Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel? (2017) - <AUTHOR> Was just Googling around for whether Excel (sans VBA scripting of course) is Turing-complete, in order to decide whether telling a layperson that Excel (or spreadsheeting in general) can be considered very much like programming. Came across this 2009 HN thread, "Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?" from pg:
> One of the startups in the current YC cycle is making a new, more powerful spreadsheet. If there are any Excel power users here, could you please describe anything you'd like to be able to do that you can't currently? Your reward could be to have some very smart programmers working to solve your problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429477
What significant advances -- in Excel/spreadsheets, not the Turing-complete thing -- have been made in the 8 years since? What's the YC startup from that cycle that "is making a new, more powerful spreadsheet", and what is it doing today? I remember Grid [0], but that was from 2012. Any other companies make innovations that would overturn the spreadsheet paradigm, or at least be copied by Excel/OO/GSheets?
A commenter mentioned "Queries", since many spreadsheet users use spreadsheets like a database. I just recently noticed that GSheets has a QUERY function [1] that uses "principles of Structured Query Language (SQL) to do searches). The function has been around since 2015 (according to Internet Archive [2]) so perhaps I ignored it because its description then was simply, "Runs a Google Visualization API Query Language query across data."
It appears that "Visualization API Query Language" has a lot of SQL-type features with the immediately obvious exception of joins [3].
edit: Multiple people said they would like Excel to have online functionality, i.e. like Google Sheets, but being able to accept VBA and any other features of legacy Excel spreadsheets. There's now Excel Online but I haven't used it (still sticking to Office 2011 for Mac if I ever need to use Excel instead of GS). How seamless is the transition from offline, legacy Excel files to online Excel?
[0] http://blog.ycombinator.com/grid-yc-s12-reinvents-the-spreadsheet-for-the/
[1] https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343?hl=en
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20150319144449/https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343?hl=en
[3] https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/querylanguage <comment><USER2> The real data structure for financial reporting and analysis is hyperdimensional, like it or not:

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

After a 15 year struggle, digital financial reports are a success in the U.S and the Europeans are following up.

\---

Also, many people use a spreadsheet when they really want a database. In the office world that would be Access instead of Excel; I like the idea of Access but the implementation is an uncomfortable place of having a complex GUI and having to know some SQL.

\---

Finally, decimal arithmetic. Financial calculations should not have the artifacts that come from trying to represent (1/100)th in base 2.

<comment><USER3> W3C RDF Data Cubes (qb:)

[https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/knowledge- engineerin...](https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/knowledge- engineering.html#rdf-data-cubes)

> RDF Data Cubes vocabulary is an RDF standard vocabulary for expressing > linked multi-dimensional statistical data and aggregations.

> Data Cubes have dimensions, attributes, and measures

> Pivot tables and crosstabulations can be expressed with RDF Data Cubes > vocabulary

And then SDMX is widely used internationally:

[https://github.com/pandas- dev/pandas/issues/3402#issuecommen...](https://github.com/pandas- dev/pandas/issues/3402#issuecomment-26689558)

</comment></comment><comment> alok-g Topological sort on cells based on formula references.

Excel sheets are often highly convoluted in cell cross-references in formulas. It would help to have a clean-up mechanism that performs a topological sort on all the cells with formulas and puts them in a more natural order. It would help to be able to identify the backward references even if the cells are not automatically rearranged.

<comment><USER3> +1 for Topological sort of formulas (e.g. into a Jupyter notebook; as e.g. Python)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/comments/2arevn/how_to_u...](https://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/comments/2arevn/how_to_use_python_for_statistical_analysis/ciyf3v3)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1739oc/imp...](https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1739oc/improving_your_excel_skills_can_definitely_help/c84lr6x)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If we're talking Microsoft Excel; I want baked in regex support. It bugs me having to copy over my module each time I need it. I default to using Google Sheets if I don't need charts.

<comment><USER5> Holy _€}^_ {%}€ yes.

God the amount of times data cleaning and comparison fails in excel because collapsing names or identifying sets is not doable is annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> To me, the question sort of misses why (I believe) people use Excel instead of something else. I think people use Excel for all the things that are missing from other spreadsheets. Google gives away its spreadsheet and markets it to everyone with a Gmail account and makes it easy to use and people still pay for Excel because the cost of the missing features outweighs the price of the paid software.

Sure there are people who will express dissatisfaction with Excel. And many many use cases for which Google's product is good enough. But it is all the edge cases that Excel covers that makes it viable to standardize upon across a user base where some users have a significant level of expertise and that expertise is diverse.

To put it another way, free and available anywhere and easy collaboration are all great features. But they are not enough. Killer features will only become killer once a spreadsheet does pretty much everything Excel does (and in pretty much the way Excel does it so that muscle memory works).

<comment><USER7> I don't work in tech industry but from my experience it's a lot simpler than that. Most of these day-to-day desk workers know nothing but excel because that's all they know from home and work.

<comment><USER6> I agree that most people just default to Excel. Mostly that's because there isn't really any competition and Excel is the default and even if there was competition, it would not matter because Excel has a low initial cost except when compared with free.

More subtly, Excel has a low lifetime cost because there are many good learning resources (and also many bad ones) and those resources are widely available. Which makes me think that one of the killer features of Excel is all the technical headroom it provides for solving problems...by which I mean there is usually functionality and features that could make an ordinary job faster...particularly repetitive ordinary jobs of the sort most people wind up doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Power Query, aka Get & Transform (built into Excel 2016), is probably the best new feature since Excel Tables were introduced in v2007. It lets you pull data from local, network and web sources - including databases - with a relatively easy UI. The queries can also be refreshed.

My main complaint about spreadsheets (or at least Excel) is: you can't generate data of arbitrary length via a formula and display it on the grid without manually managing the cells it takes up. An example where this would be handy is an array formula for unique items.

It seems that maintaining location-based referencing as a feature (referring to data based on cell location, eg '=A1') makes this difficult to implement.

Power Query allows this via List.Generate and the M language, but you need to break the spreadsheet auto-calculation paradigm to use it.

This is why Mesh exists: [https://github.com/chrispsn/mesh](https://github.com/chrispsn/mesh)

</comment><comment><USER9> R Data frame like data type, Excel tables get pretty close but not quite as nice

Storing internal data without making it visible in a sheet

Code interpreter, R/Python style

More readily available statistical functions

Better plotting options

Packages/Package manager

Basically I want more R and Python functionality native to Excel

</comment><comment><USER3> Linked Data.

> [...] 7 metadata header rows (column label, property URI path, DataType, > unit, accuracy, precision, significant figures)

[https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/linkedreproducibilit...](https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/linkedreproducibility#csv- csvw-and-metadata-rows)

Specifically, CSVW JSONLD as a lossless output format.

CSVW supports physical units.

[https://twitter.com/westurner/status/901990866704900096](https://twitter.com/westurner/status/901990866704900096)

> "Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web" (#JSONLD, #RDFa HTML) is > for Data on the Web #dwbp #linkeddata [https://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data- > model/](https://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-model/)

> #CSVW defaults to xsd:string if unspecified. "How do you support units of > measure?" #qudt [https://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-primer/#units-of- > measure](https://www.w3.org/TR/tabular-data-primer/#units-of-measure)

</comment><comment><USER10> -Linked Cells: A = B, If Cell A changes Cell B updates, and viceversa.

-Linked Cells by a formula: A = 2B, you change one the other updates.

-Key columns. Auto-increment columns. Unique rows.

-Auto-generate forms for input.

</comment><comment><USER11> I want Lotus Improv's features and philosophy back (particularly the separation between visualisation, input numbers, and formulae acting thereupon).

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd like Excel to have built-in .net scripting support. Imagine being able to code excel macros in F#.

<comment><USER13> Quite a while ago I called Excel via NETLink using Mathematica. There should still be a COM interface link for excel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A built in headless scriptable browser / a full http client with optional cookie store.

</comment><comment><USER15> First-class source control / versioning.

</comment><comment><USER16> It' turing complete, no? ;) (google it)

</comment><comment><USER17> Audit Excel spreadsheets.</comment>


Go's memory model [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://nil.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2016/notes/gomem.pdf <comment><USER2> I was hoping that there were answers here. Instead I got:

      Go Memory Model
      Two purposes:
      ● Make guarantees for programmers.
      ● Allow compilers/hardware to make certain changes to programs.
      Ideally, perfectly balanced. In practice, more conservative: might do neither.
      Explicit concern: Leave room for future refinement, refraining from:
      ● making debatable guarantees to programmers
      ● allowing compilers/hardware to make debatable changes to programs

and specifically I was curious about sync/atomic and only got a proposal (which ironically says 'be like Java'):

      Package sync/atomic is conspicuously missing.
      Proposal: match Java volatile and C++ memory_order_seq_cst.
      ● An atomic write happens before an atomic read that observes the write.
      ● The outcome of atomic operations must be consistent with a total order over
      all atomic operations in the program.

TL;DR

      Go Memory Model

      Semantics based on happens-before:
      ● If p imports q, q's init happens before p's.
      ● Package main's init happens before main.main
      ● The go statement happens before the created goroutine's execution
      ● A send (or close) on a channel happens before the receive
      ● Unlock happens before subsequent Lock

      A read r is allowed to observe a write w to location v if:
      ● r does not happen before w
      ● There is no write w' to v such that w < w' < r. [< is happens-before]
      A read r is therefore guaranteed to observe w if:
      ● w happens before r (w < r)
      ● For any other write w' to v, w' < w or r < w'
      Intent: like DRF-SC without allowing compilers to ruin programmers' lives.

