Ask HN: Fastest way to get recurring revenue with hosting? - <AUTHOR> I like startups and creating webapplications. But my main income (after working hours) is still selling websites / hosting or invoicing packages (=> customization of the invoice layout, configuring webapps, ...), which is like 85% of my income). The rest is mostly from hosting (webapps / websites)
I'm wondering, what do you sell to people (webapps, websites, cms), which contains hosting and is fairly easy to create a recurring revenue with?
And do you upsell? (eg. selling a website + email marketing application + affliate gmail for biz) <comment><AUTHOR> I'll give you example of how i upsell a website

When it is a new company (is going to launch in 1 month for example), i propose them to set a launch page (basic one, created in max. 15 minutes) for 100 €, to collect emailaddresses.

The launch page includes a text email to all of your visitors when they subscribe and say that this proposal doesn't include HTML (for images), because that is custom work and more difficult.

When the moment arrives, i ask them for the text they want me to send to their visitors.

In 70% of the cases, they ask to include a picture of the team.. I explain them that this was not part of the deal, but that i can change the message to a HTML email for 80€ (if provided the assets first).

So, selling a website earned me another 180 €, a happy customer (the launch page is added publicity)

How do you upsell?

<comment><USER2> You're probably making less money than you think you are because you're ignoring most of the time costs in acquisition and client relationship maintenance. For example, the time taken for a 100 euro launch page is not 'max. 15 minutes' \- it's 15 minutes development time + whatever time it takes you to persuade the client that it's necessary, time to write the necessary copy, time to source artwork, time to agree it with the client, time to put it online, time to update the client on it's performance, time to export the list of gathered email addresses, and so on.

In total I could imagine that 100 euros covers up to about 10 hours work if the client wants to change a few things along the way. I don't imagine your time is only worth 10 euros an hour.

This is a fundamental problem with scaling a consulting business - it might feel like you've earned a lot of money for a tiny amount of work, but the reality is that all the time you spent getting and managing that work means it's not very valuable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the launch page part is actually quite easy to sell. I propose it if the client is a new business.

It takes about 10 minutes to persuade (in experience), i choose the layout and ask for a picture and a small title + subtext. There isn't a lot to change on the launch page (the layout is almost solely the picture in full)

The changes by the client are usually for the website, but that's a different package. There i create max. 3 first page designs, then i create the whole website. (included according our talk). Then for reasonable changes, i check wether it's part of the package or is it stuff that we didn't talk about that requires >20 minutes of work (eg. new features)... I'm quite clear on that upfront.

The launch page is just an extra income that takes max 40 minutes (talk + create + publish + text email to subscribers).

Then again, i'm also waiting to raise prices untill i get (more) busy with projects to create.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Web agency founder with a decade of experience in selling websites here. I wrote a book on the subject of recurring revenue for web agencies and web professionals, all based on our experience.

Here's what worked for us:

\- after selling a website, we sold the mandatory support and maintenance contract. We considered this service the foundation, or level one of our recurring revenue stream. This is fairly easy to sell and renew. The recurring revenue we got from this was enough to keep us afloat.

\- after selling support and maintenance, we upsold the client to "levele two": services which grow our client's online business. The types of services we offered in this plan: everything that needs to be done to reach client's business goals, and that we could deliver well. This was harder to sell (because the type of client needs to be just right for this kind of service), but the amount of money coming in every month is substantial. This is what makes the agency grow in long term.

Here's what didn't work for us:

\- web hosting. We've been offering this for more than a decade and in the end, all things considered, it is just not worth it. A combination of support + maintenance + growth-oriented services is a much better bang for the buck. We sold most of our servers and hosting accounts to a specialized hosting company and focused on what we did best.

For the exact details about building, pricing and selling support and maintenance services, check out my book: [https://www.simpfinity.com/books/recurring-revenue-web- agenc...](https://www.simpfinity.com/books/recurring-revenue-web-agencies/) (the part about growth-oriented services is coming soon, matter of weeks)

I love talking about the subject of recurring revenue, it's a passion of mine. I'll gladly answer any questions you might have.

Edited: typo.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think selling hosting to a customer is wrong, but selling services based on hosting could do well (email app,invoicing app, website, dropbox alternative, booking services (restaurant, hotel) ...). There's no money in the hosting without a webapplication part (my 2 cents)

Currently, a lot of my clients don't need the monthly support option. That doesn't seem to sell very well, because they mostly have no problems.

What can be sold is the support for 3 months (during the start)... But that is where the most problems are, so i'm wondering if it's financially interesting to do that :) . I also mention that i'm a busy guy, but with a monthly support fee. They can call dibs on me anytime.

<comment><USER3> The way I see this "clients do or do not need support" is this (and this metaphor faired well with clients, to help them understand why support and maintenance is absolutely crucial): I personally don't need medical insurance either because I'm healthy most of the time. But what happens when I get sick? I need fast remedy and I want to live my life assured that there's a team of experts on standby, ready to take me in.

In my experience, it made no sense to argue with the client about maintenance when the website was "sick". All the client wanted was for us to fix it. I knew that, so I made sure I sold them a maintenance package in advance, when they "didn't need" it. A website is just like a bridge: if you build it, you're responsible for it, but it's not for free. Everything I put in the world, I am responsible for, but the client needs to pay for it.

Here's how we sold support: \- 30 days guarantee period (after launch) \- we were selling only annual contracts. A lot happens every month. Frameworks and libraries need updating, 404 links happen, browsers update, CMS systems get new security updates... There's a ton of things to keep an eye on as a developer, and you could create an annual plan which your client pays for monthly (give her a discount when she signs a contract).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As others have mentioned, hosting is not a profitable business in itself. There are plenty of web/vps/dedicated hosting services who have been in the business for years and who can easily outcompete you on price, features, stability, and pretty much every other metric that you can come up with.

Except one thing.

DreamHost staff are generalists. They're probably good at fixing hacked WordPress blogs, but they will never be able to compete with you when it comes to in-depth troubleshooting of the exact application that you built for your client. At best, all they can do is direct your client back to you. At worst, they'll misdiagnose the problem and damage your client's website.

You, on the other hand, are a specialist. You know the website inside and out. You can take one look at an error message and figure out exactly which line of which file is causing the issue. You know when the software stack will need to be upgraded, and you know which parts are the most likely to cause trouble after an upgrade. You know when the client is expecting traffic spikes, and you know that when that happens, DreamHost is likely to suspend your client's website.

Your hosting package, should you choose to offer one, must take advantage of these differences. It should be part of a long-term support contract, not a standalone product, and it should be massively overpriced, like, at least an order of magnitude more expensive than the off-the-shelf equivalent. In exchange, the client gets a server stack that is perfectly tailored to their app (nginx, node.js, redis, you name it), a guarantee that they will never receive a canned answer in response to an urgent support request, and a guarantee that their website will not be suspended in the middle of the biggest marketing campaign of the year.

And of course you should be ready to fulfill such expectations. Don't use cheap servers to host your clients, get some Linodes or Droplets instead. There will be no in-house email hosting, it should be outsourced to Google Apps or some other company that specializes in email. Don't mess with cPanel, your clients can call you if they need to make any changes. Everything should be premium-grade, because there's no money to be made in the low-end market. Make your customer feel like your offer is actually worth the combined cost of hosting and support that you're charging them for.

</comment><comment><USER5> Like many others have said in this thread, it's hard to make any meaningful dent in your profit from being a middle-man between your clients and who's hosting their sites.

I'm a fan of bundling — which sounds a bit like what luckyisgood was getting at.

Every consultant wants diversified and/or recurring revenue. This is why just about all of us inevitably create (or try to create) products of our own. Eventually, many consultants get wind of the idea of retainers, which can have the predictability of SaaS but without needing to build and market software first.

The issue arises with how most consultants put together retainers. It's usually something like "I'll sell you in advance 20 hours a month of my time for $2000."

Here's the problem:

Any first grader can figure out that you're effective hourly rate is $100, which is probably less than your real rate — but hey, it's a retainer and it'll relieve your need to always be selling, so that's OK for most.

Since you'll be making $100 an hour on this retainer, your income potential becomes constrained (you're now on the hook for 20 hours a month @ $100/hr) and the client knows what your hourly rate is. "Brennan, I need more this month. I'll pay you $2500 for 25 hours" or "Can I just pay you $100 an hour when I need you?"

And this is where the retainers of a lot of the consultants I've talked with go south, and the relationships sour.

A better approach (which is something patio11 and I talked about during an event we hosted last year) is to instead sell bundles — which could include your time, and hosting — and make these bundles really tricky to divide.

I could sell a client on:

\- Hosting

\- Backup management

\- Framework / security updates

\- A/B test experiments and management

\- Up to 20 hours of upgrades and modifications

Now it's not so easy to divide the invoices I'm sending my clients monthly by X.

