive, while other modern messaging alternatives doesn't charge by message.

<comment><USER16> No need for data connection, which can be (more) expensive and energy intensive. The phone can be in deep sleep, consuming nothing, and yet deliver texts in a timely manner. Sometimes in bad network conditions, texts work while calls and data fail.

Some pitfalls are reliability and lack of encryption and usually requiring a phone (which almost requires running non free today in practice, and having an entity knowing your position at all time and exposition to electromagnetic waves)

In France texts are usually unlimited in any offer, starting at 2€

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Now all they need is a mobile IRC interface to close the loop? :)

<comment><USER18> So, Quassel and Quasseldroid? (e.g. the new beta of [https://quasseldroid.info/](https://quasseldroid.info/), requires the new beta of Quassel, both are expected to be released in the next week, only minor bugfixes pending)?

Or Weechat + Weechat Android?

Or IRCCloud?

Mobile IRC can be an amazing experience, if done right. Now we need to make sure it becomes more accessible.

Disclaimer: Quasseldroid author

<comment><USER19> If only there were a good iOS quassel client. iQuassel is hot garbage. Quassel-webserver would be okay, if only iOS didn't immediately reload PWAs when you reopened them.

<comment><USER18> Some people have offered donating me an iPhone so I can build a proper iOS quassel client.

Once the Quasseldroid beta is released, I'll start working on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hope that the numbers are fake.

<comment><USER21> The central office code "555" indicates fake numbers under the NANP[1].

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_\(telephone_number\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'd replace the whole thing with Slack :)

<comment><USER23> I bridge SMS to matrix, I currently have no use for slack, but if I were forced to use it I would bridge that to matrix as well.

Of course the matrix IRC bridges are also quite good. I'm in a couple of bridged IRC rooms.

<comment><USER24> What do you use to bridge sms to matrix? I've seen a couple projects people were working on, but some were very hacky, and the rest were lacking features.

<comment><USER23> I use the one by tijder: [https://github.com/tijder/SmsMatrix](https://github.com/tijder/SmsMatrix)

It works well enough for me, though I don't use SMS too often though.

What I did like is that I can add another account to a room such that I can monitor texts from both matrix accounts.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is "open the kimono" a racist term? - <AUTHOR> We had a team meeting today, business as usual.
5 guys on the call, all white men.
Sales guy referred to one of our partners Indian team member and then says "and his cousin Abdul", when referring to the new guy on their team. They're not cousins, there were audible groans.
That was racist. It's racism I see very often in Australia.
Then next he started talking about the client, and then he used the term "open the kimono". Groans again. Now I'd only heard this term except from a Slack message I saw our CTO post a few years prior. I thought it was an odd choice of phrasing, but now after looking it up I learned it was used mostly in finance.
Is that racist? <comment><USER2> I don't know whether it's "racist"; the term "racist" is highly ambiguous. It might also be "sexist". In any case the expression is nasty and should not be used, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER3> I first heard the phrase in the 1990s when I lived in Silicon Valley working for a software company.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/11/02/360479744...](https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/11/02/360479744/why- corporate-executives-talk-about-opening-their-kimonos?t=1592387441488) gives a rather comprehensive treatment. I'll provide only a cursory set of quotes:

It mentions a 1990s characterization "Basically a somewhat sexist synonym for 'open the books,'", another characterization as "kind of creepy" then goes on to expand:

> The idea of a corporation wearing clothes is kind of creepy, because the > idea that corporations are people is creepy — as is the idea that showing > skin equates somehow with sharing information. ...

> Greenhouse calls it "somewhat sexist" — and there's probably a reason it's > "open the kimono" and not "drop the trousers" — but a kimono is technically > a unisex garment. That doesn't mean the phrase isn't read in a gendered way.

> ... So there is certainly a gendered dimension to the kimono in the West. > But is "open the kimono" a racist phrase, exactly? Well, it can certainly > lead to, shall we say, racist-adjacent behaviors like white guys dressing up > in kimonos for their marketing presentations.

> ... "It does make sense that this ethnically charged bit of jargon could > have emerged from fears in the U.S. about the rise of Japan's economy in the > '80s," Vanderbilt's Barry says. He adds that in his view the phrase is "kind > of racist, frankly, especially if it is borne of fear of Japanese economic > dominance."

> That explanation may make sense, but like most discussion on the subject, > it's basically conjecture.

</comment><comment><USER4> I didn't know the expression "open the kimono".

When I read this post I interpreted it in a sexual/sexist way (assumed to be related to Geisha) which made it rather racist but the link provided by TomMarius in another comment suggests that it is not so.

So I think the issue here is that it is too obscure and too specific to a country in a way that people may interpret it as being sexist or racist.

Always best to stick to unambiguous expressions, or maybe don't use an expression at all and say 'relax' when you mean 'relax'.

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/open- kimono.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/open-kimono.asp)

Apparently it is considered at least a little racist. I don't know why, though - is "loose your tie" (not sure if English has similar phrase; said to an angry person) racist? Would "show your cards" be racist?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure about lose your tie.

On show your cards, sounds like poker. There's no culture-tie to cards.

<comment><USER5> Card players are more than not white.

Other people than Japanese wear kimono, e.g. in martial arts, even these that split off a hundred years ago - is that racist too, then?

<comment><USER3> Racist usage is contextual. What's racist in one context is not racist in another.

