Ask HN: How do you set prices? - <AUTHOR> I'm helping a friend's startup figure out pricing for their products. What are some tools/services that you use to do this? Are there any pricing analytics platforms that you'd recommend?<p>I can't find anything that wasn't enterprise focused ("Call for pricing!"). Are there any services that your company uses that you're happy with? Ideally, it would help calculate common metrics & make suggestions for pricing experiments (& help run them!). <comment><USER3> (Note: cofounder responsible for pricing decisions many times.)

The closest thing to a "methodology" I've found is asking these four questions and having the users generate their own pricing curve [1]:

Here's a real set of curves this process generated for me recently: [http://imgur.com/lPKLk53](http://imgur.com/lPKLk53) ($ values redacted)

The four questions are:

1\. At what price would you consider [the product/service] to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it?

2\. At what price would you consider [the product/service] to be priced so low that you would feel the quality couldn't be very good?

3\. At what price would you consider [the product/service] starting to get expensive, so that it is not out of the question, but you would have to give some thought to buying it?

4\. At what price would you consider [the product/service] to be a bargain—a great buy for the money?

Require a specific $ amount as the answer to each question.

Take ~100 users, ask them all four of these questions, and then compile the results. You really have to do this on a subset of your own qualified potential customers to get any meaningful data.

The neat thing about this is that this creates a price sensitivity curve without anchoring the interviewee with any prior numeric values.

At the end of the day, it's still a gut call about where to place your price point relative to the user's alternatives, and testing is encouraged, but these four questions are a decent start.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp%27s_Price_Sensi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp%27s_Price_Sensitivity_Meter)

<comment><USER4> It's been consistently shown that what people say they'll do regarding pricing and what they actually do are not correlated.

Rather than asking people, if you can, try just changing the prices and see how customer acquisition changes.

I sell a program online to consumers, so for a while I tried several experiments in pricing, including a "pay what you want". Structure. Eventually I settled on a price that's about half what the highest accepted price was ($10) and the typically "pay what you want" price ($1). Right now I sell for $4 (perpetually listed as 50% off of $8), which brings in about as much revenue as the $10 price. The advantage, though, is that it gets in the hands of more people, so there's a higher potential for word-of-mouth advertising.

So, I would say, if you're in the position to do so, experiment with the prices in the real world and look at how purchasing behavior changes.

<comment><USER5> > perpetually listed as 50% off of $8

Isn't that quite dishonest? I'm fairly sure this is illegal in at least the UK, so I'd assume in plenty other EU countries too. Are you in the US? Is this practice legal there?

<comment><USER6> this practice is so prevalent here in the US I cant imagine it being illegal

<comment><USER7> You are wrong. Many states have laws against this type of deceptive pricing, and it's against the FCC's guidelines as well: [http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi- bin/text-idx?SID=0fe5a1d5614a06c2f27...](http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text- idx?SID=0fe5a1d5614a06c2f279e26eab8caa72&mc=true&node=se16.1.233_11&rgn=div8)

<comment><USER6> and yet we dont care when Manning tech books always have a discount someway somehow. there's almost always a deal of the day. just have patience. I know it's not technically perpetual but it has the same effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I should really about this in a more formal fashion, but here's the HN comment version of several years of doing pricing for SaaS companies:

Price higher than you feel comfortable with. Approximately every SaaS team devalues their software because, unlike their clients, they were actually capable of writing it. Your clients don't care that it was "only a few weeks of work" or "really not as good as $UNRELATED_SOFTWARE_YOU_COMPARE_IT_TO" or "not as polished as Apple." Also, if you haven't run a business before, you have no idea how much businesses pay for pedestrian services like e.g. trash takeout, business insurance, monthly bookkeeping, etc.

Concretely, my standard "knowing nothing else" pricing for B2B SaaS is a three plan grid with $49/$99/$249 . If you're servicing informal firms like e.g. many Shopify sellers, you can add in a $29 price point. You don't want to service businesses for below $29 a month; you will suffer enormous pain in doing so and you will find that they churn and burn through software for a variety of reasons unrelated to you, for example because they go out of business, they have such severe cash-flow constraints such that sending you an email asking for a $5 discount is a good use of their time, etc.

You're not going to get pricing right the first time around. No one does. This is fine. Over time, you are likely going to raise prices across the board, as you improve your product, get a tighter focus on which customers benefit from you (which is isometric to improving the product, from the customer's perspective -- c.f. a below comment from tptacek on packaging), and get more confident in your team/offering. There is a simple way in SaaS to make price increases a non-event: grandfather in existing customers at their existing price. If your company is growing, your revenue for the next month is dominated by existing clients but your revenue as T goes to infinity is dominated by new clients, so I tend to just recommend people grandfather indefinitely. Yes, this does result in a couple of early adopters getting $1k a month of services for (in some cases) $19; I consider that a marketing expense to reward people for loyalty.

There are a lot of microtactical things you should build to support experimentation with prices. One is backend infrastructure to allow your CS team to change someone's plan at any time; another is some sort of crediting feature or special one-off pricing (one-time or ongoing), because as T goes to infinity you'll probably want to do both of them. I'll write about them some day.

You can track churn rates by the plan people are on, but I find that that isn't terribly useful early in the life of a business, since you'll have relatively few accounts in any bucket. For this reason, I often have a shadow attribute on plans to do "bucket by relative size of account", such that e.g. folks on Small Business at $49, Small Business (March vintage) at $34, Starter Edition For YC Companies at $45, etc all bucket into the same place for churn calculations.

Prefer giving people free things (exceptional acts of service, for example) to giving people discounts. They'll remember them for longer and you absorb the costs once, early in the relationship, rather than every month. Any recurring discount you issue in SaaS is essentially a liability on your books. (And existing happy accounts are a de facto asset, though GAAP doesn't treat them that way.)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the comment. But Github (to take one example) has pricing that starts from $7 a month. This despite of having a free tier. What's your opinion on that? Is it because they target developers and not businesses at that price point? Even their organisation plan starts at I think $11.

If Github priced it so low, I guess they wanted to capture that segment of developers who would pay $7 a month but no more. It makes me want to price my product too at $7 a month at a lower tier. Any comments on this please?

<comment><USER8> I think GitHub intends to have approximately every software developer in the world use GitHub, which is not the planned endgame for most software companies.

I do not think, if your customers number less than hundreds of thousands, that getting the custom of folks for whom $9 is a lot of money is a worthwhile use of your time. Devs consistently overestimate the impact on their marketing/etc of having cheapskates use them, and underestimate the real operational costs. (These customers are disproportionately pathological; they contact support rudely, with inane questions, at a rate orders of magnitude higher than good customers.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Joel Spolsky has written a great article on software pricing: [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and- rubber-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber- duckies/) This article was part of the reading list at Stanford's Startup Engineering CS184 course.

Another resource with lots of actionable advice: A Gigantic List of Psychological Pricing Strategies: [https://www.nickkolenda.com/psychological- pricing-strategies...](https://www.nickkolenda.com/psychological-pricing- strategies/)

<comment><USER11> That write-up by Joel is great as an intro to economics course in 15 minutes, but even after all the analysis he makes the very valid statement that it depends on the strategy of growth you have in mind. If you are trying to cash out right away, you don't care as much about longroots longevity / word-of- mouth / gradual-grow / customer feedback loops. If you are going for a long- term recurrent-returns kind of loop, then you want to go for what will be conducive to growth & also act psychologically well as a "price for a valuable thing/connection/pathway/service" Because if you sell me your awesome product too cheaply, although I will be appreciative, the average consumer will assume some sort of defectiveness. Thanks for that link, it is helpful when contemplating this stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hey Everyone - Patrick Campbell here, CEO/Founder of Price Intelligently. We've been in the pricing trenches for the better part of five years now working on the pricing for anyone from Atlassian and Autodesk to Lyft and Blue Bottle Coffee.

Pricing is ultimately a process, similar to product or marketing development. We've written extensively on it at priceintelligently.com, but here's a bunch of topics you should look through that will ultimately give you a solid foundation. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that there aren't any tips or tricks that are going to help you win - you need to quantify your buyer personas and price based on them accordingly. If you ever have any questions, always up for getting on the phone - patrick[at]priceintelligently[dot]com.

Value based pricing 101 - overview of how you should be thinking of your pricing (not based on costs or competitors): [http://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/162160/Value- Base...](http://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/162160/Value-Based- Pricing-101-The-Necessities-and-Your-Pricing-Strategy)

Pricing Process: Here's a 130 page ebook we wrote on how to collect the data you'll need, how to structure things, and a bunch of other pieces. This isn't the final cut of the ebook, but given the conversation I thought I'd share early (no lead form): [https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/120299/Price- Intelligently-Sa...](https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/120299/Price- Intelligently-SaaS-Ebook.pdf)

Here's also a webinar recording that walks through the above process if you prefer to watch: [https://pi.wistia.com/medias/79lpgnqd2f](https://pi.wistia.com/medias/79lpgnqd2f)

Survey design is absolutely crucial. We've sent around 20M using our pricing software at this point, but here are some lessons we wrote through at the 5M mark: [http://blog.profitwell.com/lessons-from-sending-5m-saas- cust...](http://blog.profitwell.com/lessons-from-sending-5m-saas-customer- development-surveys)

<comment><AUTHOR> Is Price Intelligently an automated service, or do you provide consultants/analysts to do the analysis?

