Ask HN: how quickly do you answer support emails? - <AUTHOR>

How do you deal with support emails? Ideally, you deal with each request within the hour. Especially when you have to back and forth a few times quick turnaround time is critical. But when you're in different timezones (and we're a European startup) it becomes far more challenging. Add to that we can only work on our startup part-time and it becomes an even bigger challenge.<p>How quickly do you respond to support requests? And when disaster strikes (server down/hacked/etc) is there always somebody ready to deal with it? <comment><USER2> Respond quickly, even if you can't answer the question immediately. The most frustrating thing if some service isn't working is if users think nobody knows or cares. Just a quick mail saying, "Hi, one of our guys is looking into it. We'll send you an update in a few hours." helps a lot.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you should think out of the box here. You didn't ask the right questions.

How can you make people don't email you every time when they have problems? Like building a good knowledge database .... give them the solution of the problem before they asked for it and so on.

How can you prevent the disaster strikes to be less then a minimum and hopefully never to happen?

For does question the right answers depends on you and what you can find on the net ....I think.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course, prevention is better than the cure. No argument there. But no matter what you do, you will still receive some support requests. And I'm curious how quickly people here feel obligated to respond to them.

It's quite expensive to reduce the risks of disaster, and funds are tight. Mirrored servers + high level SLA costs thousands of dollars. We can't spend that to soften the blow of a disaster, which has only a 5% chance/yr per server or so of occurring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From my experience, while working on a software development team and replying all the time to questions from testers, business owners, managers, etc., I think I would sum it up like wheels did: as soon as possible, even if you don't know the answer. People will appreciate the consideration.

There are cases when may not have the time to reply immediately to all questions (e.g. small team). In that situation common sense will tell you which ones are more pressing, I guess.

Going a little off topic, one thing I've been noticing that works pretty well (especially in agile environments), if you can afford it time-wise of course, is to have one person exclusively dedicated to support for a week. Then rotate to another person next week. That will both keep the requesters happy to get answers on time, but also the repliers, who can fully focus on other things when they are not "support person of the week".

</comment><comment><USER5> We have a ticket system (which is just a basic Rails app I built). When a ticket is submitted, the customer gets an auto-reply that we're looking into it. The ticket is emailed to almost every staff member (6 of 8 people). An initial reply is usually submitted within 30 minutes (not necessarily a resolution). Tickets become a thread of messages until it is resolved.

I'm a big fan of a distributed/threaded system like this. I don't like direct emails for support.

BTW, if anyone is interested in using our ticket system, let me know–I could open source it on GitHub or something.

<comment><USER6> I'm interested. We use email currently which is not very flexible.

<comment><USER5> Ok, here you guys go: <http://github.com/bigfolio/big-help/wikis/home>

There's nothing there yet except a wiki page and an empty Rails app. Give me a day or two to the code organized and commit some updates.

Contributors more than welcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Think this depends on the pricing structure. Are you offering a free or a paid service? Is support part and parcel of this, or do you offer different levels of support?

<comment><AUTHOR> No different levels of support: best-effort is the best we can do. This means that sometimes it may take a while for us to get respond to somebody, given that we have to sleep occasionally.

I'm mostly curious how other people deal with it. Do people carry a laptop everywhere so they can plug in whenever something happens? Or do people just hope for the best and deal with problems only during "office hours"?

<comment><USER8> If our team is going to be away for a few hours, we usually do have a laptop on hand. Otherwise, we just do it through our phones (which is slow and painful), or ask another team member to cover for a few hours.

Side note to parent comment -- we do offer the same support to free and paid plans right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my current venture, we're not yet to the point where we have very many support questions, we're mostly still in "Friends and Family" testing. However, prior to this venture I worked on some other projects, specifically in gaming / gaming server management and for some small hosting companies. With them, responding to support "tickets" if you will was one of our top priorities. However, rather than using an e-mail support system we relied mostly on forums and, for the game, in-game support message systems.

Every company is different and for most of these we were just a bunch of hackers running free communities (with the exception of the web host provider - which was free with premium memberships). However, the importance of answering support quickly was still the same. In terms of the free service, when things didn't work right or we wern't able to instantly respond we were able to write it off as "we're not paid to be here." That didn't always stick though. You might also consider making sure people know what times you guys are generally available. Letting people know that you're not available from midnight to 6am in your local time is a good thing for your users to know.

Depending on what it is you're offering, looking at a message board / forum as a means of technical support might not be such a bad idea. It allows not only you and your team to answer questions (and quickly from almost anywhere you have net access) but it also gives your other users ways to contribute as well. Most importantly, it's an active way to build a knowledgebase, if done correctly. It also saves you from having to necessarily answer the same e-mail's over and over. Even with an e-mail contact available, you could easily put in an auto-responder that lets them know you got it and gives them a link to your support forum for them to browse for a solution in the mean time.

 __Note: If you use forums, make sure you find some method of making your support posts easy to manage and your official team members easy to spot.