I might call my kids "little monkeys" if they act rowdy at home. But given the long racist history of calling black people "monkeys", that same term might not be interpreted the way I mean it should I refer to rowdy black kids that way.

And I would be in the wrong, because it's wrong that I should have gotten to be an adult without learning that aspect of American history. (I shouldn't get away with that privilege, to use the modern term.)

So we have to look towards how the term came about, the racist and sexist interpretations of both "kimono" and "geisha" in American culture, the origin of the term in the era when Americans were worried about Japanese economic dominance (why did the phrase come out of the US instead of Japan?), etc.

Along those lines, how did the term get to be "open the kimono" instead of "drop trousers" or "go skinny-dipping"? And in real life, what secret is opening the kimono supposed to reveal - the color of one's underwear? The existence of one's genitalia?

Given how many times I've gone skinny dipping - including at clothing-optional areas - and taken a sauna at public bathhouses, well, plenty have people have seen me naked. I still have lots of secrets. So I don't even see how the analogy is supposed to be relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm an American who travels to Japan frequently and once lived there for eight months. I don't like the phrase and I feel uncomfortable whenever I hear it; to me it evokes stereotypes and myths surrounding geisha.</comment>


Productivity Tip: Turn off Mail Distractions on Your iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zeroinboxapp.com/2013/08/productivity-tip-turn-off-mail-distractions-on-your-iphone/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm surprised at how many apps push distractions at us, and how tricky it is to find these settings. Mail for me is a big one - I get tons of email every day, and having my iPhone buzz or ring each time is ridiculously distracting...</comment>


Humans Can Taste Glucose Oligomers Independent of the HT1R2/hT1R3 Sweet Receptor - <AUTHOR> http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/08/23/chemse.bjw088 <comment><AUTHOR> A New Scientist write-up of the paper, with some additional sources: [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2104244-there-is- now-a-...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2104244-there-is-now-a-sixth- taste-and-it-explains-why-we-love-carbs/)</comment>


I am an investor in 9 companies: How and why I started angel investing - <AUTHOR> http://joel.is/angel-investing/ <comment><USER2> Spoiler alert: The answer is having money.</comment>


'The Bay Area is broken': Why Silicon Valley startups are hiring elsewhere - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-04-bay-area-broken-silicon-valley.html <comment><USER2> From an engineering perspective, building a remote-first team was an easy decision to make after a brief attempt to hire local talent.

Some of the unexpected benefits, in addition to the obvious upsides of better talent for the same money, an easier time finding them, and better retention:

Documentation gets really good.

Discussions frequently have a written artifact associated with them, which allows for easy reference later on. (e.g. asana thread, slack discussion)

No open office problems. The dreaded shoulder tap is not a thing.

We have to be clearer and more deliberate about the communication channels we use and the reason we use, and when and how we choose to do so. This is a good thing! We use a mix of Slack, Mumble, email, asana, Zoom, and 1:1 video calls.

Our culture is less driven by force of personality than it may otherwise be. Having a strong leader in the room can be a powerful multiplier. On the other hand, remote teams can lead to a more subtle and thoughtful type of leadership, with more of a focus on the team as a system than as a troop. This is frequently a good thing! Also, if someone important is having a bad day, there is less of a transitive effect on the team.

Our automated dev tooling got better. (Since futzing around with other people's computer has a higher barrier, code that does stuff like setting up a vagrant box on dev machines becomes more valuable. So we keep it in good repair, and if something about it doesn't work, we fix it right when the problem comes up!)

The above extends to all code: when your code may break other people's builds, and you won't be physically around to make it right, I think people put in a little extra elbow grease and, for example, write one more test than they may have otherwise.

Our systems for code review are naturally a lot more in line with some of the compliance requirements we have. All of our code goes into a PR for code review, and many of our clients need that as part of a comprehensive set of data protection and security requirements.

Our automated testing via CI got better. Would it have gotten better without being remote? Probably. But tests are a great method of communicating about code, and so we started caring more about them.

Team get-togethers become exciting due to their infrequency!

Even beyond all these rational productivity-based arguments, it just feels more natural and humanistic. Makes it easier to spend time with your kids! To travel to your dream destination and spend time working from there, as more than just a tourist! To settle down exactly where you want, with the continuity of your same team and job and project. No commute if you don't want one! Less of a second-circuit driven environment! (as defined by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight- circuit_model_of_conscio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight- circuit_model_of_consciousness))

Hit me up if you're looking into adding remote work into your organization, especially if you're early in the process. Let me try to help convince you!</comment>


Negative Keywords Create Positive PPC Results - <AUTHOR> http://www.brickmarketing.com/blog/negative-keywords-results.htm

<comment><USER2> Google Adwords ->

Keywords ->

See search terms... ->

All

Go back a few months and export the data into excel. Sort by cost, filter out any keywords that convert at a cost effective cost per conversion, and look for trends in words that cost a lot of money and don't convert. If the words aren't relevant, add them to negatives. If they are relevant, figure out if they need their own ad group and more effective ad copy/landing pages.