_Note: DRF-SC Data Race Free-Sequentially Consistent_</comment>


Show HN: Super simple social poll app - <AUTHOR>

I recently launched my first web app, polls.io. It's a super simple polling app that doesn't require sign-up. In my opinion, this is the most simple/social polling app out there.
There are certainly many similar apps out there, but I think this one stands out as it straight-forward and doesn't have any unnecessary "mess" getting in the way of the actual poll.
From idea to inception this took about a week. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. We'll be listening to feedback in the coming days/weeks in order to make the proper changes.
I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts and feedback!
Here's a little sample poll:
Pancakes or Waffles? http://polls.io/cdrbe <comment><USER2> The radio buttons don't act properly... You can light up multiple buttons. The whole two-click-to-vote thing is probably unnecessary. Otherwise, nice, simple.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty simple.

Are you trying to make a business out of this? Or is it just a project?

Clickable poll: <http://polls.io/ugoht>

Suggestions:

\- It's not clear that after you select an option, you then have to also click "Vote" to apply your vote.

\- Often in Polls, I don't want to vote. To avoid selection bias, you should allow people to view results without voting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a project for now. I have a few things that I may add in the future that could turn it into something that might make money (maybe a daily featured poll?)

I doubt I'd ever put ads on the polls though.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm also looking into adding a stream page that will show all the recent polls created on the site. This will allow for polls to get some extra exposure.

I'd probably have to make sure it was optional though as people might only want to poll a private group of people and not have random people answering.

</comment><comment><USER4> UX suggestion: Allow users to click on the answer, the whole row, not just the checkbox. See SurveyMonkey.

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks quite nice. I like it.

For long questions, the polls don't wrap, and you end up with text on top of other text.

<http://polls.io/ffc>

Browser is Chrome on OSX Lion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads up. Working on fixing that up as well as less decimal places right now.

Should be done soon.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Smarter Way to Compare Phones/Tablets - <AUTHOR> http://photab.com

<comment><USER2> Is there anything more than a LaunchRock page yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> currently building it. have got basic functionality going but need to work on UI.</comment></comment>


BrewCrate is the perfect mix of tech & DIY - Homebrew by subscription - <AUTHOR> https://www.brewcrate.com

<comment><USER2> As a person who knows nothing about beer other than it's damn tasty, this is awesome. I also happened to go to the launch party (friend of a friend) and they walked me through the booklet, the kit, everything in maybe 5 minutes. I felt like a beer expert and I ended up signing up for one as well. It'll be interesting to see how easy this is for my challenged self once it's all in house. Sam, will you be offering any FAQs or support once the kits do ship?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we absolutely will be. The basic "how do i buy?" FAQ is up already, and we'll be adding live chat and brew debugging in the next week or so. But seriously, we designed the product to be accessible to total newbies. You won't have any problems :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> These guys had a launch party this past weekend, which I happened to attend. (I used to work in wine, so I try to keep in the loop when new stuff is coming out.)

I was surprised at how _polished_ these kits were, with complete and thorough documentation, exactly the equipment one needs, etc. I signed up.

There are a lot of folks doing subscription $products, which is theoretically great (as a business you get paid every month) though I wonder what the attrition rate will be given how (relatively) labor-intensive this is. (I once signed up for Blue Apron, of those "kitchen in a box" subscriptions. But even that was a bit advanced and cumbersome for my awful knife skills, so I cancelled after the first month.)

Best of luck to you all!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the challenge of any subscription service, I think. Especially with perishable goods product loss is a real problem. But hey--what's the point of doing something easy? :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess it's time for me to upgrade to an all-grain setup. It would be nice if you could choose between all-grain or extract kits for your subscription, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do Brew In A Bag, which is about as simple as all-grain gets. It's a one- vessel brew setup, just like extract. If you're moving from extract to AG, I'd definitely suggest Brew In A Bag as a stepping-stone.

<comment><USER4> Awesome! I will definitely be considering this

<comment><AUTHOR> Reach out if you have any issues. I'm monitoring this thread or you can get at us at info (at) brewcrate [ dot ] com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I LOVE this. Are you going to add a 5 gallon option? Since I've been brewing for a few years, 1 gallon seems sort of pointless.

<comment><AUTHOR> We will be adding 5 gallons in the coming months. Think of 1 gallon as a test batch--if you brew at scale, try out new ideas and techniques with 1 gallon batches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Launch party was great. Can't wait to get my first kit

</comment><comment><USER7>
        0 0 * * * brew update</comment>


Show HN: Messaging plugin. Extensible. Cross platform - <AUTHOR> https://cloudilly.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I am the founder of Cloudilly. Would love to get your feedback. It's a set of high level messaging APIs. Features include: Presence, auto reconnection, offline data sync, emails, push notifications...</comment>


Ask HN: What's your take on Product Hunt? - <AUTHOR> Worth all the effort put into it, or just a one time hype(assuming you do well when you're hunted)? <comment><USER2> I like it. It is a great community with a bunch of people who love creating cool stuff, a lot of cool products to explore, a lot of new launches happen there and when I need a product I go to PH to search if something exists first, then google. Why? Because google is full of shit-tier SEO spam in most cases.

<comment><USER3> I use it like this as well. Catalogue aspect might be the most useful application of PH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It was this cycle's version of being featured on TechCrunch...now it's akin to being featured on TechCrunch after Arrington left.

</comment><comment><USER5> I doubt it will compensate for a lack of product-market fit for a startup. For a small business it might offer marketing value on a purely risk/reward analysis...that is it might average out across many companies that the total value of inorganic spikes exceeds the total cost of pursuing it.

Since it's a hype machine I doubt it, but it's possible. Mostly, I think it is a case of:

      We must do something.
      Product Hunt is something.
      Therefore, we must do it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I used to go there in the early days. The UI was intuitive and neat products used to get hunted daily. The last straw for me was the ebooks that showed you How To Launch on Product Hunt. These ebooks and lists were like a whack-a-mole popping up every day getting voted to the top. Also how you can't comment unless you're invited by an insider killed it for me.

</comment><comment><USER7> I preferred the old list style layout as I'm not a big fan of Horizontal scrolling.

I really like the collections feature - but I wish you could do a reverse collection search e.g Click on a Product and see what collections it appears in

</comment><comment><USER8> I enjoyed it before the rebrand, now I can't be bothered to wade through it. Before it was a real easy snapshot of the community interest, now it's some weird design all mashed together.

</comment><comment><USER9> I stopped viewing it after the UI revamped. It sets me thinking when using it, like solving a mini puzzle.

I can't recommend enough the book Don't Make Me Think.

</comment><comment><USER10> As a list of resources or as a company trying to get exposure?

As a list of resources I think it's great. Often, I've never heard of any day to day new items on there. Some are interesting, some I have no need for and some I could use some day.

I can't speak to being on there as a company but as I said above - I've never heard of or seen so much of what gets submitted to it - it could help get the word out.

<comment><AUTHOR> As a company trying to get exposure :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A time waster. Also agree with other commenter: whoever redesigned it deserves to be fired - what an unintuitive navigational mess. its a conglomerate mess with no consistent theme amongst the products. nobody looks for tech or podcasts. We look for Specific markets like productivity podcasts or marketing tech.

</comment><comment><USER12> I can't speak to it as a company either... but as an observer I'm pretty disappointed with it.

Unaffiliated people are prevented from commenting, meaning that every posting has a flood of positive, and completely useless comments.

Great site for astroturf, terrible for actually vetting a product.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly how I feel about it. I mean Show HN in my opinion is a much better vehicle for product feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not worth my time. It's incredibly boring.

</comment><comment><USER14> UI revamp killed it for me too. Also the iOS app got unfortunately worse.

</comment><comment><USER15> Meh</comment>


Ask HN: What are your thoughts on this idea? - <AUTHOR>

Hello everyone.
I have thought of an idea for the social commerce space. We propose to create a button, deployable on ecommerce product landing pages, which allows users to recommend a product to specific friend(s) (instead of the whole world) via Facebook and Twitter. The recommender, acting as a reasonably shrewd person, would hopefully direct qualified leads to the ecommerce website and drive targeted marketing. We would then charge the ecommerce website for clicks (CPC affiliate marketing), giving a cut of our revenue to the recommender if a sale indeed happened (CPA-based profit sharing).
What do you think? <comment><USER2> I read through this, and all I heard in my head was "Click Here to receive 10% off your next purchase" and then the repeated sound of old-school cash registers. I think the hardest part would be coming up with an adequate monetization strategy for the purchasing sites. It may be a long-shot, but you may be able to do something like, user submits a referral. Referral receives a potential discount, original user can now redeem the discount promised. Your company receives x% of the purchase by the user using the discount. The existence of your service basically garnered 2 extra sales for the site, but I think it would be difficult to charge based on just the usage of the service. I think it would be an easier sell if you only charged if the referral resulted in a purchase. That way it costs the company nothing to try and get the free sales. The problem is, the take rate may be completely out of balance for the loads. Either way, done right it sounds like it could benefit the seller, the buyer, the referral and you, which is usually a pretty good sign of something worth trying.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it "might" make you a LOT of money if you can find a good enough hook to market to the big retailers, and also find a way to give a desirable kickback of some sort to the recommender to spend time using it.