</comment><comment><USER10> In my business, which involves $600 software, I reply within 30 minutes. Many deals are lost because you delay in replying emails.

<comment><USER11> And many can be gained.

It's amazing how many potential customers use e-mails as a sort of "test" to see whether they'll go with you or not. Striking these while the iron's hot can almost guarantee dollars in the pocket a month later.

<comment><USER10> Yes. Once you start emailing with a potential customer, the success rate is about 70%. The effort is certainly worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My answer seems to differ from most people here.

I do all sales and support once per day, first thing in the morning, getting the mailboxes to completely empty. I then glance at the mailboxes a few more times during the day, but don't send any more replies till the next morning. The only exception is if there's an urgent issue or serious bug.

This works for me because:

* I can concentrate on productive work (building new features) most of the day without serious distraction. If I were to reply to emails all day long, I'd get far less done.

* In my experience, users put that little bit more effort into solving problems themselves, if they're given the motivation to do so. They read documentation and FAQs. If you reply to emails within half an hour, you'll often find yourself in a lengthy back-and-forth that takes up a lot of time.

This second point might sound like heresy in a world where the customer is always right. But it's not so bad to lose customers whose opportunity cost in time is greater than their revenue is ever going to be worth.

While a small minority of users are unhappy to wait more than an hour or two for a reply, a guaranteed 24 hour turnaround is still pretty good compared to large companies.

</comment><comment><USER13> Just responding to every email (except form letters) we've ever gotten asap has gotten us countless buyers, blog write ups and press.

<comment><USER14> I think this also raises the issue of "personifying your company." Whatever you do, try to show the human side of things as much as possible rather than acting as an autonomous servant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Use a ticketing system or issue tracker that creates tickets based off of e-mail (I like Jira personally). Setup an auto-reply to let them know their e-mail was received, and someone is looking into it. If your ticketing system is world facing (which I think is a nice idea), ask them to visit their ticket (Jira can auto-create accounts for people who don't have them yet when they send an e-mail that creates a ticket), and set the priority.

Give your timezone/part-time issues, I'd provide a cell phone or something for people to use in case of dire emergency. If people abuse it, you cut off their support service.

I'd also instrument as much as possible so that in the event of a disaster you are first to know, not last. I use a heavily customized nagios setup that sends SMSes to my cell phone. Works out well.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been using email for my main company, which isn't great. Just finished putting together the new support system, which is still email-based, but also logs everything in a private ticket system and texts if there's an emergency.

Response time: it varies, but it's definitely good to send a "hey we're looking into it" canned response so their issue is acknowledged. It would almost be worth it to have a few of those prepared and auto-reply within 10-20 minutes with one...

</comment><comment><USER17> The answer is 'as quickly as possible' - especially when you think about support as pre-sales and marketing.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd recommend live chat similar to <http://support.mozilla.com/en- US/kb/Live+Chat>

</comment><comment><USER19> If people are paying you, then you're going to have to make an effort to not only solve their problem, but solve the general problem of support. If you weren't getting paid, you can always make the case that support services are simply unsustainable. But if you're making money presumably you've factored the cost of support into your rate, right?</comment>


Ask HN: How to build a home automation system in 2014 - <AUTHOR>

Do hubs make sense? Z-wave? Cloud services? Open-source solutions? SmartThings? I'm having a very hard time figuring out what's a reasonable way to go about it. <comment><USER2> I use a VeraLite hub for two purposes: (1) to talk to z-wave things, and (2) because it provides one API for thousands of devices. Not everything will work with Vera, but most of the popular stuff does, from smart bulbs to switches to home security and cameras. Vera's hub doesn't have a monthly subscription or require a "cloud" to work. You can also buy one used for a reasonable price on Amazon/eBay.

Here's a bit about my setup:

[http://www.dangrossman.info/2014/10/29/home-automation- dashb...](http://www.dangrossman.info/2014/10/29/home-automation- dashboard-2-0/)

<comment><USER3> Is there a significant lag between calling an action and it taking place? I've got a wink hub and it's hilariously slow at running scripted events.

For example I have it set to lower the bulbs over our kitchen table, bring up bulb over the sink and then dim a lamp at 7pm when we normally sit down for dinner. In theory this sounds like it'd be neat but it just dramatically drops the light output and takes about 20 seconds to go from one bulb to the next.

<comment><USER2> No, it's nearly instant most of the time with the wifi stuff (WeMo light switches, Nest, etc). My z-wave door lock sometimes lags a few seconds, but I blame that more on the protocol than anything. I exclusively use the hub for its API; I don't know if the built-in UI would have any lag when executing scenes created through that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Right now there aren't any systems that do it all well, so you want to just pick the best tools for each job, then glue it together with a hub.

A surprising number of things have relatively IP interfaces, so in my house I scripted it all together by writing [http://route.io/](http://route.io/) \- this lets me do things like control Sonos from my lightswitches, unlock my house when I walk up to it, or turn off _everything_ with a single command.

