Zendesk CEO calls Freshdesk a freaking rip off - Freshdesk responds - <AUTHOR> http://ripoffornot.org <comment><USER3> Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Helpjuice.com. We compete with Zendesk's knowledge base.

This is so rude from Zendesk. In case you think someone has ripped of your product, in any way, you (as the CEO of a 30+ company with 10,000 customers) SHOULD NEVER, EVER write something like that.

I'm 100% with Freshdesk on this one specifically because of the tone of Zendesk and Freshdesk. The way Mikkel responded to Freshdesk is silly and childish.

If someone were to make a knock off of my product, I wouldn't tweet at them like Mikkel did. Or support one of my buddies (who is perhaps disguised as a blogger for blog XYZ) that's trolling a company's image, saying that they're the same as Zendesk. Or calling them Indian cowboys.

Zendesk, I hope you understand that you've turned me (an actual person who supports everything you do, and someone who talks to the folks at Assistly with a great and friendly tone) into someone who honestly hopes you loose this "battle" and have left a nasty look in a lot of people's eyes.

I don't know much about Freshdesk's product, but I know the way they reacted was nice and professional (exactly the opposite of how you responded). +1 on that.

Lesson learned: You don't do marketing by bashing on someone's product without looking like an ass (and perhaps loosing a couple customers).

P.S.: (to the Freshdesk folks) Congrats on stepping up and putting time in to create a page like this. I would have maybe included screenshots of the product to further help your customers understand that you're not a knock off of Zendesk.

<comment><USER4> > I'm 100% with Freshdesk on this one specifically because of the tone of > Zendesk and Freshdesk.

Why would you decide who is right based on tone?

Why not on the validity of their argument?

<comment><USER3> There isn't too many arguments in play. One thinks Freshdesk is knockoff of Zendesk, the other one makes a website describing how it isn't. The real play is the choice of words and how Mikkel("Indian cowboys", the RIP OFF comment, etc.) went on about this, and how Zendesk responded

The customers are there to tell whether they're a knock off or not. I don't want to say anything as I'm not a customer.

<comment><USER5> I don't think Mikkel called them Indian cowboys - that was someone else.

<comment><USER6> Correct, it was @cloudgroupsyd (Christian Marth), who promptly apologized and explained what message it was trying to originally say.

Though he should've learned from Michael Richards and never said something that stupid in the first place. He had plenty of characters to phrase it right in his original tweet. But you know what they say about hindsight...

<comment><USER5> It wasn't an apology at all. This is what he said:

 _@mrgirish not attacking your nationality only your lack of innovation for product development, if you were offended in any way sorry_

Let's parse that.

 _@mrgirish not attacking your nationality only your lack of innovation for product development_ \- here he attempts to justify himself, by trying to explain what he meant.

 _if you were offended in any way sorry_ \- here he says he is sorry if @mrgirish was offended - NOT that he was sorry for offending.

That's like me saying "Please come out and have Thai with me and my friends. Oh - you don't like Thai food? Sorry to hear that - will I see you there anyway?". In both cases there is no acknowledgement of wrongdoing, and in both cases the other person is effectively blamed for either being offended or for not liking Thai.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> HackerNews readers, watch and learn. I'm about deconstruct what is going on.

Anybody who brushes off FreshDesk because of its Indian roots is doing FreshDesk a favour. This is a sharp mind at work and it is lethal.

FreshDesk is executing the standard modus operandi of upstart against an incumbent.

Jobs is a master at it (I'm Apple I'm Microsoft), Calacanis too (remember the SEO controversy, and then the Angel controversy?), and Girish is in the same league. The idea is to frame everything as a controversy, and linkbaits people into discussing it.

Notice how a custom domain is used and it is a mini website, not just a blog post? It is a custom website intended to fuel controversy and will drive a lot of SEO juice from bloggers all over the world. Sit back and watch its PageRank explode.

Girish is also running very hungry by executing a social media campaign. People may not buy from Twitter, but it buys mindshare. It will be a matter of time before FreshDesk gets a good recall rate, as long as it acts heads above other people. The name itself enjoys co-recognition from Freshbooks as well as ZenDesk.

Don't forget, Girish comes with a Zoho pedigree, and this is a company that has bootstrapped itself in India and no one would say the software is anything but world-class.

As for ZenDesk, Girish has stuck a fork into Ben Keepes for the lack of disclosure (by the way, I've been a long time reader of CloudAve, always insightful, even if [I now have to perceived it as potentially] biased), and then masterfully weaves ZenDesk CEO's twitter reply with the overtly racist overtone that cloudavesyd (onya Aussies) "Indian cowboys"-tweet. Note that mikkelsvane wasn't party to the "Indian cowboys" comment, but the way it is put, mikkelsvane sounded like he was in agreement (although to anyone who pays close attention to this type of things, he clearly was talking about something else).

Girish, if you are reading - I'm in Australia, if you could - please don't turn this into a wider "Australians enjoy India bashing meme". We already have a hard time here, and race doesn't factor much if at all in business.

As for ZenDesk, the important thing is to stay above the fray, establish their incumbency, but emphasize their own underdoggedness. Both can play the jingoist game and appeal to emotions.

<comment><USER8> > Girish, if you are reading - I'm in Australia, if you could - please don't > turn this into a wider "Australians enjoy India bashing meme". We already > have a hard time here, and race doesn't factor much if at all in business.

Aussie here. Australia has in the recent years acquired a bad reputation when it comes to its treatment of immigrant populations, for e.g.: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_Indians_in_Aus...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_Indians_in_Australia_controversy).

If you truly care about avoiding an "Australians enjoy India bashing" meme, then make sure to hold Christian Marth (@cloudgroupsyd) accountable to his tweet, and other Aussies who say things like this. It belies an insensitivity toward other cultures, and we should really address this seriously.

<comment><USER9> Guys - as it happens I'll see Christian in Sydney next week and I'll be sure to tell him that his comment was insensitive and racist...

My original tweet was an off the cuff remark, I didn't like Freshdesk's choice of name and I still don't. It's nothing against the founders, the product or anything else. And it sure as heck isn't some dodgy conspiracy aimed at ensuring that Zendesk succeeds....

<comment><USER7> Bear in mind, it is very difficult to convey tone in a tweet. The larrikin in Australia gives a lot of colour to life here, and I'm sorry to see it go if all communication go electronic.

There used to be a time when a gentle jibe in the ribs between friendly groups included off-colour remarks making fun of race. I grew up in that environment in Malaysia. The only problem is on the internet, you are not anyone's friend, and there is no nuance at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As much as I'd like to side with the guy getting picked on (Freshdesk), Zendesk is completely right. Ignoring the interface and naming similarities, you can't complain about ZenDesk on Twitter without multiple Freshdesk spammers bombarding you. Sure there's nothing illegal about it, but they're obnoxious with the "a customer of a rival is complaining, I MUST CONVERT THEM!" concept.

(I called them a rip-off of Zendesk back in late October - <http://mobile.twitter.com/ecaron/status/123594375560302592> \- and it took several days for @vshankar90 and @mrgirish to stop harassing me on Twitter...)

<comment><USER10> Something about the whole freshdesk attitude really rubs me the wrong way. Not saying zendesk is in the right either. I just feel like I read the whole ripoffornot page and cringe. Definitely doesn't seem like the type of company I would want to give my time or money.

A couple people complained about their product on twitter and they built a whole page responding to it? In it, they respond to the criticism by making personal attacks against those who complained about them? Really weird.

Stop starting flame wars, start making a decent product.

<comment><USER11> How on earth did you get to freshdesk making personal attacks based on this page? I'm gobsmacked you managed to so severely misread the whole thing. The entire point of the page is to point out personal attacks made against them and then respond to the rip-off comment. Supposedly they did make a decent product already.

<comment><USER10> My point is, they respond to the personal attacks by making personal attacks against the people who made them. An eye for an eye. In my opinion, they sunk down to the level of the people who were criticizing them. Making a good product speaks for itself, you don't have to have this petty back and forth.

<comment><USER12> Where are the personal attacks on that page? I see none.

<comment><USER10> Taking a tweet from someone with 73 followers, throwing it front of thousands of people (maybe more) and saying that the tweet "reflects poorly on the intellectual ability of the person making the judgement" is a personal attack to me. You can argue that they're right, but does the punishment really fit the crime? It seems in poor judgement to publicly shame some dude who's comments would of otherwise gone unnoticed.

<comment><USER13> The someone with 73 followers made a racist comment. Calling a competitor "indian cowbows" _does_ reflect poorly on the intellectual ability of the person making the judgment.

Don't throw all the blame on the Freshdesk people. Everyone is responsible for what they say - and it appears to me that you're eager to let the 'someone with 73 followers' off the hook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Christian Marth (@cloudgroupsyd) has a lot of explaining for that ridiculous and risible "Indian cowboy" dig. Twenty times worse because he doubled down on it while backpeddling.

<comment><USER15> Normally comments about someone's perceived race (I didn't know there was more than one human race) is reserved for idiots who get their education about the world from tv.

The indian cowboy slur against Freshdesk is beyond ignorant. Especially for a technie. They're usually pretty good for researching.

