The world's top industries would be unprofitable with externalities priced in - <AUTHOR> http://grist.org/business-technology/none-of-the-worlds-top-industries-would-be-profitable-if-they-paid-for-the-natural-capital-they-use/ <comment><USER3> A study I found incredible was The Harvard study on the external costs of coal: [http://cleantechnica.com/2011/02/17/cost-of- coal-500-billion...](http://cleantechnica.com/2011/02/17/cost-of- coal-500-billion-year-in-u-s-harvard-study-finds). Half a trillion in external costs in the U.S. alone.

An environmental group our law school worked with (ELPC) lobbied hard to get two coal in the middle of Chicagoland (Fisk and Crawford) shut down. They did a study estimating the negative externalitiesmofnthe two century old plants at $127 million, the majority of which fell on working class people in the areas around the plants.

A related phenomenon I found interesting is an LSE paper (can't find the link offhand) arguing that the GDP calculation vastly overstated the GDP of countries built on resource extraction. Income is change in wealth, but when $100 of coal is sold, it is counted as $100 to GDP. But the bulk of that price is offset by the decreased value of coal reserves in the ground, which isn't counted in GDP even though its part of the change in wealth.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's quite a bit of evidence for _induced innovation_ from energy prices. As the cost of energy goes up, so does the rate of innovation in finding more economical ways to use it.

Of course, a corollary is the _Jevons paradox_ : as energy efficiency goes up, demand for products that use energy also goes up when energy price is held steady. A popular example is the home refrigerator, which has gotten bigger at about the same rate that it has gotten more efficient.

One way around this is to ensure that energy prices continue to increase so that efficiency gains don't lead to increased overall energy consumption. That means some kind of green tax - preferably something designed to be revenue neutral via equivalent cuts to, say, income tax.

<comment><USER5> >One way around this is to ensure that energy prices continue to increase so that efficiency gains don't lead to increased overall energy consumption. That means some kind of green tax - preferably something designed to be revenue neutral via equivalent cuts to, say, income tax.

The key is that it doesn't have to be "energy prices" but only "unsustainable energy" prices, i.e. fossil fuels. And then you have your method of making the tax revenue neutral: Tax fossil fuel, use the money to subsidize non-fossil energy. Result is that net energy prices don't rise by very much, but they shift away from fossil fuels and toward sustainable energy.

You can control how fast this happens just by adjusting the amount of the tax. And yes, imposing an immediate 10000% tax on oil would get people to stop using it very quickly indeed, but a somewhat more gradual phase out may be less disruptive -- a 50% tax, for example, with a promise to raise it even more as time passes to encourage people to buy electric cars and corporations to stop wasting money looking for new deposits of fossil fuels.

<comment><USER4> Yes, absolutely. A nuanced, evidence-based approach is best.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sensationalist headline. "Top industries" - when ranked by environmental impact. Kinda renders the article a tautology?

<comment><USER7> True, although measuring industries by environmental impact is just as valid as using, say, revenue or profit or number of people employed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >coal is the enemy of the human race

What a spoiled, Western-centric, historically ignorant point of view. Without coal mining in England, there would have been no steam engine, no railways, and no modern economy. Preaching to the Chinese about the evilness of coal is a classic case of pulling up the ladder after you've climbed on it.

<comment><USER3> Nobody ever seems to realize how un-economic arguments like these are. Say there had been a coal tax from day 1 in England that internalize the external costs of coal. Saying the market wouldn't have still gone through the industrial revolution is tantamount to saying that industrial society is not economically efficient! Because that's exactly what things like coal taxes do --let the market manage the externality to allow an efficient equilibrium to be reached.

<comment><USER9> Exactly, he externality argument is about economic efficiency, and does not value environmentalism at all. It's about discovering the dollar cost that a single entity is extracting from others property. Many environmentalists hate it because of that; it's an argument that inherently trusts in free markets, instead of environmental purity.

<comment><USER3> A lot of environmentalists hate it not because of the trust in the markets per se, but because they see policy makers tend to discount the economic value of the environment. If you show that something is causing $100m in externalized costs, even if the government acts to mitigate it might only shift $20m in costs (because "jobs"). Which is un-economic, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you are going to try to account for the costs of "externalities" you also need to make at least the same effort to account for the benefits. How many people live longer, healthier lives due to the availability of cheap, abundant energy?

<comment><USER3> The difference is that the benefits of electricity are generally priced in, either through taxes (for public lights and whatnot) or through utility bills.

Here is an illustration. Would you rather live next to a coal plant or a solar farm? Would you rather get electricity from a coal plant at 2 dollars, or a solar plant at 3? Note how in the first case, the price of electricity is irrelevant because the external effect of the plant on you is the same no matter the price of electiricty. You can't decrease it by using less. In the second case, price is the only relevant consideration. The coal electricity doesn't have any positive benefit to you not accounted for in the price.

"cheap" by definition can't be a positive externality because the definition of externality is costs and benefits not accounted for in price.

<comment><USER11> _benefits of electricity are generally priced in_

The societal benefits of cheap electricity are no more "priced in" than the negative environmental externalities of coal use.

You can't put a benefits dollar value to society on all the women in the work force who would otherwise be preparing a lot more meals from scratch. You can't put a benefits dollar value to society on the productivity gains from all the people who would have died of childhood diseases that we have cures for thanks to western medicine.

You're obviously in favor of accounting for one factor in the cost/benefit analysis of coal power and ignoring the others. I think it's hubris and folly to do so.

<comment><USER3> The exercise here is accounting for costs and benefits external to the power producer/consumer transaction. Any costs and benefits arising from the transaction are factored into the price of electricity. If electricity allows women to participate in the work force instead of making meals from scratch, that presumably increases demand for electricity, which affects the price. In theory, the benefits that stem from people having electrical service should be reflected in the price of that service.

Accounting for externalized costs is a wholly different exercise. It's an accounting of the costs that do not arise out of the producer/consumer transaction and thus cannot affect the price of electricity through bargaining. Health costs of coal are one such cost. People bear that cost whether or not they even have electric service, and their level of usage does not affect the level of the costs they incur. This kind of cost is not priced into the price of electricity from coal. The benefit that would be relevant in this accounting is a benefit from electricity that you get whether or not you directly or indirectly pay for electricity. Your wife being able to work is not such a benefit--you only get that benefit if you pay for electricity.

Note the wiggle word both you and the poster above use: "cheap electricity" not just "electricity." It's not "electricity versus no electricity" its "cheap electricity versus more expensive electricity." The benefits from cheaper versus more expensive electricity are entirely internal to the producer/consumer relationship an are thus priced in to the price of electricity. They're not the same as external environmental costs which are not priced in to the price of electricity.

<comment><USER11> _People bear that cost whether or not they even have electric service_

Just like a child cured by Western medicine gets the benefit without having to necessarily be a consumer of electricity. When I mentioned women in the work force as a benefit, I didn't mean to the individual. I was talking about the societal advantage to having a more productive work force. That is not factored into the purchase of a KWh of electricity.

No, "cheap electricity" aren't wiggle words that describe an internal relationship. Cheap electricity was a necessary condition for the cascade of advancements we've made over the last 60 years. In this thread, I've seen the argument, "If only we had charged for externalities from the beginning of electrical generation" - as though we would be where we are today in all other areas of Western life if we had stalled the production of CHEAP electricity for 80 years while we waited to develop alternatives that were themselves predicated upon the cheap electricity we got from coal in the first place.

<comment><USER3> > I was talking about the societal advantage to having a more productive work > force. That is not factored into the purchase of a KWh of electricity.

But it is. If society as a whole benefits more from electricity, their demand goes up, which raises the price of electricity. You're just trying to double- count the benefit.

> as though we would be where we are today in all other areas of Western life > if we had stalled the production of CHEAP electricity for 80 years while we > waited to develop alternatives that were themselves predicated upon the > cheap electricity we got from coal in the first place.

The situation isn't banning the use of coal from the beginning. It's forcing the external costs of coal to be accounted for from the beginning. Economic theory tells us that this wouldn't have stalled our development.

<comment><USER11> _their demand goes up, which raises the price of electricity_

If that were true, then electricity should be astonishingly expensive because we use astonishingly more of it than we did 60 years ago, yet the last time I looked, inflation adjusted prices for electricity were remarkably flat.

 _Economic theory tells us that this wouldn't have stalled our development_

What economic theory is that? Plus, if you want to compare Economic theory vs History; I'll take History. History is filled with discoveries and technology advancements that were the results of cascading advances which were the result of an advancement that made due to some basic resource becoming available and/or cheap. Advances are in no way inevitable. Advances are in no way unhindered by prices of resources.

Really what we did early on was to trade our environmental resources for cheap power. From that tradeoff, we have reaped extraordinary benefits. Why are those benefits so hard to recognize in this discussion?