<comment><USER13> I bet you've just given some folks a SaaS idea that might be worth tackling with full-on automation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Use good invoicing/billing software that allows you to discount on a per customer basis.

Start with two price points: one targeted at price sensitive customers, call it price A, and one targeted at price-insensitive customers (think enterprise), call it price C.

Set price A lower than you think - you can always add features and raise later to the point that people start to scream.

Set price C at much higher than you think - use volume discounting to offer discounting where needed, but this is your anchor point for conversations with big customers.

Consider whether price A is your acquisition channel or if you will have a "free" tier. If you don't have a free tier, you can feel fine with a lower than optimal price for tier A, as this is your conversion channel to price C.

Eventually you'll want a tier between A & C (call it B) to anchor pricing and encourage people to choose A or C. Refer to research on movie popcorn prices.

<comment><USER15> > Set price A lower than you think - you can always add features and raise > later to the point that people start to scream.

Set price A higher than you think. It is easy to lower the price later or to give -30% to customers and have them think it's a bargain. A higher price tag will confirm that your product is valuable and useful and you've got a market.

If they don't want to pay, you need to make a better product, or sell harder, or market it better. You don't want to fight for cheapness, cheap customers are cheap, annoying and they won't cover the costs to run the service.

<comment><USER16> Agree. My experience in pricing was that we were locked in to the initial price we set. (And the CEO did it by accident. Oops.) No one could stomach raising it.

Then again, we didn't actually try raising it and face backlash. It's possible we were just too cowardly to try and fail.

<comment><USER17> I tried something similar... Our CEO set the price of our email service too low (oops). But unlike you we faced the music and doubled the price only a year after. The backlash was much smaller than I anticipated. We marketed the price hike by adding some requested features and made the payment term half as long so the price seemed to be the same. This made it easier for our customers to swallow. Of course we lost customers, but not enough to make a difference (about 5%).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Pricing sounds so simple but it is a surprisingly complex thing to get "right". I read an article from Sequoia recently that I thought was very well written. Not sure if it's relatively new or if it's been there for ages. I recommend it anyways, great read.

# The Sequoia Guide to Pricing [https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pricing- your-product/](https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pricing-your-product/)

<comment> zupa-hu Annoying they have no date. The Internet Archive has first saved it on 2016-03-11.

[https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.sequoiacap.com/art...](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pricing- your-product/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> TL;DR - Price is not a function of cost, and is ideally set before your product is built. Do not attempt to set a price unless you have a profile for your target market. Then, price according to what your customer is willing to pay.

IMO, this is a marketing question and here's a good entrepreneurial process for profiling the market and your target price. First, ask yourself these questions:

* What actual value does the product give to the customer?

* What are the competitors / substitutions to the product?

* What makes this product sustainable?

* What does the customer currently pay for comparable solutions - in money, time, and effort?

This should give you a good feel for what your customer is willing to pay. Then, set some financial profit targets which is your total revenue - <USER2> expenses (don't factor investment money as revenue). Finally, bend your product / process to this target price (not the other way around).

I would encourage any engineer to research courses on Marketing and Entrepreneurial Finance. The best marketers merge the engineering process (i.e. research, statistic, and financial analysis) with psychology (i.e. the feels).

Anyways, good question and it should not be taken lightly. I've stalked HN for some time now, but this question caused me to finally create an account.

</comment><comment><USER20> (I was responsible for pricing)

We built developer tools and we figured that by using them people were at least 10% more productive (pretty easily verified). We leased (we offered to sell it as well but priced it unattractively) and priced an annual lease at about 1-2% of an engineer's salary. So about $1500/year.

It wasn't an easy sell back in the day and it's almost an impossible sell today. People want everything to be $8/month which is 10-15x less than what we were charging. Good thing I'm retired, eh? :)

One side not, amusing maybe, is that before I did business to business sales I was under the impression that a dollar is a dollar no matter who you area. Boy, was I wrong. We quickly figured out which customers were pleasant, gave us good bug reports, read the docs, and which customers were sort of lame, and which customers were complete assholes. It was not very long before we had the "nice guy price" and the "asshole price". It was eye opening to me, I had no idea how much everything is negotiable and how much that was influenced by how pleasant people were or were not.

</comment><comment><USER21> Do you have customers who value and use the product/service now? Do they value it? Consider talking to the customers who need and value it.

When I ran my consulting business, I was always afraid to raise the price. I discussed this fear with one of my customers, and he told me that I was too cheap, and that I should raise the price by 50%. He depended of the service, and wanted me to stay in business. I did raise the price 50%, and I don't think I lost a single customer.

To answer your original question, I don't know of any specific tools for pricing. How a company decides to price a service tends to be pretty confidential. It's also normal to base pricing on how much competitors charge. For something new, it is tough. Get customers interested, sell it for more than it costs to make (before you run out of money), figure why customers like it, and eventually you'll have a pretty good idea of what to charge.

</comment><comment><USER22> How I did it for an ebook:

1\. Set up Google Ads for your product to drive some traffic to an hidden web page

2\. Set up A/B testing for your product with a range of different prices. I set up six web pages with prices ranging between $5 and $100.

3\. When users click 'Buy now', have a page saying that the product is not available but record the number of people who clicked it.

4\. Calculate which setup generated the most income.

<comment><USER23> A/B testing prices. Never heard of that before, seems interesting. I have heard of people creating landing pages to get a mailing list of people interested.

Are you collecting their email's, sending them to a page or social page to check back when your product is available?

Someone picking a higher price, and you end up pricing it lower that sounds like a plus. If someone picked lower then you actually price it, wouldn't they have been false advertised to? Unless they actually knew it was a survey up front then that seems more fair.

<comment><USER24> A/B pricing has just as good of a chance of destroying your business. Far more "everyday" users than you'd expect will Google your company for coupon codes, discount opportunities, etc. The very moment that someone sees a $20 price for them, and finds out that other people are paying $10-15 - you've just lost a customer.

People like to think they're being clever by A/B testing their prices. The fact is enough people are smart enough to figure out that their "A" slot is worse than the "B" slot you've given other people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Pricing can be one of the most complex topics in business. About twenty years ago I read through what I consider to be THE book on the subject, "The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing":

[https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-Growing- Prof...](https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-Growing- Profitably/dp/0136106811)

What I learned was invaluable. I do have to warn you, the book lays it all out. This is excellent, of course. However, what happens is your level of confusion as to how and why to price using a certain approach will grow as you progress through the book.

Somewhere past the middle things start to coalesce and your choices become clearer. Again, this depends on the nature of the product.

Please note this is not a critique of the book at all, it's excellent, this is a complex topic and it is only natural to be confused before reaching clarity.

</comment><comment><USER26> (I consult on topics like this for startups)

A lot of the comments are focused on figuring out price points, i.e. how much.

You should also spend time figuring out the right pricing metric, to make sure that as your customer gets more value out of your product, you continue to get a fair share of that value.

By pricing metric I mean things like per user, per server, per API call, etc.

Take for example a SaaS app that helps you create project proposals.

If you charge per user at $10/month, and one user generates 1,000 proposal a month, effectively that user is paying 1 cent per proposal.

In this case the proxy for value for your product is number of proposals.

The user is getting a lot of value from your product, but you're getting a flat share of that value. Regardless of how many proposals the user create, you still only get $10.

So in this example, it makes more sense for you to charge by proposal first and foremost.

Gets more complex as you think about secondary metrics but that's the principle.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you're new and don't really know what you're doing, price it just below what alternatives are charging. Make it a non-issue, learn as you go and adjust. Don't get too fancy. If you are able to attract & delight customers you will have nearly unlimited flexibility to adjust pricing.

If you are experienced and have a strong vision on the service you are offering and how it should be priced, you can think about premium or non- traditional pricing schemes.

<comment><USER28> This is probably not great advice. Prices do more than determine how much money you'll make from a given group of customers; they also _select which customers you 'll be servicing_. The two most important pricing lessons startup founders need to learn are _segmentation_ and _qualification_. You should select a market segment that's attractive, and your pricing scheme should in part serve to ensure that you're not wasting time being responsive to the demands of people outside that segment.

The list of things you can do to repackage your product to go after different market segments is very long and very few of the bullets on the list involve changing code. I think the most important thing to do is to select a group of customer prospects deliberately and then make something those people want, rather than making something for the whole world and trying to optimize the number of people who buy through prices.

You can cost yourself customers/clients by pricing too low.

<comment><USER29> Yes. Running a boostrapped organization for 7 years now, I always wish we had priced higher. The few times where we've priced offerings too high, it was always easier coming down in cost rather than going up, and we learned a lot from those early customers who would pay a premium.

<comment><USER28> That's another great point. If you're going to make money from long relationships based on recurring payments, it's good to know that it's extraordinarily difficult to raise prices on an existing customer. If you sell to large companies, you'll find they have entire departments dedicated to ensuring that never happens.