And I could charge... $5000 a month for that. Or whatever would make it so that my client gets both the peace of mind they're looking for (smart guy managing hosting, backups, security issues, etc), a product that's becoming more valuable (running a/b tests, analyzing their funnels, etc), AND a pool of time for me to do whatever random updates they need.

<comment><AUTHOR> Things (in my experience) that are hard to sell to smb's:

\- Security updates + framework

\- A/B testing

\- 20 hours of upgrades and modifications upfront (charging per hour works or naming it differently and including it in your price)

\- Monthly support

What i can sell more easily:

\- Backups (else, they have to do it themselves)

\- Hosting

\- Webapps (email marketing, invoicing, ...)

\- Google Apps for business

<comment><USER5> I've done, and know quite a few people, who are currently selling framework updates ([https://railslts.com](https://railslts.com)), a/b testing as a service ([https://draft.nu/revise/](https://draft.nu/revise/)), and not to mention selling blocks of time upfront — e.g. the retainer model a lot of agencies employ.

(Re)selling hosting, webapps, etc. situates you as a middleman; The margins are much better if you not not only sell them on an Optimizely account, but run it for them also.

<comment><USER6> Optimizely takes minutes to sign up for - and they're always looking to make that easier, and to make more people aware of the value they provide. In contrast, the expertise to conduct tests that alter revenue outlook takes somewhat longer to develop.

Sure, people could go out and spend the time to learn just about anything. In practice, they won't, because that's competing with all the other anythings they could be doing.

 _Sell the thing that actually has significant barrier to entry._

You take care of the easy thing too, because making the client spend meaningful attention on something that would take you five minutes is just silly, and you're there so they don't have to worry about that stuff. But sell the hard thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a "consultant", but I've only had the same, one client for the last 3 years, for whom I work 40 hours a week. I have a comparatively low rate ($75/hr), which the consistency of work has made difficult to argue over. I'm also getting bored with the project. Basically, it's in every way what it was like having a real job, except I don't put pants on most days (I work 100% remote, my client is a 3 hour drive away).

I don't specialize in anything particular. I do both web and desktop apps for my client. They are a small suite of systems for collecting certain types of physics data, mapping it, and performing a basic analysis of subsets of that data. Other than setting up the servers (system administration is a weak spot for me), I've built everything of consequence in the project: from designing the database schema, to implementing and even improving the client's proprietary algorithms, to building a smooth, intuitive (as intuitive as this can get) UX around Google Maps. But it's mostly done now and I'm bored with the project.

Any tips on how to get out of such a rut?

<comment><USER3> It depends on what you want to do next and from which sources you want to build your recurring revenue. Building recurring revenue before quitting the client or venturing in a product business is the key.

Let's say that your one current client is like having a day job. It's wise to keep them if they're your only source of income, until you find more exciting and equally / more profitable sources of income.

A couple of ideas:

\- try to get a couple of new clients, but only a few, so that you can manage them. Put them on a retainer and service them yourself for starters. Repeat until you have enough money from that on retainer. Aim for fewer clients at higher retainers.

\- hire a person (as an outsourcer, or paid by the hour, or similar) to help you service the existing client first and the new clients later. Keep training that person so that there's less and less manual work for you, and keep overseeing everything she/he does (be the quality control person). This brings you closer to a real business (other people do the work, you sell and negotiate deals)

\- let's say that you now have one colleague that does the work, and a couple of clients who pay just enough consulting to make you feel relatively safe. Let's say that you've organized this in a way that leaves you 50-75% free time to work on The Thing You Really Want To Do. Now, do you want to build a professional service business, or a product business?

In any case, if your work is the only source of income and you can't raise any capital (not even from friends, fools, and family), building recurring revenue streams first is how you get out of any rut, because getting out of the rut requires freeing up your valuable time first.

Does this make sense? Would any of this work in your case?

<comment><USER7> Actually, what you've written is basically what I've been trying to do for the last year.

I'm definitely more interested in a product business, rather than a professional services business.

I've been trying to find small contracts and other sub contractors to push stuff on to. It's difficult to find clients who only need a small amount of work for the sort of things I do. Most of the potential clients I end up talking to either need something simple-yet-out-of-my-competence like throwing together a Wordpress theme, or they want to hire me full time for their early stage startup (at a huge pay cut) on a project that doesn't interest me. I might be bored, but I don't hate it so much that I'm willing to make life measurably worse in just about all aspects over it.

The few (two) potential clients who sounded ready to work evaporated after I mentioned putting together a contract. That's skeevy. Probably a good thing they disappeared.

And it's been _extremely_ difficult finding developers who A) know what they are doing, and B) don't want full time work. I'm either finding great guys who want me to hire them full time (which I would love to do, if I had the money) or I'm finding chuckleheads who will take any scraps I can give them, but I have to redo all of their work in 2 to 3 months. My current client says I shouldn't hold everyone to my own standards. I don't know how to do that and my knee jerk reaction is that it's a terrible idea. I don't know how to make software with bad developers. I can't just sit by and watch Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee fail to complete tasks week after week that I know I could have gotten done myself if I wasn't spending so much time managing them.

I've been running side projects, but I'm blocked on turning "thing I'm excited about" into "thing that makes money". My most complete project so far is an ePub-generating, browser-based text editor. My friends use it regularly and love it, but it's been very difficult getting other users to it, so after about 5 months I think it's time to move on. I'm torn between just hunkering down and refining the tool even further + adding a pay wall, or leaving it the way it is and pursuing a new project with more potential.

I tried finding a PR/advertising partner. Everyone has their own projects and nobody wants to sign up for someone else's. I only looked for about two or three months, though. Perhaps I gave up early.

I think the big problem is that I am very isolated from people. I live in a suburb of DC. I moved here two years ago to be with my wife, a move made extremely easy by the fact that I was already freelancing and working from home. The only people I know down here are her friends. So I'm trying to get out to tech meetups, do some networking.

There is one task coming down the pipe for my current client that I'm somewhat interested in doing. I'm not sure I'm going to get to do it, though. He's been trying to hire someone with more experience in that particular area, plus there is a long list of other things that have to be done first.

In the past, I've been apt to just quit at this point and then figure out where things would go from there. I've usually been able to find a new job right away, as my skills are usually in demand, but it's always the same sort of consultoware that burns me deep. I'm trying not to follow the same pattern again. I wouldn't call it a mistake the times I've done it before, as it afforded me chances to see things from different perspectives and even got me into freelancing. When it was just me, not having any money to go on exotic vacations was fine. My wife has spoiled me in the last couple of years.

So I don't know. I feel like I've been spinning my wheels. I think I'll wait out my client to see if I get the chance to work the project I want, sock the cash away, and if I don't, double my rate on him, drop my hours back, and screw around with VR programming.

<comment><USER3> How about you offer your client that it would be YOU who would help find another person for that other project for your current client, so you form a team of two? If your client is not a developer or a technical person, it's 100x harder for them to find a suitable person for the job (and I hear you: you wouldn't want to work with Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee either nor should you lower your standards). Whatever needs to be done on that task, chances are you would be an ideal dev lead / project manager / senior dev for that task on that project. You could present yourself as a partner on that project who would do some of the work, but that way you'd be slowly moving away from coding and more in the direction of managing / strategic consulting. That way you can demand more money because you're adding more value, and you'd be responsible for the other person. Recognizing good dev talent is hard, that's the hidden value that many developers forget that they bring to the table.

And yes, networking helps. I have my own small "mastermind" group and the best thing I get out of it is inspiration, bursting my own bubble I have locked myself into, and decreasing fear of the future. I just wrote about it yesterday on my personal blog, so that part of your comment rang very near and very true to me.

In the end, you already know what to do :) I see from your comment that your direction is clear. Good luck with everything!

<comment><USER7> Thanks. I have such a group of people, friends I have an email circle with. I try to read back through our emails over the years every once in a while. Things are definitely better today than back then. It just doesn't always feel like it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If operations/systems is a second class citizen in your company, then you just live with that fact, minimize the headaches and maximize your other incomes.

When you offer "hosting"... do you offer intelligent systems? advanced low level networking? CDN? anycast DNS? disaster recovery plan? peak resistance? awesome monitoring system with 24/7/365 support of the solution? 0day level security solutions? nanosecond performance? 99.999% SLA? penetration testing as proactive maintenance? multidevice testing of every change or patch? development, staging, validation and production environments? storage engineers? database tuning? project road-map with weekly (or daily) reports and meetings of a team of engineers analyzing infrastructure usage, logs, new threats, proposals and evolutions? an awesome web interface for ALL customer facing controls? a problem free experience?