<comment><USER3> > If that were true, then electricity should be astonishingly expensive > because we use astonishingly more of it than we did 60 years ago, yet the > last time I looked, inflation adjusted prices for electricity were > remarkably flat.

So, the price of computers has gone down even with skyrocketing computer use. But nobody would say that the benefits of computers are a positive externality that isn't priced into their price.

> What economic theory is that?

Bog-standard neo-classical economics. See: [http://www.libertarianism.org/media/around-web/negative- exte...](http://www.libertarianism.org/media/around-web/negative- externalities-coase-theorem).

> Advances are in no way inevitable. Advances are in no way unhindered by > prices of resources.

There is a "right price" for resources. If the actual price for the resources is too high, that will retard development. If the actual price for that resources is too low, development will happen in a way that uses an inefficiently high amount of the cheap resource. The market will generally arrive at the "right price" for resources, except in the presence of externalities.

> From that tradeoff, we have reaped extraordinary benefits. Why are those > benefits so hard to recognize in this discussion?

It's not a matter of recognizing those benefits, it's a matter of not double- counting those benefits.

<comment><USER11> _nobody would say that the benefits of computers are a positive externality that isn't priced into their price_

You're the one who said that the increase in price of a resource already accounted for its benefit to the producer. You can't use the fact that I broke your argument to then construct a straw man. Besides, if someone used the same one dimensional environmental argument against the pricing of computers (which they sometimes do), then I would be consistent in the defense of the beneficial externalities of computers.

 _Bog-standard neo-classical economics_

You got me there, you named A theory. Hey, here ya go: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality>

Right there they mention "invention". My claim is that inexpensive electricity has led to many inventions because people have more time to invent and more resources with which to invent. Because of cheap electricity, we have more people alive because they could afford air conditioning and well refrigerated foods. Some of those people have invented things.

If "Invention" is a beneficial externality (or more properly has positive externalities), then the predicate of invention, "cheap electricity" is also a beneficial externality.

 _If the actual price for the resources is too high, that will retard development_

Use of a resources normally has a critical minimum price before it's used commonly or at all. Why do you think the title of this article is "Cost of Gene Sequencing Falls Raising Hopes for Medical Advances"?

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/technology/cost-of-gene- se...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/technology/cost-of-gene-sequencing- falls-raising-hopes-for-medical-advances.html?pagewanted=all)

Gene sequencing has negative externalities too. There's a loss of privacy. There is a possibility that terrorists could release gene-based biological agents that could wipe out segments of societies. Should we price that into gene sequencing now "just in case"?

 _it's a matter of not double-counting those benefits_

I could just as easily say you're double-counting the costs of electricity since society (to a small and appropriate degree) views its generation as harmful to the environment and so they already have less of a demand for it. That would be a nonsense argument to since consumers don't typically factor in non-sequitor benefits and negativities during price negotiation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some of these estimates are certainly on the very conservative side.

Example: NUCLEAR ELECTRIC POWER GENERATION (page 59 bottom table) all estimating an impact ratio of 0.1 (cost of waste / revenues)

Actual cost of nuclear waste and other related cost are more likely about 100 times or more than estimated in this study - they are pushed to future generations or just passed over to tax payers globally by subsidies or cost covers e.g. cost for dismantling / building back a nuclear power plant after its commercial lifetime - from 3 Billion to 20+ Billion depending on the power plant etc. - power company will only cover a marginal amount of that, majority is paid from taxes. Storage cost for nuclear waste (thousands of years - <USER2> likely hundreds if not 1000s of Billions in cost)

About 2 years ago in Europe an in-depth scientific study into the actual cost of (uranium based) nuclear power has been undertaken (paid by various European institutions) including all subsidies provided to the power companies for building these nuclear power plants (in Europe hundreds of Billions) and (as far as I remember) also parts of the actual cost for waste - the outcome: true cost per KWh ~1.20 EUR - cost base used in business / profit calculations about 0.02 EUR

</comment><comment><USER13> Haven't read the article (not loading), but with regards to the headline:

In a competitive market, this is precisely what we should expect. The price is driven toward the cost of production by competition. This doesn't include the externalities (it's not a part of the cost of production paid by the individual firms), so when you add them in the price is too low.

</comment><comment><USER14> If they were forced to price all this in things would just cost more and they would go on being profitable.

Also there would be a ton of innovation in negating these costs.

<comment><USER15> > things would just cost more and they would go on being profitable

Unless they got replaced by something other that is currently unprofitable due to the de facto dumping prices of those industries.

<comment><USER16> Food and Electricity aren't really things that can be replaced. Sure the details of the particular methods currently used to produce them would change, as would the level at which their consumed, but the underlying companies and industries would simply adapt to these new realities.

<comment><USER17> What food is consumed and how electricity is generated can be changed though.

If for instance, you wanted to reduce the impact of cattle farming in South America, you could encourage people to eat alternative sources of meat and protein (substitutes) or tackle the problem by pouring more funding into research into synthetic beef[1].

For electricity generation, you could gradually ramp up taxes on the dirtiest sources of power generation, coupled with economic incentives for individuals and companies, which would guarantee lower monthly bills for those who switch, and guarantee a certain price for excess power that is generated to sweeten the deal. You could also introduce heavier taxes on inefficient home appliances, and subsidise LED bulbs (for example) to encourage adoption.

It's not that these problems are insurmountable, it's people's attitudes and entrenched interests.

(a thought experiment- if you could say for certain that sea levels would rise by some amount within say 50 years, and this would guarantee that many major coastal cities would be flooded within our lifetime unless we do x within the next decade, do you think people would do x?) Again, it's attitudes. No one wants to be out of pocket, and many people just don't see any visible downside to continue eating beef or getting their electricity from a coal fired power source.

[1] [http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business/technology/...](http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/business/technology/130307/freaked- out-horse-meat-try-vitro-beef-burger)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article title made a very interesting point. It would be surprising and interesting if the most biggest or most profitable industries all had such huge externalities that they would be unprofitable if those were taken into account.

But the headline does not match what the TEXT of the article says. The text of the article says:

> Trucost's third big finding is the coup de grace. Of the top 20 region- > sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if > environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment. None of > the world's top industrial sectors would be profitable if they were paying > their full freight. None!

In other words, the industries THAT HAVE THE MOST EXTERNALITIES have externalities greater than their profits. No longer surprising at all. And the entire frenzy the article is trying to whip us up into is based on this one misstatement of their actual results.

</comment><comment><USER19> Economic behavior is not static.

Industries use lots of free resources _because they're free_.

It is not possible to say a priori whether they could be profitable with different input prices, because there are myriad complex ways to economize and substitute.

</comment><comment><USER20> How are "natural capital costs" calculated?

<comment><USER15> This is complicated and will probably always be the area that is most prone to critique. The authors of the report put some effort to explain their methods - see p. 3.2.2, Valuation, pages 18-27 of the report.

They seem to have used abatement costs (how much for removing the damage?) where available. For other factors like air pollution, estimates on increased health costs, crops, water, increased corrosion, etc. were used.

IMHO the most tricky is the part on "opportunity costs" of things like land use - it's hard to put an uncontroversial price tag on the fact that you cannot go hiking on parts of land used by some industries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wait a second, _we need a revolution_?

We all agree on the negative effects of those externalities, but pricing them in before completing the transition to sustainable systems would only make resources MUCH less affordable for the end-consumer - you, me and everyone else, given the basic needs those goods fulfill.

<comment><AUTHOR> Except that other, more sustainable, systems would be financially viable _now_ if they were competing with the true cost of the current ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if there's some economic equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics. If entropy is always increasing, perhaps the environmental costs of a system can never be non-positive. Entropy can only increase. I haven't fully thought it through but it's an intriguing idea.

<comment><USER23> Entropy can/will decrease in a system with a flow of energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It would be nice to pass a law forcing companies to publish their profit and loss accounts amended with the externalities costs (or gains). It would be just for information but the psychological impact would be great.</comment>


"With TwittrRatr you can distinguish negative from positive tweets surrounding a brand..." - <AUTHOR> http://twitrratr.com/search/blagojevich

<comment><USER2> I am getting ~90 percent neutral for several searches, which makes this service ~90 percent useless.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks slick but the algorithm is about as accurate as bad-word filter: <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001176.html>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think it's safe to assume that more than 5% of tweets about Blagojevich have been negative. fail.