</comment><comment><USER5> The best way is going to be a custom solution with hacked together custom hard/software. You can then open source your design for community learning and growth.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm pretty excited about the work going on at spark.io. Might be worth checking out if you pursue the smart-things route.

</comment><comment><USER7> Arduino + NRF24, and optionally a Raspberry PI as the main controlling device hooked up to the Internet and a Bluetooth receiver.</comment>


Hand Gesture Recognition Benefits Different Industries - <AUTHOR> https://www.banuba.com/blog/how-hand-gesture-recognition-benefits-different-industries <comment><AUTHOR> Learn what hand gesture recognition is and why there is a need for it, how does this technology work and some examples where it's being used.</comment>


Engineering Tests to Evaluate the Feasibility of Solar Pavement Technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7080/8/1/9/htm <comment><USER2>
      The SRPs shear test results could not be compared directly to
      published ASTM standards due to the unique nature and/or geometry
      of the SRPs.

      Due to the unique nature of the SRPs and the materials used to
      manufacture them, no direct comparison to concrete, asphalt,
      or other plastic materials can be made

Then what's the point? Put the solar panels on your roof, at a more optimal angle, away from grit, dirt and mud. You get way more electricity out of it and they are much cheaper. God dammit, this research is from 2020! Why is the solar roadways bandwaggon still rolling?

Seriously asphalt roads are proven and tested technology, no compound elements that also incorporate solar panels and electrical connections can compete with this matured technology. Asphalt roads if done correctly last for decades! Exactly the same with normal solar panels, they are a proven mature technology if you put them somewhere with unobstructed view to the sky at an optimal angle, you may have to give them a quick cleanup every few years depending on your climate. Why combine both things and create something that does boths jobs terribly????!!! We have lots of unused roof space everywhere. Highways in the US mostly have this wide strip between the roads, where you can put up solar panels if you really want solar roads so badly, though why would you want to put them there instead near industry and housing, I don't know. Charging electric cars with induction? Another useless and terribly inefficient technology.

It is just jaw dropping how people buy into these stupid ideas. I honestly believe it's a scam, these founders and engineers know it's not feasable but it's one way to get dumb money and publish papers.

Yeah, MDPI is an open access publisher. Anyone can send in their low quality work there. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Controversies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Controversies)

</comment><comment><USER3> I can see huge problems with this, all the way from having to take 120,000 pound big rig loads to surface wear causing lowering of transparency by surface dirt by abrasion as well as obscuration of the surface by that dirt, as as dropped oil etc. Surface breakage by hard stones etc - the few test roads made were total failures.

<comment><USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6n8UEKZies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6n8UEKZies)

Dave Jones did lots of videos debunking this bullshit.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for that! A valuable comparison to the official glowing reports of the 'valuable lessons'. Looks like a cover of pure diamond would resist the scratches, and in the netherland, their groos national product would enable them to cover a few square meters a year. This is a dog that never hunted, not a paw hit the ground, this dog is as dead as Monty Python's parrot [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZw35VUBdzo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZw35VUBdzo)</comment></comment></comment>


Why I'm a Creationist - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/why-im-a-creationist-141907217.html

<comment><USER2> "A story with God is the better story."

A good reason for being a creationist is that you think God (or some being) created life and the universe.

Thinking it's a better story is not a particularly good reason to call yourself that.

The fact that science and pseudo science have conflicting hypotheses and theories doesnt make creationism right either.

</comment><comment><USER3> TL;DR: Science is sometimes confusing. So is religion. Therefore religion is no less invalid than science.

What is this doing here, danso?</comment>


Lies About Lying - <AUTHOR> http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/seven-lies-about-lying-part-1/

<comment><USER2> Could someone list them here?

<comment><USER3> It's not that I need all information in list form--I just expect "list of" articles to follow a certain form.

This article is amusing (if rambling), but a title like "Ricky Jay and Errol Morris wax poetic about lying" might work better.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I read the article carefully, but I could not find seven lies about lying in it.

Perhaps this is part 1 of 7 parts, each of which covers one lie about lying. But then I'm still left wondering exactly what lie about lying this part covers.

Or maybe this is just the introduction, and the second part will cover the first lie about lying.

Or _maybe_ the statement that this series covers seven lies about lying, is itself a lie. (Or maybe it's just deception.) :-)

<comment><USER4> UPDATE: None of the above! The second (and last) part has been posted, and it lists _all seven_ lies about lying. How 'bout that?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=748545>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It appears that this is only part 1 of the interview. I'll keep a lookout for part 2. Very interesting read.

</comment><comment><USER6> For those trying to skim, give it up. This is a terribly amusing article, and it's part 1 of a series (presumably there will be 6 more [maybe 7?].) It read much like a DamnInteresting.com article, which is a compliment.