Maybe Christian Marth should learn indians invented counting, the pentium chip, hotmail, fiber optics and lots of other things without which our ability to bask in our own glory is not as possible.

If they're not perfect, but as we can see from Zendesk, neither are others.

<comment><USER15> Thanks downvoters, your hatering feeds my loving. :)

<comment><USER16> Wikipedia: Smith came up with the idea for anonymous web-based email in 1995, and worked with his colleague at Apple, Bhatia, to found the company.

<comment><USER15> Here? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail#History>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Zendesk should've left this alone. I can't even fathom why they'd start. The products don't look alike. They are takes on the same name, help / support desk, which is a standard name.

I don't want to rag on Zendesk. I've been using them for years. But with stupid remarks like this, their incredibly slow / almost non-existent development on the product, and lackluster support have me keeping an eye out for replacements.

Kind of dangerous with stuff like Assistly looming out there.

That said, I'm not sure an entire domain name was warranted for this. I thought it was just a blog post at first.

</comment><comment><USER18> If you're on the right track, competitors are going to rip you off.

If you're on the right track, competitors are going to try to poach your customers.

If you're on the right track, some competitors are going to talk trash about you when they think no one's looking. Or even when everyone's looking! Using profanity in their Twitter feeds, even!

But just because you're on the right track doesn't mean you can't derail; take the high road and let your customers decide. How you deal with unethical competitors is just one mettle-proving battle in a much larger campaign.

I sympathize with Zendesk, but there are times where it's wiser to just let your tongue bleed out. Let that extra salt sustain you for the more important battles ahead.

<comment><USER19> How is FreshDesk ripping off or poaching the customers of ZenDesk?

Last time I checked, it was people connected to ZenDesk who are the one's talking trash.

<comment><USER20> Last time I checked, having a feature list where you compare your product with theirs, complete with little green ticks and all, it probably means your software is playing in the same space as theirs. That's the real essence of the "rip off" portion of the accusation.

Copying your competitors features... well, that happens a lot. Copying their name and their features, and then acting surprised when people call you on it? That's pretty much textbook douchebaggery.

But the copying doesn't stop there, because they even copied the pricing structure!

And then they act all upset when they get accused of copying.

As for the racially inflamatory remarks... go check the last big discussion on hacker news about the state of the Indian education system. The Indians themselves say that cheating is blatant and pervasive. So while that kind of strawman argument doesn't do much for the intellectual quality of the argument.... you shouldn't complain about being stereotyped if what you are doing conforms exactly to the stereotype.

In other words, if the shoe fits, wear it. If not, then throw it.

<comment><USER21> "The Indians themselves say that cheating is blatant and pervasive." - <USER2> does that give one a license to call someone a 'rip-off'. Aren't americans cribbing of 'lack of culture' in America? So shoudl the world start calling them names,. "In other words, if the shoe fits, wear it. If not, then throw it." - But DO NOT throw it on other's face.

<comment><USER20> You don't get it. That they were blatantly ripping off someone else's software, and THAT is what gives them the right to label them a rip off.

Everything else is just smoke and mirrors, where the Freshdesk guys are trying to pretend that it is all about name calling, it isn't. Based only on what they themselves say, it is obvious that Freshdesk is a copy of Zendesk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The help desk field is crowded. A quick search reveals that at least half a dozen of the large number of companies in that space have "desk" in their name. Any analyst that thinks that putting "desk" in the name of a help desk product is a "blatant attempt to piggyback" off of another help desk product with "desk" in the name is an idiot or is being paid to make that observation. (In this case, it was the latter, although that doesn't preclude the former).

</comment><comment><USER15> This might be a good lesson in don't feed the monster so it gets more attention.

When the big guy talks smack about a presumably smaller guy, it's because they're threatened?

Who cares if their pricing is a rip off, it's good for Zendesk if Freshdesk is a ripoff, because no one will use it. By saying and doing nothing Freshdesk could spiral into a blackhole of me never hearing about it.

Instead Zendesk put Freshdesk on it's own level by talking about it as an equal.

Zendesk used it's brand power to legitimize Freshdesk as an option just by talking about them like this.

Instead of never seeing Freshdesk, I checked out a Zendesk competitor because of Zendesk, with more than normal scrutiny. One feature I now like about Freshdesk is that it manages multiple SLA's.

P.S., I use neither Zendesk or Freshdesk.

<comment><USER23> >Who cares if their pricing is a rip off

yea, I read it that way at first but I don't think that is what they are saying. "Knockoff" is probably what they meant.

<comment><USER15> Fair, but we could find things zendesk is a knock off of, no?

Maybe some folks start to believe their own legend too much. Originality and innovation is far rarer than we'd like to think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks like I won't be using either of these products.

Think of all that could have been accomplished on the product had they not been squabbling and setting up websites to argue with one another.

No one comes out on top in situations like this. I think it's best to end it with something like: "I'm sorry you feel that way. We'll let the customers decide."

<comment><USER25> Actually, this should increase the number of trials and customers for Freshdesk.

It's like playing chess. Zendesk made a bad move and Freshdesk used that move to respond brilliantly.

<comment><USER24> I'm sure it will. It doesn't change my perception of them. In my opinion, anyone who thinks taking the time to create a web page for an argument or who thinks a product in the same field with a similar name is a copycat doesn't care about me, the customer.

They should be spending their time improving the product, coming up with new ideas, or responding to legitimate support inquiries.

Neither of these companies showed any "brilliant" response. Both end up looking bad.

<comment><USER26> You realize that it probably took FreshDesk maybe 2 hrs to create that page with the intention of defending the credibility of their reputation?

And at the same time, by picking (or rather extending) a fight with the industry leader, they are gaining lots of visibility for their product.

Was it worth it for FreshDesk to put in the 2 hours to defend their reputation? Of course. How is that not brilliant?

<comment><USER24> Sure. You can argue the publicity was worth something but I am certainly turned off by the way they went about it.

They could have mockingly made a fo-ZenDesk logo or any number of other things that didn't make it look like they are on the defensive.

Either way, as a customer I am more concerned about either of these companies using ANY of their time on this. Regardless of how much time they spent, it reflects on where their priorities lie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This whole thing is really juvenile. The Zendesk guys look a lot worse here, but by making such a big deal out of it and turning it into an obvious PR stunt the Freshdesk folks aren't doing themselves any favors either. I understand it's difficult and highly offensive when a competitor blatantly bashes you but don't overreact and bring yourself down to their level.

</comment><comment><USER28> Regarding the initial dispute over trademark: The "desk" part of the name is 'descriptive' and so isn't the strong part of each trademark. The "zen/fresh" parts are arbitrary so are the strong part of each mark. These are distinct, so I don't think there is a valid claim to trademark infringement here. One could argue that "desk" is 'suggestive' in trademark law which makes it a bit stronger, but I don't think that would fly.

If one of the companies can show actual instances of customer confusion, then there may be a case as this is an important test in a trademark case.

The fact that zen haven't filed suit speaks volumes.

<comment><USER29> It's not all about a name. Freshdesk is an embarrassing copy of Zendesk.

<comment><USER12> A lot of successful products are copies of something else, and more power to them. The company I work for* had a competitor make an "embarrassing copy" of our flagship product, and they managed to get acquired because of it. But you know what? I don't hold it against them, in fact, congrats to them. If anything it validates the space we're in.

* I'm deliberately not mentioning the company or product by name, because I don't particularly want to start a subthread about this situation - the particulars would detract from the point I'm making.

<comment><USER29> Does your company's competitor copy even your visual design? What I see here is some bullshit makers trying to promote their product by trolling. This is not the common case.

By the way, I'm not against copying. I distribute my website, multiplayerchess.com with WTF License to let people clone it easily.

Again, what I see here is bullshit. It's unethical, it's not honest.

<comment><USER12> Yes, the copying was primarily of visual design. Of course, in our opinion, it's a poor copy, but they got acquired and we didn't, so who's to say? I just don't see how it's unethical to try to improve on what someone else has done, which I'm sure is how companies in these situations think of themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Quoting Mahatma Gandhi and then immediately writing your name and title under it just seems wrong.

<comment><USER31> It is just a closing argument, I don't think it went through multiple iterations

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is some sort of PR stunt marketing ploy?

Either way I'm not really impressed (I'd guess most consumers aren't impressed) by pointless personal bickering. Marketing based on negative sentiment is not effective.

<comment><USER33> If negative marketing didn't work, we wouldn't have negative campaigning. The point of it isn't to boost your brand so much as it is to suppress your opponent's.

However, it alienates the undecided. Mudslinging works best when targeted to base voter blocs. We rarely see it in product advertising, though, because of this fear of alienation. It takes a very well-put-together campaign to attack your competition without giving them too much exposure. The last effective one in recent memory is probably Mac vs. PC, and that focused on targeting the frustrations of current PC users. Often you see it set up in that David vs. Goliath light, which is what I think Freshdesk is trying to do here.

This however, isn't marketing. Or, at least, didn't start that way. It started with what you said: pointless personal bickering. There's no reason for it and Zendesk should probably have never have brought up Freshdesk in the first place, negative comments or not. Freshdesk took it as an opportunity to do a compare/contrast while people were paying attention. I'm guessing it has zero effect on sales in the long run, though.