</comment><comment><USER4> Who comes up with these names?</comment>


Show HN: Create intranet webapps with VueJS/SQLite in minutes - <AUTHOR> http://appshare.co <comment><AUTHOR> I have posted here many times before and I just want to get feedback on this experimental intranet app builder. It is open source and uses:

\- Electron \- VueJS \- Bootstrap 4 \- SQLite</comment>


On paying for software - <AUTHOR> https://seths.blog/2018/06/on-paying-for-software/ <comment><USER2> One of the reasons that I switched from Linx to OSX was so that I could pay for more of my software. Why? Because then I more of the software I used could be maintained by someone who had the time to dig into bugs and UI problems and to fix them. But in Linux, couldn't I just edit the source myself? Realistically, no. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to source-dive in a totally new project in a language I never use, especially without someone willing to give me a walkthrough of the architecture and fundamental models of the program. It is waaaay more efficient for these to be fixed by an engineer working not in their spare time, but as their full-time job.

A developer targeting OSX knows they have an audience of people willing to pay him money so he can spend his whole day doing usability tests and his evening watching a little league game.

I do miss strace though.

<comment><USER3> I use Linux and most free software projects allow donations. I even donated to projects I don't actually use, like FreeBSD. I donated money to many free software projects, Ardour, Mozilla, LibreOffice, OpenBSD, etc. This is clearly a false dichotomy.

<comment><USER4> The problem with open source is, for some reason, the developers feel no sense of obligation to the end users or the people who donate to them. MacOS devs do and will go out of their way to make sure their software is not just usable, but a sheer pleasure to use in every way possible. Yes, there are exceptions (I'm looking at you, Apple, with your Xcode and your Finder) but for the most part that's just the way things are in the MacOS app ecosystem.

Open source, on the other hand, is like trying to shave with a razor blade with no handle. It's a hard sell to get people to donate to projects that they know are going to cut them at some point.

<comment><USER5> I actually find open source developers to be far more passionate about their projects than developers of commercial software. This makes sense to me, as they work on these projects because they want to, not because they have to.

<comment><USER6> Passionate about making the installation process seamless on every distro? And all the other mundane, tedious tasks that are expected by users used to commercial software?

My OSS project, which I haven't worked on in ages to be fair, I never made any effort to make it work anywhere but on Debian for example. I know some people used it in Suse and RHEL so it can't have been too painful but I never had that as a goal.

<comment><USER7> This is the other issue with 'linux on the desktop'. The linux desktop is massively fragmented. Notably this goes for desktop environments and package managers.

This makes it hard to target 'linux' in general with polished software. The issue of package managers seems on its way to being solved by containers. However, the issue of desktop environments is much more thorny. As you can't really abstract away the metaphors with which a user communicates with his PC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As an indie dev of desktop software, I have grown tired of complaints that my products aren't free as in speech and beer. I now reply to such criticism by linking to this post: [https://fman.io/blog/dear- comrade/](https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/)

<comment><USER9> Paying for software may be _moral_ , but it certainly isn't _natural_. As the game's developer, you're the scare resource. Making copies of the finished game itself costs approximately $0. Copyright makes your game _artificially_ scarce so that you can charge for it. It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model. The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and update the game they want to play for as long as they want to play it.

<comment><USER10> > but it certainly isn't natural.

So what? Nothing about software development is 'natural'. I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here.

> It's a phony concept that exists to support an unnatural business model.

It's a social construct that we've adopted in society because it allows for things we like.

> The real business model should be players paying you directly to develop and > update the game they want to play for as long as they want to play it.

This is a valid business model for some games, but there are many games that would not exist without such a model. I'd prefer that those games exist instead of insisting that reality should be the way that fits nicely with my arbitrary mental models.

<comment><USER9> >I don't even know what definition of 'natural' you're using here.

Copying data is a fundamental operation that all computers are able to perform and it costs nothing. Therefore, data is _naturally_ easy to copy.

Software doesn't need to be _manufactured_ like physical goods do: the software construction step is fully automated by compilers and build systems. The cost of all this is approximately $0. Networks aren't free because of bandwidth costs, but they still make it really easy and cheap to copy data to a lot of computers.

Since games are software and software is data, it is rather easy to distribute them to an unbounded number of machines. Even if you come up with some complicated copy protection scheme, people only need to crack it once and produce a DRM-free version of the game that will work everywhere and won't do stupid things such as require an internet connection. Even cryptographically secure platforms such as the PS4 eventually got cracked and the first thing people did is enable the execution of unsigned software.

>insisting that reality should be the way that fits nicely with my arbitrary mental models

That's exactly what copyright does.

<comment><USER11> > Copying data is a fundamental operation that all computers are able to > perform and it costs nothing.

That is not true. Running, maintaining, etc the IT infrastructure is costing money, electricity etc. It doesn't come for free.

<comment><USER12> Marginal and transaction costs are very low.

But you are right on the principle : storing, copying and transferring data always costs energy (in physics, temperature, energy and change of entropy are linked together)

<comment><USER11> OK, maybe you still have a point. What then, would be the threshold for saying: now, at this point, the costs of X are not marginal anymore but substantial enough to be taken into account?

<comment><USER12> Depends on what you are thinking about ? Such cost always need to be taken into account, but IMHO in general we must always differentiate material things (that are formed from matter and its organization) and information (i.e. concept of entropy, ideas, thoughts, songs, language, jokes etc..) which have temporary physical supports but exists apart from them

<comment><USER11> Good distinction, I agree. This leads me to this: If, for example a song, is not written down anywhere, but some brains contain it, this means there some people who could reproduce this song by singing it, this song would still exist. Is a brain a temporal physical support unit in our sense?

<comment><USER12> Yes of course. As long as we have electricity in our brains we can store and process information. The very precise implementation of this would require to study biology (it's already interesting to see that we run on electricity like computers!).

<comment><USER11> Ok, cool, now, how is the number eight, for instance. Does it exist only because human brains have it in it? Or do numbers exist in the universe outside our brains? Can we answer this? This would be an important step in IP rights and all that…

<comment><USER12> It's a whole philosophical question...I would say yes maths and humans abstractions exist independently !

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most of the "software" mentioned in the post, are actually services (slack, zoom, tidal, etc). For many people, it is easier to accept to pay for a service rather than software.

While I do use paid services, I usually "pay" (donate) for free and open source software. Why? It helps me get my work done, support is usually good, I set the price and I know that people who aren't as fortunate as I (being able to afford to buy software) can use it for free and get the same opportunities as me. :)

<comment><USER14> The marginal cost for software is zero, the marginal cost for services is non- zero. This puts a floor under the price. People don't accept that they have to pay, rather they are given no choice.

<comment><USER15> Often.. but for a lot of software businesses, the difference between being software or software as service is a choice, and cost is often a minor implication of the choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have experience selling to companies and I've found that even when they realise they need and want to pay for a piece of software they have absolutely no clue how to figure out what it's worth.

Consequently they engage in endless hardball negotiation and invite other suppliers to provide quotes (even when your offering uniquely meets all requirements).

In the end the challenge is to get customers comfortable that they're paying a fair price for what they're getting. That however is much easier to say than to do.

<comment><USER15> This is a great point.

No one wants to be ripped off. Software basically can't be objectively priced. You might be selling £50k per seat software that competes with £50, or free. It sucks to be making that decision.

<comment><USER17> >Software basically can't be objectively priced. //

Can anything be objectively priced, how?

<comment><USER18> I can buy apples at a somewhat objective price by comparing the price provided by other sellers in nearby stores. Also the price will be mostly affected by supply vs demand.

OTOH, softwares prices can be affected by too many parameters.

Then again, IT industry is a child when compared to say, mechanical or Civil industries.

<comment><USER17> Your first method just overprices/wrong-prices the whole market. I'd argue that supply-demand doesn't give fair pricing (which presumably is what's meant [in part] by objective), if you can make something very cheaply does that mean you objectively deserve to be very rich simply because you've got a corner on that market?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would not have a problem paying for software if what I was paying for didn't suck. Case in point: I have never been very happy with Win 10 since I got it, but in recent weeks it has become completely unusable, mostly because of their constant upgrades and behind-the-scenes processes that slow my machine down to a crawl. Out of frustration I wiped my drive and installed Ubuntu. Granted, Linux has it's share of problems but still works much better for my uses. So, one OS is paid and one isn't. Guess which? :/ My personal gripe is that it seems to me, when it comes to basic customer service, we the customers are on the bottom of the totem pole. Software companies spend more time worrying about how to reassure their shareholders than they do about making sure we have a usable, hassle-free product, and I've been seeing this trend getting worse in recent years. So until that thought-process changes these people will not get my money. As far as I'm concerned, at this point anyway, FOSS is the lesser of two evils.