I immediately began trying to get more information on the magician who didn't lie, Jerry Andrus, but Wikipedia doesn't list anything about that whatsoever. Does anybody have more information regarding his routine?</comment>


Australia to regulate Bitcoin under counter-terrorism finance laws - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/world/australia-to-regulate-bitcoin-under-counterterrorism-finance-laws-20160808-gqnne2.html <comment><USER2> Just imagine what would've happened to the Internet, if governments of the world _knew then_ what they know now about it.

"Porn? Anyone can just say anything they want "without repercussions"? Propaganda by other governments? Communicating without being able to intercept them like we do through the phone lines? My god, what an awful thing this Internet is! We better lock it down tight!"

I think it would've been worse than what Chinese government did to it in its own country. Perhaps something more along the lines of Zuckerberg's "charitable" Internet.org/Free Basics service.

That's why I never supported Free Basics. Can you imagine what it would've done to a country like Uganda or somewhere where people have no idea what the real Internet is? They would've grown up knowing only 100 (or perhaps 1,000 eventually) websites that are fully curated by both Facebook _and_ the local governments. Nothing else would be allowed.

These tight regulations on Bitcoin and other similar technologies will definitely limit their potential, in ways we may not even understand yet, if that experimentation that was supposed to happen, never does.</comment>


Ask HN: Can I trust Tor? - <AUTHOR>

... <comment><USER2> It is literally funded by the federal government. Says so right on the website. If you want to know who pulls the strings, follow the money.

While Tor theoretically can be secure (as long as you don't use it to access the clearnet), there are a few known vulnerabilities which would be trivial for an entity like the US Government to take advantage of. You can be sure there are also plenty of non-public vulnerabilities known to government security contractors and, of course, the NSA.

If you want close to guaranteed security on Tor, use PGP for all communication while connecting to it from a VPN bought with Bitcoin. Never use javascript, java, flash, etc. Use only a live linux CD and a non-standard browser. Just don't be a low hanging fruit.

</comment><comment><USER3> If PRISM is real, which seems more and more likely with every statement; you're screwed even if you use Tor if to access any of the PRISM-enabled services.

<comment><USER4> Well, yes. This is like saying you're screwed if you pull a perfect bank heist and then spraypaint on the wall "My name is jrdn and I robbed this bank. My social security number is 123-45-6789 and I live at 123 Elm St."

Tor should still do a just fine job of protecting your anonymity if you don't, you know, shout out who you are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Of course not.

<comment><USER6> Of course not? Why?

<comment><USER5> You cannot trust any electronic system.

<comment><USER6> > You cannot trust any electronic system.

You are in error sir.

Proofed(eg, OTP) or overwhelmingly messy crypto and mathematics is secure. Animal meatspace is not. Who watches the watchman? Something silicon.

<comment><USER7> Ironic that you would say silicon, since someone could theoretically put a backdoor in a chip and you would have no way of knowing it's in there.

<comment><USER6> Silicon is only required because we're lazier doing repeated simplistic operations. Apply alot of pencils, paper, a 1GB sufficiently long one time pad(OTP) 11 miles off the grid without mobile, for the rest of your life, if you think you need it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: anyone's partner left them from years of failed entrepreneurship? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I speak partly from family experience, unless your partner really understands the subtleties of risk, it's a hard convince that person that you are not gambling or just lazy.

Gambling because that's unfortuantely a similar enough activity in more ways than we'd like to admit: jacking everything in for the hope of getting a successful startup, and doing it time and again, is like going to the casino to the outsider. The real difference which most people fail to see is that gambling is not skills based. It's luck based, ie everything you learn in entrepreneurship is valid next time round. In gambling the odds never change no matter how many times you play.

Lazy, or as it was once said to me - "you ought to go and get a proper job" is still a very strong viewpoint for outsiders.

A partner leaving you and giving failure as an excuse is not and never was a _partner_.

<comment><AUTHOR> It understandable though that years of financial pressure can take a toll on a partner.

Even worse, consider the case where your personal finances would have been great if the money had not all gone in to the business - hard for a partner not to feel resentful about not having a house, but instead having 100,000 lines of code that no one wants.

<comment><USER2> I fully understand this, as it is hapenning to me. I tried looking at it from the partner's perspective:

At the outset when optimism was high, the mind can work in wonderful ways to spend all that cash. But it can take _a very long time_ to realise. Maybe not even in this project.

I always end up questioning the motivation of the partner. Cash, a house, holidays, clothes... this is all very well, except it ignores the elemnt of risk that lies at the heart of any venture. That risk at the end of the day has to be shared by a partner. It is what it is love me, love my dog.

If the partner was not prepared to share the risk ( and not have all those fancy things when it didn't happen _at this point in time_ ) then this is tantamount to misleading me (you) over a time.

I don't know if you can agree with this, of course being in the centre it's hard often to rationalise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> At first I thought you were talking about a business partner, but after the comments I'm not so sure.

If you're talking about marriage or something of a similar flavor, no but it came very close several times. It can be very frustrating for someone on the other side of the equation to take the answer "I don't know." to so many questions for so long. Some people abhor that reality, and while I am not one of them, I can understand where they're coming from, especially if there are other aspects of the equation (a mortgage, children, a mountain of outstanding debt).