<comment><USER27> I've had several experiences raising prices. It's not that hard. On new customers it's trivial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Call for Pricing is code for "starting at $1000"

Call all your competitors and pretend to be a customer. Get quotes from all of them.

Position yourself based on their pricing. If you're trying to be high end, charge more. If you want to be seen as affordable charge slightly less.

<comment><USER31> Do people think this is OK generally? There are some products I would really like to know the price of but pretending to be a customer to gain competitive information seems ethically questionable.

<comment><USER32> "I'm interested in your product, can you send me though a price sheet?"

No lies necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'll take a different tack than most other comments. Assuming you're B2B Step 1: Determine how much value your product creates for your customer Step 2: Set your price at a majority chunk of that

Example: How much money would you be willing to pay for a lead list that could make you $100 in sales? Assuming you have no internal cost to acquire (for sake of simplicity), if you paid $90 for that list, you'd make a 11% ROI. What sort of ROI do your customers need in order to bite?

</comment><comment><USER34> Ha - @TransferWise... we approach this slightly differently.

Most of the discussion here is about - setting to price to optimise for an objective. e.g. how to optimise for revenue, profit - or cash that you can invest in marketing.

Ultimately all these approaches seek to optimise for growth - depending on the definition / time frame / risk profile.

So what you think about growth as an OUTCOME, not an OUTPUT of the model.

We describe ourselves as a mission driven startup - with the mission of making the worlds money move at the touch of the button, instantly for almost nothing.

We invest in making international payments faster, cheaper and less of a pain.

As we reduce our costs, our price drops (obviously money isn't free and we need to have a small margin to cover our costs and continue to invest in the platform)

Hence - there isn't anyone here thinking, lets drop price by 1% and see if we get 1% more volume. We've built a conviction that if we continue to invest in aggressively dropping price customers will switch to us.

Note - if we approach this in a very data centric way will not move with the speed and aggression we are on this. Also our authenticity on this mission would be questioned by our customers.

This authenticity, and conviction - on not focussing on maximising the amount of value we can extract from our customers - is what driven our Word of Mouth growth rate. More on this here - [https://www.slideshare.net/pnilan/slides- from-jam-london](https://www.slideshare.net/pnilan/slides-from-jam-london)

</comment><comment><USER35> Working with a PhD student to do economic analysis is overkill for an early stage startup.

I would use the methods outlined by other commenters to create a set of potential price points. Pick the highest one and revise downward (or upward) as needed.

If you're solving a real pain point, there's a set of early adopters who will pay a high price for your solution. If this isn't true then I would examine product / market fit.

Mistakes to avoid:

1\. Doing a "name your price" promotion.

2\. Thinking you've found the golden ticket of pricing and sticking with it. Pricing should be scrutinized early and often.

3\. Charging too little. At least some users and reviewers of your product should be commenting that perhaps your pricing is too high. You're charging too little if no one is complaining about pricing. Of course, you've charged too much if everyone complains.

Finally, how you present the value of your product is perhaps more important than the pricing. See here: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704240004575085...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704240004575085513717202880)

<comment><USER36> Damn, I knew I was charging too little. Not only noone is complaining about price, but some explicitely says it's not expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Here's a neat trick I've used a few times when facing this exact issue.

First, set up a survey on Google Surveys ([https://www.google.com/analytics/surveys/](https://www.google.com/analytics/surveys/)) and select the most appropriate audience for your concept. Set the first question as a screener of who you think this product is for. So if your business wants to sell to pet stores, you might set the audience to "Small Business / SMB owners" and have the screener question be "Do you own a pet store?" and screen out anyone who says "no."

Then, briefly describe your product and ask a straightforward question about how much they would pay for it. So, something like "What is the maximum you would pay for a service that handled the logistics of mailing pet food to your customers?" Then make the answers to that question your possible price points - "$9.99/month", "$19.99/month", etc. Make sure to include a "I would not pay for the service" or "$0" option - this is an excellent gauge of whether or not your service is actually something people will pay for. If you run a pricing survey like this and 95% of people say $0, that's pretty telling.

When you look at the results, you'll see a clear curve from the higher prices to the lower prices / not interested option, but you'll be able to see what a relatively targeted group would pay. So if 40% of people would pay $9.99/month, and 10% would pay $79.99/month, that tells a story you can interpret into a basic pricing strategy.

Depending on your budget, run 3-5 of these with different prices, different pricing anchors, different wordings, etc. - get as much data as you can.

I used this method for my last startup, when we were trying to figure out how much a specific niche would pay for our product. The pricing research we did through these surveys led us to a conclusion of about $29 per product, which was actually much higher than we had anticipated (we were going to sell it for $9), so we priced it 3x higher than we were going to. Very long story short, we made the right choice - people bought it and we had very few complaints about pricing too high. We even raised prices eventually after adding new features.

Now obviously, there is a delta between what people _say_ they will pay and what they will _actually_ pay, but this method might help get to a starting point, or add a layer to your existing research.

Admittedly, I do this sometimes when I have random dumb ideas for companies and I want to see if there's a market for it without really committing anything.

<comment><USER38> this advice runs against a lot of the usual recommendations about ignoring what people say and focusing on what they do. It may well be that basing price on what people say they'd pay results in leaving money on the table.

<comment><USER37> Sure, we ran real pricing tests and adjusted accordingly once we were launched. This exercise was useful pre-launch, when we had a lot of ideas, but no clear picture of what our potential customer base would pay.

At the same time - never forget that a lot of the "usual recommendations" are wrong :)

<comment><USER38> of course, but I was thinking more towards the A/B testing approach to finding the demand curve that's commonly touted and follows reasonably scientific principles. My concern with customer-driven pricing is that customers will not be able to fully envisage what your offer will be and the effects it would have on their business, or might suggest a lower price than they would realistically pay. I'm glad it worked out well for you though :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I saw what Envato elements did with their pricing. They started off at $19 a month, and declared that their prices would increase as they came out of beta, had a full launch, etc. but the older customers would retain their lower prices. Their pricing was to go up from $19 to $49, so there was a lot of incentive for early customers to lock into the lower price.

If you look at the pricing page now, the price is fixed at $29. So maybe mentioning the $49 price point was just a marketing trick to lure customers in to the lower price. They also give a discounted price of $19 at cybermonday, etc.. What do you think of this approach? Can approaches like this be considered ethical?

</comment><comment><USER39> If you read the book "Thinking fast and slow" (excellent book btw), one of the concepts is a baseline price. For example, if nobody knows the worth of your product, they tend to compare with an alternative - the closest competitive product or substitute. This gives you an idea of what you can charge. That defines your product price range. You cannot avoid the comparison because everyone googles, and if they can't find the equivalent, they will find the closest. This approach is not really scientific but I find that I can relate to this very easily then reading "X% says they will pay $100 for this" in a survey. Hope this helps.

<comment><USER40> More importantly, if people can do (or currently do) what your product does costing $X and you charge $Y > $X and unless you offer them a good advantage (faster/easier/less defects) then they will think hard about adopting your product

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I recommend nice book "Don't just roll the dice" by Neil Davidson.

[http://download.red-gate.com/ebooks/DJRTD_eBook.pdf](http://download.red- gate.com/ebooks/DJRTD_eBook.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER42> I've been focusing on pricing for years and just delivered a presentation on "bad pricing pages" this afternoon. [0]

Pricing can be very complex, but here are three points that many folks don't know:

* The best price for you will often depend upon your goal (maximize profits, break into a new field, prevent competition, etc)

* Economics textbooks lie! Lower prices don't always correlate to more sales. Sometimes buyers will see a low price and assume the buyer is junk.

* The way you present your prices is often at least as important as the actual prices themselves.

[0] [https://taprun.com/talks/](https://taprun.com/talks/)

</comment><comment><USER43> My #1 advice on pricing (esp for bootstrapping SaaS/software) is to think about your Customer Acquisition Cost (=CAC) first, as in: how many customers will you reasonably be able to acquire given your marketing/sales plan and at what cost? Don't cheat here, but consider the fully loaded cost of doing sales+marketing and divide that number by the number of customers you'll be getting within the same cost period.

That'll give you a lower boundary of what you absolutely will have to charge to break even + an idea of the multiples on this you'll need in order to become a successful business.

</comment><comment><USER44> [https://www.saastr.com/a-little-less-about-pricing-a- little-...](https://www.saastr.com/a-little-less-about-pricing-a-little-more- about-deal-size-please/)

</comment><comment><USER45> You do not have to necessarily have a single price.

You can present different prices through A/B testing and see which one is more profitable.

Then, devise a way to make sure all features pull their weight. Get rid of the features nobody uses or improve them, but don't invest on development and maintenance of features nobody needs (feature creep).

Feature creep translates directly into unaccountable product people and software rot. Software rot translates into checked out engineers that either hate their job or don't care about the project, and heavy/inefficient organizations.

</comment><comment><USER46> IMO, be aggressive to a fault.

Most service providers (esp. w/ repeating customers/ recurring revenue) will under price.