<comment><USER20> > _So, one OS is paid and one isn 't._

Quoting from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_\(company\)):

 _Canonical achieved a small operating profit of $281,000 in 2009, however until 2017 it struggled to maintain financial solvency and took a major financial hit from the development of Unity and Ubuntu Touch, leading to an operating loss of $21.6 Million for the fiscal year 2013.[19] The company reported an operating profit of $2 Million in 2017 after shutting down the Unity development team and laying off nearly 200 employees. The company now plans to focus on its server and professional support solutions, which have proved to be most profitable. By shifting resources away from Ubuntu Desktop and cutting less profitable products and services, Canonical plans to maintain solvency and achieve long-term profitability._

"one isn't" (your words) to the extent that they had to switch focus away from the desktop OS to stay afloat. Much as people would like to pretend otherwise, the almighty dollar/euro/yen/etc. is still what matters most.

<comment><USER21> I'm not convinced that unity every added much value to ubuntu it seems like they could have spent a small fraction of the money customizing gnome/cinnamon or actually shipping plasma with up to date deps and come out way ahead both for users and monetarily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Even Stallman doesn't have anything against paying for software. Seth's point 1 is reasonable. Point 2 is about paying for support, not paying for the software itself. Point 3 is no point at all, it's just rephrasing point 1 (ie marketing is about the business, not the software).

</comment><comment><USER23> I see the use of OSS in government services as almost a moral imperative-but the first point seth makes is crippling this "you need money to write the software in the first place"

Take voter management software - the preparation of polls, counting of results etc. all this software behind it is afaik propriety but used exclusively by the public sector - which seems mad, and even risky when we look at electronic balloting, but can one persuade any government to kickstart the process of building new? i cannot

Edit: thinking of this, what chnage would a kickstarter project stand to build a base of oss government software?

(I know things like GDS and 18F exist but they are not covering the full range of services - see [http://oss4gov.org/manifesto](http://oss4gov.org/manifesto)

<comment><USER24> The software might be free, but nobody acquires mission-critical software without a support agreement -- which is certainly not free -- unless they don't value staying employed. We might not like Diebold (or whatever name they go by now) but _someone_ has to be an accountable party for supporting electronic voting systems.

<comment><USER23> free as in beer is irrelevant - free as in speech that i can read, check verify and is what matters - so i would envisage (and encourage) a network of "certified in using votermachine-oss" contractors that can be called upon or paid for, in a retainer fashion, and most importantly some means of priming the pump

</comment></comment></comment><comment> open-source-ux Why is it so hard for developers to make a full-time living selling their open-source software? Are the available options stacked against them?

Thousands of developers make money building products or services for clients using open source software. But what if you don't want to be a consultant and simply want to charge a business for using your open source product?

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) says that you can sell your free software by charging for distribution (for example via CD-ROMs). Physical media made sense in an era of dial-up modems and low-bandwidth connections, but no-one can realistically charge for distribution today - not least when so many projects are hosted for free on GitHub. See: [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html)

So what are the alternatives?

\- There's the dual-licencing approach e.g. Red Hat. (Naturally doesn't work with permissive licences. Requires a strong copyleft licence like the GPL).

\- The open core approach e.g. GitLab.

\- There's also the option of charging for support only - I'm guessing this is an unattractive and unappealing option for many developers who'd much rather be building their product.

\- Or there's the Kickstarter or Patreon approach which simply isn't a stable, sustainable long-term solution.

There have been some alternative licence approaches such as the Fair Source licence (fair.io). This is neither open source or closed source but allows developers to charge for their software.

The large market for Wordpress plugins is an interesting case study. Wordpress is published under the GPL v2, but many Wordpress plugins are not open source. No one polices this, but those plugin developers are selling their software to businesses who are willing to pay for the features of those plugins.

So who here in 2018 has made a success selling their open source software? Did you follow one of the models above? And who has struggled to make it work?

<comment><USER25> As someone that was part of an effort to do this in the early .com days, it is a lost hope trying to sell open source software to consumers.

While selling to enterprise can be made via consulting and training, most consumers just want a one time shot paying for their software.

Well, if you do that with commercial software, usually the only way to avoid paying is piracy.

In open source world, they can just go to another guy that is re-packaging your work and making it available for free, thus killing your source of income.

Which is the major reason most desktop software shops are going the store model, hoping that higher control will prevent that kind of workaround (which doesn't work with rooted devices anyway), or forcing consumers to migrate to a SaaS like in the good old timesharing days.

I might add that FOSS developers are the first to blame, as contrary to most professions, many go to great lenghts to avoid paying anything, while feeling entitled their costumers pay them.

I am overgeneralizing here, but you see it every time someone comes up with licensing changes as means to be able to keep working on the product that they love, right away the forum gets flooded with free beer alternatives and vocal complaints how everyone is going to migrate to something else.

<comment><USER26> I don't think the primary problem is cost, but that when you build your product tightly coupled with a propretary product that is hard to migrate off of then the vendor of that product can shake you down, or they can go bankrupt or what have you. It makes your business vulnerable, and no one wants that.

Also your production environment crashing because a license expired. Fun times.

<comment><USER27> I agree with this. That's why I avoid most web and SAAS platforms for things nowadays. I make an exception for things where I can get my data off their platform in a format I want pretty easily (i.e. I will use Google Docs because I can easily download the files as DOCX or PDF files) or the data I'm storing with them is mainly settings or preferences (I.e. Youtube knowing I'm subscribed to X publishers).

I've been burned a few times and lost data just because a company goes out of business, or I decided I wanted to use a different platform and all my data from before was locked in to this other proprietary system.

So yeah, if you're coming up with this hot new productivity/task software and I can't either download the data in an open format or at least use the software on the desktop, 100% offline? No thanks.

And in general I hate subscriptions unless I'm getting access to libraries of content, i.e. Spotify, Netflix, or it's just for updates. By that I mean I get the software and a year's worth of updates when I paid for the license, and it's mine, you can't take access away from me, I have it for as long as I want, and I only pay again when I decide I use the software enough and the updates are compelling enough that I really want to update.

Which is another reason why SAAS and Web apps don't really work for me, because they almost invariably charge a monthly fee and there's nothing to download so I just lose access the moment I stop paying. There are exceptions, but those are rare (mainly web hosting and cloud storage).

It's for this reason why I refuse to pay for Adobe Suite, because you only have access for as long as you pay the monthly subscription. Screw that, my copy of Adobe Illustrator pre-subscription still gets the job done fine thanks. I might have upgraded by now if they hadn't switched to a subscription model, but now I'm going to keep using that as long as humanly possible, then search for an alternative.

<comment><USER28> In all fairness, the software that you buy today is almost certainly going to stop working at some point in the future as you upgrade your OS etc. So, unless you can download data into some reasonably open format, you will eventually lose access anyway.

That said, I don't disagree with your basic point. In the case of Adobe, I use one of their programs fairly heavily. But most everything else is once in a blue moon. As a result, their Suite subscription doesn't work for me as I'm perfectly happy running something from a few versions back. Subscriptions only make sense for things you use pretty regularly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> _To name a few, I'm glad to use and pay for: Overcast, Feedblitz, Discourse, Zapier, Dropbox, Roon, WavePad, Bench, Nisus, Zoom, Slack, SuperDuper, Mailchimp, Hover, TypeExpander, Tidal._

Those are services, not standalone software. (Tidal may be standalone, but it's from 1979.)

It's not like people are still buying Walter Bright's C++ compiler.

<comment><USER30> At least 3 of those are desktop software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Great post.

On the same note, paying for software has psychological benefits for the person as well, which I wrote about recently [https://rolandas.blog/posts/id- rather-pay-for-software-than-...](https://rolandas.blog/posts/id-rather-pay- for-software-than-get-it-for-free)

</comment><comment><USER32> I believe corporate red tape one of reasons to not-pay for a software licence. If you download the trial or non commercial edition, works for you, you would never go through chain of approvals to buy a cheap software.Meare player is an example that you can think of. Araxis merge, Visual studio, Visio are some to name a few.

<comment><USER24> Depends on where you work. I've been in shops where developers had a certain amount of money -- $500 or $1000 -- to buy whatever work-related tools they deemed to be helpful in getting their jobs done. Those tools could be software (Beyond Compare and ReSharper being popular ones) or hardware (monitors!) and up to that amount there were essentially no questions asked (the only caveat being if you spent on stuff that was not needed you risked ruining it for everyone else so you ran the risk of a getting a Code Red from the dev team if you wanted to spend wastefully). As much as companies spend on finding and keeping good developers, dropping $1k/each per year for things that make them happy is chump change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> >Ubuntu gives you a very clear option to pay for it when you download it.

If it works for you and you want it to keep working, making a donation/payment may not be the worst idea.

Yes, agreed. However, one of the points I think I'm trying to make is that that paying for a piece of software doesn't automatically make it better quality. I think that a lot of people in the free software world do try and put as much effort into making a good product as the ones in the paid world. Even under the pressure of not knowing how they're going to pay their mortgage. :/

</comment><comment><USER33> Bruce Eckel had some ideas about a better model to fund open source projects. [https://bruceeckel.github.io/2016/06/20/a-model-to-fund- open...](https://bruceeckel.github.io/2016/06/20/a-model-to-fund-open-source- projects/)

</comment><comment><USER34> I was thinking about this recently, maybe FOSS isn't quite ideal for the developers.