Or are we talking about cheapo domain+cert+shared resources "online presence"? If yes, than maybe just stick to one provider and seek for a "reseller plan", to minimize costs, and as said in other comments, start offering a "maintenance package" as part of the products/solutions to get some recurring revenue.

When you get a great team of operations and support engineers with outstanding knowledge and passion for "systems", they stay motivated, and they are not mismanaged, you will be able to monetize them (and their "toys") with "hosting", "cloud", "online presence", "services" or whatever name, in team with the rest of the solutions you sell.

Infrastructure is a complex and expensive topic. If you do it properly, you can move money. You just need more customers wanting your system solutions/team, than the cost of it.

Otherwise, there is many competence and "third party" services, and the average position is to re-sell that, and focus on the ego of "i'm a designer/coder, systems is a second class stuff I cannot convince you to payme more for that".

<comment><USER9> Are there any hosting providers that are "moving money"? Most of them seem to have pretty minimal profit margins and low valuations by the financial community. I believe Voxel sold to Internap for only $30M.

<comment><USER8> A few (about 3) years ago, the company where I was (in Europe) did make money doing hosting over housed space.

We did hosting (dedicated and virtualized servers), managed services, and re- housing, this is, rent again the racks/power/IPs which we did rent on different providers.

If I'm true, I think it did work very well because the company did get very big projects, because the company management did have great agreements and contacts with high environments (local government, local banks, football teams, newspapers, etc).

That is, I as a technical person, do not see myself starting from zero the same AND getting the local customers we did use to get. And much less global customers.

I can assure the systems part of the project budgets, did make great money. Even more profitable on maintenance status. The worse on the company was sometimes, the development team's estimation and execution balance.

<comment><USER9> Right but there's making "great money" which for anything that has fixed overhead is probably like 2-3x cost vs "great money" for software which implies you have 80%+ margins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is no money in hosting.

Call it cloud, thats where the money is.

</comment><comment><USER11> 10 years in niche websites here. We sell a website system (hosting + cms) to professional photographers. A lot of them. We do traditional hosting where each customer is an individual apache host with it's own database, FTP account, etc. But you could just as easily do something in a multi-tenant, "cloud"y fashion.

The margins are decent IMO. You can get a decent sized VPS or dedicated server and easily have your costs under $2 per user per month. Then you charge the customer $9-29 per month.

They key will be automating the setup process. If you're doing traditional hosting, you may also need some sort of control panel (they all suck, btw).

We also sell other SaaS tools for photographers–allowing them to sell and share photographs. We upsell them to our website clients.

It's hard to define _fairly easy to create recurring revenue_. We were profitable from day 1 but it took more than a few years to clear $1M in annual revenue. And now there are a lot of well-funded competitors (wix, squarespace, etc.). So, my advice would be to find a niche, figure out what they need, and focus on them.

I have a few ideas (below). This is random, but I would advise you to avoid restaurants. I've tried it. Many others have too. They owners are too busy, have little money, and most just don't care that much.

Some other ideas I've had:

* A static website hosting service based on Jekyll. But a web-interface somewhere allows you to create new jekyll posts/pages.

* Wordpress hosting for landing pages. I like Unbounce but it's expensive. Create a WordPress theme with 12 different page styles and let me make an unlimited number of landing and lead-gen pages for it.

* Elementary school websites. As a parent of 4, I've yet to see a good one. I'm sure there are existing players, but if you can carve out a niche, there are COUNTLESS other things you could build for them. Start with some private catholic/christian schools near you. They have much less red tape in their buying process. If you have some sales chops, aim at the district level so you can bag a few schools at once.

</comment><comment><USER12> I see a lot of great discussion but not much centered around hosting itself. I do agree with Brennan and have been pricing how he described for some time, it works. Value based pricing always works with the right kind of clients.

Along the way I was able to run a website that delivered the retail customer website of a billion dollar company using my code.

How something as silly as hosting helped make it happen..

I have hosted customer apps and sites in a datacenter since about 98. Networking, security was something that there was little choice to avoid picking up in addition to software development.

Forget about today, even 15 years ago (man it's weird typing that), hosting was quickly becoming outdated. Yet, there was still an earnest need that was going unfulfilled.

The need I see repeatedly is for complex/custom hosting of Web apps and websites instead of the basic ones.

Example today? Even something as simple as Wordpress is a pain to reliably host when there is traffic for the average person. Someone deciding to master WP has lead to a fantastic startup with WPEngine which sits on the premium end compared to it's peers.

This isn't for everyone: assuming you have the ability to develop your skills as needed, and with the right support, you can tackle your slice of the complex/custom/app hosting market.

Even small businesses with custom workflow or website apps often end up needing their own vps or dedicated server to maintain. If you're this passionate about hosting, I'm trusting that you have or are pursuing dedicated hosting skills.

Putting together a managed server hosting package that may or may not provide application level support can be quite stable income assuming the line is clearly drawn between code induced issues vs infrastructure induced issues.

How much is on the other side?

On the low end I have changed a few hundred a month, all the way up to a few thousand a month, so a customer can have a sys and app admin rolled into one.

The right kind of customers definitely have a peace of mind budget, where they want the discipline and consistent availability of someone who cares about them more than a contractor. The bottom rung of customers don't scale very easily, either.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think we have quite a few people waiting for the answer, and a few people not wanting to give up the answer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the exact same thing, that's why i added one of my easiest/best technique to earn more with the same thing.

I really hope some people share their knowledge/experience. The more people that share, the more people you can use it to gain a better profit :)</comment></comment>


How to get website address from Business name - 100-xyz Hello all,
I am looking for an automated way to get a website url, given the business name.  I can write the scrapes and clean the data etc, but which free service or API can I call to get a list of possible web addresses?  It was possible to do it using google apis many years ago, but not now.  Any alternatives?
If the question is not clear or you need more info, please let me know. <comment><AUTHOR> Clearbit Autocomplete API: [https://blog.clearbit.com/company-autocomplete- api/](https://blog.clearbit.com/company-autocomplete-api/)

<comment> 100-xyz Tried to register but got a Password format error.</comment></comment>


How to Split Sentences (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://tech.grammarly.com/blog/posts/How-to-Split-Sentences.html

<comment><USER2> I did an analysis of different sentence segmentation tools when I was working on my own rule-based segmenter. The results can be found in this README ([https://github.com/diasks2/pragmatic_segmenter](https://github.com/diasks2/pragmatic_segmenter)).

I think this blog post almost hits on the key in the middle - in my opinion it is important to test (all of) the edge cases. The problem with most corpora typically used to test segmenters is that 80-90% of the sentences are the same (i.e. a regular sentence ending in a period). Thus if a segmenter just simply split the sentence at every period it would still show a 80-90% accuracy rate. This is why I am trying to develop a standardized set of edge cases: [https://github.com/diasks2/pragmatic_segmenter#the-golden- ru...](https://github.com/diasks2/pragmatic_segmenter#the-golden-rules)

<comment><USER3> Great work. I love the "Golden Rules" list you compiled. It seems like teams develop their NLP systems without sharing a common training set which leaves some teams without testing things like the "a.m. / p.m." thing.

<comment><USER2> See my comment below for some of the reasons I've had issues trying to test the commonly used segmentation corpora. I completely agree it would be great if there was a free (as in both speech and beer) common training set. One key would be that this common training set either provide the exact text that should be run in the segmenter or exact instructions on how to produce the text to run in the segmenter (re: see the issue I mentioned below of the ambiguity around how to actually test the Brown corpus).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Self-promotion: I wrote an open-source sentence splitter tool that outperforms the state of the art on the "standard split". It is also very fast.

[http://sonny.cslu.ohsu.edu/~gormanky/blog/simpler- sentence-b...](http://sonny.cslu.ohsu.edu/~gormanky/blog/simpler-sentence- boundary-detection/) (link to GitHub repo in post)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've just added this kind of support to node-summary ([https://github.com/jbrooksuk/node- summary](https://github.com/jbrooksuk/node-summary)) which seems to make a bit of a positive difference under the tests.

</comment><comment><USER6> is anyone aware of a sentence segmenter for poorly written english that is missing some punctation? like from chat sessions? it could be useful for normal sentence segmentation. i.e. if you forget about the punctuation, can you detect the boundaries of the sentence anyway.</comment>


Spotify has been doomed from the start - <AUTHOR> http://pando.com/2015/06/12/is-spotify-doomed-because-of-apple-music-no-spotifys-been-doomed-from-the-start/ <comment><USER3> Related to this - If European IT companies continue to lose against their bigger US competitors, the Europeans will start protecting themselves. Indeed this is what is happening right now with EU anti-trusting (remember Obama said "they can't compete").