If you're talking about business partner, I would say certainly. My most recent venture folded up because within four months my (business) partner got engaged, started putting in about 1/2 of the hours needed to get the job done, and the abruptly moved two hours away. He's since found a day job and I'm ready to move on to something different. Sometimes, no matter how long you know someone, they change.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was talking life partner rather than business partner but I can imagine business partners having enough after a while too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This happened to me a couple of times before I had a solid business infrastructure. After you have an office, employees, etc., your life partner becomes more understanding. I think they need validation on your seriousness, the vision of your business and your track record.

However, if you lose large amounts of money (unexpected severance payments, macro-economy, loss of contracts, etc) then things can get really complicated. Sometimes even your relatives expect to benefit from the business - if you shoot for and get high profile press you should expect this.

Don't despair. At the end, you'll end up with a stronger social network: the people that really matter are going to stick. To ensure they do, be open, communicate and involve them in the process (this is key).

Alternatively, to avoid bumpy financial roads, just diversify your investments:

\- Put a fraction the money of an exit or the final payment of a major contract in the bank and never touch it

\- Invest in real estate so you have a stable income source no matter what

\- Assume (like Bill Gates famously did many times) that no client is going to pay for your software and plan for the worst case scenario

\- Never go all-in. In anything!

\- Get a part time job/ a speak at conferences/ etc

\- And, finally, engage with someone who is very stable or also an entrepreneur (which incidentally works like a charm)

Hope this helps.

</comment><comment><USER5> I believe it was Eric Ries who once said; "Entrepreneurship is synonymous with failure." Try to learn as much as you can from this experience. Stay hungry, entrepreneurship is in your blood. If need be, take a step back and re-focus. No one ever said it was going to be easy.

Good luck bud!

P.S. What you've experienced is certainly a fear of mine. How you handle this adversity will say a lot about the person you are.

</comment><comment><USER6> fortunately - the opposite. the hard times have made our relationship stronger. but we've had a couple of close calls...

</comment><comment><USER7> Had a bunch of them that left in 1 month not doing anything :D

</comment><comment><USER8> I never had a partner in the first place =(</comment>


Detailed Instructions on How to Make a Spam Blog - <AUTHOR> http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/making-money/58572-auto-blogs-cracks-how-i-make-3k-month.html

<comment><USER2> What a poorly written piece of crap. People on HN build things that people want. This audience does not want to spam Reddit and get cheap clicks for a quick buck.</comment>


US contractor fined $3.1M for outsourcing work to India - <AUTHOR> http://sakshipost.com/index.php/news/international/77667-us-contractor-fined-$3-1mn-for-outsourcing-work-to-india.html <comment><USER2> For those who prefer primary sources:

"STATE CONTRACTOR TO PAY MORE THAN $3 MILLION IN PENALTIES FOR ILLEGAL AND COVERT OUTSOURCING OF MILLIONS OF FINGERPRINT RECORDS TO INDIA FOR DATA ENTRY", New York State Inspector General Catherine Leahy Scott, 24 March 2016 (Press Release)

[https://ig.ny.gov/sites/default/files/pdfs/IGFocusedTechRepo...](https://ig.ny.gov/sites/default/files/pdfs/IGFocusedTechReportPR3-24-16.pdf)

"Investigation of Improper Outsourcing of Confidential Records", New York State Inspector General Catherine Leahy Scott, March 2016 (contains report and agreement/order by state IG)

[https://ig.ny.gov/sites/default/files/pdfs/FocusedTechnologi...](https://ig.ny.gov/sites/default/files/pdfs/FocusedTechnologiesReportandAOD.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> "The agreement arises from a USD 3.45 million contract..." "Focused paid the Indian company just over USD 82,000..." "Overall, the Indian company performed approximately 37.5 per cent of the work on the contract".

<comment><USER4> The Indian company handled 16m out of 22 million documents. Not sure what other work there was which led to the 37.5% overall figure, otherwise last I checked 16/22=73%...

<comment><USER5> It goes by tasks. Each contract is broken into a series of tasks (CLINs) and assigned a value. The "prime" contractor typically has to perform 51% of the work by value and task when some sort of set-aside preference is used (like Veteran-owned, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My read is that the title here is a bit misleading. The article implies that the illegality is not outsourcing to India, but rather that the Indian contractor was not approved to handle the data it indexed. Am I misreading this?

<comment><USER7> > Given the confidential nature of the information of the fingerprint cards, > Focused was required to perform all of the work in New York and it could > only use employees that had passed a criminal background check. It was also > prohibited from subcontracting any of the work to any other entity.

(Breaching your contract is only illegal (as opposed to a tort) when the other party is the government)

<comment><USER8> Not necessarily.

In this case, the contract involved a vendor bidding with/through NYS Industries for the Disabled, which is a "preferred source" contractor that is supposed to employ disabled people to perform work. Typically this is light manufacturing work, although operating scanners for a purpose like this is also common.