As long as nobody is compensated, it is very fair system. But if somebody gets compensated for their work, then if their work depends on other people's work for free, the other people not being compensated is not fair.

For example, consider somebody producing Youtube videos using FOSS. They are compensated, yet the authors of the tools they use are not (necessarily).

FOSS basically started as a radical revolt against copyright system, which is somewhat dysfunctional, but its purpose was to make compensation fair.

But maybe a better copyright system would actually help. Say limit copyright to 5-10 years. The short term would remove the huge gap between doing copyrighted work and doing work for free, and make them more compatible with each other.

<comment><USER28> >FOSS basically started as a radical revolt against copyright system

FOSS _depends_ on the copyright system in order to operate. If you don't have rights to created works you have no rights to impose reciprocal obligations on downstream users.

<comment><USER34> It kinda does, but it's an open question whether it's a requirement.

In recent years, many programs became BSD-like licensed and it didn't impede the availability of their source code. Similarly, in the world of Minecraft, many mods started closed-source but free, and eventually became open-sourced, because it turned out to be beneficial on its own.

I actually like the free software philosophy, but it might be that the copyleft clause is not required if there is enough rational self-interest. However, in the current copyright system (where the copyright lasts effectively forever), this self-interest commands to hoard the source code (for the duration of the copyright).

<comment><USER35> > I actually like the free software philosophy, but it might be that the > copyleft clause is not required if there is enough rational self-interest.

At least RMS's form of the Free Software philosophy sees preventing non-free software, not encouraging free software, as the highest goal. In this version of the philosophy, tools that prevent even a small amount of non-free software being made are valuable even if they don't do anything to encourage free software (and even if they impede it somewhat.)

<comment><USER34> Proposal to shorten copyright to 5-10 years wouldn't prevent philosophy of free software to function.

It would be additional incentive to release the source code after it enters public domain.

<comment><USER35> > Proposal to shorten copyright to 5-10 years wouldn't prevent philosophy of > free software to function.

It would certainly not be helpful to the implementation of the philosophy of the part of the Free Software movement (which includes RMS) that wants to prevent non-free software from being created to the extent possible.

<comment><USER34> I am not sure what you mean. RMS himself expressed many times that the copyright term should be shortened.

Remember, the copyright was created in order to promote creativity. If the term was short enough, then lots of useful software could be created based on the source code that is in public domain which was previously monetized by being closed source. This additional software would be an economic win for everybody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> If more of the developers who work on the software I use had Patreons or similar, I would pay monthly. Until that day I'm happier with a lot of the free software that I can't even pay for, than I am with a lot of the software I could pay for.

</comment><comment><USER37> There are many areas where you can create opensource projects, for example, SaaS subscription management platform with plenty of payment, tax, fraud detection plugins.

Last time I heard there are so many SaaS indie developers forced to add WHMCS, amember pro or Woocomerce/Shopify for collecting payments using crypto, stripe, and PayPal. I mean, these platforms aren't for SaaS!

Then offer a hosted version which implements high availability, load balancing, robust failproof backups.

Most developers start their projects in areas which are unlikely to pay off, I don't blame them for this as it's something they find interesting but we shouldn't expect the market to pay for our interest.

</comment><comment> mAEStro-paNDa Although the author failed to mention, the comments here pointed out the distinction between software from a little guy innovator and a huge corporation. That content was glossed over in the article, but it seems to be a very important part of the conversation about free/paid software.

Not only that, but there's an underlying assumption here that some person or company has to receive a wage or profit for a software to be maintained or repaired, which is simply not true.

<comment><USER2> > there's an underlying assumption here that some person or company has to > receive a wage or profit for a software to be maintained or repaired, which > is simply not true.

Indeed, one can have unpaid maintainers. But it is more difficult to keep a healthy team running when none of them can focus full-time on the thing because all of them have to support themselves with other jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Is there any license that makes software free (as in beer) for contributors/maintainers and paid for everyone else? This way it would be possible to alleviate the free riding problem while providing a mechanism to use software free of charge. Maybe this could work with networks of projects, so contributing to numpy would let you use scipy for free. Add exceptions to personal/non commercial use if necessary. Something like that

<comment><USER39> At this point you're operating a propietary software company that offers a "contribute and get the software for free" perk. You need to manage access to your closed source code and decide what is a viable contribution, etc. Sounds to me like this would have the potential to be a PR and legal nightmare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I think I have never read a piece in which the word "single-minded" is used in a positive way. Mostly people refer to it as a bad thing. Also I don't think that single-mindness really helps developing good software people want to use. Because you already have to think about two things here.

<comment><USER41> Hmmm, people can be "single minded" on delivering a good experience for end users. Our project (DB Browser for SQLite) definitely has developers that are. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> > I like being the customer (as opposed to a social network, where I'm the > product).

Interesting concept. Can anyone expound on what he means by this?

<comment><USER43> In a "free service" the service company often makes money by selling ad space to third parties for displaying to users or by selling user information to third parties. In each of these models, the user of the service, who isn't paying money, is actually the product not the customer. Yet, many users believe that these free services are being run for their benefit free-of- charge, which is clearly a bad assumption to make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I've always felt that charging money for software is dumb.

I, as a programmer, think about saying to other people that they _cannot_ use a piece of software that is _already written_ unless they give me money, is a damn ridiculous idea.

Software is wealth.

If I had a gold coin that had the property that I could give it to you and still have it, _and_ that _both_ coins would increase in value when I did, _and_ that you and I both can repeat the process endlessly, then there is no good reason not to give out the coin copies freely.

One model of a computer is a set of automatic functions that each solve some human problem or need. We should all be working together to expand that library of functions as rapidly as responsibly possible.

Attempting to extract value from the economy per-copy is retarding the whole system. It's a selfish local optimization. My basic argument is that we should use computers and software to globally maximize human happiness and contentment, and avoid local optima.

tl;dr: "Don't be greedy."

So how do you make money? First, if you want a lot of money, open a bank. Let's narrow the question: How do I make a living? House, picket fence, family, doge and qat, gotta have a car, etc... Let's put a ceiling on it, even if it's high. Let's also avoid discussion of financial meta-games, you save and invest, so if you avoid misfortune you're more or less going to be okay, right?

So, how are programmers supposed to make enough money to live the dream if we don't charge per copy?

First of all, the best way to do it since the dawn of the internet is simple: Get 10,000 fans who love you and sell them stuff. (Or just ask them to support you, like the Zig creator is doing.) This is a simple, easy, universally accessible method that's pretty much guaranteed to work.

Second best way: get paid to solve _new_ problems (one thing I am _not_ saying is that you shouldn't charge people to work on a problem you otherwise wouldn't work on, that's fine. Charging people to use your solution after it's been developed is the stupid thing to do, IMO.)

Third(-ish, this list isn't precise nor prescriptive) teach people. I think that learning the Turing Machine trick makes people think better, and learning to program obviously empowers them. (I remember the first time I used an iPad, I thought "this isn't a computer, it's a mall in your hand") The information revolution is still happening, and people need your help to navigate it and reap the full benefits.

Fourth, here's the meta-most: You should be living in a very-low-overhead way _right now anyway_. We have to learn to live in harmony with Nature or we are about to tank our whole civilization. Go outside, it's June, _where are all the bugs?_

<comment><USER2> > Charging people to use your solution after it's been developed is the stupid > thing to do, IMO

I think this is the core of what I disagree with in your post. Imagine 3 scenarios:

1) I have a problem that I'd like solved and I go searching for a solution. After a while, I come across a reddit post where someone says "oh, you're trying to reticulate splines? You should buy ReticulatorPro for $50. I use it and its great!" I see that someone built it 3 years ago and I go and download the 1 month free trial, I'm happy with it and in 1 month, $50 comes out of my bank account.

2) I have a problem that I'd like solved and I go searching for a solution. After a while, I come across a reddit post where someone says "oh, you're trying to reticulate splines? Someone is trying to fundraise to build it and they seem pretty serious." I see that they've been trying for 6 months and they are 70% of the way toward their goal. So I pitch in $50, but then I'm waiting as the uncertainty of fundraising and software schedules takes its toll. 18 months later the solution is released. I am less happy.

3) I have a problem that I'd like solved and I go searching for a solution. After a while, I come across a reddit post where someone says "oh, you're trying to reticulate splines? Someone is trying to fundraise to build that." I see that someone built it 1 year ago and I go and download it for free and I am happy.