My thought is a big retailer like Amazon might say, just a "Friends Button"? What makes your service unique enough that for instance Amazon won't just put in their own "Friends Button"? How will you convince a retailer like Amazon to use your "Friends Button" service? What is the benefit to Amazon to use you for this service vs. doing it in-house?

Still though, I think that if you have a good enough business proposition to offer the retailers, this service could make you a LOT of money.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a good idea, however I think it's pretty much covered by the 'email a friend' type feature. Some e-commerce sites display that feature prominently on product pages. How would your service differ from that feature, even if you offered analytics?

<comment><USER5> Seems like the real value is derived from the incentives system. I don't think I've ever used those common 'email a friend' links. There's two potential reasons for this:

1) I don't get any results. Not even confirmation if the person took me up on my recommendation. 2) I go to ecommerce sites to research and buy things for myself--for some reason I just don't think of others during this process.

That being said, I do believe you're on to something here. Distribute this among the long-tail of ecommerce stores and you have a high potential market on your hands.

<comment><USER2> If the rate of cost to the ecommerce sites is right for the number of extra sales, it'd spread like wildfire (with the right sales calls). I think there's really two models here. Refer a product and refer a site. Refer a site would be a prime target for the long-tail, especially if you only charge them on a successful sale (not just a referral submitted). On the other hand, a system to implement refer a product would fit in well for the mid-sized sites. And if it gains any traction, the big sites are your exit strategy. Get acquired for the technology so they don't have to spend the money to develop it in house. I'd probably start with the refer the site, charge based on a percentage of an extra sale, then later integrate refer a product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In general I don't think people like the idea of their friends sharing links with them in the hope that they (the sharer) will profit from it.

<comment><USER5> I could see the dropbox reciprocity tactic working here. The recommender may get a cut of revenue, but the recommended could be given a discount as well. This could turn companies off from the CPC model though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a good idea. Like Facebook's like, but for ecommerce. Check out how Amazon creates special links for Twitter affiliate sharing, something like that, but for all commerce sites. I like it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Will this not lead to a lot of spam? Maybe not on the scale of automated botnets but still someone spamming their friend list everyday.</comment>


Journalist detained at US/Canadian Border - <AUTHOR> http://www.onthemedia.org/story/my-detainment-story-or-how-i-learned-stop-feeling-safe-my-own-country-and-hate-border-patrol/?utm_source=local&utm_media=treatment&utm_campaign=daMost&utm_content=damostviewed Systemic abuse at border crossings. <comment><USER2> I hear these detention stories at the border continuously and each time there's a lot of discontent among people about such practices. However, nothing changes.

I wonder, is it that largely this topic does not concern the American public or are there no democratic means to influence the agency?

<comment><USER3> real answer: it always happening to _other_ people, I have to hide, blah blah....

The border agent has a lot of power and his /her judgment is trusted. Of course a US citizen has the right to get in but they hold you for hours and hours based on suspicions. Just a cavity type search for your luggage will set you back a few hours and I suppose they can justify it with "he was acting nervously.". Go ahead and dispute that

<comment><USER4> Real, real answer: Not only is it happening to other people, it's happening to small N other people.

You hear about it like five times a year, and millions of people cross the border every year. The _proportion_ of egregious false positives -- defined as, bad enough for someone to want to write about it -- is vanishingly small. The odds that it'll happen to any given person here, even any given person of the subject minority (brown), is so small it might as well be zero, from the perspective of a brain that's bad at dealing with small numbers [1].

It's hard enough to get people who read a tech site to care. Now try getting everyone to.

[1] [http://lesswrong.com/lw/6h1/people_neglect_small_probability...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/6h1/people_neglect_small_probability_events/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Misleading title; makes it sound like the Canadians were doing the holding.

<comment><USER6> Hmm, are you from the US?

I am, and I assumed this article was referring to the U.S. doing the holding not Canada. I feel like the title is appropriate actually, saying "journalist detained at U.S. border" would be less informative imo.

That's just my opinion though, perhaps I am not properly conceptualizing the matter from yours/others viewpoints.

<comment><USER7> s|US/Canadian Border|US's Canadian Border| # solved</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Discusslr.com - <AUTHOR> https://discusslr.com/

<comment><USER2> Well done for making something and having the guts to share it with the world.

A bit of critical feedback:

1) the image of a girl on the beach doesn't seem to have much relevance or am I missing something?

2) how is the data stored and backed up? (Details on encryption, backup regularity etc...)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi. Thanks for the feedback. Being honest this is a really early stage idea and basically I just wanted to get some nice photography on the home page.

Data is currently stored in RDS on Amazon. When moving to doing private discussions (the next major feature) then I'll really focus in on security and possibly encryption on the messages. Privacy is an interesting topic actually. Making sure private conversations are "unreadable" is something I'm very interested in.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I added a discussion for product feedback and improvements that should be open without any need to sign up. [https://discusslr.com/discussions/8](https://discusslr.com/discussions/8)

<comment> daniel-levin Your discussion has been hijacked by somebody posting /r/spacedicks type pictures.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I disabled images for anonymous comments. Should have guessed that would happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a very basic product, don't get me wrong, basic is a good thing.

Some feedback: Registration is very nice, simple steps. However, log in with Gmail/Facebook/Twitter might be a nice option in the future too.

How do you handle links? I didn't check this since I'm on mobile but nofollow would be a good idea to prevent spammers. Maybe even add Google's recaptcha to prevent spam bots for anonymous users/on registration?

For groups/companies, it might be nice if we can register a sub domain and allow others to post new discussions in there to keep it all grouped. But that would mean there'd have to be a moderation option (?).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi. Thanks. I suppose the who idea is to keep it simple but some new features will be added for private conversations, better link handling as you mentioned. Will definitely need to start thinking about handling spammers on anonymous comments. i had to turn off images for that very reason. I'll change it so that only logged in users can post images from now on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The site is broken for me. I don't see any text. It's just white and blue boxes with a background image of a girl.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey. Which browser are you using out of interest?

<comment><USER5> I'm having the same issue on Arch Linux, Chromium, Version 42.0.2311.90 (64-bit)

<comment><USER6> Huh. Works for me with Fedora, Google Chrome, Version 42.0.2311.81 (64-bit) and 43.0.2357.37 (64-bit)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My instant reaction to the name was that this had something to do with 'cussing' not 'discussing' because I put the emphasis (in my mind) on cusslr and read it as dis-cusslr. Others might have the same reaction.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting. I never would have thought of that. I just started with the word "discussion" and tried to find an available .com. It's so difficult to find domains for new products.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A tool I made to quickly start and discuss things online. The idea is to quickly setup a conversation about something, share the link and start talking. Comments can be public or anonymous.

<comment><USER8> I'm always interested in conversation and in supporting people trying to have good conversation.

Some hopefully constructive thoughts: There's nothing about the landing page that makes me want to sign up. Could you show me an example of how it works, what it looks like?

Ideally I think you'd want to seed it with pre-existing conversations, so that new users don't feel like they're signing up for one more thing that doesn't have any obvious value.

Chicken-egg problem– Quora, Reddit, and I'm sure HN itself all started with a small group of people who were having interesting conversations.

<comment><AUTHOR> That feels like the hardest problem initially. Like you said it's difficult to really explain the concept until there is more content and discussion happening.

Adding the ability to post "anonymous" comments was partly motivated by people who might not want to sign up. If a conversation is "open" then anyone can start commenting without having to sign up.

<comment><USER8> This might seem sneaky but some people do this by literally having conversations with themselves, using multiple IDs. Sleazy, but hey, if the conversation is great, I'd be more tempted to join in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Submit button below the comment box is an <input type="submit" /> but missing a value so it says "Submit Query" on Firefox. Probably should change that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. A few people have raised this. Will roll out a fix now. Stupid mistake. Sorry about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How is this any different than [https://sublevel.net](https://sublevel.net)?

<comment><USER11> I've tried both of this sites.

[https://discusslr.com/discussions/29](https://discusslr.com/discussions/29)

[https://sublevel.net/tux/](https://sublevel.net/tux/)

Discusslr is more like chat and allows you to register without captcha and to reply you don't need to register. SubLevel you need to enter captcha and be registered to comment, it also looks more like Twitter. But SubLevel provides more features like RSS feed of your recent posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sounds similar to my domain [http://discusr.com](http://discusr.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice. Looks like a neat tool. How did you come up with the name?

<comment><USER12> I wanted to use medium.com but it was closed invite, so I made my own website and then added readability like viewing options. The name came from a previous website that was for people of different religions to discuss on a facebook like feed system. However I scrapped that idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> owainlewis, I think you could increase signups if you'd add a few screenshots of the discussions. Or let new visitors read them without registration.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea. I think the homepage probably needs some more work around explaining the product and screenshots would be a good move. I'll take a look at improving it today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How is this in any way different from ... forums?

<comment><USER15> A big part of a forum is the centralization and interconnection of all the threads, this is explicitly removed in this product, with all the discussions happening in their own and very separate context.