As a preferred source contractor, they have preference over any other competitor -- if you bid on the contract and offered to perform the services for $1, the preferred source vendor would win.

The issue is that this is a serious fraud, not just a case of violating some contract term. I'm curious as to why the principles aren't facing criminal prosecution.

<comment><USER9> > "To advance special social and economic goals, certain providers have > preferred source status under the law. The acquisition of commodities and/or > services from preferred sources is exempted from statutory competitive > procurement requirements. All state agencies, political subdivisions and > public benefit corporations (which includes most public authorities), are > required to purchase approved products and services from preferred sources > in accordance with the procedures and requirements described in the > Preferred Source Guidelines.

[https://www.nyspro.ogs.ny.gov/content/buying-preferred- sourc...](https://www.nyspro.ogs.ny.gov/content/buying-preferred-source-0)

This is why the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It seems to me that the people who should face criminal prosecution are the people who came up with this nonsense "preferred source" scheme.

<comment><USER10> You prefer welfare for blind people vs giving them meaningful work?

<comment><USER9> If that means a level playing field, yes. Positive discrimination is discrimination and should be banned outside of education.

Why the downvote? Is that for disagreeing?

<comment><USER10> I didn't downvote you, but I would if I could. I both disagree with your view and think that you haven't really argued your point very well.

Blind people aren't born on a level playing field.

I believe that a society should take care of people who are unfortunate, and this method seems like a reasonable way to allow market mechanisms to improve their life.

I'm assuming that you disagree that this is a role society should take. However, the consensus of of most societies in history is that blind people should be taken care of in some way.

I think it's reasonable that you should be expected to make a better argument to overturn that view than you have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For _illegally_ outsourcing a government contract

<comment><USER12> Exactly. It's like immigration vs. illegal immigration. It's easy to drop the "illegal" part and stir up racial emotion and thus divert attention away from the real topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> can someone with more knowledge of the legal code explain why no criminal charges?

$3.45m - $3.1m - $0.082m = $268k profit

Also getting to hold onto $3.4 million for the 8 year time period since 2008 would net some good returns as well.

<comment><USER14> There's also the expenses for the other 62.5% of the contract, the taxes paid on the profits, and the business development to get the contract in the first place.

I don't actually know how these things are calculated, though.

<comment><USER4> Good points. They are certainly not making out after the fines. Now I wonder, if the fine is tax deductible?

<comment><USER15> It shouldn't be in general - [http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/business- expenses-tha...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/business-expenses- that-are-never-deductible.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like 'business as usual' to me.

Small company is granted preferential treatment on the contract reward because the company fits under a 'special class'. For example SDVOSB.

The company doesn't actually have the skill/ability to fulfill the contract requirements so they outsource a significant portion of the work; either by picking up one of the bidders who lost as a subprime or bynoutsourcing to a third-party. Passing off the responsibility violates the 'protected class' certification threshold but there's no oversight to verify compliance so the contractor is never held accountable.

Many/most small business defense contractors are simply administrative companies that work the 'special class' certification process, pocket a significant percentage of the funds, and either outsource most of the actual work or hire people and provide substandard pay and provide little/no resources to do the work.

Source: I used to work for one such company. Never again...

</comment><comment><USER17> I love that kind of stories: [http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693)

Capitalism! :)

<comment><USER18> It's like life imitates satire: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYaZ57Bn4pQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYaZ57Bn4pQ) [Onion video]

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This reminds me of the story from a while back about a contractor who took jobs and farmed them all out to Indian companies for a small percentage of his take.

</comment><comment><USER20> How did they catch them?

<comment><USER5> Contracting with the government means you open your books to them, essentially whenever they want. They can audit you at any time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> man, that was messed up!

</comment><comment><USER22> So have these guys essentially lost $40k plus time involved? This doesn't sound like much of a deterrent. There should really be criminal charges for these blatant fraudulent behaviours. While I believe prison should primarily be a rehabilitation, giving white collar criminals actual time will work as a deterrent rather than a 'don't get caught' mentality.

<comment><USER23> Don't forget lost future business too - good luck winning the next contract bid with this kind of track record (hopefully). If that effect is strong enough, it could potentially even put a place out of business.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best gaming laptop for machine learning/deep learning research? - <AUTHOR> I need to travel a lot so thinking about some high end gaming laptop like Razer Blade...any thoughts please? <comment><USER2> Running machine learning jobs on a laptop essentially turn your laptop into a desktop.

Let's say you get suitable hardware, possibly with an external GPU enclosure, and launch a 24 hour training job (which is not that long)... and then what? You can't really close the lid and take it with you anywhere without stopping that process. The workflow becomes unwieldy and inconvenient, requiring compromises between running the ML stuff and your personal mobility. And how about when you're done with proof of concept experimenting and need to train a larger system on all data available, which would take for your laptop, say, two weeks?