(Personally, I'm now even more glad with our choice of using Assistly.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Just to point out this was posted to HN by Girish Mathrubootham himself (the Founder/CEO of FreshDesk).

It's worthy of debate, but we'll all feeding this PR stunt (and if some people feel Girish is a troll, then you're feeding a troll too).

And usually it's considered 'poor form' to submit your own stuff to HN.

</comment><comment><USER35> Being first is worthless in and off itself. Execution and customer service are what counts. If you are:

a) an entrepreneur; and

b) think that "rip-offs" like this one are in some way unethical...

... you need to get your head out of your ass, ASAP!

Taking other peoples' great ideas and applying them to make your own product even better is not called "ripping somebody off". That process is called "business".

</comment><comment><USER36> Interestingly enough, Freshdesk apparently got started when Zendesk raised their prices - and a comment on HN about how this created a market for a cheaper competitor gave them the initial idea. So, at least partly a rip-off in my book.

Source: [http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a- simple-c...](http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple- comment-on-h-0)

</comment><comment><USER9> OK - here goes....

My tweet, ""Seems to me that #Freshdesk is an unethical troll trying to cash in on #Zendesk's good name. But that could just be me…."" was an off the cuff remark. I still think Freshdesk is trying to leverage Zendesk's brand but hey, hat's just my opinion. I do note that other folks in here have commented on the similartiies between the two products, I've reached out to Freshdesk asking to ommuncate with them to review their product - am looking forward to comparing them with Zendesk.

The image on Freshdesk's site showing a Zendesk post with my name on it actually relates to a CloudCamp that Zendesk was helping to spread the message about earlier this year. I run CloudCamps in aus/nz (for free, as in gratis, voluntary, unpaid). So that image is kind of irrelevant - it's kind of like saying that a Red Cross volunteer is somehow in the pocket of a large corporate that sponsors the Red Cross.

That said I did do some writing for Zendesk for their blog - around a year or so ago and not since then. So saying I'm a paid blogger for zendesk is kind of like saying I'm an advocate for mcdonalds since I worked there when I was 15. And for anyone who really cares, I have possibly the most complete disclosure statement of current and past engagements - feel free to cross check any other comments I make... [http://www.diversity.net.nz/diversity_analysis/ben_kepes_dis...](http://www.diversity.net.nz/diversity_analysis/ben_kepes_disclosure/)

Finally, in relation to the comments from Christian Marth about he country of origin of the Freshdesk founders - that I obviously don't condone. Those who know me will see (from the size of my nose if nothing else) that I'm Jewish. My mother spent time in a concentration camp and my Grandfather was murdered by the Nazis because he was Jewish - with that background it's unlikely that I'd be a candidate for pulling the race card.

/out

</comment><comment><USER37> This whole spat just highlights one of those truths that's evident to those in the industry:

There is no such thing as a good idea, only good execution.

Being first doesn't count for anything. Having a vaguely similar name doesn't count for anything. In the end, only how well your product works, how many users you can attract and retain, and how much value it provides matter.

<comment><USER38> There is such a thing as a good idea, it's just not very defensible, because once it appears to be working well as a business, the copycats come out of the woodwork.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The whole thing is completely overblown (intentionally so and calculated, of course, by Freshdesk) and was very unnecessary to begin with (on Zendesk's part).

As an Indian-started helpdesk software company ourselves, the 'Indian cowboy' comment raised our brows a bit. It was very unfortunate. But then I realised it was said by a relative nobody. That didn't stop it being used to inflame the situation, though.

Disclosure: I'm from Kayako.com, competitor, the original Original helpdesk and bemused bystander ;-)

<comment><USER40> We all should realize it's Twitter, home of public flame wars.

Agreed. That comment was from a bystander and Freshdesk pulled it into the story to sensationalize.

Yes, I remember back in 2005 when there was Kayako, Cerberus, Activecampaign, Request Tracker and PHP Ticket. All required self-hosting of files and maintenance. A cloud based helpdesk just wasn't an option.

In the end, customers will select technology that fits their needs. Those needs may be completely technical in nature but more and more, customers are making decisions about technology vendors based on the ethics and relationship with that company.

Nice to see you contribute this thread.

<comment><USER39> Ditto! I seem to bump into you everywhere. The Internet is a small place.

> customers are making decisions about technology vendors based on the ethics > and relationship with that company

Indeed. In such a crowded space with plenty of the same feature-wise, there is no doubt that the personality of a company (in this case, conveyed over social media) is going to play this kind of role.

PS: We were doing SaaS in 2005 :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Hey girish,

Can you write a post in a week to let us know how many customers you gained from this? If you can find out how many came from ZenDesk, even better.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you think that will help the HN community,I will. I have another post almost ready where I wanted to share my Series A fundraising experience . But then this happened!

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Hey, look, Ad Hominems on a domain name registered for the express purpose of an internet flame war between two competitors! It must be Sunday.

I wonder if these tactics actually have a measurable impact on sales?

<comment><USER43> Even if they did it will simply be a short lived bump unless the product and service is measurably better. If it is then in the long run it shouldn't matter either way.

However, I do think their criticisms of Zendesk and their paid blogger's method of product 'evangelism' are fair and they have every right to take their shot and fire back a bit. It's all good, the better product development team will most likely win either way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> "Rip-off"? It's a help desk service for Pete's sake, not the Xerox GUI or the Page-rank. If Freshdesk can deliver the same value to customers for a fraction of Zendesk's cost, kudos to them.

</comment><comment><USER45> They're all freaking rip offs of Request Tracker. :)

<comment><USER15> I wonder if Zendesk wants to reply to that. :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Great response. :)

I will be reminded of this incident every time i see the Zendesk logo when i submit a ticket on a site that uses them.

What an awful way to lose respect and damage credibility.

</comment><comment><USER47> As CEO of another Indian startup, I am furious that anybody would drag nationality into this. There are no boundaries on Internet, and certainly Girish rightly says that commenting on nationality simply reflects poorly on his own maturity level.

Aren't most of the products rip-off in some sense? Take Apple, Google, Yahoo or any other company out there. Rarely, if ever, a company comes up with something totally new and innovative that it doesn't resemble anything else in the market. A new category, that is. ZenDesk didn't invent helpdesk system. Instead, like all other companies, they are evolving and perfecting helpdesk systems. FreshDesk is also an attempt at this, (and so is our product Visual Website Optimizer for A/B testing tools).

I wish companies compete in a professional and respectful way, this war of words simply disgusts me.

</comment><comment><USER48> If desk part of the name is Zendesk's issue. There exist multi billion companies with desk in their name (Autodesk) much before anyone thought of Zendesk. Freshdesk really did good with their response. I never heard of them before and now anyone talks about Zendesk, I will remember Freshdesk.

</comment><comment><USER49> All I want to know is how this got to be the top story on HackerNews. Its a blatant PR grab on one side, and borderline infantile on the other.

Yuck on both counts.

</comment><comment><USER50> All I see are a bunch of self-promotional trolls, on both sides of the "issue".

Is setting up an entire website really a proportionate response to a dumb tweet? (Obviously, it is if you're stirring up controversy).

Seriously, guys... don't feed the trolls. You should know better than this.

<comment><USER51> What's wrong with self promotion? Who else is going to promote you for free?

<comment><USER50> _What's wrong with self promotion?_

It can make the signal-to-noise ratio unbearable. It cheapens the community, and makes it less interesting and useful.

 _Who else is going to promote you for free?_

People who genuinely like your product. It's even better than free, they're paying _you_ money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Related discussion from when this company launched almost a year ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2341454>

</comment><comment><USER53> I like how MRGirish admits that FreshDesk wouldn't exist if it wasn't for ZenDesk. Doesn't that prove the point?

So my question for FreshDesk is this ... How is your service more innovative than ZenDesk?

<comment><AUTHOR> smoyer - When I said that, I was referring to this [http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a- simple-c...](http://blog.freshdesk.com/the-freshdesk-story-how-a-simple- comment-on-h-0) HN Discussion is here - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2340732>

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Freshdesk is a cheap clone. I've tried it.

Once all the dust settles, it will be clear that Freshbooks IS a complete rip- off of Zendesk. 'RipoffOrNot.org'... errrm yes. You could think of worse products to rip off, so in that sense they've done well.

I'm not going to point out the obvious stolen elements. Anyone can see the app is not just inspired, but clearly deliberately copied. They've also spent a lot of time reading all the feature requests on the Zendesk forums. There is also an import feature from only one competing helpdesk product. Guess which one.

At the end of the day, Freshdesk is built exactly like any Zoho product (Girish worked for Zoho). And based on how it feels it might as well be a Zoho product: feature wise it ticks a heap of boxes and it's low cost. But to live with it has many limitations that won't stand up in actual real life, as in this case, the running of a help desk. It's seriously lacking workflow, custom widgets, the 100+ 3rd party integrations, and plenty more settings and customizations that make Zendesk what it is.

Zendesk has many decent alternatives but Freshdesk isn't one of them. If you're actually considering Freshdesk there are a huge amount of alternatives including freemium ones. Mojo Helpdesk comes to mind but really the web is full of them.

</comment><comment><USER55> Absolutely a rip-off, but Zendesk was stupid to comment on it.