So I guess the use case would be to share a link on social media and then have the discussion in something that is not as awful for real discussions as facebook threads or twitter conversations.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure making a forum that simply has only one board and no public index is a useful enough differentiator for this project to survive at all. You could do the same thing with secret github gists, AND at the same time already have a much more fully-featured everything.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd see this being more useful to a non technical person who doesn't use Github for example and just wants to start a quick conversation. They can create a discussion and open it up to the world. Given a bit more time there will be more features to keep track of mentions and notifications that lift it up from it's currently very basic state.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Drone photographer captures winter in Lithuania - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-35344613 <comment><USER2> Wow just wow I cant even. It's the current year.</comment>


Show HN: Rocket – The D in CI/CD - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Omg you are right! As I can't longer edit here is the URL

[https://github.com/astrocorp42/rocket](https://github.com/astrocorp42/rocket)

</comment><comment><USER2> You forgot the URL?</comment>


The Death of Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://ce.ntup.org/?u=http://www.obsessedwithconformity.com/2434/the-death-of-twitter/&t=The%20Death%20of%20Twitter&p=Jim%20Mitchem

<comment><USER2> Twitter is big and I personally don't have that problem. So I'd guess that this is more of an issue related to the people you follow instead of Twitter itself.

Unfortunately Twitter can't know which content you'll like so there is some work required to build up a feed that continuously delivers this content.

This seems to be one of the major issues when it comes to joining Twitter nowadays too.

PS: Title feels very "sensational"...

<comment><USER3> >>> PS: Title feels very "sensational"...

They all seem so sensational. The TLDR version of this post is "I don't like Twitter so much anymore so it's kind of dead to me"

wc has that at 62 chars. Enough for a Tweet :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My problem with twitter isn't the content[1], but the tools to let me read what I want. Since twitter changed its policy on client software, it has become more and more painful to organize my twitter feed. I am starting to wonder if I should just spend a weekend an write my own custom client.

1) why follow stuff you don't want?!?

</comment><comment><USER5> Simple solution: Don't follow accounts that tweet content you don't like.

Twitter's great for following friends or people I respect in that it helps me feel a bit more connected to them. If you just want a list of most recently added content to a site like Huffington Post: Maybe consider using an RSS reader.

</comment><comment><USER6> You definitely follow different people from me. What I mostly see are links to interesting projects and gigantic social issues flamewars triggered by people overanalyzing each other's casual insights. For the former, it remains more than worth it.

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit Shouldn't this link straight to the Obsessed With Conformity domain and not that "iframed" CentUp site?

Also, pretty pointless article. So... don't follow accounts that post stuff you don't want to see.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like you need to fire the person who curates your Twitter feed.

</comment><comment><USER8> Linkbait headline</comment>


Linux Directory Structure (File System Structure) Explained with Examples - <AUTHOR> http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/09/linux-file-system-structure/ <comment><USER2> This merely tells you what is usually placed in the filesystem, not why.

I find the explanation provided on the busybox mailing list to be far more insightful: [http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074...](http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html)

<comment><USER3> Yes, that was eye-opening; it even got 800+ on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519952>

<comment><USER4> The autobiography _The Periodic Table_ , by Primo Levi, see Chapter 12, Chromium. Recipes are perpetuated. Reasons forgotten!

 __Spoiler __: The extract mangles the humour, but you get the idea.

[http://www.philosophyblog.com.au/extract-from-the- periodic-t...](http://www.philosophyblog.com.au/extract-from-the-periodic- table-by-primo-levi-chromium/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heh. The OS landscape has changed over time, as disks have gotten much faster and much larger, and some of the design decisions made decades ago no longer make sense.

Fedora is moving everything from /bin, /sbin, /lib, and /lib64 into /usr because maintaining this separation no longer really makes sense: [http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForT...](http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge)

<comment><USER6> It's fair to say that some of the specific design constraints no longer apply.

However, that's not to say that we haven't arrived at similar conclusions (a root filesystem accessible at boot, multiply hierarchies of additional storage under, say, /usr, /usr/local, etc.

I mean, the ultimate conclusion of the UsrMerge argument would be to put all directories on root.

I find the justifications for UsrMerge to be specious at best, and better described as counterfactual. I strongly suspect that a large part of the reasoning is Red Hat's chronic inability to enforce discipline among its software packagers (both within and outside of Red Hat).

<comment><USER7> Fedora put everything in /usr so that if you are sharing it, you can NFS mount just one directory instead of several.

<comment><USER6> There are multiple ways to do this. UsrMerge still isn't required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And if you want more technical details, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is the place to look:

      http://www.pathname.com/fhs
      http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html

Somewhat Linux-specific, but worth reading even if you're on OS X, as much of the content is the same.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wrote something a bit more detailed a couple years ago, partly as a school project and partly because I couldn't find it anywhere else: <http://andrewfleenor.users.sourceforge.net/fhs/fhs.xml>

It goes into much more depth, and you can expand and close directories to see what's inside them. I was pretty proud of it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Obligatory link to the standard (FHS), since it's buried in the comments under that blog post: <http://proton.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html>

</comment><comment><USER11> I've always wondered, are the directories hard coded into the kernel or are there some EV's somewhere or something pointing to them?

I can guarantee one of the bigger problems with mainstream Linux adoption is that the top level of the file system is covered in OS directories. For all its faults, keeping the OS under C:/Windows keeps most Grandmothers from deleting system32.

</comment><comment><USER12> So /usr/local implies that the binaries were built for the local machine, and might not work elsewhere?

<comment><USER13> Generally, or "local to the site".

In the mid-80's to 90's when disk space was at a premium, it was quite common to have one big file server that had the /usr/local, /opt, /home, etc. hierarchies on it, shared out over NFS to the other desktop machines on the network.

As most/all of the machines would be similar architectures, they could share the binaries. In cases where there was more than one architecture, there would frequently be multiple file servers, one per arch. Another remnant of this on modern systems: "/usr/share" usually contains data like machine-independent help files that could be mounted across architectures.

The result of this was that users could hotseat from machine to machine, and site-specific software would only need be installed once, which was a space/complexity win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been using Linux for about 4 years now, and I've tried to find a document like this a few times and failed. This is probably the best reference on this topic I've seen yet.

<comment><USER15> `man hier`

<comment><USER16> Wow. How would one go about discovering this?

<comment><USER17> apropos hierarchy

apropos 'file system'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Thank you. I wish they would just rename the directories already.</comment>


Ask HN: When Andreessen Horowitz invests $100M, how much equity does it take? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure about your hypothetical $100 million round or what valuation specifically since there are so many variables (kind of like asking how much house can you buy with $500k?).

Here is a good video to watch ([http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec09/](http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec09/)) to get an idea of what investors have in mind. They want enough to make it worth their while (20-30% for a series A is the example they give), but they don't want to own too much of the company because it is demotivating for the team.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm sure it depends on the deal.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure of that too but interested to get an overall picture.

<comment><USER4> The % of equity is the % of worth that is fulfilled by a $100m purchase. If you receive a $10 off voucher for any purchase in s shop could you tell me right now what the % is?</comment></comment></comment>


The PlugBot ~ A covert penetration testing device - <AUTHOR> http://theplugbot.com/ <comment><USER2> The annoying thing about the PlugBot is that the "creator" is trying to get patents put on the device - as if putting Metasploit on a PlugPC is anything unique (been doing this since they came out). See "© 2010. Patent pending." at the footer of the about page.

From talking to others in the local security/hacking scene (the PlugBot creator and myself live in the same area) nobody seems to be impressed with what he wants to do with it. PwnieExpress is a much better alternative. But, in reality - if you're planning on using these there's no reason why you wouldn't just buy and build yourself.

<comment><USER3> It costs about three times less money to build it yourself, by the way. Buy the hardware, install BackTrack, and Go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd be curious to see how this differs from a product I'd seen before, and was at DerbyCon: <http://pwnieexpress.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't this just a Marvel Sheevaplug with a sticker and some software? How is this thing patent pending?

Here's the PlugBot: <http://i.imgur.com/SvHQq.png> And here's the Sheevaplug: [http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/skins/skin_1/images/s...](http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/skins/skin_1/images/sheeva_side_back.jpg)

The picture in the Kickstarter video also looks a lot like the inital form factor of the Sheevaplug, still seen in the datasheet. Here's the video screen shot: <http://i.imgur.com/LmOCX.png> And here's the datasheet: [http://www.plugcomputer.org/405/us/plug- basic/documentation/...](http://www.plugcomputer.org/405/us/plug- basic/documentation/Marvell-Plug-Computer-DevKit.pdf) <http://i.imgur.com/3azJX.png>

Also, isn't _It's a covert penetration testing device (bot) designed for covert use during physical penetration tests._ a little redundant? That's the second sentence of the copy, and it doesn't set up a good first impression.

</comment><comment><USER6> A large network of these surruptiously deployed throughout a city, town, country in or near free wifi points would make be an interesting ploy. I agree that roll your own is a better option, but for some, ahem, experts, ahem, this may be an easier option.</comment>


Microsoft's Bill Gates: Steve Jobs cast spells on everyone but he didn't fool me - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-bill-gates-steve-jobs-cast-spells-on-everyone-but-he-didnt-fool-me/ <comment><AUTHOR> Title is slightly antagonistic but the text of the interview has Gates sounding like he considered Gates more of a frenemy & peer than a huckster

</comment><comment><USER2> I heard this. As a marketing guy myself, I don't know what magic Steve Jobs did, but it worked on most people. I've always said that Apple is not a tech company. They are a dam good marketing company that can sell you a lifestyle for the price of your soul.</comment>


The Gmail logo was designed the night before they launched - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-gmail-logo-was-designed-the-night-before-gmail-launched/252007/

<comment><USER2> What a revelation! Thanks for this information. Its just amazing that an overnight project was become a successful one. Now I know the history of this logo.</comment>


Feedback on start-up web app - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
I have just completed developing my first web-app / start-up (http://www.filegoose.com). The app is a document management system designed to simplify the way companies/individuals manage documents online.
I have been looking on the net looking for places to get good feedback on web applications and ycombinator is the site most mentioned and highly rated.
I would appreciated if anyone could give any feedback on the application.
Cheers, Dave <comment><USER2> This looks interesting and obviously is a ripe market. Right up front though I'd like to see how I can make it secure and why its better than sharepoint.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi tsunamifury,

thanks for your feedback. To answer your question:

1.) Within the next week I'll be introducing 256-bit SSL encryption across all accounts, I also have spent a lot of time ensuring login system etc. are hack proof and I have a backup system in place which backs up users files every 12 hours to to a secure location. Hopefully this will give peace of mind to users.