In the current world, all of these are possible. In the world you propose, option #1 is impossible. I argue that a world with Option #1 available is a better world for everyone. Why? Because in the world of option #2/#3, the only time period during which the developer can raise money is _before_ the product has been created. That means only products with sufficiently good pre- development marketing can be successful. (note: "Get 10,000 fans who love you" isn't "easy" but at least moderately difficult.) In the world of #1, someone who isn't good at pre-development marketing but _is_ good at building a product and using the quality of the product to do post-development marketing can succeed.

I want a world where someone can build a good product and get funding mostly on the strength of their product.

> teach people

Is a valuable but different skill from building products.

<comment><USER44> > In the world you propose, option #1 is impossible.

You can still send $50 to the creator of ReticulatorPro?

But that's not quite your point, is it?

You're saying that I, as a developer, should be able to work on a product that doesn't have enough qualified demand (pre-sales or crowd-funds) upfront to pay for its development costs, and expect to cover my gamble by requiring customers to give me money before allowing them to use it after I've already written it? Is that right?

<comment><USER2> Correct.

<comment><USER44> Okay, cool.

Meaning no disrespect, what I'm saying is, I think that's dumb.

Not the first part, that's a problem I face personally: I'm a developer working on a product that doesn't have _any_ qualified demand upfront. (Heaven help me, it's a _programming language_!) I'm really hoping the Zig creator's plan works out because that would be my ideal life (modulus living in NY. Wonderful city, but I like forest.)

The second part: attempting to limit copying of a digital artifact after it's been written is really hard and I think that setting up your business strategy to rely on it is pragmatically and strategically foolish. That's not to say it can't be done. More like, imagine an alternate universe where Microsoft open- sources DOS and Windows from the very start and Bill Gates has only $100M net worth...

As an aside, in re: getting those 10,000 fans. I've found that a lot of people are lacking one or two skills that would really help them succeed, and if they can connect with other people who have those skills then together they can really take off. If growing a fanbase feels daunting to you, that's okay, you can get a consultant, coach or co-founder that can do it. Kevin Smith found Jason Mewes whose performance in "Clerks" catalyzed both their careers. Anyhow, for my own project, I am going to try "Tupperware parties" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupperware#Tupperware_parties](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupperware#Tupperware_parties)

Finally, working on projects you love and believe in is great and I don't knock it, I'm doing it myself, but if you're starting a business to make money you really should pre-qualify your idea, and doing that by pre-selling and/or crowd-funding gives you pretty $$$olid feedback that there's real demand for your product.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Frequency graph of U.S. birthdays for babies born 1973-1999 - <AUTHOR> http://www.vizwiz.com/2012/05/how-common-is-your-birthday-find-out.html <comment><USER2> Interesting, thanks. Another graph I've wanted to see is a histogram of days- off-of-predicted-birthdate. That would be an indication of how well the predicted birthdate (often from a sonogram measurement and built-in algorithm) compares to the real birthdate.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm on it</comment></comment>


Crittercism raises 5.5m Series A from Google Ventures, Shasta, and Opus - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/01/crittercism-series-a/

<comment><USER2> Cool. Glad to see Crittercism using PLCrashReporter. Good stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats Andrew & Team!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks :) btw lookcraft is looking great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome service and great team. Much deserved.

</comment><comment><USER5> Congrats CT team!

<comment><USER6> thanks!</comment></comment>


What Ails the American Startup? - <AUTHOR> http://esoltas.blogspot.com/2015/08/what-ails-american-startup.html <comment><USER2> Having just started my own company, I think part of the problem is regulatory burden. Dealing with the government is an exercise in kafkaesque madness. I tried filing my small company's taxes last year and I will never do that again. I swear, accountants make up all this bullshit just to keep themselves employed.

But you get through it. And then your competitor calls the fed on you with an anonymous tip that you are violating some obscure industry-specific regulation. Cue two weeks of quadruple checking your stuff before the investigators come. Then a patent troll knocks on your door 3 months later and demands $50,000. All of that to eek 2% out of a market to make exactly what you'd get if you had a day-job.</comment>


PredictionIO – an open-source ML stack built on Spark, HBase, and Spray - <AUTHOR> https://prediction.io/

<comment><USER2> Does ML unambiguously stand for Machine Learning now? I got excited because I thought it referred to ML the language.

<comment><USER3> As a fan of both the ML language and Machine Learning, I would say not unambiguously but highly likely. ML as a specific language is mostly dead, living on through its descendants like OCaml, F#, Scala, etc. For the most part, people will mention an ML descendant by name if they are talking about a programming language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I found it very interesting tool to play around, at the same time when I was playing with it (year ago or so) it felt like black box without any visible feedback on your learning process. It's very hard to tune ML system without intermidiate learning feedback.

</comment><comment><USER5> I remember them sending me an (unwanted) email because I had contributed to an unrelated Scala project on Github by reporting a bug.

<comment><USER6> Similar(ish) thing. I think I starred the project and about a year later I got an email out of the blue from them.

I get that I starred the project on github but that's hardly consent for an email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have used this and found it to be super easy for someone with no knowledge of ML to get started. Is there anything better than this?

<comment><USER8> Maybe Spark + Cassandra, but Cassandra has definitely shown to be finicky when it comes to 4+ node clusters, meaning, unless you're willing to contribute time and resources to devops and dive into Java, it's a point against getting up and running quickly.

That said, this service runs on HBASE which is great, however, queries function similarly to a mapreduce. This has proven consistently slower than SQL-like alternatives and I can think of a few use-cases where you'd definitely want that added speed.

It's really a question of "good enough" and how many components of your stack you're willing to take responsibility for, in exchange for enhanced scalability and IOP/s.

For what its worth though, I think Spark (in light of the recent commitment from IBM) is here to stay, so I'd say it's the unequivocal leader in distributed load/clustering frameworks.

<comment><USER9> Also built-in support for other data store backends e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, ...see [https://docs.prediction.io/system/anotherdatastore/](https://docs.prediction.io/system/anotherdatastore/) since 0.9.3 release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The website doesn't say who is behind this. How can a user trust it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe they're an open-source-as-a-service company like Chef or Datastax.

</comment></comment><comment> bra-ket previous thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6574087](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6574087)</comment>


Surviving Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://briancray.com/2010/11/10/surviving-silicon-valley/

<comment><USER2> Love it.. quote of the day: "I was hired because I had the capacity and the desire to learn and grow professionally"

Great article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "The only way to keep up is to simply get 'er done." Agrrrrrreed.</comment>


I got 40 paying customers in 6 months with 0 dollars spent - <AUTHOR> https://blog.pixelixe.com/2019/10/24/how-I-got-40-paying-customers-in-6-months-with-0-dollars-spent/ <comment><USER2> > Another 100% free technique that still requires effort and time to set up is > to answer Quora questions where your website and product will be the answer.

No wonder Quora is such garbage now. It's basically a self-promotion platform.

<comment><USER3> This post is an ad for his product, too.

<comment><USER4> And we all walked right into that one...

I guess "how to successfully do X" of the type of clickbait HN readers enjoy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You may have spent $0, as in that's the amount that left your pocket. However, you invested your time, your skills and expertise.

While it's cool that you are making headway, a better question is: does this financially make sense in the long run.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. I always find it amusing when people say they did something for 0$ by working in their spare time.

This calculation doesn't make any sense. Can you build the initial Google project in your spare-time? Probably, if you find enough qualified volunteers.

Does that mean it's a viable business?

Absolutely not.

You need to check how much you would have get paid when working in your last highest paying job... (Even when you do things in spare time)

<comment><USER7> I get your point, but taken to its logical conclusion, no one should ever stop working, because it costs them money to do so.

If my alternative is sitting in front of the TV, or reading a book, or gardening, or... whatever but I choose to do something like this, the cost of that time is effectively zero because that's what I would have been doing with it otherwise.

So, by "working" at something I enjoy and that I'm doing by choice, I'm basically being paid to entertain myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> At 5.99 monthly that's $239.60/month, which seems low after 12 month product build + 6month post launch...

<comment><USER9> Low compared to what? If he's making more than his operating costs, it's not low.

I'd love to make an extra $240 a month.

<comment><USER10> > Low compared to...

"I worked on this project during my free time (weekends, evenings, holidays) for approximately 12 months, from April 2018 to March 2019."

If by "free time" the author means 1h per working day and 4 per day on weekends, that would be ~680h -> 85 days (8h per day)(back to back). Not that's not a good ROI at least for me. I won't count the deeply unique value of "time not spent with family/friends/children".

I sincerely hope that this picks up and gets 4000 paying customers, but so far for a year's worth of work it's not impressive.

<comment><USER11> They spent their time working on a project that they enjoyed, successfully completed, and ended up with 40 customers. I would not call that a waste of time at all. Even if it dies off in 6 months it's a great learning experience and the kind of thing that's great to talk about with a hiring manager.