Spotify and SoundCloud are some of the European IT stories at the moment, if they are both slaughtered by Apple, that will not go well for trade negotiations. Additionally, like the Chinese, Europeans are getting increasingly weary of reliance of US made hardware.

Upshot: Spotify and SoundCloud failing will give more fuel to EU protectionists and will in the long run curb the reach of US tech multinationals.

<comment><USER4> The US and China both have the "unfair" advantage of a big homogenous market. I think that's the main reason you don't see a Microsoft, Google or Facebook in Europe. For example Spotify, headquartered in Stockholm, initially had a domestic market of 9 million people. Spotify is growing fast, but again, not enough engineers would move to Stockholm to sustain a Google. There's a language and culture barrier between EU countries that just don't exist in the US.

<comment><USER3> Yes. I happen to think Europe actually has somewhat better human capital than the US, though the US has a clear institutional advantage (more homogeneous market, different politics, etc.) which trumps everything else.

I was once a part of a medium sized European start-up that was bought by a large US company. Even though everyone got rich off the acquisition, we came to view this as a failure. If we didn't agree to be bought, we knew we would be out spent/marketed by the much larger (though much more clumsy) US company.

At the end of the day, the Europeans will not consign themselves to US dominance (and the Chinese certainly won't). The EU moves slowly, but there are clear signs the past few years that it is moving to curb US tech multinationals in order to nurture domestic alternatives. While I support free trade in principle, I think this is a good development for Europe.

<comment><USER5> Sure, the EU could get all huffy, but starting a trade war over that when they are a huge net exporter to the US would be extremely stupid. Maybe even too stupid for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How did this sentence make it into the article: "In turn, the $41 million people who pay to use services like Spotify was $1.6 billion."? It doesn't even read properly.

(I think they mean "In turn, the 41 million people who pay to use services like Spotify generated $1.6 billion").

In my view, the real problem is the music labels. Hopefully the future lies with smaller and less malevolent labels, or even no labels at all.

</comment><comment><USER7> Meanwhile at Spotify HQ:

"OK guys — it's been more than a couple of months since we scrapped features that people like. Let's spin the wheel of misfortune, shall we?"

"Maybe we should hold more talks about how awesome our processes are, and how agile we've become — all the while letting our core product languish and not listen to our customers needs."

"Hey, could you take a look at this? I've spent all weekend creating a better version of the playlist-view. It uses twice the amount of padding from before. Maybe this encourages more in-depth listening, since you have to scroll a lot more. What do you think? It's nice, right? Perhaps we should also require the users to click and drag the scrollbar?"

(I love Spotify though. I just wish they put a little more effort into their applications — or at least made it customisable so I could make semi-permanent fixes myself. The _only_ meaningful feature they have shipped that has impacted me the last two years is detection of duplicates in a playlist. Like seriously, what are you guys doing?)

<comment><USER8> Tidal was the first promise of a decent competitor to Spotify and I jumped immediately. Spotify has had so many requests for features that they have completely ignored and consistently made their ux worse across every device for the two...maybe three years I've been a paying customer.

A feature request to prefer explicit over clean and vice versa when possible has been on their request board for nearly two of those. For a long time it was difficult to even select or search for the version you wanted.

They ignore their customers, break their UI, fail to optimize for conversions to paying customers, how could they expect to be profitable?

So far I've been extremely happy with Tidal. It's gotten quickly better and I'm excited to see how the artist based model plays out. It's odd to me that the author laments the plight of the starving and ignored artists while calling Tidal a joke. Their stated mission is to improve the landscape for artists, they have a real opportunity to build on top of and change the indie scene and I think they'll take it.

<comment><USER9> I'd argue that Rdio is a pretty good product. On Android, Google Play is very good. Both predate Tidal by a wide margin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A bit of poor analysis in my view. While I have no doubt Apple Music will be popular in the long run (as new handsets become available), I saw very little in Apple's offering that was differentiated from Spotify. Pricing and features were more or less identical except for 3 months free (please correct me if I missed something).

Anecdotal, I've heard no excitement from any of my normal Apple-obsessed friends about using the new service. I find streaming music apps to more sticky than I had anticipated - people have their playlists/history - and they don't want to lose this. My wife was a user of MOG (one of the few), then of Beats post-purchase. She hates the Beats interface/app, but she will not change to another service. Spotify has another important sticky factor - <USER2> desktop app - which allows you to play back both what is on your hard drive with the streaming music.

This is not to say Spotify isn't doomed long term - they have, in my opinion, a fairly unsustainable business model that continues to exist only because of VC funding. They need to create a more multi-stream business - just working with the labels will put them into the ground. My guess is that they continue to evolve into a more complete media platform, and that they sign artists directly to get to a real margin.

But to say that Apple will crush them reminds me of the whole Netflix/Blockbuster comparison. Now Blockbuster was no Apple - but everyone thought that they, as the incumbent, would crush Netflix. That didn't happen - because Netflix was there first and Blockbuster launched a very me-too competitor. Spotify is also focused on winning this - it's all they have - whereas Apple Music is a tiny part of Apple as a whole.

Now, this could also play out like Google Maps - I believe Apple Maps now crushes GM in terms of usage - so Spotify will likely have trouble going forward if Apple Music is installed by default on every handset.

<comment><USER10> "I believe Apple Maps now crushes GM in terms of usage"

That's a bold claim. Are there any sources on this?

<comment><USER11> Apple Maps is used a lot more than Google Maps on iOS.

It is the advantage of being the integrated application in the operating system.

There is no way to make Google Maps/or any other application the default one on iOS and any map link goes to Apple Maps

<comment><USER12> I suspect Apple's claim is true _on iOS devices_. It's a good example of marketing spin.

<comment><USER13> _" Apple's claim"_? I see no claim in this thread that Apple made such a claim.

<comment><USER12> See: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9714686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9714686)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The tone of the article is horrible. Does the behemoth, errr, Apple care to outcompete spotify or soundcloud? I though apple's strategy is just to provide more content for their devices

<comment><USER15> Maybe Apple is using it as a decoy to draw attention away from the Apple watch.

It's funny though since Apple said "Hey Apple Records in England we want to name our company Apple oh no we'll never be involved in selling any music" is getting more involved in music each decade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The author of this article appears to be unaware that the major record companies have a significant stake in Spotify[1]. Of course they're not going to support any attempts to undercut the market.

[1] [http://www.swedishwire.com/jobs/680-record-labels-part- owner...](http://www.swedishwire.com/jobs/680-record-labels-part-owner-of- spotify)

</comment><comment><USER17> It's obvious that this analysis is shallow by the failure to mention Google Play.

Don't have a particular opinion on the merits of these services, only that leaving out Google makes the analysis incomplete.

<comment><USER18> I noticed that, too. I've obviously not got the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google Play wasn't number two to Spotify right now in terms of subscribers. To not mention it at all is a strange oversight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Apple IMO has never really understood the social dynamics of the internet, let alone "social networking." The company they bought to incorporate into their music service (Beats) has the executive DNA of the major label music entertainment business, which time and again has failed to understand why and how people share and enjoy music.

Not long after Beats bought streaming service Mog, they laid off the big data engineers building the "related things you might like" features in favor of marketing-driven genre-based playlists built by internal "experts." They killed one of the best features of Mog which was the ability to have the player continue to play music you were likely to enjoy when your song or album or playlist reached the end. Instead, the music just stops. It was a noticeable shift from an individual- personality-driven music experience to a top-down, father-knows-best experience.

My hunch is that Google/Youtube streams more music than any other dedicated service, and that's almost by accident.

I have no idea how these past moves will play into Apple's new service, but I wouldn't be naming anyone a victor quite yet.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think Doomed is a strong word... Apple has lost this war over and over again (remember Itunes Ping anyone). They also seem a bit out of touch with focus of on mainstream artists, curated content and one-way "social networking". Apple's coffers and integrated payment system makes them a very dangerous adversary but no competitor has the reach, inventory and ecosystem that Spotify currently enjoys.

That being said I think the writing is on the wall. Spotify is too juicy a strategic asset to not be snatched up, it's just a matter of time and price. It'd put my money on Google buying it within a year for a hefty price.

It's a pity because I'd rather see Spotify as an independent service rather than platform leverage. If Spotify becomes a de facto monopoly in a walled garden under Apple or Google it is we who are doomed. Better for the music labels to own a part of Spotify (and perhaps demand more ownership) than handing over control.

<comment><USER21> Ping was a complete failure but apart from that, what else? iTunes was their only other attempt in the "war" and it absolutely dominated.

Regarding reach, inventory and ecosystem - I think Spotify should be very worried by Apple. The iTunes library is one of the biggest and it seems that most of it is available for streaming. Apple Music will be coming preinstalled on all iOS devices (with three months of the service for free) and, to top it all off, it'll be available on Android too. I'd be very concerned if I were Spotify.