2.) As for it being better than share point. My goal was to make a simple document manager for small to medium companies and even photographers and such. Also cost, I tried to make the cost as competitive as possiblt to attract small commonalities and start-ups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Please don't e-mail me my own password in plaintext when I sign up. Other than that, looks pretty promising :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, Password is now starred out when sent.

Cheers

<comment><USER4> is it stored as plain-text in the database?

<comment><AUTHOR> no, never. sha1 encrypted with a salt.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wealthy buyers reportedly in 'mad rush' to leave San Francisco - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfgate.com/living-in-sf/article/Wealthy-buyers-in-mad-rush-to-leave-SF-15324574.php <comment><USER2> What remains to be seen: is it due to the ongoing coronavirus or the protests, or varying degrees of both? Real estate analysis tends to lag somewhat, and protests are fairly recent, so the current data could be reflective of the sentiment of March/April, a time which felt like peak uncertainty surrounding coronavirus.

<comment><USER3> I took it as more about ability for remote work.</comment></comment>


AI startup claims to automate app making but actually just uses humans - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20805676/engineer-ai-artificial-intelligence-startup-app-development-outsourcing-humans <comment><USER2> Good grief.

When will people wake up and realize that AI today is just capable of "curve fitting"?

Yes, that is a bit of a simplification. But not far off.

Neural networks depend on back propagation. They are really just another type of optimizer for maximum likelihood, using gradient descent. They work better on high dimensional, non linear data than other methods before.

But if the function you are attempting to model is non differentiable, neural networks won't help you.

They certainly aren't capable of performing magic tricks like writing an app for you.

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer - I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai

AI is certainly not magic, and as an industry we're super far away from what would be considered real AI in the technical sense. That being said, AI has become a catch all term for everything as simple as linear regressions, all the way through to neural networks.

We don't claim to be able to write apps using AI, we're a platform that is trying to use AI and general automation in order to optimize the traditional SDLC. Actual code generation/synthesis is years away in my opinion and there is far more impact that can be had by going after other manual aspects of software development.

<comment><USER4> > we're a platform that is trying to use AI and general automation in order to > optimize the traditional SDLC

I don't think you can get away with corp-speak/buzzwords here this easily. Could you elaborate on how exactly you're using AI to "optimize" software development?

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer - I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai

Happy to elaborate - in a nutshell what we're trying to do is automate as many parts of the traditional software development lifecycle as we can, and for whatever cannot be automated, put in place the right tooling to allow for repeatable results.

Our thesis is that most applications today have a huge amount of duplication at a code level, and process level. We're trying to use reusable building blocks (well structured libraries, templated user stories, wireframes, common errors, etc.), in order to immediately solve that duplication. That being said, we're not talking about automatic code generation, it's more about being able to assemble these reusable building blocks together at the beginning of a project so you have a better starting point. There will always be customization required for any project however, and that is a human led process.

Apart from actual development, we're also trying to automate processes around project management, infrastructure management, and QA. For example, what we've already been able to do is automatically price and create timeline estimates for a project without any human involvement, determine which creators on our network are best suited for a given project, evaluate and onboard developers on to the network, setup developer environments, and a lot more!

<comment><USER4> Sorry if I'm missing something obvious but it's not very clear to me how the first part significantly benefits from AI. Code re-use is just good software engineer practice, are you somehow able to figure out what libraries to use automatically? Isn't this trivial to perform by a human anyway?

The latter part, as far as figuring out what work to assign and estimating time-frames does seem like a legitimate AI use case though.

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer - I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai

We're attempting to tackle the problem holistically. That means that we're tackling every single step of the traditional product development process. All the way from how you ideate, price, and spec, to sourcing and managing developers through to QA and infrastructure management.

For example, today, our ideation/pricing/spec tools leverage applied ML, creator management leverages facial recognition for fraud prevention, and infrastructure management uses statistical modelling.

We're trying to make code re-use a repeatable and predictable process rather than just a best practice. Today in the industry it's a purely led by developers, and very often is done solely at their discretion in a manual fashion. We're attempting to platform enforce code reuse, across autonomous distributed teams and products. Apart from just deciding what the optimal building blocks for a project are, the actual assembly or intelligent merging of these building blocks in an automated way is non trivial and mirrors modern automative assembly lines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For all those people asking why the VCs did not catch this: what sort of diligence would you do?

I don't know the company or the details. Assume two scenarios:

1\. The target company is willing to lie, fabricate code, mix in tensorflow etc.

2\. The company will not outright lie, and will answer honestly. However, they are very optimistic about their chances, and about their ability to deliver some sort of AI-enabled solution.

Right now they have -- let's hypothesize -- some sort of funnel and they route bits of code to different developers. They think they will replace some of it. They are using various AI libraries.

Suppose you believe that even if the AI won't eventually code the whole app from scratch, it will make huge strides in certain areas that we don't even know about. These strides will dramatically reduce the cost of making an app (eventually, you believe). Suppose you think that this company is basically an exploration of those areas.

In other words, be generous to the diligence undertaker.

Now, how would you know? What steps would you take to that you suspect these people did not?

(Because this is the internet and no one knows for sure: this is a real question, and not a rhetorical attack on people asking why VCs were "tricked")

<comment><USER6> It's not an unsolvable problem. Software is much easier to read than to write. It's much easier to see if something works than to make it yourself.

<comment><USER7> >Software is much easier to read than to write

If you mean software is easier to use than create, sure. But if you mean it's easier to understand existing code than write new code, countless rewrites suggest it's not so simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Duggal "was telling investors that Engineer.ai was 80% done with developing > a product that, in truth, he had barely even begun to develop."

Due diligence? I mean, I understand VCs are not the smartest bunch but if you are investing $30M, please do the due.

<comment><USER9> VCs use portfolio theory. Quantity over quality. Due diligence takes too much time, effort and money that can be better spent just getting into another deal.

<comment><USER10> >> VCs use portfolio theory.

I dont buy this argument. I used to help manage a large portfolio. Portfolio theory does not mean that you can put in garbage and magically get more than garbage (actually, it did with CDOs, since they were tranched, but even that ended up tragic if you recall 2008.)

Portfolio theory, esp with A-round and beyond VC where your portfolios are smaller (~15 to 30 entities) requires due diligence.

<comment><USER9> You don't know it's garbage. Disqualification is easier than qualification. Funds say "no" to the obviously bad or incompatible. Whether something is a "yes" takes research and is never certain.

The entire game is picking the winners so how much are you going to dedicate to predicting that (which is massively unpredictable) vs just investing in another shot that may be a winner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Couple of comments:

1\. Fake it 'til you make it is pretty accepted in startup world. It's only a problem if you don't actually make it. If you do, then you're a hero---even if you made wildly unrealistic projections initially [and got lucky]. It's kindof unfair, but nobody said life is fair :)

2\. Most software people (like me) assume that due diligence goes deep into software. I've been through DDs at several companies, including my own startup: it's not that deep. I would say growth metrics, financials, legal structure, executive team is more important.

3\. If you haven't read the Theranos story, read it. It's a good example what can happen in the extreme, edge case.

<comment><USER12> "Fake it til you make it" should not extend as far as lying to your investors.

If "fake" for this company meant that they told customers there was AI and there wasn't, no big deal. Customers agree to a service at a certain price. Why do they care how the company accomplishes it?

Investors, however, do care about whether cost-saving "AI" works today vs. in 2045.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ha! This company tried to recruit me a little bit ago. The CTO walked me through the business model, and it was pretty obvious they were just a typical agency. I pointed that out, and he got defensive and tried changing subjects.

In their defense, there is a slight twist in that they subcontract to hundreds of other agencies when those agencies have additional capacity. Essentially, they arbitrage on that.

But, yeah, the pitch that they use AI to build apps -- it's pretty ridiculous. They don't. Even with a very open mind to that phrasing, it's still a huge stretch.

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer - I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai

To clarify, while we intend to use AI to solve a variety of different problems, we're not using it for actual code synthesis (ie. building apps). Instead we are leveraging code reusability and programmatic stitching/merging for our software assembly line.

In addition to that, we are leveraging various AI/ML techniques throughout the rest of the product development lifecycle, for areas such as pricing/specing/ideation, infrastructure management/scalability, code reusability itself and matching, creator (developer/QA/design) resource matching, sequencing and dependency prioritization, and more.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, none of that sounds like AI. It sounds like standard features of IDEs and PaaS. I can't imagine you have a programmatic way to save much time on pricing/specinf/ideation because machines can't do that yet.

Also, the clear message of the company was "AI writing code that would otherwise be written by humans".

Again, would strongly suggest you stop posting anything about this situation without consulting a lawyer. Based on your HN posts, you can't claim ignorance anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I could imagine how their conversations with investors are going.

"When we said we use AI we meant An Indian"

<comment><USER15> You just made me spit protein shake onto my keyboard. You gonna buy me a new keyboard?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As someone who used to work at one of these places: shocking.