<comment><USER12> And that's without counting the level 2 / 3 benefits. Hard to measure, but one of his customers or people having read that blog might offer him a good job one day, or start something with him/her.

All time spent can't just be measured straight in money / hour can it.

In any case, if he's happy and proud of his project that's the worse I wish him

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You mention SEO efforts but looks like you are making a standard error of keeping your blog on a seperate subdomain that throws away all the backlinks karma from making it to the front of HN. You can check out this post for more details [https://pawelurbanek.com/simple-seo- mistake](https://pawelurbanek.com/simple-seo-mistake)

<comment><USER14> Google themselves has stated they treat content at subdomains and root domains equally, with the exclusion of link farming via subdomains: [https://www.seroundtable.com/google-treat-subdomains-vs- subd...](https://www.seroundtable.com/google-treat-subdomains-vs- subdirectories-22485.html)

If a subdomain blog has high ranking from backlinks, it's not really a problem that this doesn't transfer to the root domain. The visitor gets the content they want and the visitor is also exposed to the company/product that owns the blog. For example, if I land on Stripe's blog and I'm interested in a credit card processor, there's a high likelyhood I will also visit their main site, and I will be more qualified since they've already provided value from the blog post.

Search engines rank pages, not domains. Search results aren't a list of domains, they are a list of pages. The domain is only one factor in the page's rank. Whether a blog lives at a subdomain or root domain, the root domain will not rank higher than the blog post for keywords backlinked to that post.

"Make good content others want to link to" is not something automated SEO testing and SEO consultants can sell, unlike "You have a subdomain blog, please move it to /blog for better SEO points."

<comment><USER15> > Search engines rank pages, not domains. Search results aren't a list of > domains, they are a list of pages. The domain is only one factor in the > page's rank. Whether a blog lives at a subdomain or root domain, the root > domain will not rank higher than the blog post for keywords backlinked to > that post.

The problem is when you want to rank both your content on the blog AND some dedicated landing pages. Keeping blog separate will make it harder to get the juice passed to your landings.

<comment><USER14> Google has claimed otherwise, as linked in my post.

The assertion that sub domains don't contribute to domain authority is not backed by facts or authoritative evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great work. Excellent post. Did you get any enterprise customers? The site is very well made and high quality, but to be honest I'm a little surprised that people were willing to pay for this. I too I'm a 'solo-preneur' but I struggle with validating my ideas. How polished was your UI/UX when you launched on producthunt?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Not yet any enterprise customers. When I launched on ProductHunt, the UI/UX was exactly the same as today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I agree with many suggestions, and I believe the results are very reproducible with some effort.

I would offer an alternative approach to launching with working billing in place. I believe a good way to validate an idea is to launch a site quickly and see how easy it is to generate traffic. I would rather not spend time on coding that may never get used. And early usage may point to improvements and pivots where time will be better spent before attracting paid users.

And it's possible to fake it with free trial periods that extend longer than promised. No one will complain about being allowed to continue using a site for free. And I believe it relieves some of the stress of having trying to support paid customers on early versions of a site.

</comment><comment><USER18> All great ideas and seems to reinforce the notion that by being helpful and delivering value to others they are more likely to return value to you (especially if you have something of premium value to offer). I'm curious if the "solo-preneur" had a fully articulated (written) business plan complete with an exit strategy in case the business became successful but they got sick of it. I applaud people who have the vision and motivation to build a business on the side but really feel for them when they feel trapped by their own creation and cannot get out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you mikece, to be honest I have no plan whatsoever regarding how I will react if the business become really successful. It is not my full time job, more a hobby to me so I just enjoy it and do my best to acquire qualified traffic to see were it goes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Excellent work! In a crowded space that's pretty impressive to be profitable that quickly.

How much maintenance/work on the product do you do per week excluding marketing and sales?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I fixed a few bugs the first couple of months, then nothing. I just answer questions (emails mostly and chat). Maybe 20 minutes by week.

<comment><USER19> Sounds like the perfect setup, good work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's awesome that after posting in numerous places he was able to finally get some SEO juice. But, the article makes it sound like you're highly likely to get SEO juice from doing this.

My experience, from numerous projects I've started over many years is that the vast majority of time, you won't get any SEO traffic at all even though I've gotten temporary increases in traffic from posting on HN and ProductHunt, quorra and reddit.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have a similar programming background as the author, so this really resonates with my 'marketing' weaknesses.

This post is simple, yet it really gives me simple steps to figure out how to get the 'marketing' aspect for my product... which was a bit obscure to me, until now. Of course not looking to build the next big thing, just help me understand the basics and get my feet wet.

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER22> I normally don't use sports metaphors, but this is like if someone said they spent a year practicing their free throws and got up to hitting 30% of them, but they had a lot of fun doing it. I would read such an article as more of "how not to practice free throws".

</comment><comment><USER23> He got 40 paying customers paying ~$5 to $15. Is this a big success? Am I missing something?

</comment><comment> floodyberry- "Area man who thinks he's business guru outs self as generic seo spammer"

</comment><comment><USER24> local prostitutes operate in a similar way too..</comment>


First animal-to-human transplant treatment approved - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827913.200-worlds-first-animaltohuman-transplant-approved.htm

<comment><USER2> Yeah uh pretty sure I know a dude with some pig heart valves in him. Fix title please.

<comment><AUTHOR> Suggestions?

<comment><USER3> "Worlds first live animal cell-to-human transplant approved" ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't pig-valves qualify?

<comment><USER3> If they do, the source of the cells aren't really important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Slightly misleading title, what has been approved is the first non-trial transplant treatment, not the first actual transplant, as human trials for this transplant have already taken place.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - changed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >The "seaweed" coating is alginate, which prevents the immune system from attacking the foreign cells.

If the immune system can't get at it, wouldn't it be more prone to infection?

<comment><USER3> A tissue, probably. Small cellular packets would, if compromised, burst open and then be exposed to the immune system.</comment></comment>


How to run Docker securely in production - <AUTHOR> http://www.apcera.com/press/apcera-and-flawcheck-defend-against-docker-workload-vulnerabilities-and-malware/

<comment><USER2> This appears to be a press release, not actual content.</comment>


Joe's Own Editor version 4.1 released - <AUTHOR> https://sourceforge.net/p/joe-editor/mercurial/ci/default/tree/NEWS.md

<comment><USER2> I fear there will be again no Windows binary. Hope I'm wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> JJ is on his Honeymoon.. so I think it will be a few weeks.</comment></comment>


Dgraph, GraphQL, Schemas, & CRUD – Ardan Labs - <AUTHOR> https://www.ardanlabs.com/blog/2020/05/dgraph-graphql-schemas-crud.html <comment><USER2> >Relational databases are very rigid so you need to really make sure you understand your data upfront.

Is NOT true:

        CREATE TABLE/VIEW ...
        ALTER TABLE ...
        SELECT (whatever) ...

Changing a rdbms at runtime is fully supported, in MUCH better ways than almost all "nosql" databases.

> Changing the database is a big effort

Is much less effort than nosql. With more guaranties than the change is CORRECT, and not left you half documents in one version and the other in other version.

> These databases are hard to distribute and scale so you tend to end up with > single instances that are very large and require replication for backup. The > cloud providers have relational databases today that are supposed to scale, > but I have no experience with them.

Is very easy to be "web scale" if you don't care about data integrity. Very few nosql are half good about this. Scaling a rdbms is very similar to have a less brittle nosql product (like mongo), is about how you model the data.

I was in a team behind one of the largest deployments on google cloud store. The amount of coding for cover for the store lack of integrity was a big part of the codebase. Despite the supposedly massive amount of data I don't see why have a rdbms in the back could have been worse (when anyway you must put in front redis and other caches for high ingestion).

I think for the majority of the startup deployments, rarely a non-rdbms make much sense, specially if the team have not idea of what truly a good rdbms can do, or how code by hand a correct transaction code...

<comment><USER3> (author of Dgraph here)

I'd argue relational DBs get way more credit than they're worth. And it is indeed tricky to make them work across different data models -- that's by now an established fact across big SV companies. Restricting direct access to rigid RDBMs and making data modeling easier via graphs is why Facebook Tao, Dropbox Edgestore, Airbnb Knowledge Graph and so on exist. See my post [1].

I'll give you a simple example. Consider, movies and directors. If you started with the fact that each movie has exactly one director, you'd design exactly one table, with a director column.

Later, if you realize that each movie can have multiple directors, you can't just alter that table. You need two new tables -- one for directors, and another one to connect movies to directors. That's not simple, that's a big change which requires a bunch of work.

Doing this in graphs is simple. Adding a bunch more outward relationships is simple. Data modeling, in general, is way simpler in graphs than in RDBMs.