Rinse, repeat.</comment>


How to license our SAAS product - <AUTHOR> We have a SAAS product and we offer it on a monthly/yearly subscription. Once of our products is an API which is also offered on a subscription basis.(Price range, $75-$300 per month). One of our clients recently requested that we license our APIs to them, to be run on their servers for security reasons.<p>1) Should I offer it for lifetime/yearly license? 2) Assuming, I go for lifetime license, how do I price it. Our costliest API plan currently comes as $300/month. ? 3) If I offer it on a yearly license, how do I make sure that they renew it. Since, ours is a nodejs app, they'll have all the code and technically they don't need to renew anything to make it work. 4) If I go for yearly license, do I just offer it for Monthly pricing X 12? <comment><USER2> My first thought is that if your product does not meet a client's security policy, then it is not the right product for that client. There is nothing wrong with that, and a great deal right with it. It's the basis of market segmentation.

Selling "shrink wrapped" software is a different business than SaaS. Support infrastructure is different...and probably less efficient. Distribution infrastructure is required. More importantly, customer expectations are different. The software company starts owning client decisions regarding platforms and hardware and configuration that are out of their control. And your client has told you that they want to run your software on configurations that reflect decisions that are outside your control. These could be dynamic, e.g. your company on the hook when they move from in-house hardware to AWS or Azure or Bob's Discount Cloud Mart.

As far as pricing, my take is that it should cover the costs of going into an entirely new market segment. That means covering the cost of additional engineering, support, and sales. It should be priced for _serious_ buyers, i.e. at _many_ thousands of dollars per month. It should reflect the value the customer places on running your software on their hardware.

To put it another way, the approach to a client who runs your software on their hardware is as a consultancy. "Nickling and diming" is the core of successful consultancy. It's a linear growth activity. The price should be just slightly less than the probable cost of the client reproducing your service with it's own developers times the time value of money divided by the probability of it being successful. This is a big number which is why they are willing to pay for your service.

So my gut is, go big if you want to be in the consulting business. Otherwise, stick to product.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good and important questions with broad implications for your company. Your current business model is a subscription-based offer of SaaS. You also offer a hosted API under a subscription model. If I understand correctly, access to the API is not usage based. Rather, you currently host the API on your company servers and provide a subscription to use this API via some variably-priced and tiered RESTful interface. So, the questions you ask can be re-stated as follows: should we also offer, alongside the subscription model, a RTU (right- to-use) license-based model for your product. But more is needed that adds significant complexity: you are also being asked to provide source code for integration with the customer's code base. If you agree to provide such a source license to your code, how do you price such an offer?

My first advice is that you should consider pricing mechanics as secondary. The primary issue is business model; whether and how you can work in the very different worlds at the same time. You need to sort through the issues carefully. The SaaS model is very different from the more traditional license- based software offers. I won't repeat the abundance of thinking on this here other than to say that (a) metrics you use to measure and guide your success for the SaaS offering are very different from what you will need for a license model, (b) the deployment model for SaaS is very different from source-based licenses. For SaaS, you have complete control over your code base, how and when to issue revisions to your cloud-based services. You have zero control over the source distribution, (c) product support processes are very different between the models, because in the source code model you need to understand the customer's code too! etc., etc...

Let me suggest that you DO NOT offer the source license model alongside of your SaaS subscription model. They are different enough to make it very hard to manage the baseline jointly for both offers. And, the significant additional complication of source-based licensing will make it nearly impossible to manage together. I think this "opportunity" is a sure way to kill your SaaS company.

Rather, you can consider for the particular customer a ONE-TIME SOURCE CODE LICENSING deal, where you sell the source as-is. To make is easier for the customer you can provide some nice documentation on internal frameworks and interfaces. Make sure that you write careful language in the contract to ensure that the customer will not compete with you in your primary business areas (this may not be trivial). Pricing must have NO RELATIONSHIP whatsoever with your SaaS pricing model. It should be based on value of the solution to the particular customer. Once you have this number, double it. Then include pricing for 1 year support (with some bounds, e.g., not more than, say, 10 hours per month) for a fixed fee and an option for the customer to buy additional support for $$ per hour beyond the built-in 10 hours.

If you want to eat Indian food, don't go to an Italian restaurant.

good luck</comment>


Game changing plugin for your Splunk Try out new vuln scanner - <AUTHOR> https://vulners.blog/2020/08/12/game-changing-plugin-for-your-splunk-try-out-new/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/i8cooi/transforming...](https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/i8cooi/transforming_splunk_to_vulnerability_scanner/)</comment>


DeepGram (YC W16) Is Building a Google for Audio - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/deepgram-yc-w16-is-building-a-google-for-audio <comment><USER2> Many speech tech startups are sued endlessly over patents [0], primarily by Nuance, and then when things look hopeless, Nuance offers to buy and make all the lawsuits go away [1]. How do you view this situation, and how will you fight the lawsuits?

[0] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/09/nuance-sues-vlingo-again- ov...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/09/nuance-sues-vlingo-again-over-voice- recognition-patents/) [1] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/20/after-years-of- patent-litig...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/20/after-years-of-patent- litigation-nuance-acquires-vlingo/)

<comment><USER3> We're not familiar with the behind-the-scenes details of those cases, but we're not competing with Nuance in the transcription game. We are doing really killer audio search and view competition through that lens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I posted this comment five days ago. It seems like audio indexing and searching might be the next big thing.