It pretty much always is this way. They pretend it is AI, then when it comes out that it is pretty much all humans, they pivot to admitting it is "human- assisted".

The humans were truly creating data that was being fed back in, that wasn't a lie. Engineers would have to poke at the bot a bit to get it out of corners it would get itself into occasionally.

The big issue is the VC nature of the business. You are fighting a shot clock on an extremely hard problem. So you have to rush things out to get to the next step, then realize at the next step all of the data you collected, oops, can't be used because there was a small issue.

Or maybe they realize a model was inaccurate and has to be rebuilt.

I truly don't think a VC-funded true AI company is possible, especially for hard and fairly unbounded problems (speech is one thing, engineering is just... that's insane).

If someone made a sustainable AI company that could run infinitely, that company would have a huge shot due to that financial position.

<comment><USER17> You could call it "artificial artificial intelligence".

<comment><USER18> Yup, for many years that was Amazon Mechanical Turk's actual marketing slogan.

I haven't seen them use it lately, but I might have missed it somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I recently wrote two blog posts that touch on this. I honestly think many people cannot tell real automation from "a box full of little elves with a tech interface." (I often compare it to the MIB2 scene where Will Smith opens the _automatic mail sorting machine_ and reveals a multi-armed alien rapidly flinging mail, not robotic parts.)

It's made me less aggravated with certain things to realize that. It also makes me wonder if founders are genuinely being intentionally deceptive or just unclear where to draw that line themselves.

How much AI inside the box do you need to qualify as an AI company when advertising what you do and wooing VC money? I bet some people honestly don't know and some of those people may be in decision-making positions at such companies.

Serious tech people may be clear on that, but most companies involve more than just tech people. If your PR people don't really get it and your tech people don't have adequate power to insist "You cannot market the company this way," then it will get sorted out in ugly headlines and court cases and the like.

<comment><USER20> I think people come up with the idea of marketing things as having AI behind them, before the implementation is fully realized. Once they have funding and employees, they can't exactly back down. So they have to put humans behind the solution as a stopgap. In their minds, it's temporary: they're just gathering more data, they have real paying customers that they want to keep until their solution is ready, etc. The little lie becomes a big lie and sooner or later it will blow up for a lot of companies.

Uber's house of cards is a very transparent example, but there are many others who don't even disclose that humans are at the wheel.

<comment><USER19> On the upside, it means that dystopian dreams of automation taking all our jobs and creating an 80% permanent unemployment rate are laughable.

There will be plenty of paid tasks for people. They will just be online, remote and we will need to sort out how to make this make financial sense for all involved parties so it doesn't turn into a permanent underclass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "The company claims its AI tools are "human-assisted," and that it provides a service that will help a customer make more than 80 percent of a mobile app from scratch in about an hour"

By the 80/20 rule, that would no doubt be the 80 percent that takes only 20 percent of the time to write; the remaining 20 percent that the tools can't do is what takes 80 percent of the time to write.

</comment><comment><USER22> Majority of AI startups are starting with manual approach to generate training data set for future algorithms...

Plus it is a faster way to validate demand for given business model.

<comment><USER23> Are there any proven examples of a company doing this (starting with a manual approach), receiving investment, and eventually developing a working AI product?

<comment><USER24> Depends on how you define AI. If you're talking hands-off, learned-from- scratch ML and deep learning. I'm not sure. If you're talking "used a human to learn the steps and then slowly automated those steps", then you're describing basically every company that's ever existed.

<comment><USER25> >If you're talking "used a human to learn the steps and then slowly automated those steps", then you're describing basically every company that's ever existed.

So, obviously not that definition then....

<comment><USER15> That's a pretty weak definition then. Might be your issue right there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> One thing I've noticed in fundraising is that many potential investors almost expect you to have some AI-driven solution.

Many don't even know what AI is, and would't be able to sniff out bullshit no mater how much due diligence there's involved. Dumb money is flowing in, as long as you have a great pitch and sleek presentation.

<comment><USER27> Any sufficiently advanced statistical model is indistinguishable from AI, at least for the purpose of VC dollars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Smells like Theranos. It's surprising how easy it is to fool VCs these days.

<comment><USER29> At least it can't literally kill people…

<comment><USER30> Stress kills people

<comment><USER29> That's true of any job, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Contrarian view. Read the article top to bottom - there is no fraud here. This is exactly how it should be done.

VC's dont know shit about AI and you cant expect them to.

Anyone building a cutting edge AI product, SHOULD NOT build it before selling it product.

First use humans to build/sell the product and then in parallel train the AI to take over. Often the training phase is best done using the human taskers.

The CEO - 'Sachin Dev Duggal' is doing it exactly right. Anyone claiming otherwise, including the journalist who wrote this post, don't know what they are talking about.

<comment><USER32> > Anyone building a cutting edge AI product, SHOULD NOT build it before > selling it product.

If they are selling a service and AI is part of the blsckt-box implementation, sure.

If "its being done automatically by a machine" is your selling point, and you haven't built a product that does that when you sell the product, it's fraud, pure and simple.

<comment><USER31> If we are talking pure and simple, ALL business takes what you would call 'fraud' to get there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wouldn't see it as a problem if human actions were systematically recorded into a structured dataset to be used as training data.

But it seems from the article that the labor is not used for this purpose at all.

<comment><USER34> Speaking more generally, I do think it is a _systemic_ problem in the world of AI that we have to rely so much on human-labeled data, often done by low-paid workers in other countries (like Amazon's Mechanical Turk) or harvested off friction deliberately inserted into the human experience (like CAPTCHA).

The AI promise was that eventually the need for human labeling would end, but the curve currently is going in the opposite direction and it's reasonable to question whether it will _ever_ reverse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> LOL, obvious #MagicalPixieDust peddler is obvious. Real AI is currently three- to-eight years away, just as it has been for the last 40 years. They shoulda just said it uses "computers".

In the meantime, you know what _does_ work here and now? Building up a domain- specific language to the level of that domain's expert users, empowering those users to tell their machines what they want without requiring a CS degree to do it.

Small steps make Progress.

</comment><comment><USER36> So, question:

Why is this fraud, but Uber isn't?

This company claims they're using humans to build apps while they develop an AI platform out of hand-wavium.

Uber claims they're using humans to drive cars while they develop self-driving cars out of hand-wavium.

Seems like the same model to me.

<comment><USER15> Yeah. This gives me about 0 pause.

Imo personal opinion, 'AI' at this point is about augmentation of human action to reduce costs (time, materials, human attention, compute, etc), and actually, if you know what you're doing, it works and can make you money.

My group works extremely heavily in this space. We use a combination of human annotation and ML to speed up human annotation and improve the products of the ML component. Rinse, wash hands, recur until 95% of predictions are 95% accurate or better. Use ML to find the 5% of predictions that aren't up to snuff and lay hands on them (this is the part where you have to pay people). There is nothing shameful about including humans in the process.

<comment><USER36> Well, it just goes to show you, it's always something — if it ain't one thing, it's another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Don't they all?

<comment><USER38> this is the right response.

if you see an early stage company using "AI", then assume they are manually doing most of the work right now.

They may have a clever way of making it smart in the future

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Disclaimer - I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai

We actually wrote a blog post a little while ago that might answer a lot of the questions I'm seeing here: [https://blog.engineer.ai/a-little-bit-about- ai-and-more-stra...](https://blog.engineer.ai/a-little-bit-about-ai-and-more- straight-from-the-builders-mouth/)

<comment><USER12> This post doesn't clear much up. The things you describe that are done by AI sound like project bootstrappers, libraries, or code-gen (in an IDE). None of those require "AI".

I just ran a tool that bootstrapped most of a CRUD app for me. Was it AI? No, because the program I ran didn't do any app-specific coding.

My honest advice is to talk to a lawyer and get this company off your resume ASAP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I like where this is going. Almost daily now, we're seeing reports of "AI startups/companies/products/features" getting unmasked. Technical people knew it all along, but corporate-speak, prefabricated demos, half-baked products and puff pieces were slowly inflating that bubble. Glad it's bursting.

</comment><comment><USER40> If I were using that company & found out after the fact that they were mostly people, I might feel a little misled, but I also kind of wouldn't care. AI is a hot buzzword, but what I really care about is can I input resources (time, money, unpolished diamonds, whatever) in one end of your black box and get predictable results out the other end. If the answer is yes, do whatever you want (in an ethical manner). Whatever you're building, whether it's powered by people, software, IBM Watson, or free range chickens pecking buttons for treats, I'm happy if it works at a price I care to pay.

Until we've truly built self-replicating machines, I just assume whatever you're selling me requires a lot of people to stay competitive anyway. There's no farm-to-table AI raised by AI farmers yet.

</comment><comment><USER41> Any language or system sufficiently detailed to accurately describe the steps necessary to solve the problem turns into a programming language.

A very large number of companies have tried to automate software development with little success.

What is supposed to make these folks special?

</comment><comment><USER42> Probably the AI part is in the configurator, at most spec generation. Development is still done by humans.

[https://imgur.com/a/hlsALdj](https://imgur.com/a/hlsALdj)

So a fancy new SAP but with cheap consultants.

<comment><USER43> probably automated the selection of templates in Android Studio and xcode ,lol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm pretty sure we already all knew they were using humans 9 months ago. Take a look at the comments here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18391280](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18391280)

It seems like they were fairly explicit about it, so I'm not sure if the outrage is justified. komali2 even noted explicitly, "There doesn't appear to be AI involved. A very good business model, but no AI."