</comment><comment><USER56> Very well executed response. If they can execute that well on this I can imagine that they are even better on product development and customer service.

I don't understand the comments against their response. I find shameful that a paid blogger tweet against a competitor with a subjective attack without disclosing the conflict of interest and that the guy paying the blogger chimes in insulting the competitor.

And Ghandi's quote at the end fit so well, I am still smiling :)

<comment><USER57> Gandhi, not Ghandi ;-) A very common mistake.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandhi>

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> It's kind of irrelevant, since both services are handily beaten by Assistly.

Well, Assistly before they got bought and couldn't keep their service up.

</comment><comment><USER21> Any startup worth its passion will use these opportunities to grab attention (you will be a dumb fool if you don't). So arguing whether Freshdesk is right vs. wrong in putting up this site doesn't really mean a lot. The only person who has lost credibility in this entire episode is Ben Kepes (ofcourse he started the fire).

</comment><comment><USER59> There's a political saying that should be heeded, "never attack downward."

You risk more by attacking downward and you have less to gain.

</comment><comment><USER60> I was with them up until the quote at the end. At best, it's disputed[1]. It's strange how one small oversight took the wind of the entire argument's sail (so to speak).

[1] [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi#Disp...](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi#Disputed)

</comment><comment><USER61> Zendesk CEO was stupid for paying them attention.

Freshdesk is SCUM. This kind of strategy, of generating controversy and creating "noise" around your company is rooted in the "there is no such thing as bad publicity" belief. It's immoral, and ungentlemanly.

And yes, it is very common with 3rd world companies. I've seen it before. Very often their products ARE rip-off of established market products as well (no idea if this is true in this case though). I suppose it comes from the social corruption and "everything goes" that surrounds life around there. Basically lack of civilization.

It would be very sad if the market rewards them instead of the companies focused on developing a good product, improving it and keeping an atmosphere of cooperation and civility in the industry.

<comment><USER62> So without knowing _if this is true in this case though_ you call them _SCUM_? Way to go...

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> You know you are doing something right when people hate you.. Seems like a odd thing for them to get into a pissing contest with these guys. First of all, you're acknowledging their existence and what can you do to prevent them from doing what they're doing?

</comment><comment><USER64> You must be awfully naive to think that there will be no competitors (with similar features) when you build a product which is relatively simple. If it wasn't listed in bold under the "threat" section of your business plan then something is off.

</comment><comment><USER65> This is a stroke of PR genius.

Agree or not, look at the attention they are getting.

The sales numbers will tell whether or not it was worth it - given that this is essentially free...I can't see how it won't be worth it.

As for Zendesk, anyway you take it, they have a crisis on their hands.

</comment><comment> avlesh-singh Blame it on me being a dyslexic kid. What is there to rip-off? I fail to understand what is rocket science in Zendesk that any other customer support tool _should not_ have? Zendesk's reactions are uncalled for.

</comment><comment><USER66> I have used both freshdesk and zendesk and have to say I prefer zendesk, freshdesk offers nothing substantial over zendesk.

Having said that I am grateful freshdesk is there to spur some innovation.

</comment><comment><USER67> Wow what a craptastic response from Zendesk. I think it is fine to have a bit of a spar over features in competing products but you have to keep it civil.

</comment><comment><USER68> I think everyone's still getting caught up in the Steve Jobs-ness of the past couple of months. CEO's are acting cocky, cause that's what Steve would have done. They're calling out people who they think have stolen their ideas, cause that's what Steve would have done.

What they're completely missing is Steve's greatest lesson: If you want to trample your competitors, just build a better product.

</comment><comment><USER69> I'm not arguing for either but trying to state a point. Putting a side-by-side feature list face-off showing you have more features than the incumbent does not in anyway, prove that you are not a rip off. In fact, it probably proves that you are and just trying to outdo the incumbent. There would be little to compare if both were playing in a different area.

</comment><comment><USER70> <http://fakeoffice.org/> \- This is how Zoho took advantage of the words of Ron Markezich to get some good publicity and recall against MS Office.

No wonder Girish who is an ex-Zoho did the same with this tweet.

Seems to be a nice way to market your product as a replacement to the current market leader.

</comment><comment><USER51> Man this is classy. Well done Freshdesk.

</comment><comment><USER71> I am Indian and I wish we would lighten up. Things aren't pure as milk here either. There are quite a few Indian companies which ask their employees to use Western names while creating online content such as on support forums, twitter accounts, etc.

</comment><comment><USER72> An obvious PR campaign that damages Freshbook's brand perception in my mind. I had no opinion of them before, but this sleazy tactic creates a negative image. I think it helps them to build awareness, but at what cost...

</comment><comment><USER73> A fitting response from Freshdesk.Zendesk has to pay for its badmouthing. They started it and Freshdesk is milking the controversy surrounding. May be FD scripted this long before, expecting this attack from zendesk.

</comment><comment><USER74> TL;DR: Nu uh!!!! ='''( [Quote comparing us to Gandhi]

I think their response was a bit too involved. They were insulted by some blowhard (CEO or not) and instead of rolling with the punches, they write an emotionally-charged, whiny blog post. Not to mention a name is the stupidest thing to fight over. If you want to see a real rip-off, check out github vs bitbucket.

Just focus on making your product. If you're doing well, some people may turn into little girls and get jealous and throw tantrums. Ignore them and focus on your goals. Engaging in back and forth like this shows nothing but weakness.

EDIT: Just noticed they actually bought a domain for this. Even worse. I don't see good things in the future for Freshdesk if this is how they respond to an affront. Also, why are they comparing themselves to Gandhi? You've got to be kidding me...?

</comment><comment><USER75> Both sides look silly to me. That's exactly the type of emotional reactions you get from young, technical entrepreneurs. EQ is just as important as IQ if you really want to be relevant in business.

</comment><comment><USER76> I'm less likely to give my money to either of these companies now.

I hate when companies publicly bash each other, even if it's in retaliation.

</comment><comment><USER77> There's nothing like bad publicity. I never heard of freshdesk before this.

Use the publicity That you've been given freshdesk but don't overdo it!

<comment><USER78> _"There's nothing like bad publicity."_ Carrier iQ might have something to say about that.

I agree though, this is great publicity for FreshDesk. May the best service win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> It's funny because they could be co-operating instead of competing and be making much more money by targeting different markets.

</comment><comment><USER80> Why is this here? How do I downvote the post or recommend it for the "stupid twitter he-said-she-said" category?

</comment><comment><USER81> I started the day off sympathizing with them because I thought Ben was not right in saying they ripped off the name. But now Freshdesk has proved that many of the commentators here are right. They are spammers and they even spam your Google Docs. See the screenshot here. <http://twitpic.com/7p0m3o>

<comment><USER81> Looks like Freshdesk is not the culprit but Google. It automatically adds docs I visit on the web to my list. I think I owe freshdesk an apology for thinking that they are spamming me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Without much research it sounds like Kepes and Svane got pwnd hard.

</comment><comment><USER82> Delicious drama. Go on.

</comment><comment><USER83> YSoapOperas.

</comment><comment><USER84> Yawn

</comment><comment><USER85> This is going to hurt Freshdesk more than help. Creating that site was an immature move. They're framing it like this is an issue that anyone besides the guys at Freshdesk cares about. And calling the site "ripoffornot"? Cheap move. I honestly thought I was about to visit a website dedicated to comparing products and deducing who is ripping of who. Then I saw it and I thought "damn, what a cheap, crybaby, attention whore move".

Freshdesk is playing dirty all while trying to convince us that it's the other guys that are playing dirty. I hope we all see through the BS. You don't win hearts and minds by being a bully and they're being bullies while trying to look like victims.

When I see a company do something like this, that's so cheap and obvious, I immediately wonder how desperate they are. They're also doing themselves a disservice by calling attention to the fact that they've been called a ripoff. People's first reactions will be to wonder why they feel the need to defend themselves so vehemently against that sort of thing. If they're not a ripoff then why do they have to work so hard to convince me otherwise? Am I saying they're a ripoff of Zendesk? No, but their actions have now put the idea in my head. Major backfire.

</comment><comment><USER29> What Freshdesk tries to do is redirecting your attention to the similarity of the names. If you really check out Freshdesk, you'll see that they copied Zendesk with no piece of difference!

</comment><comment><USER29> If the Hacker News people need a guide to notice how FreshDesk guys are motivated to draw the attention of people by making bullshit, I'm going to stop reading HN. Shame on you the readers voted this article up.

This is completely bullshit. If you take a look at the website of Freshdesk, you'll see that they stole the design of Zendesk. They probably did it to draw the attention of Zendesk and gather some angry tweets that can be used in such a way you see.

This is the last article I've seen in HN. I'll never enter this website again. Seriously, enough bullshit for a coder.

Time to leave HN alone with the embarrassing promoters and gossip girls.

<comment><USER86> > If you take a look at the website of Freshdesk, you'll see that they stole > the design of Zendesk.

Are there _that_ many different possible designs for a helpdesk system?