Get a decent "conventional" laptop. It will run small jobs quite well anyway, even on a CPU; and for anything beefier connect to a dedicated system remotely, no matter if it's owned or rented, that's the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're going to travel a lot, I would recommend using a lightweight laptop and use a remote server with GPU.

You can either access GPUs on demand or rent a server by the month. Hetzner[0] offers a GeForce 1080, 64 GB ram and Quad-Core i7 for ~$115 / month (+ setup fee).

[0] [https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd- gpu](https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ex51-ssd-gpu)

<comment><USER4> This.

Other options could be:

1\. Get an external gpu with an enclosure that you can attach to your laptop when needed.

2\. Build a GPU enabled desktop computer, leave it connected to the internet somewhere (home or office) and access it via a VPN connection.

These, together with renting from Hetzner, are the options I would consider/advice.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't this require a constant internet connection?

<comment><USER4> Maybe not constant, but certainly "readily available".

Don't get me wrong now, I understand that this might not be feasible or comfortable. But OP did not actually describe his/her needs that much, so we are all speculating.

Some good questions that OP could answer might be:

1 - Do you need to do your computation on the spot, like gather data and perform computations in "real time" ?

2 - When you say "travel", what do you actually mean? Do you "travel" like "I am always on a train/plane/bus" or "I move from a site to another constantly but when I'm there I can access a desk and a stable internet connection" or "I move from an airbnb to another" or something completely different ?

3 - What are your security/confidentiality requirements ?

4 - What are your constraints (weight, connectivity, budget, operating costs) ?

5- What are your preference in terms of tradeoff?

6 - What can you compromise on? And what do you value the most? Speed? Computing power? mobility? Energy efficiency? Operating costs?

OP should really answer some of these questions, then we can all come up with better solutions.

<comment><USER4> Tangently related (mobile GPU): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjty3I3Cdg8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjty3I3Cdg8)

In this video Linus Sebastian is using a Razr Blade because that is the laptop he chose as a daily driver, but OP could use any laptop compatible with the enclosure.

I would like to add that using external GPUs is nothing new and there are people that have successfully attached high end external gpus even to old laptops like the glorious ThinkPad X220 (via an ExpressCard adapter).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can take a look at the P71 which has a serious set of hardware (if you're not going to be too far from a plug at any given time).

        GPU: Quadro P5000
        RAM: 64GB DDR4
        CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1535 or Intel Core i7-7820HQ

[https://www3.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-p/Th...](https://www3.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-p/ThinkPad-P71/p/22TP2WPWP71?menu- id=P71)

<comment><USER7> I have the P50, and it is so heavy that carrying it around all the time has literally damaged my back. It's fine if you don't walk everywhere in a city with it in a backpack or messenger bag.

<comment><USER6> There's also the P52s which is lighter (4.39lbs instead of the P50's 5.6lbs). You give up the nice screen, gpu, and Xeon but you do save some weight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Buy a dumb terminal. A very cheap, lightweight laptop that can handle a web browser, ssh, and ideally drive an external monitor or two. Then rent time on a cloud service of your choice.

Deep learning is very power hungry. Pretending you can do it on a battery is a fool's game.

</comment><comment><USER9> Like most comments, my strong advice is to go for a light laptop with long battery life, and setup servers in AWS/DO/Linode as per your requirements. You will always be able to destroy the server instances to save significant amount of money. You will always be able to add/remove resources depending on your requirements. And you will never have to worry about power supply. Can you imagine how efficient it will be when you run time consuming tasks before flight and get those done on arrival? ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> It's cheaper and easier to have a workspace in the cloud than having a laptop that consumer more than a kettle.

Just spent the past few weeks setting up distributed Tensorflow on Kubernetes and I can say that the amount of power you have at your disposal is phenomenal. I was able to do hyperparameters sweeping in a blink of an eye. The best part if that you can delete your cluster when you don't need it anymore. I can't think of a more cost effective setup.

</comment><comment><USER11> would a laptop be optimal for such things? Wouldn't you be better loading data into a home server where you can have more powerful cpu and multiple gpu's?

</comment><comment><USER12> The one you like developing on. Thinkpad for Linux, Mac for MacOS. Don't skimp on RAM.

Rent GPUs in the cloud or buy a GPU box that you can run jobs on.

</comment><comment><USER13> wouldnt something with a Vega M or Nvidia MX150 chip in be the best bet? something like the XPS 15 maybe, thees also the nvidia quadro in the likes of the thinkpad P but im not sure what the performance is like.

the other option is to get a fairly modern laptop with thunderbolt 3 and get an external GPU enclosure to house a card to do the heavy lifting

</comment><comment><USER14> Get a light cheap laptop with a great display - maybe a Chuwi Lapbook 12.3 if you really want to go #lowend - and spend those $2000 you'll save from not buying a ghastly expensive laptop on cloud resources to do your research right, and at a scale you'll never be able to achieve with a GPU or three.