</comment><comment><USER45> VC funding needs to stop. It's a complete cancer on the software industry. All this money going towards half-baked promises that are completely overvalued, only to fund companies for decades that never turn a profit.

Maybe I'll hire an animator or something and go to VC firms and ask them for money by showing them an animation of a new flashy product I've never designed. Better than working an honest living it seems.

</comment><comment><USER46> Similar approach used by a lot of self-proclaimed self-driving car companies. They have a driver and an engineer in the front seats but can't stop from saying we have self-drivings cars on the streets :-) .

Also, the same pattern with Cloud hosted companies. It might be true these days but back in the day - a lot of them were claiming to be hosted in the Cloud to look cool but actually, they were using colo data centers.

</comment><comment><USER47> I was a going to register "soylent.ai" and put up a roll of shame but the ai registrars charge an arm and a leg. Perhaps someone else will.

</comment><comment><USER48> > The company was sued earlier this year by its chief business officer, Robert > Holdheim, who claims the company is exaggerating its AI abilities to get the > funding it needed to actually work on the technology. According to Holdheim, > Duggal "was telling investors that Engineer.ai was 80% done with developing > a product that, in truth, he had barely even begun to develop."

Ouch.

</comment><comment><USER49> so if humans do it, is it called 'Organic Intelligence' which could then be called 'Artisanal Intelligence' aka AI.

</comment><comment><USER50> This reminds me of a couple of KYC companies, the ones that help you check a user's passport and other docs.

They talk a lot about algos, then when they demoed it to me it comes out that they actually send my picture to India for a human to look at. There's literally 24h service with real people there doing the "image recognition".

</comment><comment><USER51> This is yet another black mark on softbank. Seriously? This should be day 1 of DD for anyone looking into any AI companies.

</comment><comment><USER52> They contacted me for a Software Engineer position, 2 months back by them. I checked Glassdoor review, majority of those are stating that CEO is not a person you will like to work with and several of them saying it is just manual labor, no AI, everything they market is fake. I am glad I trusted those reviews.

</comment><comment><USER53> The HN title is "AI startup that raised $30m claims to automate app making just uses humans". That's a painful and confusing sentence. The real title is "This AI startup claims to automate app making but actually just uses humans". Can someone set a more grammatical and accurate title?

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm happy we are starting to move on from all the AI hype and BS. Hopefully some of that VC money will start shifting to something useful. Mitigating climate change, or educating children, or feeding children ... Nah. Just kidding. VCs just want to pretend they are Tony Stark.

</comment><comment><USER55> I was attempting something like this but the company paying me to do it lost patience around 30 days where I was only able to identify widgets visually from mockups from past training data. This was a nice step but going to know what to do with those widgets contextually got pretty rough.

<comment><USER56> You had 30 days to do an automated website builder with visual input? How can the stakeholders be that dellusional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Hmm, I met these folks in Lisbon late last year, at Web conference. They did tell me it's humans building, and their play was to build MVPs quickly with AI APIs - which I thought was honest and useful. Of course, I'm not a VC :D

</comment><comment><USER58> > The number of companies which include the .ai top-level domain from the > British territory Anguilla has doubled in the last few years, the WSJ > reports.

This sounds like some statistics manipulation. Why limit yourself to Anguilla?!

<comment><USER59> Maybe you're joking, but .ai is the ccTLD for Anguilla. I don't think they meant to imply the companies in question reside there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I'm always amazed by the funds that companies manage to acquire from VCs without a (developed) product. Having recently read _Bad Blood_ it's horrifying to see how often similar situations arise.

</comment><comment><USER61> Did they update their web site? Because as it stands now, it's clear that they're a standard agency connecting developers to people who want work done, with some vague stuff about AI helping to match them.

</comment><comment><USER62> They already tried this kind of thing in the late 18th century:

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

</comment><comment><USER63> At GitStart we use a global pool of devs and mentioned that upfront.

We have still deployed a ton of models to improve quality and SLAs, but embrace our human nature upfront.

This is bad faith to the extreme.

</comment><comment><USER64> People are very creative at spinning consulting shops as AI software something or other to get a higher PE. The most prominent example being Palantir.

</comment><comment><USER65> So they feed their AI with food instead of data

</comment><comment><USER66> The automation they described sounds like automation of part of project management. why they are not selling that? :-D

</comment><comment><USER67> Reminds me of Kite - AI Autocomplete and Docs for Programmers. Just always s/ai/marketing/

</comment><comment><USER68> So it's an "I" startup? Almost like you get more than you paid for, haha.

</comment><comment><USER69> It's not a lie if you think 'artificial intelligence' means 'pretending to be clever'

</comment><comment><USER70> Relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/2173/](https://xkcd.com/2173/)

> "Yeah, I trained a neural net to sort the unlabeled photos into categories." > [...] Engineering tip: when you do a task by hand, you can technically say > you trained a neural net to do it.

</comment><comment> m-p-3 They took "fake it till you make it" to another level.

</comment><comment><USER71> I mean, "do things that don't scale," amirite?

</comment><comment><USER72> 37 k. for an app and it uses AI.

Didn't got through the bullshit test :)

</comment><comment><USER73> Wizard of Oz prototypes aren't meant to scale...

</comment><comment><USER74> their investors should have clarified what the "A" in AI stood for -- actual intelligence! :)

</comment><comment><USER75> Is this securities fraud?

</comment><comment><USER76> i mean they need to generate a training set first right?

</comment><comment><USER77> [https://xkcd.com/2173/](https://xkcd.com/2173/)

</comment><comment><USER78> Anyone remember Spinvox :

[https://kernelmag.dailydot.com/features/report/2573/spinvox-...](https://kernelmag.dailydot.com/features/report/2573/spinvox- the-shocking-allegations-in-full/)

My eyes popped open when I read who the author of this was ! Utterly Loathsome - but apparently doing some journalism in 2012.

</comment><comment><USER79> AI is the biggest fraud of the 21st century. Especially Deep Learning. Deep Learning is a bubble that has no application in reality. And I mean NONE. Even in cutting edge FAANG companies that claim to use modern AI techniques, Deep Learning is barely used. Because it's simply not reliable enough for real datasets. Classical statistical techniques, along with human domain expertise are what runs the world. Not new-fangled hyped up stuff.

<comment><USER80> This is absurdly wrong, DL is used in industry all the time.

<comment><USER79> Show me one example where Deep Learning is used in production?

<comment><USER81> See my comment above. Image processing alone has saved millions of dollars in engineering hours alone.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using Python(Pelican) to create website: Better than Wordpress? - <AUTHOR> https://shahayush.com/2020/03/web-pelican-intro/ <comment><USER2> I've been using Pelican for my personal site for ~1 year now - how are you finding it as a general blogging and website tool?

I'm hosting on Netlify which seems like less hassle than dealing with Travis CI and Github Pages. I'd recommend checking it out if you've not already.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just got into Pelican and wrote my first blog series. I found it very convenient and the perfect tool for blogging since I am used to writing articles in Markdown. I didn't know about Netlify. I will definitely check it out. Is it free?

Also, now, Travis-CI can be replaced by GitHub-actions which is much more convenient and hassle-free. I am planning to replace Travis-CI by Github actions.</comment></comment>


Cold War espionage paid off–until it backfired, East German spy records reveal - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/cold-war-espionage-paid-until-it-backfired-east-german-spy-records-reveal <comment><USER2> You ask yourself what the startup craze does to research. Back then, all the big companies had their Central Research Department (note: Microsoft, Google and Facebook still do), which would do stuff that paid off only after 20 or 30 years. Nowadays development has been devolved to universities, and much stuff is done at contract labs somewhere far away. The average startup is a webapp with Twitter for cats. That can't be good in the long run.</comment>


Indian call centres selling your credit card details and medical records - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116649/Indian-centres-selling-YOUR-credit-card-details-medical-records-just-2p.html

<comment><USER2> This is a scenario that I have expected to hear about since a long time. Places like India and China are easily prone to corruption and data theft. What needs to be investigated is the role of the administration of such call centers in the theft. After all, why is this data not sufficiently protected by encryption? Why is an employee able to leave the premises with a laptop full of live data and who needs to sign off on such devices. The only way to stop this is to have better security in place for customer data in call center databases.</comment>


Tobacco out, hemp in for Tennessee farmers - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Tobacco-out-hemp-in-for-Tennessee-farmers-14059023.php <comment><USER2> > So those folks are used to managing a high-value crop, a high-labor crop, > managing a lot of labor...

> You use the same resources if you do tobacco as you do hemp. You have the > same tractors, the same planting equipment. You have the same regimen to get > the plant ready for the year. Popping your seeds are the same and doing all > that

Clearly, the biggest driver of this shift is CBD oil. Here in KY, there are tons of shops opening up, but also production facilities. Millions of dollars have poured in (lots from CA) to process hemp into CBD products.

It makes me wonder what would happen to our economy were farming marijuana to be legalized. All these areas have years of history growing high labor cash crops, and even though a lot of that infrastructure is gone or shrunk (tobacco warehouses, etc), the skill is still there.

<comment><USER3> Just wait until they find out you can make paper from hemp, at a much higher yield than with trees - and a much quicker regrow rate.

it is not just CBD that can come from hemp

<comment><USER4> Hasn't industrial hemp production been legal in _most_ of the world the whole time? And hasn't importation of hemp products (e.g. rope, or tshirts, or whatever) been legal even in America the whole time?