<comment><USER29> Did you checked out the designs of two website? Freshdesk even copy the buttons of Zendesk's homepage. What the fuck are you talking about?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Slightly off-topic: anyone got any ideas on how to innovate in this niche? I am always looking to add to my idea pile :) (See here: <http://ideashower.posterous.com>)</comment>


Ask HN: Audit or proof of NSA's ssh decryption? - <AUTHOR>

From the NYT, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/unlocking-private-communications.html<p>Is there any evidence or proof as to the attack vectors on ssh as listed in the article? <comment><USER2> Nope, the diagram is just hand-waving FUD. It's an enumeration of which "technologies" people rely upon in case they didn't already know. Gotta laugh if people think Skype isn't backdoored.

<comment><AUTHOR> It sure feels like a bit of hyperbole, but that said, it seems that ssh was mentioned in the documents.

Still curious what the vectors might be, or if higher level insecure bit depths might be to blame.

<comment><USER2> The fundamental motives are good... TLS/SSL is extremely complex (per 'cperciva)

But without hand audits and active research, it's peeing into the wind without knowing which way its blowing.</comment></comment></comment>


Chatbots have struggled to live up to the hype - <AUTHOR> http://marketingland.com/inside-chatbots-year-growing-pains-210182 <comment><USER2> Geez I guess no one bothered asking users if THEY like chatbots? IMO chatbots are the online equivalent of getting an automated response from a phone line. like calling CVS pharmacy "press one" for pharmacy, etc... You get the point of it, but it's basically a tool that only benefits businesses because the user experience is very poor. I wonder why no one tries to make this whole bot thing have more of a personality? It seems so bland. If they modeled it after ONE person instead of using "data" to sound neutral, they would be more successful.

<comment><USER3> Have you ever called support over phone and waited a long time for a simple question? Annoying, yes? A chatbot can often answer that simple question immediately. So yes, people do like chatbots as long they at least manage to get most of the simple questions right.

For example in our case, clients often have problems logging in. With our chatbot they can easily get a one time password sent to their phone. With a regular search/faq they would have never known about that, because they are often too frustrated with the UI experience for finding that information. With a natural language conversation, it is easier :-)

<comment><USER4> can't a button saying "can't login" on your website solve this problem?

<comment><USER5> Yes, but how many buttons would you need to add?

<comment><USER6> Two buttons: 1.- Forgot password? 2.- Send

<comment><USER7> Forgot password, send password, change password, change contact info, check warranty status, estimate next release date, download product manual, how to replace the battery, does the license allow commercial use?, which product is better for an apartment?, I'm looking for more information about your upcoming event in Tulsa - or was it Toledo?

<comment><USER8> Sounds like your site has poor navigability. I would be irate if all those things weren't available.

<comment><USER7> The problem is how best to expose those and 100,000 other potential buttons to the user who has better things to do than "navigate".

An obvious solution is a search box, but most sites also have terrible search functionality, so users have learned to ignore it. For the rare gem that has useful search, dressing it up as a chatbot could get people to actually try it. Too bad it looks like a lot of devs are just dressing up their shitty search as chatbots, so users are being trained to ignore them as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The developers of RPGs like Morrowind would be better suited at building chatbots than the companies currently trying, I think.

Much like the examples in this article, I haven't seen any bots that can present information in a way that is easier than a normal interface, or that even counts as "conversational."

Maybe I'm being an asshole when I say this, but it just doesn't feel like these chatbot companies have put in the sheer man-hours to work out conversations. They're feeding you the information they have, through a small number of prompts that they predetermine. 100% useless.

Where are the creators of Cleverbot? Shouldn't they be using their platform to capitalize on this? That was the most conversational bot I'd seen so far and it came out forever ago.

<comment><USER10> I think you're right that chatbots need to be way more conversational, but I don't think having every company re-implement Cleverbot would be beneficial. Certainly Siri does this, but that gets old after awhile, and it's annoying when siri thinks you're looking for a joke or something clever when you just want information. I think the parallel to real life is when you call customer support, or order food at Wendy's. The conversation is usually extremely railroaded towards one specific subject (though within that domain, you can dive deep, like "are the pickles super sour or are they more like fresh pickles" that chatbots can't do yet)

<comment><USER9> I definitely agree with you on this. I think somewhere in the middle-ground is perfect, obviously.

I think I should be able to ask your chatbot how their day is going, but I don't think I should be able to shitpost with it for 3 hours.

The reason I bring up Chatbot is because they seemed to at least have the conversational part figured out.

Also, Siri is really not such a part of this conversation because it is honestly the only chatbot that I can think of that accomplishes a portion of what we're talking about here.

<comment><USER11> Siri can't even tell jokes, while Cortana is capable of telling jokes, singing, and much more.

These little things - even though programmed by some other person - can spice things up and make the bot look even more natural.

Go home Siri.

<comment><USER12> The other day, (French) Siri replied to "What are you doing this evening?" with "I'm playing hide-and-seek with Markov models".

<comment><USER13> When I set a short timer the answer sometimes is something like:

"Make sure you don't overcook that egg" or

"The suspense is killing me".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The examples given are just embarrassing. What weather service doesn't understand zip codes, or, y'know, the name of an entire US state?

Last year, I said:

 _" Chatbots are a fancy name for when your API is accessible through some well-known IM service. They come with all of the monetization issues of APIs, but they're surfaced in an environment where you have no pre-existing relationship with the client, and you can't even charge them for access. This essentially limits the business model to where you give away the chatbot and make money some other way; or you recognize you have no business model and do it anyway."_ [1]

The discoverability factor is amusing: apparently everyone complains about discoverability, just like they did with Apps and websites. First-comer Kik isn't big enough for advertisers, meanwhile, Facebook added bots just to have them and isn't doing anything to promote them because it realized it has all the users, and botmakers will give them business regardless.

The discoverability question always boils down to "how will people find my stuff, in favor of my competitor's stuff?", which just proves that the chatboot "boom" is _just_ like the app boom and the website boom before it [2]: a gold rush to make it big early, then as the dust settles, the roster of victors will have emerged and they'll maintain those rankings for years. Others can still establish niches for themselves, but they are deluded if they think runaway success is a realistic goal.

All this means, as the article points out, that most of today's chatbots are just phone trees in text form -- which still has value, but is a lot less enticing as a get-quick-quick scheme.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309116#13309844](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13309116#13309844)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12863565#12867493)

<comment><USER15> And as with all gold rushes, it is the people selling the pickaxes who are really making money off of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a owner of a bot building platform ([https://www.botamp.com](https://www.botamp.com)), it's very disappointing to read articles like this. All the hype around chatbots, the high expectations that will obviously never be met (at least not with current technology) are hurting adoption of these very useful tools.

Actually, for this very reason we don't even have the word "chatbot" on our homepage.

When people say things like "stay in contact with everyone who clicked on the ad to open a conversation with the bot", "Discovery is the biggest challenge", it shows that they just don't get it.

No customer, ever, will open their Messenger just to hold a conversation with your chatbot. Customers don't actually want to "discover" your bot so that they can chat with it. Why would they want that? They have more important things to do with their lives. :)

What customers want when they write to you on Messenger is finding information or performing a transaction. When you understand that, you can quickly see the benefit.

E.g. add a bot that will instantly reply to frequently asked questions to decrease the load of your customer support team. And when the bot doesn't understand requests, don't make it say "sorry I don't understand", just leave the question and a human will reply later (and maybe send a message with expected timeframe for human response).

When you have a chatbot which can replies to more than 30% of customer queries (for some of our users, we've seen bots reply to more than 90% of questions), it'll save plenty of money and time for your business.

About discoverability, well, how did your customers find your Facebook page in the past? Why do we need a special way to "discover" now? Maybe for "game and entertainment chatbots" a bot store would work, but I just don't see how it would work for serious businesses.

How can a business leverage bots right now?

      - quick data collection
      - instant answers to frequently asked questions
      - surveys and polls over chat
      - lead nurturing via Messenger (engagement rates > 70% compared to low read rate of email)

<comment><USER17> > E.g. add a bot that will instantly reply to frequently asked questions to > decrease the load of your customer support team. And when the bot doesn't > understand requests, don't make it say "sorry I don't understand", just > leave the question and a human will reply later (and maybe send a message > with expected timeframe for human response).

Why not just present your users with your FAQ and a search box prior to them chatting with an agent? If most customers write in to support on questions that they would've found answers to via an FAQ, wouldn't that work? You don't need a bot for that, and it's just more load on a customer to try and understand the interface to the bot.

I think bots are going to be big in customer support or in conversations between a customer and a business, but I feel like a lot of bots are being built to try and replace the human connection between customer and the business, which I think is the wrong approach.

<comment><USER16> > Why not just present your users with your FAQ and a search box prior to them > chatting with an agent?

Because e.g. the user asked the question on Facebook Messenger. And you don't want to send them to your website when you can reply instantly, right there.

> You don't need a bot for that, and it's just more load on a customer to try > and understand the interface to the bot.

I'm actually advocating for bots with no interface, no IRC-like commands. The customer sends the question via chat. If the bot understands it replies instantly, if not a support person replies. Simple. No "type X for whatever" or "sorry I didn't understand your request".

> I feel like a lot of bots are being built to try and replace the human > connection between customer and the business, which I think is the wrong > approach.