> I've been wanting to make something like this for a while. Really nice > product you have! I think this kind of service will really take off in the > future. Imagine having an app that constantly records everything and allows > you to search it later. Questions like "What did James tell me last November > about traveling to Europe?". It would also eliminate hearsay, since you > would no longer have to trust one person's word against another — you could > simply search the transcript of that moment in the past. In the very long > run, I almost wonder if such a tool would make lying obsolete.

<comment><USER3> I'm Noah, one of the founders. I also think lifelogging will be common in the future because it's becoming easier to record everything and the benefits of having that dataset are also increasing (that's where we come in) You're correct that lying could become obsolete. It could be sort of like the changes brought on by the Information Age, where now it's pointless to argue over truths that are the public domain (since we can just look up the fact whenever we need). It would extend that to private life.

<comment><USER5> Have you seen "The Entire History of You" episode of Black Mirror?

<comment><USER3> It's one of our favorites :) I don't think it would be so bad to record our lives. We would be more efficient scientists, journalists--explorers of information. We could focus on the here and now instead of taking notes.

<comment><USER6> Or we would be stuck focusing on the best [and the worst] of past because it's persistent, like in the episode.

<comment><USER7> Reliving memories seems like a much more powerful drug when streamed directly to your retina just as you experienced it.

I'm pretty sure it requires a whole other level of nostalgia to be immersed and get lost in transcribed texts of the audio of an event.

Not that I'm saying the latter is what the tech will remain like, but at least at first that's what it will probably look like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have always wondered how patents and copyright apply to deep learning networks. It is pretty obvious that the NMIST deep learning convolution network uses the same algorithm patented in letter separation patents by OCR companies. And yet ...

I wonder if you were to go further. Suppose you let a sufficiently deep neural network see all simpsons episodes for instance. And it manages to make new simpsons episodes. This will at some point become possible. At that point, does it count as a new work ? Does it fall under simpsons copyright ? Where is the line ?

<comment><USER3> I would love to see a computer-generated simpsons episode. I bet you could do a basic version using DeepDream applied to the audio and video of a different video / tv show. I imagine the voices and images would morph to sound more simpson-like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks great! I created a simple NodeJS wrapper for it: [http://bit.ly/1YYUbzX](http://bit.ly/1YYUbzX)

<comment><USER3> Awesome, I'll take a look!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does this compare to [http://clarify.io](http://clarify.io)?

<comment><USER11> The important difference is that DeepGram is a fuzzy search that can find matches even if a text transcript is wrong. This is what ups the accuracy very significantly.

I'm the other cofounder of DeepGram. I'm glad we're getting everybody's feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is incredible. _BIG_ ups.</comment>


Spam in Your Calendar? Here's What to Do - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/09/spam-in-your-calendar-heres-what-to-do/ <comment><USER2> This has been something that we've been aware of as a threat in the industry for a while:

[https://www.calconnect.org/news/2019/01/18/calconnect- publis...](https://www.calconnect.org/news/2019/01/18/calconnect-publishes- calendar-spam-best-current-practices)

I first spoken on a panel about it more than a year earlier than that, along with some people from 1&1 who were very keen to see progress on at least defining the risks!

But it's hard to get attention on fixing things, even in the big players (maybe especially in the big players) until there's user impact.

It's also why, from the very first moment we added this feature in our system, the default in Fastmail has been "only auto-add if it's from somebody in my addressbook". And the "from somebody in my addressbook" test checks for DKIM or SPF alignment.

We also allow turning auto-add off of course, or restricting it only to senders in a particular named addressbook group.

<comment><USER3> I would be disappointed if I e.g. buy a plane ticket or a ticket to a show and the event is not added to my calendar. (and you never know the email that a show ticket will come from; so I can't add it to my address book)

As an alternative, could you just have it so if I mark an email as spam, any calendar events from it are deleted from my calendar?

<comment><USER2> Luckily you can turn on "live dangerously" mode if you want - and besides the email arrives straight to your mailbox (unless marked spam) and has a button right there to add it to your calendar.

We think the default is the right balance for most people, and provide easy knobs to adjust the settings if you want.

Right now marking the email spam doesn't find the related calendar events. There's some design work to be done there around user interface when marking emails as spam in bulk (particularly with support for undo and rolling back the calendar changes which isn't as simple as just applying the attached event again, because you may have updated the calendar event since)

<comment><USER4> For events from spam emails that got updated, it might be worth to investigate if you could ask the user; "You marked an email as spam but an event was imported from it that you updated, Keep/Update/Delete?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With Google I recently had invites from emails sitting in my spam folder show up in my calendar. You would think that being flagged as spam would be simple to filter on. I actually really value the automatic adding of events to my calendar from legitimate emails, so this was very infuriating as the spam continued to pour in over weeks.

<comment><USER6> This recently started happening to me too! Spam emails with ical/calendar attachments get loaded into my calendar even if they're appropriately flagged as spam in my Gmail inbox.

It's especially annoying as the spammers create repeated alerts (often late at night). I've wound up with dozens of these I have to manually clear from my calendar.

All of this started a few weeks ago. Perhaps it was a regression rather than a new exploit?

 _Google /Gmail engineers: please file this as a bug._

<comment><USER7> Note that if in Google calendar you mark one of those events as spam, all the recurring ones are automatically removed, whereas if you just delete one it does not remove the others. There's a 'report spam' option (desktop only) in the little drop down options when you open the event.