What's more, iOS users tend to be some of the more valuable customers, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a higher portion of Spotify Premium subscribers on iOS than other platforms. I suspect that Spotify Premium memberships will take a big hit after it launches. I know I'll be leaving for it.

To me, Spotify is a perfect example of the power of a good UI (or rather, how damaging a poor UI can be). I have subscribed to Spotify since pretty much the beginning - for years and years - and yet I am completely disloyal to them. I can't think of any other company, besides utility companies and such, where I haven't become somewhat fond of them having been a customer for so long. I can't stand Spotify. Whilst the service is great, the UI is awful and the apps are slow, don't feel native and are annoying to use. That's why, having only seen screenshots of Apple Music, I know I'll be switching to it from day one. A good user interface is king.

(In case anyone brings it up, I've tried many competitors to Spotify, including Rdio, and haven't been able to find anything better. Rdio looked promising but their Mac app is actually even worse.)

<comment><USER20> I see a lot of hate for the Spotify UI and on desktop & web I think it's kinda justified just because they've flip & flopped so much and remove/added/changed features constantly.

The Iphone & Ipad client I actually think is pretty well designed and I'm not sure where the hate is coming from, would be interesting if you could go into more detail

<comment><USER21> Best example I have is the whole navigation structure (this is on iPhone). Let's say you were listening to a playlist and then you went into an artist, maybe a related artist from there and played a song (basically, you've gone pretty deep). You now decide to search for a song and play that. In order to do that, you need to hit the back button repeatedly until the hamburger icon appears. Then, you can search and listen to the track you wanted. If you want to return to where you were previously, you need to hit the back button repeatedly until you get the hamburger, then redo every step you took to get there.

How is this fixable? Really easily! It's built-in! There's a UITabBarController that is used in many apps, such as iTunes, for this exact purpose. You can switch between sections of an app without losing your place in each section.

<comment><USER20> Ah that's a good point, thanks! Consistent navigation is the crux of many apps. Though with the phone version i find 99% of my use is either listening to my playlists or searching & placing specific song, so I seldom hit all those use cases that I do on the desktop version. I can imagine it being quite poor at those edge cases however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Spotify has nailed the social aspect of music sharing/collaborative playlist creation through its great Facebook integration (at least here in Norway where "everyone" uses Spotify).

From what I've seen of Apple Music it seems like they haven't bothered with the social aspect at all. Is it even possible to share what you're listening to and collaborate on playlists?

That may not be a big deal for some people, but I'm pretty confident that at least my group of friends won't switch to a streaming service where collabrating on playlists isn't super easy (or even possible).

</comment><comment><USER11> Pando, they are always funny

</comment><comment><USER23> It might be the subscriber model. Consumer would loose their access to music and would have to restart from scratch with another service (favorites, playlists) and maybe buy special hardware (Apple Music?).

An audio CD has a longer term value, legal backup are possible, it can be resold, it has a higher audio quality and the musician ears more too.

</comment><comment><USER24> Hindsight always seems to be 20/20

</comment><comment><USER25> Apple is not Spotify's problems. The labels are. The labels have all the control. They'll squeeze out all profits from that company.

//

Apple Music is not a problem because it is for Apple users. They won't be able to help themselves, it'll be centered around their eco-system. There are a lot non-Apple users. There are a lot of Apple haters (I got annoyed last week when they restricted streaming of their keynote to Apple devices - seriously).</comment>


Ask HN: Are startups diluting their own market? - <AUTHOR> Some of favorite quotes from Sam Altman's class at Stanford (CS183B) were:
1. Don't start a startup for the sake of starting a startup. 2. Product should solve a personal pain. 3. Build something users love. 4. Live in the future. 5. Learn powerful things. 6. Get users. 7. Dominate small markets. 8. Make everyone do customer support. 9. Do things that don't scale.
Particularly though, I thought #1 was the most interesting, as every college now has an entrepreneurship course and PG says that college students shouldn't be starting startups. I'm curious about the dilution of real (whatever that means- can be measured by future success metrics) startup ideas with ones that people are coming up with just for the sake of starting a company. Will this have any effects on the market, funding attainability, customer acquisition? And will the pot of ideas get so saturated at some point that it drives innovation away? <comment><USER2> > 1\. Don't start a startup for the sake of starting a startup.

Seen that first hand happen. Someone at old work was enamored with "startup world". Read too much HN perhaps... Then came up with an idea for a startup. Right off the bat, could tell it was a forced idea. It was like they sat down and given a task of "come with an idea of a startup in 5 minutes" and they came up with one. It just seemed, well ... artificial. You can almost tell how they went about it in their head "Ok maybe Uber, but like for dogs. So they can go to a park play chase...". It was that kind of thing. However, the amazing thing is it didn't matter! They convinced management to spend money on him and his startup. I believe they are still bankrolling him and his idea 3 years later, while everyone there looked at each other with a look disbelief.

One can argue the startup is good enough, if you can convince some investor to invest in it. You don't need customers, a good idea, profitability, a market, etc etc. You need a dumber investor than you, who will bankroll you and you are done. After that you can always claim you were a CEO of a startup for the rest of your life, and do talks and presentations about it, put it on your resume and so on. It just feels good, you are part of something cool and exciting.

<comment><USER3> I took a technical entrepreneurship course, and the professor forced us to come up with startup ideas very early on, and then iterate and convince everyone to throw our original ideas out. After a couple months every group had startup ideas that were clearly much more sound than the originals.

"First startup" ideas are very easy to identify, and are the majority of what you see in college entrepreneurship. The close, but often not scalable problems in competitive markets: food delivery. Textbook re-selling. Better course scheduling. Some way to make profit off of nightlife and parties. And then the large, technically unfeasible ideas: Solve X with drones, 3d cameras, machine learning.

The startups that keep going are usually not in either of these camps, but often start firmly in one and move towards the center as far as complexity.

But your last point is also spot on - a campus food delivery startup from my university got into a good accelerator and raised some money. Seems to be doing well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting question.

I would say that yes, startups (as a whole) are likely diluting their own markets. When a startup notices a real pain point and tries to solve it, but cannot make a sustainable business out of it, it shakes the customers' trust in trying an unproven company. This can have negative consequences.

Think of it this way: currently, people have faith in the 'startup brand'. A potential customer's internal monologue may be something like: "Oh a startup is trying to solve this problem that I have? They're probably doing something really innovative and they're inevitably going to build a successful company because of it." After the same customer gets burned a couple times by a new company shutting down, they're not going to be as likely to put their faith in the next new company that comes around the block. The 'startup brand' to them comes to mean a bunch of naive kids who will fail in the next year or so. Even if this company can do it better than before, it may not be worth the risk of frustration/headaches/delays that using the old startups' software has caused them in the past, so they choose to not try the new product. This makes user acquisition a lot harder, and I'd imagine that it would be a net negative (when compared to a scenario where the weak startups didn't try to start a company).

<comment><USER5> So consequently there would be a lot of startup failures as well... One more interesting scenario that can result could be if there will be an investor fatigue as well similar to the customer fatigue of investing their time & money in these startups...? As this could potentially make finding initial capital harder for startup teams which could potentially be solving similar problems with better execution strategy but in the same market...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Starting up without doing proper industry research and without having a solid foundation can lead to a personal dilution of one's time and resources that could eat away from what could have been more valuable endeavours in the future. If we're talking about individual success here, then personal waste of time is probably the most significant factor -- more so than the effect the failed startup has on the ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER7> You also have to wonder how much startups are benefitting from the increasing number of startups, specifically B2B companies that sell to early-stage startups.

<comment><USER8> During a shovel rush, sell shovel making machines. ;-)

<comment><USER9> Technically software engineers are the shovels...recruiter anyone?

<comment><USER10> Or boot-camps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No. Ideas are not as important as sensing what consumers need in the market.

It doesn't matter there are other 10^n distracting ideas, the real need of consumers will still be there.

For example, Theranos may be a distraction, but that doesn't change the underlying problems and demand for better healthcare.

<comment><AUTHOR> Intriguing. So, regardless of the noise, you think the signal will resonate due to its demand by the consumer. But, won't the first commenter's idea play here where consumers get sick of trying new products after getting burned?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the factory-style production of prototypes is causing real effects in terms of the importance of design, just in order to not get brushed off.

There are just so many decent looking projects being posted to Product Hunt every day, and even traditionally crappy-looking mainstream sites like Paypal, GoDaddy, or ESPN actually look decent these days. I just can't imagine a successful new startup that doesn't have solid design people... Not just back end devs who 'have an eye for design', but devs who can fire up a vector tool and make custom graphics if they need it.