We're definitely on the same page. :)

<comment><USER18> > Because e.g. the user asked the question on Facebook Messenger. And you > don't want to send them to your website when you can reply instantly, right > there.

You're defending the use of a bot for a scenario that only occurs because the bot exists.

<comment><USER16> No, please read the full thread. The scenario is the following:

There are currently hundreds of thousands of Facebook pages which receive dozens of customer support questions every day via Messenger.

My point is that a bot can be used reply instantly to frequently asked questions and leave more sophisticated questions to humans. I'm not defending any fancy use of bots. Just simple use cases like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Making a chatbot is really hard, because you need a lot of data and it needs to be of good quality. You cannot use a random chat message log and train your model, it will usually have way too much noise. Instead I highly recommend that you build it from scratch. Then you will start getting great results. You also have to use a proper spell checking algorithm and understand the basics of how a full text search engine actually works and know the purpose of using stop words and synonyms.

I would love to present our virtual assistant "James" to the rest of the world, but we have only recently started to build english training data. Currently it only understands english with the use of synonyms, so it isn't working as well as it should.

If you're interested in trying it out you can play with it on the webpage of one of the largest banks in Norway [http://srbank.no](http://srbank.no), the chat icon is at the bottom right. You can ask questions in English, but it will unfortunately only answer in Norwegian at this time, so you have to use google translate too see if it answered correctly. "James" do support language detection though, but we have just recently starting to add the english answers. In a few weeks and James will answer in English :-)

Currently James can predict over 1500 intents related to banking and insurance. Here are some of the more complex questions James can handle:

Want to open a savings account for my daughter

Can I adjust the limit on my sons bank card

What can you tell me about my pension

Do you have a pension calculator?

I was out drinking last night and lost my credit card

If anyone says that chatbots aren't working and will never work, I can say this with real data to back me up, it works very well! The feedback we have gotten the last few months has been amazing! And I'm 100% sure that chatbots will become a big industry the next years. Complex UI's will finally be good riddance.

Feel free to ask me anything if you have any questions.

<comment><USER19> I tried the chatbot - I must admit I'm surprised how well it worked actually! Got me interested, I hope you don't mind a few questions:

When you write 'built i from scratch' what do you mean? That you handcrafted all the data?

How long did it take to develop this bot, and what technologies did you use?

<comment><USER3> Yes, all the data we use to train our model on, is handcrafted by our AI trainers. What they do is figure out all the different questions that are most common to ask for each intent we want to predict. We have built a tool that helps them creating all these sentences, often we use templates with keywords.

It is still under development, we started at the end of last summer. We use Torch and Python-NLTK.

<comment><USER20> Why have you chosen torch instead of staying completely in python? I assume that you use nltk for tagging, entity regoncition, ... and torch for your classifier.

What kind of model is possible in LUA-torch that could not be done in python with caffe/tensorflow?

<comment><USER3> Because it is a lot easier to tune and debug your model in Torch without diving into C/C++. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13428098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13428098)

We may switch to pyTorch though, but Lua works rather well for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I work for GYANT[0], and we're building a chatbot for doing medical triage, patient follow-up, and answering health questions. We're young (launching this Thursday actually), but it's already been pretty successful in a number of countries (like Brazil) with a few hundred thousand users with minimal marketing. My girlfriend was able to use it without issues to go from "my throat hurts" to visiting a doctor in 24 hours because she likely has tonsillitis. The interest and response from the medical, the pharmaceutical, and the insurance communities have been very positive and they're approaching us left and right to bring this out to more users.

Chatbots were probably overhyped and oversold to people. Not every platform needs to explode overnight and produce SV unicorns. I think there is immense value in chatbots as a platform, but expectations should be tempered. I've seen little to no overt marketing to regular users that they can ask a bot rather than looking for an app or website. Most users don't really want to download and learn another app and create another account for every little thing. Additionally, many budget phones in emerging markets have limited data, limited storage space, and minimal specs for downloading and running apps for every little thing.

That said, this article is pretty terrible. It almost seems like they chose the worst possible examples to fit a given narrative.

0: [http://gyant.com/english/](http://gyant.com/english/)

<comment><USER22> How has your company's interaction with regulators been so far? From your description and the animation on the top page of the Gyant website, it looks like the chatbot is claiming to diagnose medical conditions, which in most cases would put it under FDA oversight.

<comment><USER21> We honestly haven't faced much scrutiny from regulators yet (although I expect that may change once we become more popular). We fall pretty squarely into the existing rules on symptom checkers which have become pretty prolific on the web.

<comment><USER23> Does that mean you have to write after each message your bot sends a disclaimer such as "This is not medical advise, go see a doctor"?

Those symptom checkers have them most of the time - I just can't see it fit within a bot as well.

<comment><USER21> Not really. We have a legal agreement, and then the users state their chief complaint. We record their symptoms as we ask them questions and produce a list of possible conditions along with their disposition (e.g., Go see a doctor in 24 hours, visit an emergency room, home care, etc.) based partially on the Schmitt-Thompson protocol. Schmitt-Thompson is the current battle- tested standard for medical triage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I worked for a year at a super hyped chat-bot company that raised a lot of money pre-revenue, pre-customers, etc. The difference between the press / marketing and the actual product built was incredible. Last I heard they are ditching everything they already built and starting over.

<comment><USER25> aka it was a bullshit factory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> They were promoted to go with the current AI hype, but none of the bots deployed actually use any AI because the technology isn't there yet

<comment><USER27> When the technology _is_ there, I think it will be a big deal. Who knows how long that will take, though, mastering conversational language is getting into AGI territory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The power of chat bots is in marketing. They compete with email marketing as a more responsive medium. This is because platforms like Messenger allow much greater interaction from the user than email. Most think of chat bots as a textual experience, but you can actually build entire UIs with Messenger that include images and buttons. In a way, it can be thought of as less frictional minimalistic website via chat. Eventually you will be able to buy things directly in chat, closing the loop entirely.

<comment><USER2> Good point there is greater opportunity if bots were able to use visuals as opposed to just words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Chatbots are really just a way to push and pull messages on messaging channels, nothing more, nothing less. How much automation you put behind it is really up to you. And yes, many early examples forgot about their users. Yes, it is cool to write a bot that can do something cool for a fraction of use cases, but as always, solving a real problem trumps being cool.

Now chatbots can be used as a content distribution channel (see publishers' bots), app replacement (Swell is a great example, and they are in the next YC batch, congrats to them), but I'd like to point out how makers miss the point on arguably the largest use case for messaging in the business world today, customer service. Yes, most bots that address this domain can't live up to the expectation either. And really, just think Job to be Done, the customer wants a quick, accurate and preferably personal reply to their question or issue, it is that simple.

So what we (Bicycle AI) did to make our clients better at this Job is we are fusing human and AI for a faster, affordable and scalable solution for SMEs. I hear you say, wait, isn't this like Digital Genius, well, nope, we integrate with Intercom for example and we have a team of AI supervisors who approve the answers suggested by our AI.

This means our clients can provide blazing fast customer service for their customers 24/7 and according to their volumes. Simple as that. We use past conversation history and product docs to generate our suggested answers. We can go live pretty fast and can take care of around 60-70% of incoming conversations, escalating the complex cases after engagement.

Aaand, we are in alfa stage with emails.

So when it comes to harnessing automation in customer service, we believe that customers should not be the ones dealing with the rough edges.

</comment><comment><USER30> Amazing that people pouring money into the latest buzzword have once again come up empty handed.

</comment><comment><USER31> One idea I've been mentioning whenever this sort of thing comes up are those 20-question bots. I remember several years ago being blown away by its ability to guess some extremely specific and random things. I always thought it would be an interesting interface for a "find" function in an OS. I think it might work as front-line support as well.

</comment><comment><USER32> Spoiler: People don't want to talk to chat bots to interact with a company. Same reason they get frustrated at IVRs.

<comment><USER33> Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows a computer to interact with humans through the use of voice and DTMF tones input via keypad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's just a shitty interface to the same software people already use. What am I missing?

</comment><comment><USER35> The way I see it, chatbots should be there to save companies money on first line of support by reducing number of personnel to customer interactions.. Like answering the most frequent questions and only if bot cannot answer those questions then it will redirect to real human. Not as replacement for the UI as they're used today. Also bots should be part of your website/app and not be integrated into third party service like fcb messenger. And companies should constantly check and improve the bot to better respond to FAQs (so developing bot is actually never ending process).

<comment><USER36> Just like phone menus were meant to. Except they have become mostly universally loathed.

I can just imagine how much more annoying a "cute" pseudo-AI will be when I just want to get through to a human being.

<comment><USER35> let's say bot should be 90% confident that is still giving value to the customer. if not redirect to human.

<comment><USER37> If you really believe you've created a bot that your users want to use then put it to the test.

Advertise that they can get connected to a human by typing 'human' and see how popular it is. I would be impressed if a bot could get to 10%.

I don't think you need a confidence metric, the humans using the bot will be happy to signal to you that they're not receiving value.

<comment><USER35> I can only agree with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Chatbots are sociable command lines.

In some ways they are great because they make command line more popular in some ways the are completely useless as they turn something which should most likely be automated into a manual process.