Key assumption: competition is thin/weak/lazy/etc.

Aggressive pricing is part of doing business. The "value" of a given service is EXTREMELY hard to pin down to a specific #. Thus, aggressively-high pricing is the best way to go.

If the feedback from (potential) customers consistently returns to price, then lower prices.

Otherwise, consistently provide a great service at a medium-high price until your competitors start grabbing your market share.

</comment><comment><USER47> We once did a Dutch auction promotion. The strike price was a 30% of our regular subscription price. We then decided to offer the strike price to all users, not only the winners and that was the month by revenue, three times our MRR at the time. Two years later our MRR is getting close to that record revenue.

We decided not to change our regular price, but probably setting it at 2 times the strike price could be a good regular price point based on the Dutch auction information gathered.

</comment><comment><USER48> At the high end is the marginal benefit to your customer. At the low end is your competitor price or your own cost of production. A lot of hot air is in between, and that is where it gets complicated.

Some general considerations are your market strategy, your financial situation, your customer's finances, pain that you would solve, whether your solution results in growth or strategic advantage vs. back-office savings, ... and neither last or least, the emotional wins of the buyer.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is literally what we do.

There's a lot of methodologies out there you can look at, but in our experience - pricing is an art. How you price is unique to every company, and it's interconnected with product, marketing and positioning. Lesson #1: don't think about pricing in a silo.

Beyond that, there's all sorts of ways of thinking about it. Get in touch if you want to run through some of them for 30 mins (gratis).

[https://fantasticmrwolf.com](https://fantasticmrwolf.com)

Good luck!

David

</comment><comment><USER50> This is relevant to my interests.

Building an enterprise-oriented product, pricing is really a baffling mystery. Especially since I can't find a good single-factor usage control.

</comment><comment><USER51> I recommend the book Monetizing Innovation. It'll equip you well to talk about and think about pricing and value.

In my opinion, the hardest part of the problem is getting away from the psychology that pricing "uncomfortably high" is somehow cheating people. It isn't - your product is more often than not more valuable than the sum of its parts.

</comment><comment><USER52> This is a really good question. I have made a few web services and never had a good answer. Always felt like guess work. My instinct was to try to answer this question: How expensive is the problem my product solves? You start from there and then go down because customers are not going to perceive or feel that cost equally. So even if I make a tool that could save someone weeks of work or replace some existing $500 standard solution, I may still only charge $20 for it.

I agree with the sentiment that it's better to start higher and then come down though. You really are in a sense picking your audience. This is why I am very cautious about "free" services. It isn't just the fear of how the company might actually be trying to monetize by selling my data or using ads. Rather it's fear of the sort of community attracted by the promise of free stuff.

</comment><comment><USER53> Product mix is more important than hitting the single "best" price.

Each customer has an amount that they want to pay. If you want to maximize profits you need to allow customers to pay as much as they are willing. This means that you need a product mix that allows the higher spenders to increase utilization up to their spending limit.

Think about how Amazon sells AWS or how a high earning mobile game has zillions of product bundles.

If you really need a single best price and are doing something with 10,000+ users, you can check out a tutorial I wrote here for mobile app price optimization: [https://docs.improve.ai/docs/basic-price- optimization](https://docs.improve.ai/docs/basic-price-optimization)

</comment><comment><USER54> Economist here: other than doing a field test with a given price (break even + some margin determined more or less ad hoc) you just set a price and see what the market says. If too low you'll sell a ton, if too high you will sell few or none.

</comment><comment><USER55> Just take the equilibrium point for the Marshallian demand curves of the 'industry' you are located in.

Of course, once you achieve monopoly status, you can set the price at the intersection of your marginal costs and marginal revenue to maximise profits.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you aware of any ways to actually estimate demand curves? It seems like a really powerful way to price products, but no one appears to do it.

<comment><USER56> > _It seems like a really powerful way to price products, but no one appears > to do it._

In a closed system. There are too many factors obfuscating the landscape in real markets (most notably consumer access).

The only tidbit is, in a new market you can overcharge.

<comment><AUTHOR> > There are too many factors obfuscating the landscape in real markets

On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, machine learning gives us a powerful set of tools to analyse these factors, which we could use to come up with a model that learns from the market to predict consumer surplus (but you're right about the naive economist approach).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> If it is SaaS based, the guys over at Price Intelligently are a smart group to work with..

</comment><comment><USER58> To be honest I have no experience in pricing anything but myself (as an employee) but I would recommend to not put too much effort into it. Thinking about pricing often amounts to zero-sum thinking which drives you to fight about the breadcrumbs instead of focusing on the creation of value (for everyone). I mean I get that pricing is a necessary means of coordination but please don't succumb to the fallacy that it is a game that needs to be won AGAINST someone. If you create value, simply have an open discourse with your customers and you will find a viable strategy.

</comment><comment><USER59> We've continually raised the price on our product as we grow and add features. It was nerve wracking at first, but now are confident enough in our product that we feel good standing behind our pricing.

We are targeting larger, more stable customers, and have historically found the ones that say our pricing is too expensive are the ones that require much more support and maintenance. Have no issue seeing them go to cheaper competitors - while our target clients don't bat an eye at our pricing (which is still probably too low for that segment).

</comment><comment><USER60> I ask these questions and it works well:

1) What is a price for this product that would be too low for you to trust?

2) What is a maximum price for this product that would that would still seem like good value?

3) What would be a maximum possible price for a this product?

They can help to get you to a good starting point regarding your pricing strategy.

Also this is a great article about it:

[https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pric...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pricing)

</comment><comment><USER61> A recent thread on find the pricing through experiments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13756302](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13756302)

They recommend Amplitude if you can't build everything yourself. They say it lets you have cohorts and compare behavior between cohorts, so it probably helps compare common metrics. I don't know if it makes suggestions for experiments or helps to run them.

</comment><comment><USER62> I have an app that is market-priced. The more paying customers, the higher the price goes. This is fun for a hobby site but probably not suitable for a real business.

</comment><comment><USER63> hey everyone,

this is Burc Tanir - the co-founder and CEO of a competitor price tracking software called Prisync ([http://prisync.com/](http://prisync.com/)). my answer is more for products sold through e-commerce, or more specifically online retail. in e-commerce worldwide, most of the companies want to have the lowest prices - of course, while remaining profitable - but it's hard to be sure about that without knowing the competitors' dynamic prices. with our solution that works for e-commerce companies of all sizes, it's possible to be the lowest in an efficient way.

also, other than automating competitor price tracking, we previously crafted an in-depth article to give more detailed information on this topic, so feel free to check that out too:

[https://blog.prisync.com/ecommerce-pricing- strategies/](https://blog.prisync.com/ecommerce-pricing-strategies/)

</comment><comment><USER64> I recommend the book "priceless." It goes through the psychology behind how you set a price. E.g. Why there are expensive wines on a wine list.

[https://www.amazon.com/Priceless-Myth-Fair-Value- Advantage/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Priceless-Myth-Fair-Value- Advantage/dp/0809078813)

</comment><comment><USER65> Great book for this: Monetizing Innovation ([https://www.amazon.ca/Monetizing- Innovation-Companies-Design...](https://www.amazon.ca/Monetizing-Innovation- Companies-Design-Product/dp/1119240867))

</comment><comment><USER66> I think first you want a market strategy - are you competing on price or quality (features, speed or whatever.) Then the rest of the market is a guidepost for this - if competing on quality, accept you will make less sales but have higher margins.

</comment><comment><USER67> I'm starring this to read every single comment once I get home cause this is a huge stumbling block for me. My current strategy is to take my right thumb and suck a number out of it and due to my nature I tend to undercut myself quite badly.

</comment><comment><USER68> Just a tip: remember that the price is always the output of an algorithm based on the product you offer. Always think "What should the price of this product be?" rather than "What should I offer to reach this price tag?".

</comment><comment><USER69> I wrote about pricing tiers many years ago: [http://sachinagarwal.com/setting- pricing-for-a-startup-the-r...](http://sachinagarwal.com/setting-pricing-for- a-startup-the-rule-of-80)

</comment><comment><USER70> (Worked many years in product pricing for startup to IPO company)

To even begin on a baseline of how you're going to price a product, you need to understand the unit economics of your product. I think too many people fall into the economics trap and apply a theoretical approach into revenue management, when in reality it's more about understanding your business model, how you expect to grow, and the finances; then you apply economic models.

Understanding the financial aspect will allow to create at least a cost based pricing model or margin based pricing; from there it can grow into a value based model where you figure out the value proposition for each customer/market segmentation.

But, obviously all of this is developed mid-stage, and early stage just figure out what gets the customers in the door.

There are a lot of good resources online about this subject.

</comment><comment><USER71> Found this book laying around at work; maybe it's of use:

[http://download.red-gate.com/ebooks/DJRTD_eBook.pdf](http://download.red- gate.com/ebooks/DJRTD_eBook.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER72> You can set initial price based on your cost and expected/preferred margin. And you can always use discount/promotions later to mark down the price, based on the market and feedback, etc.