<comment><USER8> I was so frustrated that reporting spam was desktop only. To add insult to injury if you try to go to the web app on your Android phone in a desktop tab it still opens the Android app instead. Since I was at work (and I don't login to any personal accounts on my work laptop) I had to use Firefox mobile to mark them all as spam.

<comment><USER9> The Gmail Android app has had "Report spam" in the 3-dot menu for a long time.

<comment><USER10> Which is not what's being discussed here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those that prefer a more visual guide, I've created one here: [https://flowshare.io/flow/how-to-block-spam-invitations- from...](https://flowshare.io/flow/how-to-block-spam-invitations-from-your- google-calendar). It has a screenshot for every step(desktop) and less than 50 words in total.

<comment><USER12> Very concise. Btw, I see that you created this tool. It is a brilliant tool. Just wish people would start using this tool to explain the steps instead of writing them in ad filled/narrow column pages.

<comment><USER11> Thanks ! Let me know if you run into any problems using the site

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unfortunately, the google calendar option doesn't actually reject invitations or really remove them from your calendar, it just hides them for _you_. If you're sharing your calendar with anybody then they're still visible to them, and as far as I can tell that's unavoidable.

That means if you are sharing you calendar you can't use this option, since it makes it impossible to remove the events that are now spamming everybody else. You have to just manually mark them as spam every time they appear. I get an event like this maybe every other day at the moment, even though they're almost all identical and I've reported them as spam, it's unbelievably annoying. Even more annoying: gmail is actually picking up the invitation email itself as spam, so it's fully aware that it's unwanted, but then it appears in my calendar regardless. Gmail filters to delete them immediately on arrival don't seem to do anything.

I'm right back to the spam dark ages right now, it's terrible.

<comment><USER14> Oh boy, I didn't realize this and will need to check about this. I thought that filtering would help, but if those folks that I've shared my calendar with are seeing this weirdness....

Between this and the fact any joker can share a document with one's drive... Making google hard to use for business.

I'm now deathly afraid to have any of these products opened when connected to a projector/presenting...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How hard can it be to _not_ insert 30 events from mails that are clearly in the spam folder already?

This issue is baffling to me. If Gmail knows it's spam why on earth are they inserted. Also why inserting 50 events over 4 days suspicious in the first place i don't know.

A "post mortem" would be interesting - why hasn't this been resolved in a couple of days if the solution is that simple and it affects thousands of users over many months?

<comment><USER16> Couldn't agree more. Spam is assumed to be useless at best, if not outright harmful. This is a vector that is easily shut down and should be ASAP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I understand this is perhaps the only current solution, but for me this definitely would not work. I actually _rely_ on seeing those un-responded events in my calendar, especially for large group events.

I'd much prefer a "don't show un-responded invites _from people you do not know_ " option.

</comment><comment><USER18> >the calendar applications from Apple, Google and Microsoft are set by default to accept calendar invites from anyone.

That's insanely dumb.

Why not at least limit calendar invites to contacts or contacts of contacts?

<comment><USER19> Contacts of contacts would be a privacy violation.

<comment><USER18> Who's privacy is being violated if a friend of a friend invites you to do something?

The system in my mind wouldn't tell contacts of contacts "hey, did you know you can invite this person that you've never met with the email@example.com that you were previously unaware of (and knows Susy and John) via google calendar?"

It would just whitelist contacts of contacts, and would probably cut out 99.9% of the spam with little to no impact on the user.

It's much less intrusive than Facebook saying "hey, these two friends of yours know this person who is not your friend, do you know them?", at least.

<comment><USER20> Let's say I'm in the closet, and GLAAD sends out an invite that lands on my father's calendar. Hmmm, who among his contacts also has GLAAD in theirs?

I'm sure there are other scenarios. I don't want my contacts list being used to filter email for other people in my contacts list. It's _my_ list. Not a public web-of-trust thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I had one of these show up in my Google Calendar, it was an every-day reoccurring event. I opened the three dot menu on one of the events > Report as spam, and it removed the event and all of its reoccurrences.

I shudder to think how many innocent people will see this and follow through with the scam.

</comment><comment><USER22> I got a fairly explicit one of these in my calendar the other day, unfortunately it's a calendar I share with my wife, so it appeared on her phone too. That was a fun conversation.

Neither of us could delete the event, either via google calendar or ical. Nor could I find the original email I assume it came from. In the end I just deleted the whole shared calendar.

<comment><USER23> I had a similar experience, eventually I found the message in my spam folder. It's ridiculous that messages marked as spam show up on the calendar, but now we know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was hoping this was about the birthday spam notices in google calendar. There's no way to delete contact birthday info without deleting the contact.

For some reason Google thinks it's cool that I've emailed "email@example.com" at some point in my life. Foo set their birthday in Gmail and now their birthday shows on my calendar along with people I actually want.

</comment><comment><USER25> Google says they're working to fix an issue related to this:

From [https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/13429505?hl=en](https://support.google.com/calendar/thread/13429505?hl=en) :

> _We 're aware of the spam occurring in Calendar and are working diligently > to resolve this issue. We'll post updates to this thread as they become > available._

</comment><comment><USER26> I get this shit all the time, followed a way to disable it on google calendar, unsubscribed from all calendars, uninstalled calendar.app from iphone, and am still getting 'em WTF!