<comment><USER39> Yeah, as a developer that spends most of my day at the computer, the exciting thing about "bots" is the potential coelecensce of disparate UI paradigms

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Whenever I get on one of those call center lines, I always try the command "Agent", instead of following their rabbithole of decision tree.

These "bot" cult members say this time it's different because now we have deep learning and it's different from the shitty comcast/verizon call center lines where you have to walk down the decision tree.

But the problem is 99% of these people have no idea what they are talking about. They probably saw the Lee Sedol match and thought AI has made some huge breakthrough almost like quantum computing. It hasn't. The accuracy has gotten better and that surely enables a lot of things, but this has nothing to do with what these idiots are trying to build.

If you look at the type of people considered "experts" in the chatbot scene, you'll immediately understand how ridiculous this is. Most of them are non technical people who don't even know how to write a simple program.

It's hilarious watching these "chatbot experts" talking about how the "old approach" to AI was all about stupid decision tree whereas "NOW with deep learning you can actually let the machine learn!" haha welcome to "machine learning".

</comment><comment><USER41> I feel disappointed when I read articles like this. It seems the whole production side of the market doesn't get yet what it's supposed to do. But it's so obvious.

If you chat with a bot you have near-human expectations. Yes it should be flexible and not just one-purpose. That's the reason for chatbots instead of a button. And if you can't provide that you need to use bots to make human labour cheaper, e.g. telephone bots who make support hotlines cheaper by getting some of the details out of the way before sending you to a human. Success will come to companies who can work in this gray area where bots and humans interact to provide a service together. I think Amazon did the same, when they started their suggestion engine, where actually humans would do the sorting at first, then supported by machine learning and finally they got replaced by pure software.

<comment><USER42> The worst are the phone trees that have you type in all your info and then when you finally get to a human you have to repeat it all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I feel the AI hype is similar to the cleantech hype in the 2000's

everyone jumped on bandwagon for FOMO (fear-of-missing-out)

</comment><comment><USER44> I like chatbots a lot, very useful for translating text quickly or reminding someone else in the group to do something.

The small games are pretty fun too, perfect for killing time when bored.

There are also things which would otherwise have to have been a separate app. I don't want to download another app.

<comment><USER45> Chatbots are useful for doing stuff with simple commands.

Chatbots with AI where they try to have a "conversation" is often just a lot of hurdles to do something that should be trivial.

<comment><USER46> it reminds me of mIRC bots of the late 90s that would +o you in a channel upon joining, kick people who -o or kicked you, or did other simple reactionary things.

<comment><USER47> IRC bots still exist and are _relatively_ easy to write. Very useful things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> They failed because it's not new nor is there a direct replacement market available. Just like video calls, it's not that it's not there, it's just not as 'wanted' as the creators of such tools think it is.

</comment><comment><USER49> And why is this News. They don't have a product to sell other than a toy demo. No chatbot company can offer an easy to understand, measurable interface for customers to customize towards their own usage case, with expected outcome. You can tell me in bareface that your product is magic, and when it doesn't work, it is due to the bad weather. Though, I think DL based NLP technique is the future, however, chatbot is not the right conveyor for that vision, much more like a lot of money hungry dudes riding the hype to monetize their demo technology.

</comment><comment><USER50> Where Chatbots are useful? Best use cases?

<comment><USER51> Bringing forms to the masses. My parents will not for the life of them fill out an excel sheet or an online form for _anything_ , but slap a chatbot in front of it that asks 1 question at a time and suddenly they're game.

<comment><USER52> I identified the pain of simple data collection from customers years ago. I'd be very curious to see if chat bots actually helps, as every other attempt I've seen has been pretty rough.

<comment><USER53> I would say yes. There was an article about a chat bot used to aid immigration: [https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/28/immigration-chat-bot- can...](https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/28/immigration-chat-bot-can-help-you- with-the-h1-b-visa/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Maybe it's because I am an introvert, but I have a simple question for estimating the success of any development:

"Does this product reduce the number of social interactions I have to have? Does it let me do something without interacting with another individual?"

Chatbots, because developers keep trying to make them more "human", fail the second part of the question. They "feel" like talking to a person at times, which is something I don't want. I'll just tap a few buttons instead.

</comment><comment><USER55> A chatbot, voice or text, is a response generator, where responses are prompts, requested information, or state change (e.g., place order, cancel service). It's no more interactive than other tools, and the more divorced the interface from text, the more levels of complexity are thrown at it.

Talking at a CLI interface is no more a "conversation" than typing at one. Despite the fact that interactive computer systems were called "conversational". (Don't believe me? There are books on the subject, from 1968: [https://www.worldcat.org/title/conversational- computers/oclc...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/conversational- computers/oclc/6755846) [https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3Aconversational+comput...](https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3Aconversational+computing&fq=yr%3A1900..1980+%3E&qt=advanced&dblist=638))

I've been thinking about world models and communication a great deal. In this context, talking (or typing) with a chatbot is a great deal like arguing with an idiot. If the chatbot's world model doesn't include the actions or questions you're trying to address, there's simply no way to get it to understand. Quite literally, _its world doesn 't include such things._ Though unlike the proverbial wrestling with a pig, in this case, you're the one far more likely to be annoyed.

Which gets to another major problem: such systems are constructed, and serve, the interests of their creators and clients: the companies which create them, frequently _not_ the same as those who deploy them, the clients.

Users' interests are at the bottom of the priority stack.

Some weeks ago I had the pleasure of calling the local (and pathetic) newspaper company after our Sunday paper failed to arrive. I was greated, on three successive phone calls, to a several-minutes-long pitch for services I had absolutely no interest in, _when trying to address a problem created by the company in the first place_. To put it mildly, I was not pleased.

And my standing recommendation to cancel the subscription (substituting it with a much superior national paper) seems to be bearing out.

Chatbots which treat interactions as captive sales opportunities will, I suspect, not greatly enhance customer affinity to brands deploying such strategies.

</comment><comment><USER56> Anyone know how Visabot has fared? [https://visabot.co/](https://visabot.co/)

</comment><comment><USER57> I installed some obscure instant messenger app to try the latest and greatest Microsoft chatbot a couple weeks ago.

Walked away very disappointed. The chatbot would give incoherent unfitting answers every three sentences or so. It was also unable to keep in mind what had already been written.

</comment><comment><USER58> Where did all the hype over shitty chat bots come from? It seemed to fill up HN and every tech publication overnight. Now even Skype, an application for chatting with real people, has a bots tab. It was clear from the get go it was just another way to push ads.

</comment><comment><USER59> Unless chatbots pass the Turing Test they'll be perceived as a poor UX solution vs human interaction. I see them useful in chatops tho. We techies like automation, even if it's dumb, but non technical users expect much more...

</comment><comment><USER60> Really, what we actually need are fully sentient artificial intelligences.

At that point we get into some very interesting social questions, though.

</comment><comment><USER61> Does anyone else remember "Chatbots" on BBSes (of long ago)? Are these modern versions any better?

</comment><comment><USER62> Misunderestimating the long tail

<comment><USER63> What is misunderestimating?

<comment><USER62> reference to Arrested Development... Not a real word. But kinda works anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> brings back memories of natachata. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natachata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natachata)

Rumour has it there was this one guy who wanted to marry her ;)

</comment><comment><USER65> Just don't tell congress about it.

</comment><comment><USER66> It's a bit disorienting to see this, and on the same day threads elsewhere in HN, with the HN collective wisdom that automation and AI is soon to bring an end to most kinds of human work

<comment><USER67> I don't think that's the consensus at all. I don't think there is a consensus, honestly. The only people who would say such a thing are the same overenthusiastic (bless them, but still) CS undergrads and/or aspiring social media climbers who also post about how self-driving cars are already a solved problem that will be universal by 2020, or that we'll reach the singularity by 2035, or that Linux will inevitably devour Windows on consumer desktop PCs by 2005, or that by the 1960s every large first-world city will have a single skyscraper-sized computer with resources shared by all residents via teletypes in every home.

Futurism is an extremely useful exercise as long as it's treated as a thought experiment based on current trends rather than actual prognostication.

The median HN post is probably wiser or better informed than the median post to Slashdot or /r/programming or whatever, but at the end of the day it's still an Internet forum for anonymous tech enthusiasts, with all of the potential for bias and tunnel vision that that implies. You still have to wade through mountains of garbage to find gems of insight, there's just sometimes a little less garbage and a little more insight here than elsewhere. I don't say that to cast shade on HN, rather I think accomplishing something like "a little less garbage than proggit" is a freaking miracle and that's why I read HN every day.</comment></comment>


How I launched a business in 32 hours - <AUTHOR> http://skozinsky.wordpress.com/ <comment><USER2> Congrats on taking the dive! Business is pretty much "selling something". A lot of these methods of starting businesses like the Lean Movement and others is just another fancy word for market research.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome! You took action and hopefully it pays off. I'll share with my friends for sure.</comment>


Ask HN: Why people pay SEO tools? - <AUTHOR> I've been in a project that they need to improve the website and keep coming with the SEO importance.
Beyond I believe advertising is broken right now, I am a developer that feels confident with tools like Lighthouse and passing the basic checks will do the trick.
But it seems there is more behind. One of the major existential doubts I have is: Why are so many companies doing paid backlink checks and stealing money to the customers?
Do exist an Open Source initiative to give some clarity to this problem and reduce unnecessary costs and break the spending flywheel for normal users/companies? <comment><USER2> Backlinks are one of the stronger ways to improve SEO, and there's a million things you can talk about but I've been out of the website space for about a year but a good resource to go to is Google pagespeed insights.