Mongo and such came out of the Bigtable era. Cockroach and Dgraph are coming out of the Spanner era -- where it's not only about horizontal scalability, but also about strong data integrity and distributed ACID transactions.

[1]: [https://dgraph.io/blog/post/how-dgraph-labs-raised- series-a/](https://dgraph.io/blog/post/how-dgraph-labs-raised-series-a/)

<comment><USER4> > That's not simple, that's a big change which requires a bunch of work.

I feel like many of these criticisms of RDBMS come from a perspective of not working with a great database migrations system.

I've made changes like this (one-to-many switched for many-to-many) using Django migrations many times over, and I find it easy. But that's because I've built up the experience with the tooling over time.

Learning migration tooling in this way feels like a much smaller lift to me than entirely switching to a graph database.

(I'm a big fan of Dgraph, but I've not yet found the right project to apply it. I'm not interested in it as a replacement for RDBMS, I want to use it to solve graph problems that are genuinely painful with a relational database. Easier schema changes aren't that for me.)

<comment><USER3> Hey Simon,

Totally see your perspective. You're already familiar with data migration, but not familiar with graph DBs. The former is just easier to do than to invest in the learning curve involved with the latter. Valid point.

My take is more root-cause and principle based. If we were to think of a different way to build a DB, then avoiding a data migration altogether is a better approach. Avoiding the downtime, extra work, extra code and so on is just better for the user. Moreover, simpler data models, avoiding data duplication and such become very convincing features.

It's also not so interesting to me when graph DBs are only applied to specific graph problems, like Page Rank and such. We didn't build Dgraph just to solve Page Rank. The reason we built Dgraph was because we saw the complex data modeling problem Google Knowledge Graph threw at us. Graph system allowed that problem to be solved in a really clean and simple way. And it's the same problem we see other companies dealing with as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vanilla-almond GraphQL seems to sit between the strict relational model and the more free- form approach of NoSQL databases (from I can see, but correct me if I am wrong).

I have not used a GraphQL database, but one of the things I fear about designing a relational database is mentioned in the article:

>"Relational databases are very rigid so you need to really make sure you understand your data upfront. _Changing the database is a big effort..._ " (emphasis is mine)

Given how often requirements change in a business, it seems impossible to anticipate all future requirements at the outset of designing a database. Is it true that changing a (relational) database schema is a big effort? Is this a strong case for GraphQL?

<comment><USER5> GraphQL is not a database technology. It's a Query Language that can sit in front of REST APIs, databases of all kinds, or in-memory data. As such it typically has no impact on your database schema or any difficulties associated with it.

It can be true that changing a relational db schema is a big effort and it can be true that graph (not GraphQL) dbs are more flexible. Even for neo4j and JanusGraph, which don't offer GraphQL by default. They're NoSQL databases that store graphs instead of documents or k/v pairs. It just happens that Dgraph decided to integrate it</comment></comment>


A VC's thoughts on Paul's essay - <AUTHOR> http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/04/paul-graham-tac.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting, Fred Wilson is explicitly listed as a VC willing to take chances:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=163641></comment>


Yahoo Just Pissed Off The One Group They Shouldn't With Delicious Closure - <AUTHOR> http://www.centernetworks.com/yahoo-delicious-closure <comment><USER2> > I'd love to learn what it actually cost to run Delicious. I just can't > imagine that it was a huge expense.

An analogy.

I travel a lot, sometimes "living on the road" for quite a while at a time. It's a marvelous life.

I _carefully_ consider what I pack. Every little thing takes space and weight, which means less space/weight for something else.

A friend of mine was with me when I was doing some packing, and I was looking at my Kindle charger and iPhone charger. Both of the USB plugs can plug into an adapter so it can plug into a power outlet.

Turns out, Kindle and iPhone USB-to-outlet adapter are the same, and it works for both devices. I tested it, and then was weighing them and trying to size up their durability to choose which one to keep.

My friend said, "Why not keep both? They're small, and maybe there'll be problems later if you don't have both..."

And you know what? He's right. I could totally make the judgmental call to keep both of them, and it'd make no real difference on my space/weight. The problem is, there's 10-15 other little things I have to make the same judgment call on, and it adds up fast.

Sometimes you have to cut, even if this particular cut doesn't mean anything significant, because making 10-15 cuts really does add up to something significant.

This doesn't make Yahoo's decision here a good call or a bad call. But it's something to think about when anyone says "This one isn't too [expensive/heavy/big/cumbersome/time-intensive]" - no, maybe not, but little costs can add up fast.

<comment><USER3> In this case, though, it's more like you were weighing it up and decided to keep both adapters, but throw away the Kindle.

Delicious is not equivalent to Yahoo! Notepad or the other crud they decided to keep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This title is designed to get people to click it (to discover what "The One Group" is), rather than to be informative. Please add e.g. ": Developers" to the end of it, so that people can click on it only if they actually want to read the article.

</comment><comment><USER5> Actually, Yahoo has been a pretty developer-friendly company - for a while the geocoding service had less restrictive TOS than Google's; Pipes is pretty nifty; YUI, while a bit too verbose for my taste, is very well-designed; and of course, Douglas Crockford, the father of JSON, works at Yahoo.

This doesn't obviate OP's point - that closing a bunch of services makes developers less inclined to build on your platform. But I'm not sold on the idea that this will irrevocably alienate developers.

Besides, as Apple proves every day, developers can hate your guts but still jump on cue if the platform is good enough.

<comment><USER6> "Besides, as Apple proves every day, developers can hate your guts but still jump on cue if the platform is good enough."

It's not about being good. If it is, developers would be all over the WebOS platform. It's because the App Store still generates the most revenue for most developers.

<comment><USER7> Right, it's the distribution. Desktop developers have been willing to shell- out a lot for Visual Studio because they needed to build Windows applications for wide adoption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Yahoo just pissed off the one group they shouldn't have. That group? Developers._

As despairing as I am of Delicious's demise, I can't go along with this. Yahoo hasn't been a developer focused company in the last couple of years, even technologies like Pipes have progressed little.

Yahoo is a media company. They sell advertising. They cater to the masses. They're an AOL. If I were in charge, ditching everything not related to being a mass media company would probably get the chop too. Yahoo is no oasis for developers in my eyes.

<comment><USER9> The audience for delicious is quite different to the audience that provides the most eyeballs and clicks that power the actual revenue generation at Yahoo.

So pissing off delicious users won't have any serious financial repercussions. And since it seems plainly evident that Yahoo are now hunkering down in pure survival mode with soccer-mom content plays, it's unlikely Yahoo will need the support of early adopters for the rest of it's shortened lifespan.

Delicious users are mostly using the eco-system of tools rather than the website itself, so there's not much to be gained by splattering it with ads. The only time I see the delicious site these days is when there's a link in my inbox from a contact - and that's edge case for the vast majority of delicious users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > And now I wonder if any developer will want to work with Yahoo when they > know that services in their area might be closed at any time.

The OP was talking about why Google is more developer friendly but seems to have totally forgotten Wave, Jaiku, etc. This article is just poor generalizations.

</comment><comment><USER10> A friend of mine has created <http://historio.us> I ve started using it 2 months back and never looked back. The founder is also a member of HN. Search for stavroskor

</comment><comment><USER11> tl;dr Article believes Yahoo should pander to unprofitable developers.

Yahoo think they should concentrate on the non developer types that click on adverts.

<comment><USER12> Of course, to be fair, the OP suggests that by pandering to developers who might choose to use their APIs, Yahoo could end up attracting more of the advert-clicking people in the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> And they have perhaps pissed off another extremely important group -- the smart engineers that they want to come work for them. They probably haven't done it as badly as Oracle has recently, but if they keep this up it's gonna hurt.

</comment><comment><USER14> Luckily Xmarks backs up my delicious bookmarks. Oh, wait, Xmarks is going away. Oh, wait, Lastpass bought xmarks. Whew. Now all I loose is the tags. And the community. Oh, wait, that's what I really wanted anyway. Hmmmm.... Del.icio.us as fee-for-service anyone? Couldn't yahoo spin this off to an investor who wants to take it in that direction?

<comment><USER15> I would pay for del.icio.us.

If I were in the Bay Area or NYC, I would try to find an investor and wrangle a deal to buy the service from Yahoo and run it in such a way. I seriously hope that someone else is doing so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think they should at least consider selling it or focusing on promoting its API to allow developers to develop better/cool stuff.

Btw, a post regarding its competitor <http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=2014670>

</comment><comment><USER17> did anybody else read this and think, Anonymous?

</comment><comment><USER18> Seriously. Yahoo is a platform for people who semi-professional homem makers in the 90's. Delicious is one of their properties that is not like all the rest. Their bridge to the literate web!

<comment><USER19> Kids, remember - don't drink and type.</comment></comment>