</comment><comment><USER73> Just finish my SaaS product pricing last week. Exit strategy plays here. You can set the price by % of the customer value or the cost + margin if you don't want to hack the business model.

</comment><comment><USER74> If you have enough volume* you can do simple a/b testing to find the demand curve.

*this is probably less than you might think; at low volumes you can run a for a week then b for another week.

<comment><USER75> I'm a huge fan of A/B testing, and use it regularly. (Even wrote an open source implementation with a backend running on AWS Lambda), but have a bit of a moral / public perception / potential backlash fear of running pricing A/B tests... How do you deal with this? (Or you don't?)

<comment><USER76> >pricing A/B tests moral dilemma

You could call the lower price "on sale".

<comment><USER77> That would pollute the test, IMO. As things like JCPenny's failed pricing experiments show, price-consciousness and deal-consciousness are two different things, and can lead to some stupid behavior where customers only buy overpriced goods that are marked as being on sale, rather than buying the same thing at the same price without the sale tag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I recommend the book "Monetizing Innovation". It won't give you an answer, but it will equip you to understand value and think about pricing.

</comment><comment><USER78> Slightly off topic but I think I'd pay for slack if I could have the premium features on _all_ of the conversations _I_ have with people...

</comment><comment><USER79> _Currently, they work with a PhD student to do some economic analysis, but they 're not really happy with it._

That's the sign of a risk-averse team.

</comment><comment><USER80> Golden rule - always price higher than you think. It's 100x easier to discount pricing than it is to increase pricing.

</comment><comment><USER81> Start with breaking even. Sell first. Then set prices. Raise prices only when you have more demand than product.

</comment><comment><USER82> you charge what your customers are willing to pay. no micro economic theories or price psychology is going to change that. if you charge too low though, people will wonder where the catch is. so dont charge low unless its easy to judge the quality.

to find out what they are willing to pay, ask for budget.

</comment><comment><USER83> My dad's sage advice: Think of a number, then double it. People will always pay more.

</comment><comment><USER84> [https://www.prix.ai](https://www.prix.ai)

</comment><comment><USER75> Hey Finbarr! Is this related to our chat? :)

Even if not, some great advice here! Thanks! ...but I think most of it is B2B focused primarily. I'm curios (and can't find much info) about subscription pricing for consumers in particular... And especially for products that aren't as wide spread as Spotify or Netflix.

</comment><comment><USER85> You can do surveys. You can call potential customers and ask what they would pay.

</comment><comment><USER86> Invisible Hand, works like magic.

</comment><comment><USER87> Email me Ill help.</comment>


Linkedin gets a new look - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/49433400

<comment><USER2> I don't really like this dark header in contrast with the body. Also the dropdown menu dark border looks horrible IMHO.

The rest is quite ok! :-)</comment>


Visualizing The Matterhorn as an 860,000 point cloud - <AUTHOR> https://www.mapbox.com/pointcloud/matterhorn/

<comment><USER2> I applaud the makers of this demo for adding a gif-based fallback on the error page for those of us who have no WebGL support. It shows:

"Your browser does not support this demo. Here is what you are missing:"

[[https://www.mapbox.com/pointcloud/matterhorn/css/error.gif](https://www.mapbox.com/pointcloud/matterhorn/css/error.gif)]

</comment><comment><USER3> It is actually a raw data from UAV mapping; the whole story: [https://www.mapbox.com/blog/sensefly-drone-mapping- matterhor...](https://www.mapbox.com/blog/sensefly-drone-mapping-matterhorn/)

<comment><USER4> I don't think so, the raw data should be much more accurate down to deci-, if no centimeters.

<comment><USER5> Height data derived from photogrammetry usually has lower vertical accuracy than that (even on fixed wing planes with better sensors).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The company behind the technology to turn images into point clouds is Pix4D [1]. Their website has another few pretty demos.

[1] pix4D.com

</comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't work in Chrome/Chrome Canary/Safari on OS X. Just get a black screen after the points are loaded

<comment><USER8> Works on Chrome on 10.8 here. But not Safari.

<comment><USER7> I'm still on 10.7, Chrome 32.0.1664.3 dev

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> it's just as fun to flip it around and explore the big hole in the ground

</comment><comment><USER10> This crashes Safari on my mac. Seems to be a segfault originating somewhere in the graphics card driver. Card is an ATI HD 4870. Running MacOS X 10.8.5/Safari 6.0.5.

<comment><USER11> worked for me in Safari on my Retina MacBook Pro. Running OS X 10.8.5 and Safari 6.0.5

<comment><USER10> Yes, I think it must be a problem with the graphics card or driver rather than the browser itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a low res version of the original data, because of limitations of webgl. If you want to see the making of, as well as the full res pointcloud (over 300 millions!!!), check out this video:

Mapping the impossible: [http://youtu.be/jh4kRatBNkk](http://youtu.be/jh4kRatBNkk)

<comment><USER12> Wrong link, the video mapping the impossible is this one: [http://youtu.be/NuZUSe87miY](http://youtu.be/NuZUSe87miY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can we get Leap Motion support in this? Their API is pretty simple/well made, and it's very well suited to easily rotating 3D stuff.

</comment><comment><USER14> i don't have a reference to compare it to aside from a heightmap i used for some rendering years ago, but 25mb for the *.asc seems pretty big for the quality it puts out

</comment><comment><USER15> What's the point of point clouds?

<comment><USER11> my question also. This is useful for what, exactly?

<comment><USER16> Point clouds are not very useful themselves, if we had a choice we would skip them. They are the result of turning any measured data (like pictures or depth samples or whatever) into a 3d visualisation.

Ideally you have collected enough data to reconstruct the surface geometry with reasonable accuracy, but realistically often you don't.

Our minds are rather good at inferring surface geometry from point clouds, our algorithms not so much yet as far as I know. So sometimes (as in the case of this visualisation) it suffices to show people just the point cloud.</comment></comment></comment>


Alaska Airlines, Flying Above an Industry's Troubles - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/business/alaska-airlines-flying-above-an-industrys-troubles.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> Is anyone else totally fascinated by the UI design of slide 8 in the slideshow?

[http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2013/03/03/business/03alask...](http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2013/03/03/business/03alaska- slide-show.html?ref=business&pagewanted=all#8)

I'm counting up the datapoints in the 150+ flights in that display, which appears to be based on a particular aircraft:

      * origin/destination
      * flight number
      * dep/arr times
      * airport status (color of airport code)
      * flight status (color of bar - complete/inprogress/delayed/cancelled/?)
      * still trying to figure out what the little red/green whiskers are...

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing the red/green lines are showing if the planes are running late/early. Red lines indicate a delay with the start of the line being the expected take off/landing, and the opposite for green lines.

<comment><USER2> Ah, you're right: looking at the patterns of the positioning of the lines, at the beginning of a flight, red lines extend left towards the scheduled departure for a late departure, green to the right for an early one. The reverse applies for arrivals. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's also easier to stay away from troubles when you have a natural geographic barrier that limits the number of competitors in your region.

<comment><USER5> AS flies to a lot more than Alaska - it's really somewhat of a misnomer. They're hubbed out of SEA and PDX and fly nationally, though their scheduling is not as extensive as the majors[1].

I used to fly Alaska a lot when I lived in Seattle - one of the better airlines in the country to be sure. On-time performance was always excellent and the service is always no-bullshit (compare with United, an airline I have _literally_ never had a 100%-smooth flight with).

[1] <http://www.alaskaair.com/content/route-map.aspx>

<comment><USER6> I used to like Alaska Airlines. If you are old enough, you'll remember they actually used to be proud of the food they served. These days you could swap the experience with any of the major airlines. They are more focused on squeezing every cent out of you than making it a pleasant experience. Extra charge for food, extra charge for checking bags, extra charge for in flight movie.

My last flight on Alaska I was seated near the rear of the plane, and they actually ran out of food before they got to my row. They are clearly so focused on saving a few dollars optimizing for not carrying too much food they are willing to risk a few passengers sitting hungry for 5 hours. And the sinks didn't work in the bathrooms which is gross. And I sent them feedback about it a couple weeks ago and haven't heard a thing back. So a big meh to Alaska Airlines..

<comment><USER6> Just to follow up - Alaska did contact me today and apologized. That's good, but I still think they are focused to their own detriment on penny pinching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've definitely spent too much time in Fairbanks (flying Alaska Airlines, natch), because when I read

 _The temperature that evening was a brain-numbing minus 16 degrees Fahrenheit_

I thought, "Oh, 16 below isn't so bad. 40 below—now _that's_ cold!" Fairbanks residents consider anything above -20 to be not so bad—and in fact elementary schools can hold recess outdoors down to that temperature—but even they will concede that -30 or -40 is too damn cold.

That said, it's not like I embrace the cold. I mean, I live in Pasadena, California. We have a parade with fresh flowers every year in the dead of winter just to show off how warm it is. But it has been an interesting experience learning that there is an unambiguous difference between how -20 and -40 feel; despite appearances, they aren't both simply "arbitrarily cold".</comment>


AI thinks like a corporation (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/11/26/ai-thinks-like-a-corporation-and-thats-worrying <comment><USER2> There's a great article by Ted Chiang about this[1], comparing the psychology of the paperclip AI scenario to the single-minded "increasing shareholder value" mentality of business, in particular, silicon valley startups.