<comment><USER9> Or use a sales team. Our company had a brilliant sales team who managed to sell a good product with a horrible looking and unusable website by directly setting up face to face meetings with clients for a sale.</comment></comment>


Amazon to accept Bitcoin payments, soon? - <AUTHOR> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=58896.0

<comment> Tim-Boss I absolutely agree with the comment from EhVedadoOAnonimato: "I think it is more likely that Mr Jit there didn't know what you were talking about, and just gave you a standard "finish the discussion with client happy" answer."

I've spoken with 'remote' customer service reps before, and they do have a propensity for just telling you whatever it appears that you want to hear!

Look a bit further down the page at the conversation HostFat had with another service rep: "I have just a question, do you know if Amazon is going to accept Bitcoin currency? Deepti:I'm sorry we don't have any information about Bitcoin currency."

So it's clearly not a standard script/company line MR. Jit was reading from...</comment>


25 Things I Didn't Want to Know About You - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1877187,00.html <comment><USER2> "This recent bout of viral narcissism has sent roughly 800,000 hours of worktime productivity down the drain...But it's just so stupid...I can't believe I'm saying this, but I've finally found something more stupid than Twitter."

I think the only thing worse than sharing mundane details about yourself for the world to see is to be the TIME writer that has sunk so low as to whine about it in a front-page article (yes, it made it to the time.com home page). Really? This counts as journalism these days?

<comment><USER3> _Really? This counts as journalism these days?_

No, but it counts as selling eyeballs to advertisers, which is the business Time is in. It's the same business all magazines are in.

<comment><USER4> The sad thing is I found the list far more interesting than the article. Hint: If your going to rant about something as a waste of time don't let it upstage you're job.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the journo didn't show any hint of clever/snide/haute/arrogant/dry/slapstick humor.

Capote. Sedaris. Darling. Sweetie. Patsy, darling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yet another article that complains about Facebook or something on Facebook ... that has a button on bottom to post the article on Facebook.

<comment><USER7> I hate facebook!

Press _here_ to post this message on facebook!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I took a bit of a more unorthodox approach when I got tagged. I figure it's better to make notes worth reading: [http://unalone.tumblr.com/post/75897218/continuing-my- facebo...](http://unalone.tumblr.com/post/75897218/continuing-my-facebook- dickery)

 _Most people aren't funny, they aren't insightful, and they share way too much. Facebook is a loose social network; a "friend" on Facebook might translate to someone you'd barely recognize in real life._

This is a problem inherent with _any_ group. In real life if you paid this much attention to all of 600 people you'd have the exact same problem. It reminds me of the Internet stalker problems that people've started to be warned against. You need to treat the Internet like you would anything else - and offline, you'd never have a party with hundreds of people and pay attention to all of them. If you want Facebook to get better, limit yourself.

If your friends bore you, get better friends. I've only seen a few of these, but the ones I've read were actually really fascinating to read. Writer friends are the best.

When did magazines get this awful? I commented this on the Newsweek article yesterday, too. Weren't these both good magazines two years ago? Why've they turned so pulpy?

<comment><USER9> My opinion of Time and Newsweek has been consistently low for about 15 years. When I was in high school, I thought they were "serious" newsweeklies. I went so far as to keep a crate of them my library was discarding, with some vague idea of having them around for 'future reference' (mind you this was pre-web). Then, sometime in college, I picked one up and realized that it was essentially just a printed version of TV-caliber news. Out went the crate.

Point of story: could it be you who have changed, not Time or Newsweek?

(Though maybe they really did change -- media quality is a hard thing to deal with quantitatively or objectively.)

<comment><USER8> Very possibly - my time frame is junior year high school to freshman year college. :-)

Though Newsweek didn't use to have a "humiliated people of the week" column, and "conventional wisdom watch" used to seem interesting rather than just sniping. And I did like the quotes of the week page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How rude of someone to have _forced_ the author of this article to read Facebook notes that he hates... ...

</comment><comment><USER11> I can't believe how much I enjoyed reading the 25 things my friends posted. As time goes on, people lose track of friends, but my friends shared enough for me to remember why they were my friends. Their personalities came out in ways you never see with the boilerplate profiles and status updates.

</comment><comment><USER12> I was hoping for a discussion of the security implications of sharing 25 bits of personal information online with hundreds of people, but there was nothing about that. It's basically a rant against the little things that she doesn't want to know about her friends.

</comment><comment><USER13> Has every sentence on Time site have a suggested link???? Some arent even related to the article. What annoyance!. The article??? oh, a rant as this comment. (at least this one is shorter)

<comment><USER14> I couldn't decide if it was quaint or annoying. When these dead tree magazine/paper types figure out that hyperlinks can go to _other servers_ we're going to enter a whole new age.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sadly, I gave in and did mine last night. Can somebody make a facebook app already that quizzes you about which random facts belong to which of your friends?

</comment><comment><USER16> I enjoy reading these about my friends. If you're bored by them, you should be less permissive about who you add.

</comment><comment><USER17> Actually this is an interesting exercise. Maybe one should not share it with the rest of world, but for oneself I can see how it could help.

</comment><comment><USER18> "Here's an organically evolved thing that is really resonating with people. Clearly it's dumb." Sweet.

</comment><comment><USER19> Strangely enough, I got tagged (thrice in the last two weeks). I was just making up the list, and realized, its actually a great exercise. I really enjoyed writing that list (still working on it though).

Though if this is mainstream journalism, and this is from Time.com, I am sufficiently confident that I am not the only one wasting my time (assuming I even agree with the author)

</comment><comment><USER20> Give me a break. If you don't want to read 25 things about your friends, don't read them! I'll echo harpastum saying the most ridiculous thing about this is that it made it to the front page of TIME. What will the topic of the author's next article be: the viral narcissism of "about you" email chain letters? That's SO 1998.

As much as I used to hate those chain letters I mentioned above, I surprised myself and took part in the 25 things meme on Facebook. I actually found it pretty edifying. I wrote some things I didn't realize I was going through at the time and learned some things I didn't know about my friends.

Did I need Facebook to do this exercise? No. But the fact that Facebook facilitated it is far from "stupid," as the author suggests it is.

</comment><comment><USER21> my favorite list i've seen so far:

1.) I don't usually fill out chain lists. 9.) I've made People Magazine's most beautiful people list 6 years running. 13.) I really like 30 Rock. 16.) I've never tasted my own urine. 17.) David Blaine is actually just a character in my imagination. 19.) I was half of the men at the million man march. 22.) Four of the things on this list are true. 23.) #22 isn't one of them. 25.) I really, really hope someone sends me $25.

</comment><comment><USER22> Cussing about the internet: not only for blogs now... Also, I think he failed to see some humorous references in many of those posts.

Oh well, that's how people are I guess.

</comment><comment><USER23> Oh no, people are having fun on the internet! Quick, somebody write an article on time.com and stop them! If people enjoy sharing random things about themselves, then let them be. I personally think the 25 Things fad, while maybe a bit 'lame', is interesting. It allows me to feed the narcissistic side of myself, while learning random things about my friends. The horror.

</comment><comment><USER24> I tried to start a chain like this as a Facebook application called Four Things, One Lie. The idea was for people to post five things, one of which wasn't true, about themselves: [http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/07/stop-me- before-i-code-again-...](http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/07/stop-me-before-i- code-again-another.html)

I guess most people have _no_ imagination.

</comment><comment><USER11> I can't believe how much I enjoyed reading the 25 things my friends posted. As time goes on, people lose track of friends, but my friends shared enough for me to remember why they were my friends. Their personalities came out in ways you never see with the boilerplate profiles and status updates.

</comment><comment><USER25> Hypothesis: Your opinion of friend based social networks is a direct reflection on the people you surround yourself with, and thus a reflection of your opinion of yourself. I rather like Twitter...

</comment><comment><USER26> How is this different from the various chain emails sent?

<comment><USER27> Lately I have been thinking exactly that. Facebook really is nothing more than a slightly 'structured' form of e-mail. Or at least that's how people are using it. Your Friends list translate into your address book, and it enables you to send around all kinds chain messages, stupid powerpoint presentations and fart videos. I have been ignoring these emails for years and years, why would things be any different on FB?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have only one friend on Facebook, but I found her list interesting. I have known her for 20 years and most of the things on the list I didn't know.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't know, I enjoyed reading the majority of the lists I encountered. I also enjoyed writing mine. Why are we so uptight?

<comment><USER8> Because certain people believe that because we're spending time writing these lists, it's a sign that we're not being productive.

On the contrary: we're more productive than any other generation. We have instant communication, incredibly powerful tools for computing information, and creating things is easier now than it's ever been before. Because of that, people have more time to unwind. Possibly it's even necessary to keep our minds relaxed. Those things get ignored by Time Magazine, which likes sensationalism and negativity because it sells.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I just hope that guy who tears gummy bears limb from limb and then eats the heads last isn't a coworker.