Also mostly russian nonsense

</comment><comment><USER27> We saw this over the past couple weeks. It freaked me out and google's g suite support was useless. I did report the IAM it looked like these invites came from (to both the cloud fraud form and gsuite support) but maybe that listed IAM is actually google's auto-add-to-calendar bot? I didn't think it made sense to contact cloud enterprise support which tends to have awesome responses.

I was concerned because:

      * we received more sophisticated than usual SPAM/phishing to our employees 'from' one of our partners around the same time
      * we work in politics
      * the timezone on the calendar spam was Russia and multiple staff received the spam invites

</comment><comment><USER28> Yep, I've been getting Russian events in my google cal that just reappear the day after I report them as spam (which does what?)

Unfortunately, it's pretty inconvenient to just not show calendar events that I haven't accepted. If you have a busy calendar, it can be helpful to prioritize events - some will inevitably be declined or left hanging, but those are useful to see.

It's pretty crazy that calendar invites that are already filtered out to my spam email folder show up in my normal google calendar. Seems like a quick solution for google to go fix.

</comment><comment><USER29> I have seen this now as a sales tactic, especially with EMC.

<comment><USER30> I've had a lot of supposed "Enterprise" sales people at well known large companies try to pull that.

They'll send a calendar invite and pretend it's a follow up to a meeting we had. Yeah like I can't see through that bullshit. Immediate report as spam.

<comment><USER31> Smells like a CFAA violation to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> They need to let you easily delete events without responding to them. I ended up deleting them without (I think) responding but not until trying two or three different ways which each insisted I had to reply that I wasn't attending. And now I'm not even sure how I did it and will probably have to cycle through all those attempts again next time.

</comment><comment><USER33> My problem with this is that I have a russian event every night that only shows up on my phone calendar. I did the fix to remove it from Google calendar through the web, but it's only gone on the web. It still shows up on my phone with no option to delete all.

I've been deleting the next 4 days every 4 days for the last two weeks.

</comment><comment><USER34> I recently had this problem in an old Samsung phone. The spam was not directly coming from email, but from some other installed app which was somehow tricking S planner (Samsung's calendar app) into adding the events to google's calendar, even though the original spammer app had no calendar permissions.

</comment><comment><USER35> In my case, I had these spam-invites sent from my G Suite email to my personal Gmail. I could see the emails on the Sent folder.

The weird part is that I had a strong password (1password) + 2-factor on both accounts. I use FF with containers so I only use my email on a container and nowhere else.

I had reviewed all the 3rd party apps and security settings on both accounts and it all looked normal to me. The only issue is that I didn't had the SPF, DMARC and DKIM setup - fixed after it.

I sent email to abuse@google but got no response.

</comment><comment><USER36> Important detail that Helene mentions in a comment: You should add that that setting in Google Calendar is only available on desktop. I spent a while the other day after getting one of these trying to find the setting on my phone. It's not there. The setting affects your phone too, just have to use your desktop to change it.

</comment><comment><USER37> I recently got an iPhone and had this issue for the first time ever, during the first week of usage. It only showed up in the phone-local calendar, so I'm guessing the phone picked it up from some e-mail that Google ignored as spam.

</comment><comment><USER38> Thank you for posting this. I also had spam showing up in my calendar and feared that my Google account had been hacked. The spam even caused calendar notification sounds to be played in the middle of the night! Worst Default Setting Ever.

</comment><comment><USER39> I have on occasion thought that this kind of spam should be possible, but never witnessed it, and then, while I was reading this very article, up popped a reminder from Google Calendar about some iPhone that I had allegedly won.

</comment><comment><USER40> Are these attacks the result of mail programs auto-adding spammy email invites, or of some hacking around with the kinds of features of calendar apps that let you create events with attendees directly?

<comment><USER41> The article mentions that the calendar applications from Apple, Google and Microsoft are set by default to accept calendar invites from anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> For spam in google calendar you just turn off the option that is automatically accepting incoming calendar invites.

</comment><comment><USER43> It's bizarre that Calendar was set up to allow invitations from non-contacts in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER44> I was hoping this would be about gettinng rid of events such as "Ashura" in my iPhone calendar. Doubtlessly that day is important to a lot of people. But I would prefer to simply have the US legal holidays, without all the other stuff.

Apple are being real dicks about the all-or-nothing nature of these events. Why can't we have some granularity as to the holidays we see in our Calendar?

<comment><USER45> > Apple are being real dicks about the all-or-nothing nature of these events. > Why can't we have some granularity as to the holidays we see in our > Calendar?

Opposing customization in favor of a common consistent curated experience based on Apple's superior knowledge (especially compared to customers themselves) of what customers want has been the Apple way for a long time.

<comment><USER46> It is easy to granularly manage holidays in calendar.app.

Step 1: Turn off default holidays calendar.

Step 2: Subscribe to calendar feed of your choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm struggling to invite friends my kid's birthday so that last-minute changes are reflected.

No MUA is clear how they even parse ICS or "text/calendar" URLs.

[https://twitter.com/kaihendry/status/1167634464110825473](https://twitter.com/kaihendry/status/1167634464110825473)

This should be a standard!