He points out that the companies of the very people who fear the ai-apocalypse do already what they're accusing AI of, pursuing growth and 'eating the world' at all cost only to maximize narrowly defined singular goals.

[1][https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real- dang...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to- civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway)

<comment><USER3> I'd actually turn both this and the original article around, and say that corporations behave like AIs. They are artificial. They are (variably) intelligent.

The functions of processing inputs to create meaningful outputs are carried out by neurons made of meat (human employees) and of silicon. These processes are governed by rules and metaprocesses, which the entity continuously optimises and improves, in order to further its own growth and to improve its fitness for its purpose - typically, enhancing shareholder value. I cannot think of a single criteria for intelligence or even life that a corporation does not possess, from independent action to stimulus response to reproduction to consumption to predation.

I think the first true hard AI will emerge accidentally, and it will be a corporation that has largely optimised humans out of the loop - but even with humans as a component of a system, a gestalt, an artificial supra- intelligence, can still emerge.

This also neatly sidesteps the whole question of "should AIs have rights?", as corporations are already legally persons.

<comment><USER4> I agree: [http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/companies_are_ai.html](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/companies_are_ai.html)

It leads to an interesting question: Is a corporation controlled by its CEO?

<comment><USER3> Nice - that overlaps pretty much perfectly with my reasoning!

In my view, no. The CEO is at best a race condition breaking function, at worst, a parasitic infection.

If corporations are self-optimising AIs, then they will optimise CEOs out of existence if they aren't conducive to fitness.

<comment><USER5> Does that not suggest that CEOs are worth their cost to the vast majority of companies that retain them? What companies operate without a de facto CEO?

<comment><USER6> Well, CEOs may be inherited from non-optimal initial conditions of early ancestors and simply haven't been replaced by a better competitor yet. Or they have been and we don't understand that yet. Naturally occurring genomes encode for processes that result in all sorts of things that don't actually have to occur. The appendix, the frenulum, most of the DNA itself, as far as we can tell. Nature's full of random dead-ends that keep propagating because the system hasn't gotten over the barrier of the next local minimum yet.

<comment><USER7> Chicken can run faster if it had optimized its head away. Because it can ignore limiting factors like potential obstacles in its current course. But for how long?

Actual problem solving in a corporation is done by humans. Corporation policy can provide a set of incentives to align goals of its employees with the goal of the corporation and a structure to more or less effectively combine specialists' efforts. But someone had to think about the corporation as a whole and change its policies if the need arises.

Cephalization is a known evolutionary trend after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's an article with a similar premise by Charlie Stross [1]. Though both seem to apply to basically any software, not just statistical (or whatever currently falls under "AI"), and perhaps (AIUI) can be generalized to just (over)simplified models.

[1] [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude- you...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke- the-future.html)

</comment><comment> aaron-santos For another take on this corporations ≈ ai idea, I cannot recommend enough Charles Stross' 34C3 talk on this very topic. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmIgJ64z6Y4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmIgJ64z6Y4) (picks up approx 10mins in).

</comment><comment><USER9> This could go wrong in so many ways. Perfect way for un-accountability: the algorithm decided and we don't know why because it isn't transparent.

But there's some good potential too. It is a tool, it depends how we wield it or more precisely "who".

<comment><USER10> Certainly more quantitatively scruitable than any human system.

A human can tell you a more or less convincing narrative about why they did something, but you have fewer independent and objective ways to measure that than you do basically any conceivable computing system.

<comment><USER11> Yes sure, but the data and interpretation might be meaningless when explained back to humans, it's like a an intellectual showing off with terms and formulas:

"the algorithm did this because ..." followed by a debatable and unintelligible formula + data + stats that nobody would really understand and a new science needs to be invented to understand and so on

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think the common-man conception of AI is really flawed. Consider that autopilot -- clearly a form of AI -- was invented in 1914. AI is far older than computers and corporations are a clear and excellent example. It's a slippery slope -- and I think it is worth sliding all the way down. Once we realize how completely pervasive AI is, I think we have a much better understanding of how to govern it in the future.

Personally, I find cybernetics to have a much stronger philosophical basis than AI; I particularly like how Norbert Weiner described how cybernetic feedback loops can lower local entropy.

<comment><USER13> I can't think of the definition of AI you could be using to say the autopilot is an AI. Autopilot didn't teach itself to fly the plane - it was explicitly programmed to do so.

<comment><USER14> Did Deep Blue teach itself to play chess?

I'm not sure that "self-teaching" should be considered the defining criterion for AI.

<comment><USER15> It's not. Unless you want to rename decades of symbolic AI, probabilistic AI, and everything else that's not machine learning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Us humans like to think that we are the ultimate organisms and everything else is either the material that composes us (cells and tissue) or our products (corporations, cities).

Organisms are scale free systems. It's only our human bias to see humans as importany. If aliens came to visit the Earth, they most likely see this planet covered with massive algae which glow at night (ie. our cities). Cities at night are more noticeable from space than the cells which they are composed of - tissue cells (houses) or blood cells (cars and pedestrians).

For some reason all aliens in movies are pictured as these humanoid and human sized creatures which is most likely due to the same human-centric bias.

<comment><USER17> Even in books, where the limitations of costumes and sets are less relevant, most aliens are at least somewhat humanish. Though there are certainly some more exotic ones like the pattern jugglers, First Person Singular, or the Prime.

<comment><USER18> An aside, but Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Ruin/Time center on intelligent spiders and mollusks. Earth-centric as they were bio-engineered from Earth native species, but an interesting take on non-human species.

<comment><USER19> If we're name-dropping, the Vernor Vinge pack-mind dog things are another fun example of non-human races with actually non-human modes of cognition, even if they're not as far removed as Solaris/Revelation Space sentient oceans. In contrast, although I really liked A Deepness in the Sky for other reasons, the spiders ended up feeling way too much like humans in funny bodies rather than any kind of actual non-human intelligent species.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Obligatory plug for The Corporation (book & film)

[https://thecorporation.com/](https://thecorporation.com/)

The similarity I see between AI and corporations is single-mindedness. They ignore anything outside the scope of their interest, "externalities" in the parlance of The Coporation. Those externalities can have very real consequences.

</comment><comment> ld-50-agi-v3 My advanced image recognition matched that picture to:

1) Rectilinear behive (95% confidence) 2) Rectilinear jail (5% confidence) 3) Ancestral forest home (0% confidence)

</comment><comment><USER21> ML definitely doesn't. Not a hierarchical system at all. There have been AIs which work like hierarchical control systems, but ML systems are almost the anti-pattern to that.

<comment><USER22> ML is hierarchical. the upstream layers categorise more abstractly and downstream layers categorise more specifically.

<comment><USER23> Not all deep learning is hierarchical and not all machine learning is deep learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Research needs money.

Big money tends to go towards what generates great returns.

Thus a lot of research is devoted to dull tasks that bring business value.

No need to involve AI, or research for that matter.

</comment><comment><USER25> AI thinks like a corporation in the sense that neither really thinks. One is misleading buzzword for modern computer-driven pattern recognition & the other is a legal label for a group of people trying to make money together. This premise is kind of silly.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is understandeable: Both AI and corporations are psychopaths - they have no emotions to get in the way of rational thinking, with ultimate goal of maximizing their personal gain.

Question remains: how do we teach AI empathy ?

<comment><USER27> We teach AI empathy by programming it with the heurestics of care--optimizing for human well-being instead of profit. A difficult thing to achieve when the entities paying for the design of AIs are themselves driven by the profit motive, and for-profit AIs are self-perpetuating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> AI doesn't think. It's just a tool based on math.

<comment><USER29> "Just" is something of a sneaky word: [https://alistapart.com/blog/post/the- most-dangerous-word-in-...](https://alistapart.com/blog/post/the-most- dangerous-word-in-software-development/)

But by some measure, human thinking is itself math: emergent pattern- recognition traveling through cortical hierarchies and deeply nested layers of abstraction and metaphor. While it's indisputable that there's a qualitative leap between something like computer vision, and the basic reasoning capacity and perceptual systems of a human (even a toddler), there isn't anything intrinsically magical about atoms rather than bytes. It appears to simply be a factor of scale, and the billion-year-old "legacy code" gifted to our wetware by iterated selection pressures.</comment></comment>


Watched anything like this? [YouTube] - happy-go-lucky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ub98vlXPcg&index=18&list=RDMMfpWNimba344 <comment> happy-go-lucky Go towards the end. You won't regret it for sure.</comment>


Thoughts on Startups - <AUTHOR> http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/02/26/thoughts-on-startups <comment><USER2> Opportunity cost? Terrible argument. If you even let yourself think about this, you'd never do anything.

<comment><USER3> I bring in that for reasons why most people don't think about starting a startup. My argument is entirely against that.

<comment><USER2> Yes, we agree. Lots of good reasons for not starting a startup. That isn't one of them.

<comment><USER3> Care to explain your reasoning?