</comment><comment><USER31> v funny that Time magazine is reporting on the latest buzz on fb. the viral nature of this "25 things" meme is pretty insane. maybe Time is hungry for a little of that pg view action so they thought they would jump in. trouble is, who reads Time anymore(?).

</comment><comment><USER32> _22\. I once ran into New Kids On the Block's Joey McIntyre in the lobby of an off-Broadway show. I told him he was the first boy I ever loved. He laughed and kind of smiled. This was the most gratifying moment of my life._

JOEY WAS MY FAVORITE, TOO!

<http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/2/6>

</comment><comment><USER33> "I like to tape my thumbs to my hands to see what it would be like to be a dinosaur."

</comment><comment><USER34> This article seemed to be the carrier for a bunch of link bait

</comment><comment><USER35> I didn't RTFA, but just from the headline, it's pretty obvious why any church can't ignore science: Because it contradicts their bronze age dogma.</comment>


The U.K. Just Went 55 Hours Without Using Coal for the First Time in History - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-19/u-k-goes-a-record-55-hours-without-coal-as-clean-power-expands <comment><USER2> Bloomberg is so sloppy.

"History" goes back well before the Roman presence in Britain. According to Wikipedia, there was no coal use after the Romans left until as late as the 12th century CE.</comment>


Google are at it again... (Homepage logo) - <AUTHOR>

Today's logo is greyed out until you start typing, at which point it colors in the letters for each character you type.
Here's an image in case it's not showing locally: http://imgur.com/fx3F7
Why are Google doing this? Is live updating search going to launch for everyone? Do you think it's a good idea? <comment><USER2> Strange: I don't get that, but do get a beta version of https//google.com/ : Google over SSL</comment>


Quadrotors learning to throw and catch - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/10/01/quadrotor-robots-catch/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is another in a series of experiments at ETH on quadrotor swarms doing collective behaviors. And in this case throwing and catching a relatively small ball.

Besides the obvious manhack reference from Half-Life 2, this sort of cooperative robotics seems like it will help solve problems that single large robots cannot.

For example, the researchers could use their tool box of behaviors to create a swarm of robots which create a 'bucket brigade' from a source of water to a wildfire. If the only limitation on the rate of water drop is number of robots in the brigade, it becomes a simple economic question rather than a policy question as to whether or not to implement something like this. Given the cost/damage of wild fires it seems like a case could be made for a few thousand gas powered water bucket carrying quadrotors.

<comment><USER2> Gas powered water bucket carrying quadrotors are probably better at setting fires than putting them out.

<comment><AUTHOR> What suggests they would be any worse than gas powered water tankers?

My reasoning is that they would respond more rapidly to changes in atmospheric conditions. They have the advantage as well that if you lose one you don't lose multiple thousands of gallons of water/retardant capacity.

<comment><USER2> I'm imagining a swarm of these running in to stuff, hot exhausts + gas = the occasional crash. Suddenly you have a bunch of fires to contend with instead of just one!

Better use electrically powered ones (though the range may be prohibitive).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone interested in interesting applications of quadrotors will probably like the work of the GRASP lab: <https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/></comment>


If you're accepted to YC, can you negotiate the percentage? - <AUTHOR> I know that the amount of funding is fixed, but the percentage that YC takes doesn't seem to be. Anyone from the previous batches successfully negotiated the percentage that YC asked for? <comment><USER2> Actually, the "negotiation" is proving what you're worth. If, when you come in, you're relatively far along, have a really compelling demo, you can prove a huge market, etc...you'll get a better valuation. The differences are small, but they do give somewhat different offers to different groups. And, of course, you can still say no when pg calls to give you the terms.

But, do take pity on pg--he's frazzled on that day. He calls everybody personally. I was impressed by how nice he managed to stay through the whole process (and even moreso now that I've seen first-hand how crowded pg's life is with people who want to be around him).

We went in knowing that we'd say "no" if the offer involved more than 6% equity...but it rarely does, so that wasn't a big concern. We're glad we weren't one of the "no" groups.

</comment><comment><USER3> The easiest and fasted way to lose at negotiating is to ask "is this negotiable?". When you negotiate, you are supposed to be convincing the other side to give you what you want on the terms you want. If, instead, you come into the negotiation looking powerless, you are going to end up with no deal or--worse--a bad deal.

You get 15 minutes or so to present your idea. One minute of that presentation should be about how much money you need to get started. I would not inflate that number, but I would not artificially constrain it to fit the "fixed" limit that YC has. I can't speak for YC, but I would guess that they aren't going to turn down a deal just because the founders demonstrated a need for $7500 per person instead of $5000 each, or whatever the details are. Similarly, if your idea is the best idea they've ever seen, then are they really going to be so rigid about the percentage? Especially if you offer a percentage before they do?

I realize PG said flat out "no" above. But, doesn't Mr. Graham strike you as somebody that has a "rules are meant to be broken" mentality? Don't you think that this is exactly the type of arbitrary rule that is easily broken without too much fuss?

<comment><USER4> With 15 minutes, you don't have any time to justify a 50% increase in money and less than an order of magnitude seems negligible anyways. I think most people that actually have a need for more money are encouraged by YC to work on a limited subset of their initial problem before raising more money from another investor, which is easy enough to do for a promising YC startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No. You can turn us down though. (Two groups did, both very early on. I don't know what became of them.)

<comment><USER6> paul, if there is a standard process, is the % based on the number of founders, an evaluation, or both?

<comment><USER5> The percentage is based on a very rough estimate of the startup's prospects. If the founders seem like superstars and have been working on it for a while, we might ask less than 6%. Whereas if the company seems riskier we might ask for more.

We should go back and see if the predictions implicit in the offers correlate at all with how the startups have done.

<comment><USER6> I would be really curious about those dollars, and what percentage get an investment of 1 million plus.

6% seems like a 200% profit if each yc startup generates a 1 million dollar investment.

If the VC deal rate is closer to 1 in 10 or 1 per year, it looks like you need one $10 million dollar deal a year, each of which needs to have a potential of $250 million eval, or $25 million a year in revenue before the VC will be interested.

So my question is, if a team can demonstrate "real" projections with lower than average risk, and demonstrate a 2 year projection of greater than $25 million a year would you consider an offer of less than 6%?

My second question is, since we are in the Midwest, "What exactly is a rockstar?" ;-) We have Billy Corgan, and Garbage to be proud of, but the coasts seem to be more keen on the idea of the "rockstar," so, what are the characteristics of a "tech" rockstar?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The key to this is to discover the golden key of negotation:

BATNA- "Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement"

Your BATNA: To keep doing what you're doing, and not get rich by fulfilling your dream.

YC's BATNA: To fund someone else that is about 99% as good as you.

You have a lot more to lose by walking away, therefore YC holds an incredible amount of power in the negotiation.

<comment><USER8> It really freaks me out that there are people on this board who think the BATNA for a founder in the YC negotiation is "give up on their dream".

<comment><USER7> I never said they would give up on their dream if they declined YC.

They just have a smaller chance of it happening. As a YC-funded group, you have a 100% chance of pursuing your dream. If you aren't funded by YC, your chances of that are significantly smaller.

<comment><USER8> I am utterly skeeved out that there are people in this forum who think their "chances of pursuing their dream [startup]" are lessened by not getting "funded" by YC, and that their "chances of success" with that startup are significantly reduced.

As a serial startup founder with 2 VC backed companies behind me (one as a founder) and 2 bootstrapped companies (both as a founder, one current, thriving, and multiple years old), let me respectfully call bullshit upon you.

To support my calling down of The Bullshit upon you, let me focus your attention on two completely obvious facts of the industry:

Fact the (1)st: the Overwhelming Majority of thriving web startups are not YC- funded.

Fact the (2)st: the Overwhelming Majority of YC applicants do not collect $16,000 (one solid month of consulting dollars for a skilled developer) from Paul Graham.

If your dreams don't survive not collecting a vanity round from Paul Graham, your dreams are weak and don't belong in the industry to begin with. I leave you with that thought.

<comment><USER7> Yes, your chances of success are reduced if you do not get funded by YC. If they're reduced enough for you to quit, you shouldn't be doing it anyways.

I define "success" as being able to quit my day job and work on the startup full time. Anything after that is gravy.

My chances of being able to do that if I'm accepted to YC: 100%

My chances of being able to do that if I'm not accepted to YC: 25%

The 25% is more than enough to keep me going and to keep my inspired. But I'd still have a better shot if I got accepted by YC.

<comment><USER8> Just to reiterate, an idea that goes from 100% to 25% based solely on Paul Graham is not a good idea.