Beyond backlinks, you would do good to implement fast load times and cache the resources that you can. Once you max out technically, focus on being honest and get honest people talking about your product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree completely with this. This is what I'm trying to understand, and perhaps put some extra effort on creating something that can debunk the fallacy of SEO.

As a developer I feel we have reached a point where this shouldn't be considered a service anymore.

But the "why" remains

<comment><USER2> Well, part of the reason why I feel there are so many companies is because no one can _prove_ what's actually going on. So they spend a few months doing research and selling their knowledge as a service to clients - it would be the same thing you would do if you pursue this path. I don't see an issue with it, people sell what they know to others in all professions (now that I think about it more).</comment></comment></comment>


TSMC's Photoresist Material Incident: $550M Loss - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/13975/tsmcs-fab-14b-photoresist-material-incident-550-million-in-lost-revenue <comment><USER2> If you haven't watched it, there was a fantastic 2009 talk (given during HOPE09) on what goes into fabrication called "Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips" [1]. Keeping in mind things have advanced even farther over the subsequent decade, even at that point it was mind blowing what goes into the hardware at the core of what we all do. The level of purity and consistency needed for a lot of basic inputs is measured in atoms, really digging into the details it's amazing some of this works at all let alone with high yields. Helps give some context of how an incident like this can happen and how easily the cost could rapidly rise to eye watering levels.

I think Andor has posted on HN since too with some other high level talk, though not further updates per se since unsurprisingly details around fabrications are very heavily guarded trade secrets. I still rewatch it every year or two, it remains a real source of wonder to me what we've pulled off there.

\----

1: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4)

<comment><USER3> Definitely one of my favorite talks. I believe this is a higher quality version of the same talk a few years later: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL-I3-C-KBk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL-I3-C-KBk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Of the $550 million, I wonder how much of it is in materials cost and how much of it is in penalties paid to renegotiate delivery dates for the affected customers.

<comment><USER5> it's $550 million lost revenue in 1Q, which is recognised in 2Q instead. The loss for the whole year is $66M

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a little surprised this ended up being resist. Photolithography usually involves quite a lot of looking at SEM imagery of test patterns. (These usually go in the scribe lines.) The problem must have been pretty subtle for it not to get flagged. Maybe (since they mention unexpected polymerization) it left an unexpected residue after cleans? Post-photo clean usually starts with ashing in an oxygen plasma, so it would have to be some pretty serious gunk to survive that and the subsequent wet clean.

</comment><comment><USER7> What is the size of the market for framed almost-complete wafers? Say you can sell a framed wafer for $50, of which $10 is materials and $10 is labor, you still make $30 x ~20,000 or ~$600,000 for the whole batch, minus taxes.

</comment><comment><USER8> Imagine a state actor with the resources and motivation to engage in serious sabotage (a-la stuxnet). These processes are so sensitive and complex, I bet they could come up with a really devious way to introduce a contaminant that isn't detected until it's too late -- maybe even when the parts start failing after delivery. Pretty wild to think about having that kind of target on your back and what you'd have to do to even try to defend against it.

<comment><USER9> Supply chains are so interconnected it would be impossible to limit the damage to your intended targets.

Probably similar to GPS "selective availability": turns out it would hurt the US Military more than anything else these days so the military has essentially abandoned the idea.

<comment><USER10> Is there a tl;dr on why and how it would hurt the US Mil the most?

<comment><USER11> Shortages of the special military GPS receivers (which support decrypting the encrypted signal) resulted in the US military having to use ordinary civilian GPS receivers instead in many cases. So, limiting the accuracy of the civilian signal was having a negative impact on the US military's own operations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Dow Chem must be owing TSMC some good explanation...</comment>


The Yet Another Framework (Yaf), PHP extension for developing web applications - <AUTHOR> http://php.net/yaf

<comment><USER2> Another framework full of thinly veiled global variables:

<http://uk.php.net/manual/en/class.yaf-registry.php>

</comment><comment><USER3> Since this is a PECL extension, and therefore compiled in C, I would love to see some performance information.

<comment><USER4> <http://yaf.laruence.com/manual/yaf.bench.html>

it looks like it's about 10% slower than pure PHP, orders of magnitude faster than most frameworks

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, apart from being written as an extension (and maybe a little bit faster that way), what's the point of Yaf?

<comment><USER6> What the point of your existence? :) To make world (in this particular case) of PHP different and give users ability to choose. Being an extension is pretty good point of existence IMHO

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Yaf require PHP version greater than 5.2.1, and could not run with early > version of PHP.

No thanks. Closure? Namespace?

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure what you're getting at. Is there reason to believe that this will not work with PHP >= 5.3?

<comment><USER9> It will be is not structured using Namespaces, which can be annoying if you are using them on a day to day basis and want to integrate something like Yaf that doesn't use them.

<comment><USER10> You could always write your own namespaced shim classes if it matters that much to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [me]# pecl remote-info yaf Package details: </comment><comment></comment><comment>==== Latest 2.1.3 Installed - no - Package yaf License PHP Category System Summary PHP Framework in PHP extension Description Yaf is a PHP framework similar to zend framework, which is written in c and built as PHP extension.

                Windows binaries can be found at <a
                href="http://code.google.com/p/yafphp/downloads/list">http://code.google.com/p/yafphp/downloads/list</a>

[me]# pecl install yaf pecl/yaf requires PHP (version >= 5.1.0, version <= 5.3.6), installed version is 5.3.8 No valid packages found

So... 2.1.3 doesn't know how to work with 5.3.8. I'm not upgrading to 5.4.0 to test this right now. Any hacks to get around this?

</comment><comment><USER3> Is the source for this anywhere like GitHub where it can be looked over?

EDIT: Appears to be on Google Code: <http://code.google.com/p/yafphp/source/browse/>

<comment><USER12> <http://pecl.php.net/package/yaf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is interesting that there are no models.

This seems to be a glorified front controller integrated with a templating engine.

It is really cool that they did this as a PECL extension. I had a PHP framework many years ago that we considered converting to a PECL extension (<http://sourceforge.net/projects/cep/>).

<comment><USER14> Generally, models can be left up to the developer to create based on business logic. Take for example, Zend Framework. It provides an active record like pattern in its Zend_Db_Table but expects the individual application to create the models that use (not inherit) Zend_Db_Table.

<comment><USER13> Seems like a missed opportunity to me. Lots can be done with "magic methods" for models. Not sure how hard that is in a PECL extension.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It kind of reminds me of ASP.NET C# MVC, just glancing at the example page: <http://au.php.net/manual/en/yaf.examples.php>

Not being particularly proficient in PHP, is the 'Class myClass extends baseClass' syntax normal? I've never seen it before.

<comment><USER16> Yes, it's normal.

[http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.inheritance.php#l...](http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.inheritance.php#language.oop5.inheritance.examples.ex1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So use with blitz template engine as is extension

<http://alexeyrybak.com/blitz/blitz_en.html>

You had blazing speed and performance

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm loving the documentation: [http://us3.php.net/manual/en/yaf- loader.clearlocalnamespace....](http://us3.php.net/manual/en/yaf- loader.clearlocalnamespace.php)

<comment><USER19> The OOP parts in the PHP manual haven't been given anywhere near enough care and attention than the old bits. Unless it's core functionality, good luck finding decent doc for the extensions listed.

        Class:nameOfFunction - *the Name of Function purpose*

Some of the SPL classes are equally amusing, especially when you get as far as `RecursiveIteratorIterator` and, to recursively scan a directory (OOP stylee):

        $iterator = new RecursiveIteratorIterator(new RecursiveDirectoryIterator('/path/to/directory'), RecursiveIteratorIterator::SKIP_DOTS);

Now I make use of that and, syntax aside, it's pretty handy for the stuff you get back from it, but for the best part some of these PHP extensions are a waste of time. There's bugger all documentation and, quite often, they're missing basic methods that you can already do procedurally.

Why would anyone want to spend time figuring out this framework extension, or the OOP PHP stuff like SPL and Imagick, with no documentation, when there are plenty well established ones out there that have mountains of it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> One of the good things is it is not using the PHP namespace, e.g. use Zend\Controller\Action\HelperBroker;

<comment><USER21> You've never tried to integrate two PHP projects, eh? As in: Whoops, you guys also have a class named "user"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> When did they launch this?

<comment><USER12> Seems it was published in June: <http://pecl.php.net/package/yaf>

Keep in mind it's a PECL extension, so it's not bundled with PHP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anyone else see that this looks almost identical to Zend Framework?

<comment><USER24> Yup. We use Zend at work and I did a double-take at the example code. "Wait, my code looks exactly like this..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why?

<comment><USER26> Why not?

<comment><USER25> :) I mean why, except for "Why not?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'll stick to CI, thanks.

This smells like another Zend product, and Zend framework was just a pain, in my experience.</comment>