<comment><USER2> This kinda reminds me of the old argument that Bill Gates earns so quickly, that he'd be wasting his time if he bent over to pick up a $100 dollar bill.

I remember the first time I got a billing rate of over $100/hour. I literally stopped fixing food in my kitchen and started buying carry out food so that I could bill more hours. If I save $8/hour cooking but lose $100/hour because I'm in my kitchen instead of my office, then I'm effectively LOSING $92/hour. Can't have that.

So I started changing other things. Dry cleaning instead of laundry. Got a maid instead of cleaning my own office. Even cut my hair short to save 3 minutes in the shower.

Starting to see how easy it is to get carried away with the "opportunity cost" argument?

What's the worst thing you could possibility do? Anything that takes time without earning. Which is EXACTLY what happens in an early stage startup. That's why I simply can't let myself revert to that kind of thinking.

If accountants ran the world, we'd still be riding horses to work.

<comment><USER4> I think that's the same point the article makes... If you worry about opportunity cost... then you aren't going to want to join a start up.

Did you even read the article?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


VR on steam grew 0.06% in july and 0.02% in august - <AUTHOR> http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ <comment><USER2> Everyone who wanted a vive/rift has probably ordered it at this point.

And the software offering is so abysmal that developers are going to have to work a bit harder if they want new interested users.

Sony is releasing their own VR system soon, we'll see what comes out of that.

If Steam really wanted to make VR adoption shoot up through the roof, it'd be simple: release a VR exclusive Orange Box 2: Half Life 3, Left 4 Dead 3, TF3 or Portal 3, and a new IP. Boom, 10 million sold the first weekend.

Of course, the hardware is still a bit immature, expensive, and the computers required to drive it need to be beefy- so they might be saving that card up their sleeve for 18-24 months from now.

<comment><USER3> > Everyone who wanted a vive/rift has probably ordered it at this point.

I'm not convinced. In my small sample of ~10 friends, all would like one, but no-one can afford one.

<comment><USER4> Let's clarify. What matters is not who would want one. What matters is who wants one at the current price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While there's some interesting and fun games on VR from the looks of it, I don't think it's found it's killer app yet, the thing that really captures the mainstream's attention.

Also, I'd love to try it, but I'm not motivated enough to shell out $1400+ to do so (I'd need to upgrade my computer too), when I suspect I'll play it a lot for a month and then shelve it for a long time. Maybe my mind would be changed if I could actually try it, but I don't know anyone who has one.

The closest I've gotten is watching some annoying personalities on Youtube gush and gawk over them while displaying a video of what they're seeing, and that hasn't been enough to win me over yet.

So one thing I think should be done, that isn't, is these things need a place that people can go to try them, like a setup in Best Buy or something. If I could see it for myself how much it changes things, maybe I'd be more motivated.

And this is coming from someone who used to be in the game industry and wants the next hobby game I develop to be designed with VR support in mind. That's how bad these companies are at getting these systems in front of people to try them out.

I'm sure it's not easy to get in the big stores, but Sega did a 'bus tour' to show off the Genesis to people 20+ years ago, they can figure something out if they want this to succeed long-term.

<comment><USER6> Some Microsoft stores have demos.

<comment><USER5> Actually if we're talking specifically the HoloLens, I'm going to be attending a meetup for a local developer group in a couple weeks that goes over developing for it and I'm hoping I'll be able to try it as well.

I was thinking more specifically the Oculus or the Vive, though. If those are demoed at the Microsoft stores too, then I'll happily check them out, but I don't know why they'd have them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As other commenters have pointed out there is the chicken and egg problem right now with little interest from big software houses until hardware adoption increases and consumers hesitant to spend the $800 + $400(gpu upgrade) for access to some neat but still limited games. Based on my experience with the vive so far I am certain that VR is going to catch on eventually however I am not sure it's going to be this hardware generation. If anyone is interested trying to do some VR dev I highly recommend Unity with the SteamVR plugin. With about $40 dollars in assets and about 8hrs worth of programming I was able to build a VR demo of a procedurally generated dungeon I could walk/tele around and pickup and through objects that looked pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's not like we don't know how to launch a new gaming system at this point: you package up everything the consumer needs to get started for around ~$500, you line up a couple of launch titles that are really great games or license famous IP, you strike some massive retail partnerships and spend massive cash on marketing.

You are building an ecosystem and it's all about getting critical mass which is hugely expensive. Even new peripherals for already successful console systems are quite hard to launch because you can't put the marketing behind them that you'd put behind a whole new system launch. VR tech obviously has great potential but the ecosystem, the mass market product and marketing, the titles are all not there.

<comment><USER9> But VR costs way more than $500, because the true cost is not just the VR headset itself but a new high-end graphics card to drive it.

After the headset, the graphics card(s), and a couple of the few VR games that are out, you're easily over $1,000.

<comment><USER8> Fine, but the gaming market is what it is. The model that would work for mass adoption would probably look something like: sell a console with 1 VR headset and 1-3 games for $700, take a loss on it, and turn a profit later on more games and headsets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How fast is VR changing? I keep hearing about new hardware / manufacturers / versions - so even though I want to pickup a headset, I'm planning to wait until the market and options settle down and a clear winner stands out.

</comment><comment><USER11> I demoed HTC Vive and wasn't impressed by the resolution. Current VR games look cartoony. Apparently realistic VR requires 8K+ resolution per eye, and VR is 10 years off from becoming "mainstream." So I'll wait. There are plenty of awesome "2D" games that look incredible in 4K in the meantime.

<comment><USER12> I think compute is more limiting to the graphics than mere pixel density. Certainly if what bothers you is that it seems low-poly.

Now if you can track one's fovea fast enough to render just where you're looking at, then you don't need anything as far off like 8K+; your eye is not nearely that dense.

You do still need a screen with such a density though...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just got a Vive a couple of weeks ago, and I do not regret my purchase, however it is certainly not for everyone at the moment.

I'm sure most of you are aware that right now VR is suffering from a chicken/egg problem. There are too few VR owners to attract large studios to make great content for the platform. Similarly, there is too little content to attract a large number of VR hardware purchasers. I went into my purchase understanding this, and that even though the hardware is now being marketed to consumers it should still be considered an "early adopter" piece of kit.

I do feel like I am getting my value out of it, however. I have tried several games and demos, and I am regularly impressed as I find various developers' new and innovative approaches to the platform. I've also demoed the Vive to several friends and family, and so far everyone has found something to love about it. Just about everyone that's put the headset on has been caught with their mouth agape at one point.

Some of the older folks were reluctant, afraid of handling the controllers or trying to figure out what to do. In those cases I would show them a more "experiential" application, especially the ones with little to no interaction. theBlue, Kismet, Impossible Travel Agency, and The Lab's "Secret Shop" were big hits in that regard, though each one of those is largely a one-trick pony. Once you've experienced them once or twice they have relatively little to bring you back.

The younger crowd found enjoyment in Space Pirate Trainer and Fruit Ninja, but there is little variety in the gameplay. The games prove a mechanic, but don't have a huge amount of content or plot to speak of. You could chase after high scores in an arcade-like fashion, but apart from incrementing numbers there's not much reward or progression.

There are some games that are Oculus-exclusive which I would really like to try, such as the newly released Obduction (from the makers of Myst & Riven). I understand the developers are working on Vive support right now, which is nice. I haven't looked into Re-Vive yet, which is supposed to offer limited support for Oculus exclusives on the Vive headset, and honestly I'd like to try to avoid such things if I can. I've been pretty disappointed in Oculus for how it's trying to create platform lock-in by paying developers for exclusivity. I understand it from a business standpoint, but at this early stage in the VR market a shared game library would be vastly more beneficial.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sourced from /r/oculus on Reddit

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/50vst9/vr_on_steam_gr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/50vst9/vr_on_steam_grew_006_in_july_and_002_in_august/)

</comment><comment><USER14> The Vive is outselling the Rift? Anyone have insight or data?

<comment><USER15> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12219043](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12219043)

you can see this previous discussion. many people who own both claimed they shelved oculus.</comment></comment>


How Nike Avoids Paying Taxes in Australia - <AUTHOR> http://abc.net.au/news/2017-11-07/paradise-papers-the-journey-your-money-takes-after-buying-nike/9075626 <comment><USER2> I've had this very cynical idea for a while now. And that is, the only way we will get governments to stop this nonsense is if we democratize the extreme tax evasion... ahem ahem.. sorry, "smart tax planning" that these companies take advantage of.

Perfect opportunity for the Stripe Atlas team :-)

If you make it so an individual can pay $50 a month and they get this full double Dutch Irish sandwich shell company crap setup for them, and millions of citizens start to get incomes this way and pay their "lawful amount" rather than their fair share, then governments will start to clamp down.

Because right now we (private citizens who pay 25-40% in income taxes) are powerless in convincing our governments to do something about this travesty.

Thoughts? Remember, as these companies say with their weasel words "we pay the full taxes we owe!" So it would be legal.