To restate the original point: I feel like some of the people on this forum approach starting a business the same way they approach applying to college, or to grad school. That is not how it works. Your success is not gated on the "grownups" in the admissions office, or the department, or Y Combinator, making a decision about you.

If you catch yourself thinking about it that way, stop. Even if you get your 2 month's consulting dollars out of Y Combinator, nothing else in business works that way. There's no professorship to apply to once you get funded. You actually have to engage the market and win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not 100% sure, but my guess is no. Read:

<http://paulgraham.com/webstartups.html>

Section 2.

</comment><comment><USER10> in general, the median's around 6% and i think is also the most common, and i didn't encounter anyone who had negotiated it down. i don't think there's a formula. we had a working demo, and thousands of lines of code, but got the same deal as other groups who just had an idea.

unless the % seems way out of kilter, it's probably not worth optimizing this or cutting yc down (after all, they're making rapid fire phone calls down a list of people who would gladly take your spot. things like your option pool and follow on investments will be the dominating factors in your dilution anyway.) they definitely earn their chunk, and contribute _vastly_ more than the equity they take, even at the highest end.</comment>


Indian startup aims to sell portable washing machines at Rs 1,500 - <AUTHOR> http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/gadgets/indian-startup-aims-to-sell-portable-washing-machines-at-rs-1500/?SocialMedia <comment><USER2> I used one of these for years when I lived in an apartment (didn't like using the laundry facilities everyone else used).

[https://www.lehmans.com/p-4444-breathing-hand- washer.aspx?sh...](https://www.lehmans.com/p-4444-breathing-hand- washer.aspx?show=all)

I had a big tub I put in the bathtub and it took about 5 minutes to wash a small load of laundry. It was a bit of a workout but that's ok too. It used no power and cost $20.

Then I put the clothes in this, hung them, and in the morning they were dry.

[http://www.amazon.com/Centrifugal-Clothes-Portable-Spin- Drye...](http://www.amazon.com/Centrifugal-Clothes-Portable-Spin- Dryer/dp/B002GEDBIG%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q%26tag%3Dduckduckgo-d-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB002GEDBIG)

Now I have a house and a regular washer and dryer but I would recommend one of these breather washers for someone with limited access to power or no washer hook ups. They really get your clothes cleaner than a conventional washer.

</comment><comment><USER3> If they drop that AC 240 Volts powered device into the bucket, instant electrocution will result.

It is unsafe as < insert expletive of choice >

</comment><comment><USER4> Each bucket looks like 5 - 8 litres. That's a lot of water. Might have to keep using to soapy water for more washing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great Idea. Hope they start selling soon.</comment>


Show HN: Frequently – The easiest way to create a free FAQ page for your project - <AUTHOR> https://frequently.io/ <comment><USER2> More info in the first page would be helpful, e.g. screenshots of the Dashboard. I don't want to sign up or read the full FAQ to found out how it works.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice job.

There's a typo at the bottom of the page, should be "Sounds good?" instead of "Sound good?".

</comment><comment><USER4> great idea! wish it looked more slick tho and had options for "themes"

<comment><AUTHOR> Custom CSS is something that will be coming!

I think I'm going to go that route instead of themes.</comment></comment>


Watch Out Apple... Courier - Details of Microsft's Secret Tablet - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5365299/courier-first-details-of-microsofts-secret-tablet

<comment><USER2> For a "real device", it sure does look like a bunch of concept renderings. I predict that this will be as revolutionary as "Project Origami".

<comment><USER3> Agreed, if they had a real device I'm sure the video would have been shot in a different way than. This is simply an animation of what it could look like, but I highly doubt it actually exists. Otherwise why have a computer animated hand do the actions, instead of a real one.

Or is this the new strategy, let's show something that looks like a fake when actually we have it.

Any advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone remember how cool MS Origami looked?

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6381789873197028811>

Microsoft's commercials and reality don't intersect very well. History tends to repeat itself.

<comment><USER5> Umm, to be fair you can do most of that now. Take the bit with the photo guy who has the image preview, color wheel, histogram on his tablet; you can do that right now if you have a Canon EOS camera - as a matter of fact you can focus and twiddle the white balance etc. from the laptop without touching the camera if you want. I am looking at buying exactly such a system later this year (the camera does what I want, this computer connectivity is a bonus, albeit a welcome one).

Not that Microsft gets all the credit for that, but they've had tablet-capable Windows for ages now, and I don't blame them for the time it's taken the hardware manufacturers to catch up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am skeptical. I remember watching a demonstration of WinFS only to find out later that it was a Macromedia Director demo. Even if it was real there is some way to go before it becomes a product.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've seen this in the other new item here on HN. But this article has some interesting comments concerning left-handed usage. I wonder if the theme will be reversible for ease of use by left-handed people?

<comment><USER8> Just turn it upside down. Left on the right, right on the left. Problem solved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sort of reminds me of the Info Pad idea from a couple years back: [http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2006/05/desperately- se...](http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2006/05/desperately-seeking-info- pad.html)

<comment><USER10> Such an info pad would also be an ideal platform for taking my library of documentation, and my personally compiled tune-book. (Music notation.) The key here, is that there is a nascent market for a device on which users can compile self-generated content. Notes are such self-generated content. Moleskins and other kinds of journals and sketchbooks are another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This device might actually give tough competition to existing netbooks. It appears to be smaller and more portable than your average netbook, with the added advantage of having an interface designed specially for the smaller multitouch screen it sports.

I sincerely hope this is real. We need someone besides Apple competing in the multitouch market.

</comment><comment><USER12> I believe that the renderings are based off of the "Codex": <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=049_U-0C9qU>

No idea how old that video is, but the concept looks okay.

</comment><comment><USER13> Want.</comment>


Ask HN: Where can I learn Economics online? - <AUTHOR> As the title suggests, I'm looking for recommendations on online courses (ideally free) that start at university level econ 101 and continue on-wards.<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> Khanacademy.com</comment>


Gamemode: Optimise Linux system performance on demand - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/FeralInteractive/gamemode <comment><AUTHOR> Some benchmarks [https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/feral-interactive- hav...](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/feral-interactive-have- released-an-open-source-tool-thatll-help-get-the-most-performance-out-of- linux-games.11555)</comment>


Banks are so digital it hurts - <AUTHOR> http://www.adendavies.com/banks-we-are-so-digital-it-hurts/ <comment><USER3> Well, sure. You've got to record transactions in ledgers, and those have been stored on computers since the 60s/70s.

But on the payments side of the house, there's no technical reason any inter- bank account-to-account push-pay transaction couldn't be done in under 5 seconds for under ten cents.

But, no! We've got NACHA (but, now, FAST!) (and the Fed with their 2am window) and and and... And, let's face it: why would a main-street bank want to lose out on the MT fees when interest rates are, well, essentially ... nothing.

I agree that the banks have some best-in-class reliability and cohort analytics technology (some of them anyway). The core is kind of antiquated, but why muck around with "it's already reliable"?

The "core" is slow and inflexible. The cost structure is crippling. The regulatory environment imprisoning. Legacy interop. Risk. The interbank- frameworks.

Yes - all digital. And much of it very good work. Yet, (like in medical, but for different reasons), just because all the bank employees can download apps from the iTunes store, does not mean that the core is ... agile.

<comment><USER4> Note that the author is British. Standard payments in the UK are made via the Faster Payments Service, which is free and almost instant in most cases. Contactless payment is near-ubiquitous in the UK, as is mobile banking.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. I missed that when I read it. The UK also does not have 6.7K banks and various state regs...

But, still, I was associated with a BankOne thing about two decades ago - <USER2> had been on an M&A spree and then wanted to "merge" about 80 core banking systems. After about $200M "wasted", the answer ended up being sticking a service bus in front of the lot and routing to the right core...

And they were _all_ digital too! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Banks! Digital! So digital that our partner integration API is a batch SFTP upload of CSV files, with most success/failure reports coming back over the next few days but several coming back weeks after the fact.

<comment><USER3> Why don't you use EDI? Not that this would resolve the in-house processing, the ACH delays or the UCC-rule induced delays, but are you doing transactions that are not EDI-able?

<comment><USER5> Believe so. BACS is a CSV system, SEPA is made out of XML. I'd have to look up exactly what Autogiro needs since I'm not at the office. :b

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you want to read here's the archive:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20160910123651/http://www.adenda...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160910123651/http://www.adendavies.com/banks- we-are-so-digital-it-hurts/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Well that was verbose

Maybe the four paragraph version was enough</comment>


Show HN: CloseCamp - Sales Bootcamp. Live and Online. - <AUTHOR> https://www.closecamp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Co-founder here, proud to say we're getting ready to launch our first sales bootcamp next month online and in San Francisco.

I would love any and all feedback, happy to answer any questions.</comment>