</comment><comment><USER48> I started receiving these a few weeks ago :( I thought it must have been an exploit somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER49> I had this the other day, it was not trivial to find this setting to disable.</comment>


Erlang port protocol for Python - <AUTHOR> http://erlport.org/

<comment><USER2> I should point out Hurricane (<http://gethurricane.org>)

PHP: <https://github.com/hurricane/driver-php>

Python: <https://github.com/hurricane/driver-python>

Ruby: <https://github.com/hurricane/driver-ruby>

Java: <https://github.com/hurricane/driver-java>

All of the drivers fully re-implement the Erlang format, even the arcane parts (you can send Erlang closures around, for example).

</comment><comment><USER3> Also -

C/C++: <http://erlang.org/doc/man/ei.html>

Ruby: <https://github.com/mojombo/erlectricity>

Java: <https://github.com/fredlund/JavaErlang/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems nice. Last commit was almost a year ago though.

<comment><USER5> This is the sort of library that, once done, shouldn't need touching again. If it's already Python 3 compatible it may not need touching again for many years. (Assuming it's done. I have no direct experience.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For Twisted: <https://launchpad.net/twotp/>

<comment><USER7> Twotp worked well for me after applying the fix in this bug report:

<https://bugs.launchpad.net/twotp/+bug/767842></comment></comment>


Drug dealers shouldn't make iPhone apps - <AUTHOR> http://maxkle.in/drug-dealers-shouldnt-make-iphone-apps/

<comment><USER2> Taken on its face, this is pretty bad advice, especially for technologists. Do you really wish you were still writing DOS bookkeeping apps in Pascal, because that's what you were good at?

Think hard about the things that actually make you excel at what you do, it's probably much less concrete. Richard Branson started several totally different businesses - but he's sticking to his core competencies of being a ridiculously good showman and businessman, and being able to get shit done.

I'd figure a good gigolo might be good at understanding how to give people what they want.. which translates pretty well to anything.

<comment><USER3> I think the true analogy isn't to the programmer who's good at writing in a specific language. It's the skills behind conceptualizing software and developing its architecture that does translate well. If you're a great programmer, find someone who has knowledge of a specific subject area and combine your skills to create a great application that targets that body of knowledge.

Your final point about someone understanding how to give people what they want is the true skill. Its these true skills, like the analytical mind of a programmer, that can translate into different subject areas, you just need to find a way to acquire knowledge and apply that with your skills to another topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What about Richard Branson? He's done _exactly_ that. Throughout his career he has frequently started new businesses in totally new markets. Now his empire includes trains, planes, spaceships(!), record shops, music publishing, banking, telecommunications etc etc. In fact I would argue that people that have that business "spark" could pretty much make a success of any market if they were minded to.

Whilst of course it's sub-optimal to discard or under-utilise what knowledge or experience you currently have, it's probably even worse to not keep learning new things. And more often than not, business experiences are transferable. OK you may not know the technicalities of a new field, but these can be learnt.

Basically: a gigolo for tourists is probably not the best source for business wisdom.

<comment><USER5> His expertise is marketing and branding. Until he starts a business that doesn't sell to consumers (even very rich ones who pay for spaceship rides) and isn't branded "Virgin", he's still parlaying off of what he knows how to do.

The very fact that people know the name "Richard Branson" and that he's personally involved in all these ventures is a big part of it.

Edit: It's not a criticism--it's hard to succeed in different fields--but the basic idea of the OP, which is to expand your business ventures along the lines of what you know how to do, still applies to Branson a lot more than he's a counterexample of it.

<comment><USER4> Yes you're right he's leveraging a known brand. but marketing and branding - that _is_ business.

The point about staying in one industry is not about your technical knowledge, it's about your relationships. These are hard to build, and are the major barrier for all new ventures in any business: building your customer base, your sales channels, reaching out. That's tough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Take people like George Soros. He does one thing. He's about currency > trading, and he's really really good at it. You don't see him suddenly going > full scale into the real estate market, do you?

Only for sufficiently large values of "full scale".

[http://www.nytimes.com/1993/09/09/business/soros-real- estate...](http://www.nytimes.com/1993/09/09/business/soros-real-estate-fund- in-634-million-purchase.html)

[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/british-land- in-j...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/british-land-in-joint- venture-with-soros-deal-seen-as-confirming-upturn-pounds-500m-to-be-spent-on- british-property--shares-are-given-a-boost-1489381.html)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, a better Soros analogy would be that he's good at speculation. He's not running off to build websites or start car companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bullshit.

I used to be on one of the biggest drug dealers on my side of the city and I now make iPhone apps (among other ventures).

I worked my way up to selling about 2 kilos of crack a week, starting from "20-pieces" (little rocks that weight 0.2 grams, sold for $20).

I'm definitely not proud of myself for doing so, but those few years have taught a me a lot about running a business (including money management, cultivating relationships, "hiring" personnel, and the economics of supply and demand) and gave me much of my entrepreneurial spirit.

<comment><USER9> if you're not trolling, you should do a reddit AMA. not sure how you'd get a gold star, though.

<comment><USER8> I'm not trolling. I'll consider doing a Reddit AMA.

<comment><USER10> Please do, as your story would truly be fascinating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As somebody who is attempting to transition from my old industry into web development, I am biased, but I disagree.

I was a good ranch hand before I was a good fine dining waiter. I then proceeded to become a good engineer, and now I am proceeding to try to be a good web developer. My life would have been a lot more boring, had a stayed a ranch hand, or a waiter, or an engineer.