<comment><USER3> That would be funny, but I think if you actually tried to do it, you would very quickly run into overheads which make it unviable for most individuals. A lot of tax havens outsource the cost of compliance by requiring all financials to be independently audited, for instance, and when you have a couple of layers of shell companies that's 15-20k right there.

That, and you probably still end up having to pay income tax on it when you bring it into the country.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. And that is why you won't see small or even mid-sized companies arranging their taxes like this: it's just too expensive.

Only big companies -- Apple, Nike, Amazon, Google -- can afford to save international taxes like this.

IMO, the better solution is 100% sales tax (ala the US FairTax proposal [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax)). Companies avoid paying corporate income taxes far easier than avoiding sales tax.

<comment><USER5> How many individuals would we need in order to make it worthwhile? Asking for a friend.

Maybe we could work together with people in another country - because we all want to pay "the full taxes we owe".

<comment><USER4> ...how many people do you file taxes with?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Transfer pricing. It's the same for all big companies operating in Australia (and probably most other countries)

Of course there's nothing illegal about this and it's very difficult to really do something about it. The Australian Tax Office is struggling with this problem every day.

<comment><USER7> I think it's pretty easy to deal with it actually. Just apply a top line revenue tax of something like 2%. That can't be avoided because it is incurred at the point of sale. So it becomes an effective tax on accessing the market of that state/country. Then you would still have the corporate income tax that gets applied but companies would be able to offset their income tax liability with taxes paid for this new top line revenue tax. So it essentially becomes a sort of AMT tax for companies to ensure that they are paying some sort of minimum tax. 2% might not sound like much but when you consider that it's top line revenue and the majority of companies have profit margins in the 10-25% range, this equates to a minimum tax rate of 8-20%.

<comment><USER8> How does that differ significantly from sales tax/GST? We'd get the same government revenue increase from increasing GST from 10 to 12%, no?

Ultimately the cost of all taxes will be borne by consumers anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think there is one solution to this, the G20/WTO type organisations need to come to an agreement that to trade with each other they have minimum tax rates. Countries are free to tax higher but if say these nations agree to say a minimum 25% type thing, then any country or company operating outside of this agreement is not welcome. I'd be inclined to do the same thing for personal tax. Otherwise we risk a race to the bottom for tax rates if we let cooperates continue this.

And this is 'capitalism' done right. Part of governments role is to create a 'level playing field' for business and stop a handful of larger/international companies having a non business advantage.

Further, I'd be inclined to go a bit nuclear with punishments and make rules that abuser pay 100x what they gained and the company assets/brand in which they did this for are seized and auctioned.

This later seems harsh but if we don't stop companies doing this we may see serious repercussions on government's ability to provide for society as we know it. Companies need to feel the risk is not worth the reward. I doubt this will happen, as an Australian our Prime Minister us known to have his hundreds of millions stashed in the Caymen Islands. What an example for the nation and likelyhood of crackdown seems low.

<comment><USER10> _And this is 'capitalism' done right. Part of governments role is to create a 'level playing field' for business and stop a handful of larger/international companies having a non business advantage._

States do not exist over capitalism but under it. States competing for tax money is capitalism working perfectly, and about time this tax nonsense (or atleast overcharging productive class) comes to halt.

To give an contrarian opinion, I am extremely happy that states are finally made to work for the money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I agree that corporate tax avoidance is a problem and needs to be addressed on a global basis.

But as an Australian, I think we're missing the elephant in the room. We hold up these prominent brands like Nike and Apple, but ignore the fact that they are products designed and manufactured elsewhere. All we do in Australia is open the shipping container and distribute the goods to stores. Very little value is added in Australia. Regardless of tax changes, the tax revenue from simple distribution is always going to be low.

If we want to improve our corporate tax revenue, we need to _create things in Australia_ , whether that's manufacturing, software, services or whatever.

<comment><USER12> I don't think that closes the loophole. Although I don't know much about taxation. AFAIK an Australian manufacturer could just as easily do the same thing - set up a shell company in Ireland or wherever then fund the local company's operations and factories through 'loans' which must be paid back to the parent company in Ireland

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of how some pairs of Converse sneakers have a thin layer of felt on the bottom that rubs off, so that they're considered "slippers" at the time they're exported and not "sneakers" to get a cheaper tariff.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is not fair</comment>


Why You Should Find Product-Market Fit Before Sniffing Around For Venture Money - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcolabs.com/3014841/why-you-should-find-product-market-fit-before-sniffing-around-for-venture-money

<comment><USER2> "The next time a VC ignores your success converting potential clients and only wants to discuss how you plan to drive traffic then I suggest you find another VC."

Thank you Andy Rachleff for this. I was worried that we are doing something wrong. Unfortunately from our experience it is not only VC's who just looking at growth, but many angels as well.

Even YC and other accelerators are all about growth now. Before we submitted our application for YC this summer we got some alumni feedback. The main theme was: "YC is all about growth, why didn't you grow much over this year?"

We talked to some investors and same thing - "what about your growth?".

We are consumer web company with huge addressable market (>50b) trying to create new type of product. We spent a year iterating to make sure that our customers love what we offer. We measure this by repeat business. Our iteration cycle is about 2 weeks - if we tweak something, we need about 2 weeks to see if there is change in repeat business. For our complex product it took a lot of time to figure out main features.

We figured out what works and have our prototype website serving our customers. We have revenue and repeat customers - some stick with us for a year now. We thought this would be good time to get into an accelerator to tie loose ends before we step on growth pedal. But it looks like you either have to be already in growth stage or one of 0.01% ("... super young, well- connected, Stanford CS or EE, worked at Facebook early..." [1]) to get interest from accelerators these days. I don't blame them - there are so many applicants that they have pool to pick 0.01% and growth.

What surprised me was that no one ever asked us if we figured out value proposition and what we need to do to get to the growth stage. So far we funded our company from our savings, but it looks like we'll need about 3 more months of runtime before we can cover our cost and start investing in growth. Instead of some smart investor getting good deal on pre-growth company, I lined up a consulting gig that will bridge our runtime, even though it will distract me from getting ready to growth stage.

[1] [http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/07/16/ring-the- freak...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/07/16/ring-the-freaking- cash-register/)</comment>


JQuery Fundamentals - <AUTHOR> http://jqfundamentals.com/book/book.html

<comment><USER2> I never understood why certain books who are covering a framework or a very particular aspect of programming must start with what is basically a short tutorial about the programming language they are using. Maybe it's just me but I always assumed that someone who buys a book about JQuery already knows Javascript and if he doesn't a short tutorial just isn't enough. Take a look for example at [Hacking - The Art of Exploitation](<http://nostarch.com/hacking2.htm>), a great book that deals with stuff like buffer overflows, network sniffing and shell code injection but starts with a tutorial about C...

<comment><USER3>
      Maybe it's just me but I always assumed that someone who
      buys a book about JQuery already knows Javascript and if he
      doesn't a short tutorial just isn't enough.

There were many to come to Ruby by trying Ruby on Rails first, and I think there are many to discover Javascript by having to accomplish something with jQuery. Of course that's not the ideal way to learn things, but your assumption is often wrong.

<comment><USER4> Do you really think these people properly learned Ruby by reading a Rails- specific book with a 10-page overview of Ruby?

There's some good business in picking up Rails projects when a client discovers they've hired someone who really only knows how to wire up pre-coded plugins to auto-generated MVC code, and cannot custom-code special requirements.

<comment><USER5> Personally I think YAGNI can apply to skill sets as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm looking forward to seeing them add a section on infinite undo / back + forward button support.

<comment><USER7> (hopefully on topic) if i understand correctly, this isn't exactly a jquery "thing", but jquery is certainly of assistance...

i wrote something for this quite a while ago (likely could be improved...), <http://gist.github.com/614392>

<comment><USER6> Thanks catshirt :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've never touched JQuery. I learned Javascript, and by the time I was comfortable enough with that I didn't really want to have to be bothered with an unfamiliar syntax. If I've ever needed to accomplish something repetitively, I've written my own little (and probably very badly-optimised) JS library - that's definitely helped me understand more about JS than using JQuery ever would.

<comment><USER9> Counterpoint: I understand Javascript and the DOM all too well, and coding my own "poorly-optimized" library for things that could be handled in one line of jQuery strikes me as a huge waste of time.

<comment><USER8> OK, I won't be self-deprecating on HN in the future then... it's not poorly optimised. The point I was trying to make is that I learned far more about how Javascript works by learning the language first and thoroughly than I ever would have by learning how to use JQuery. My particular area of work means that cross-browser compatibility isn't a problem - hence writing my own library that might not be compatible with older browsers is not an issue, and it is also better for my own edification.

<comment><USER9> Upvoted. I hope I didn't come across as blasting you. I agree that hand-coding your own Javascript is the best way to learn, and a front-end developer should know pure Javascript as well as jQuery. That said, for real-world applications, a stable third-party library is a better idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love this book! The advanced topics really helped me out with some performance issues I was having with my own sites.

Definitely a recommended read.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks ! I have been waiting for that for a long time now, not having that much time to read this documentation, that one, this one, etc...

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice! There's some really useful examples in the advanced chapters.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've learned JavaScript and JQuery by this book. Very good one.</comment>