Surely if hemp was going to outcompete popular modern fibers, it would have done so by now. What am I missing here?

<comment><USER5> What changes now is that people will be growing hemp in mass for CBD and be left with all of the pulp as byproduct to be sold on the cheap. Which in turn may spur more hemp products. Whereas before your help business model was considerably different and likely not as profitable.

<comment><USER4> Okay that makes more sense. How far does that stretch though? Will the CBD industry really get so large that their waste product truly competes against cotton or synthetics? I can't help but feel hemp is destined to be a niche material for nearly all applications.

<comment><USER6> Finding something to do with agricultural waste is useful. There's so much of it already. Doing it profitably is hard. People have been trying hard for a century. Henry Ford was into this.

It's possible to make something like particle board from bagasse, the waste from sugar cane. But it's never become big. Corncobs and corn silk are available in huge quantities, but other than animal feed, not much is done with them. The energy input, processing cost, and transportation cost usually defeats this, because what you get out is usually a low-value product.

<comment><USER5> But in that same regard its part of why many foods have cellulose in them. [https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/07/10/329767647/fr...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/07/10/329767647/from- mcdonalds-to-organic-valley-youre-probably-eating-wood-pulp)

They get government assistance in the name of reducing waste. Hemp could see the same relief.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if there is anything similar going on in western Massachusetts, e.g. the Pioneer Valley area including such towns as Hadley and the surrounding areas, where tobacco barns are not an uncommon sight.

Perhaps a change has already started but I am currently personally unsure; for better or worse I moved away a good number of years ago due to college and work and have yet to move back [should that be in my future or desires].

</comment><comment><USER8> Hemp growing has a long tradition in the USA: [https://www.mountvernon.org/george- washington/facts/george-w...](https://www.mountvernon.org/george- washington/facts/george-washington-grew-hemp/)

"At one point in the 1760's Washington considered whether hemp would be a more lucrative cash crop than tobacco but determined wheat was a better alternative."

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. I live at ground zero in this article, but I haven't noticed much hemp. I'll have to go out and look a bit closer at the fields this weekend.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why do Americans always call it hemp or, more frequently, marijuana? It's cannabis.

<comment><AUTHOR> One is cannibis indica and the other sativa. Marijuana has THC and CBD. Only one kind of hemp is grown for CBD..no THC. The rest is called industrial hemp for paper/fiber etc.

<comment><USER11> It is still the same plant. "Marijuana" is made from both, India and Sativa, or from a hybrid of both. You can even buy hybrids that are made from indica, sativa and ruderalis. Also, in the EU, farmers have to buy their cannabis seed every year. It is not legal to use the seeds produced from the harvest of last year. Because over a few generations the THC content in the "hemp" rises and to stay under 0.3% new seeds are required.

<comment><USER12> I wonder how legislating such low thc content affects the viability of (industrial) hemp because I seem to recall reading that for example higher thc may help protect the plant against pests and possibly affect other qualities of the product as well as having synergistic or other medical qualities when combined with cbd and other cannabinoids in oil or other forms.

Are we gimping the potential of hemp by clinging to the war on drugs reefer madness mentality?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tiny device to track your bag. Never lose luggage again. - <AUTHOR> http://lugga.me/ <comment><USER2> Easily the worst homepage I've seen in some time.

Zero information, literally no explanation of what the product is.

None of the links go anywhere but the single page.. why even have links?

The website is literally void of information, which should be the only reason to have a website in the first place.

I can only imagine this is being upvoted by spam/shill accounts.

<comment><USER3> Actually, it's a rather reasonable homepage for value proposition testing with just two exceptions. I too was irritated by the links-to-nowhere, so that would have to change. And the email CTA is dangerous in that it deters actual signups. Otherwise, this page gets straight to the value proposition and the price, and almost nothing else. It's a reasonable way of quickly testing traction for your idea, especially considering that it was (apparently) a hackathon project.

<comment><USER4> The value proposition is weak if the consumer wants to know how this works before commuting. It skews data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like a good idea, however the website needs more information. It's not to clear what your $40 is getting you or how it works. Maybe look at adding a demo video or something?

 _Slightly off topic:_ What if you already own both an iPad ( _assuming it's a 3g model and not just wifi_ ) and an iPhone, couldn't you just leave your iPad in the bag then use the "Find Your iPhone" app to locate the bag for free?

EDIT: I guess my overall point is why would anyone pay $39.99 for a simple tracking device when you can do this free (with an iPad/iPhone) or buy a GPS tracker yourself, for cheaper than ~$40? Maybe this leads back to my first statement that the landing page needs much more info to convince the user this is worth the money.

<comment><USER6> I think the biggest risk to that is battery life.

Also, am I the only person who gets seriously bothered by profession-looking websites or applications that list the dollar sign _after_ a price?

<comment><USER7> Google thinks the page is italian, if I let it translate it, the $ sign goes to the start... odd!

<comment><USER8> The currency sign is a suffix in many locales, e.g. parts of Europe. Makes sense for a translator to fix it. Although I'd consider it feature of the currency involved as opposed to the document language.

<comment><USER9> I've noticed an increasing trend for Americans to write, for example, '10$'. As an odd reflection to that, I've also noticed a lot of people writing percentages with the percent sign in front: '%50'. I can't help but wonder if the latter is just confused web developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have to e-mail someone to pre-order? That seems...odd. Just setup a Wufoo or Google Form?

I don't know what I'm even supposed to put in that e-mail; am I going to e-mail you my CC details (PROTIP: No.)?

tl;dr: SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.

<comment><USER11> This, simple form please? My Thunderbird opens, but I don't even use mail clients. This is when you should not use mailto. How do I give you money?

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw the presentation of this startup at @AngelHack, they are pretty focused on building the product. I guess a better website is coming next on their roadmap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I usually just read and don't comment. A couple things.. Better information on the website. Even just a picture of the device. Preorder is just a mailto: - put a form on there at least, it adds to the legitimacy of the company even if it just forwards an email in the end.

And a third point - whats the status of the product? Expected Ship Date? Are you just putting this out there to see if there is interest in the product? Be honest with the consumer.

So you had the hook - there are people that clicked on the link because they want to track their bags.. but you need more.

Where is the move down button on Hacker News? I know you can give points to comments but there should be a way to quickly drop posts that seem a little sketchy.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's lot of these out there now and I guess at first glance, it seems like it makes sense. But as someone whose had his luggage "lost" (delayed etc.) about 6 times now, and every time, eventually reunited with it, I'm not sure what this app would do that the usual tracking provided by the airline's baggage service can't do for you. OK, so you can track your luggage and see it's still in JFK and it didn't make your connection to London - so what? The airline knows this too, and they're the ones fetching it for you and making sure it gets to you. This app doesn't reduce the time this process takes or in any way remove the middle man.

Maybe it's buying you a little piece of mind?

</comment><comment><USER14> I tell you what I would be useful (as a tangentially similar idea).

At my daughter's school you quite often find that the girls' have grabbed another girl's coat, hat, P.E kit etc (they have to wear a school uniform).

The current solution is to sew name tags into the clothes, which is helpful at finding the wrong clothes after the fact.

What I thought would be cool would be is if you could sew an RFID name tag into your child's clothes, and then wave a "wand" over them as you collect them, and it beeps if they have someone else's coat (for example) on.

This may well be a bit of an over-engineered solution :-)

</comment><comment><USER15> It's awesome that it can make my bag to talk to me, but I'd love to know what language will she talk.

There's zero information about how the device works. Will it talk to me online while my bag is miles away after someone steal it and drive away (I doubt)? Or is it simply low energy Bluetooth 4? Will it only tell me "your bag is within 200 meters" or will it exactly show me direction?

First make your website talk to me, then promise me talking bags.

</comment><comment><USER16> Lugga.me is registered to Matteo Lai and Empatica S.r.l. ("a young startup focused on real-time emotion tracking through bio-signals") in Italy but he seems to be based in the Bay area... <http://www.meetup.com/qsmilan/members/30004242/>

</comment><comment><USER17> Are all these luggage tracker devices approved to be continually while the airplane is in-flight?

</comment><comment><USER18> I've seen similar devices. They usually require you to pay an ongoing subscription for a mobile phone connection that makes the price unattractive in the long term.

Is there anyway to broadcast a signal from these devices without me having to make a telco rich?

</comment><comment><USER19> This seems to be just a landing page to validate the idea. However it's quite a good idea.

</comment><comment> adam-f I thought planes generally want you to "turn off all electronic devices" at take-off and landing. Pardon the pun, but how is this idea going to fly?

Also, Q. Why is the dollar sign on the wrong side?

A. "This page is in Italian! Would you like to translate it?" >_<

</comment><comment><USER20> Cue the starter pistol hack: [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/expensive_came...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/expensive_camer.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> If the airline wants you to turn off your harmless e-reader, they're not going to be keen on having your luggage emit radio frequencies.

</comment><comment><USER22> I guess this is an early design prototype (as all the social links are referring to dribble.com). Not sure what this is doing on HN.

</comment><comment><USER23> This was announced at CES 2013:

<http://www.trakdot.com/>

The site in the OP looks to be testing the idea.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the link, it seems to have all the info about this product (assuming it's the same thing).

<comment><USER23> No, a different product. However, it looks like TracDot will be available for purchase in April.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How is this different from the stick-n-find or tod devices recently launched through Kickstarter?

</comment><comment><USER26> There is no information on the site....This belongs on theuselessweb.com</comment>