In calculus, you learn about local maxima and local minima. Your life can have these as well. You sense that you're at a maxima, and if you proceed in any other direction, you will go down. Some people refuse to take any step that feels like a step down, even if the path can take them to a higher local maxima than they were at before.

I was a bad waiter before I was a good one. I was a bad engineer before I was a good one. I'm not a great web developer yet. If your ego can handle going from good to bad, I think you shouldn't stay on your little local maxima, trembling that you'll get knocked off it by events you can't control. Jump off of it of your own free will.

<comment><AUTHOR> So you're going back to the beginning every time. If you had stayed with your first profession, who is not to say you could now be owning a series of ranches around your area?

<comment><USER12> I will say that. If you look at the economics of the situation it is very very unlikely for a ranch hand to ever be able to purchase a ranch.

<comment><AUTHOR> But it's likely that ranch owners were once ranch hands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Actually drug dealers and developers are the only two groups that call their clients -> users... so maybe they should.

Plus the holy grail of game development is making the game addictive

<comment><USER14> Contrary to that old saw, I don't believe I heard anyone called a "user" in five seasons of The Wire.

<comment><USER15> They call them junkies, like programmers call them "lusers".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> His view is pretty conservative. Sometimes the interesting thing about apps written from another, outsider perspective is that they approach it in creative ways most people in that niche have not yet thought of. I think the author is parroting the figure of speech "Jack of all trades, master of none" or perhaps the french "Qui trop embrasse, mal etreint" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_all_trades,_master_of_n...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_all_trades,_master_of_none)

<comment><USER17> I think 'Let the cobbler stick to his last' is more appropriate. He's not suggesting the dealer or webapp creator wasn't excellent at what he did: just that he shouldn't expect to be any good at what he does now (or intends to do).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _And a person successful in selling web apps or in selling drugs is not a > successful mobile developer._

is webapps -> mobile apps as big a leap as drug dealing -> real estate?

isn't it likely that, within 5 years, many mobile apps will actually be webapps?

</comment><comment><USER19> The biggest flaw I see is his argument is that five years ago, there were basically no mobile app developers. So these folks (even the very successful ones) all had to start somewhere, likely with little to no mobile experience, and they learned along the way. When you're working in new markets with new tech which requires new skillets, sometimes that's what you need to do.

</comment><comment><USER20> Two counterpoints:

a) Your experience from a previous career might translate well to the new one.

b) The cost of developing an iPhone app is now low enough, that you can give it a shot and see if your idea is any good, for example by virtue of a)

<comment><AUTHOR> The point of the article is that when your experience translates well, you should do that. When it does not, you should not.

<comment><USER20> That I would agree with. The article states _Success in an area is not transferable. You need concrete domain knowledge._ That just seemed a bit too restrictive. Transferable skills can be very non-specific. A drug dealer might now more about word-of-mouth marketing than a CS whiz kid who writes very smooth iPhone apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Drug dealers make some of the best apps.

Heard of Farmville or World of Warcraft?

WoW even borrows the first-hit-is-free, by encouraging each purchaser to share the software with their friends. The entire universe of WoW is a streamlined treadmill, for keeping players addicted. From depreciating gear, inflation, achievements, status symbols... it has it all.

Tongue-in-cheek, I know. But I can see how combining the drug dealing experience with video games could lead to insights such as Blizzard and WoW.

</comment><comment><USER22> His story shows that they kind of should, though. Domain knowledge is great and all, but there's no need to be stuck in something for an entire lifetime, you can learn new things.

</comment><comment><USER23> Great post. There is research done at the MiT that also supports the fact that intelligent people (ppl with high iqs) find it difficult to make choices and stick to them even after having known which choice is most likely to benefit them the most.

Stability is hugely under rated these days.

<comment><USER22> His examples are wrong though, it's much better to move from being a drugdealer into other legal businesses, even with the cost of learning, than to stay where you are. So yes, drug dealers _should_ make iPhone apps (or buy realestate etc...)

<comment><USER24>
        it's much better to move from being a drugdealer
        into other legal businesses, even with the cost of
       learning ...

Exactly. The question to ask is whether what you know now is what you should know tomorrow (or, is what you knew yesterday still appropriate for today).

And then decide if the cost of transferring is worth it.

A problem with sticking with what you know and what has brought you success in the past is that times and markets change.

The gigolo probably _should_ open a bike shop. But hire someone to run it. Running a bordello is likely to get his ass in jail. Which also suggests that not every move to a related field makes sense. Going form one dubious activity to another dubious activity might not be the best business choice.

One issues I've seen with developers who want to have a business is that they tend to stick to what they know, while not checking to see if what they know lends itself to a sustainable business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The site's down :(

I wanted to hear about why Pfizer shouldn't make iphone apps...

<comment><USER26> Pfizer does a lot of marketing to physicians. Perhaps iPad apps could be leveraged for this purpopse?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Success in an area is not transferable.

Counter-example: Arnold Schwarzenegger

</comment><comment><USER28> * Success at Web Apps != Success at Mobile Apps.

While true, more important is

Good all-round knowledge in solving problems that users have every-day by using techology is 100% transferable between all computer and non-computer solutions. If you are good at finding niches in the market where users need help, how the hell is that no transferable?

Now maybe writing webapps does not mean I can write great mobile apps, need some training.

</comment><comment><USER29> Voted up for referencing The Wire.</comment>