</comment><comment><USER15> Like others mentioned, I'd go with a laptop with a long battery and remote in. The main advantage of using a Razer Blade or similar laptop would be doing live demos of algorithms, likely after training them, but that is a pretty niche application.

</comment><comment><USER16> Have you considered getting a laptop that lets you export PCIe lanes (i think they do that with Thunderbolt these days, not exactly sure) so you can use the external GPU of your choice?

</comment><comment><USER17> The Dell Precision 5530 is XPS-15 like and has a dGPU option.

Razer has well known quality and support issues.Asus and MSI both have strong laptop lines, but again support and quality is hit and miss.

</comment><comment><USER18> Get the one with 8 GPU NVIDIA Tesla V100 clustered with NVlink from amazon; actually, rent it, but only when you need to train a model. It'll be cheaper.</comment>


Top 5 Tools for Naming Your Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/top-5-tools-naming-your-startup/

<comment><USER2> by the way, check 2555 beta analysis from here : [https://medium.com/@dtlyst/some-stats-betalist-startup- analy...](https://medium.com/@dtlyst/some-stats-betalist-startup- analysis-f8fb35de452f)</comment>


Silently banned from Reddit... - <AUTHOR> http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2010/03/09/silently-banned-reddit/ <comment><USER2> As a point of information, how many discussion forum websites ban some users by giving them nontransparent ban messages (e.g., responses to server requests that look like error messages rather than a statement that the user has been banned)? Philip Greenspun advocated that a long time ago

[http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=...](http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch- msg?msg_id=000teT)

(the link describes a twist on his practice, used by Joel Spolsky), but I don't know how many site managers follow that suggestion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whether it's Greenspun or Spolsky, it's still explicitly described as "tricking" your users. It's sneaky and underhanded, and an incredibly bad way to treat your users.

<comment><USER3> And it's the sole moderation mechanism on Hacker News.

Domain names get put on a big blacklist so that any posts linking to them get [dead]-ed instantly. It's used for outright spam, low content sites (Infoworld, for example), and purging people critical of YC companies (kungfugrippe.com was banned for mocking Scribd). It's totally the wrong solution for the first two problems, and unseemly for the last one.

Users get hellbanned -- every link and comment they post is [dead]-ed instantly, but they see them normally when logged in as themselves. They're also disenfranchised -- they can vote and it's counted but doesn't affect the sums (this happens to normal users randomly too). Great users often get hellbanned over a brief spat concerning a narrow topic — instead of being told not to do that, or given a timeout, their contributions from then on are just blackholed. I occasionally see hellbanned users where paging back through their history reveals nothing worthy of moderation — though there are some cases where I know that the person is being banned simply for having been banned before (like Giles Bowkett's last several accounts).

I make an effort to contact hellbanned users when I see them making substantive comments — make sure there's an address in the public part of your profile! I've sent around 10 such emails and a few github messages, it would be at least twice that if more people had contact info or used googleable usernames.

<comment><USER4> I recall years ago a moderator at Fark.com describing what they called "ghost banning" which sounds a lot like the "hellbanned" you've described. The person would see their post in a thread but nobody else would.

<comment><USER5> This is fairly common on large forum sites. The last one I worked for would do this sort of invisible banning because it was pretty easy to put into code and was fairly effective. The banned users saw their posts and thought everything was fine, but probably wondered why their inflammatory comments were not attracting the sort of attention they sought. It tended to cut down on the number of new fake accounts these people would have otherwise created to get around the ban hammer.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, screwing real users in order to avoid expending effort on spammers then. Yeah, still not liking this idea. It's basicly the forum software coders throwing their hands up and saying "Hey, we don't know how to solve this problem, so we give up. Screw you buddy!".

<comment><USER5> When creating a new account has no cost at all to the banned user then this is a useful response. Perhaps you have never tried to deter a determined troll or griefer on a forum, but it is a non-trivial exercise. It was not the coders admitting that they don't know how to solve the problem, it was the coders coming up with a solution that was effective for some large portion of the problem and that did not require too much additional code.

They did not screw the real user, they just made them invisible. Eventually, when their posts did not get the replies they were looking for, they might just give up and go away -- this was the intent of the system.

<comment><USER3> It's a great tool for dealing with dedicated drive-by griefers, but that's not what most people deserving moderation are — they're usually just good new users figuring out the site norms, or old-timers having a bad day.

I've noticed dozens of hellbanned users still posting on HN, and it was never the right treatment except for one of them (the losethos guy).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


UBeam Declassifies Secrets to Try to Prove Wireless Power Is Possible - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/07/wireless-power-charger/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> The new numbers match what I said on YC the last time this came up.[1] Although uBeam's web site talks about megahertz ultrasound, as I pointed out, that won't work - air will absorb all the energy in less than a meter. They have to operate in the 40KHz - 100KHz range, where everybody else does air ultrasound and where the attenuation is moderate. Sure enough, they're now saying 45KHz to 75KHz.

As I pointed out last time, if you put together a 1 meter square array of off the shelf American Piezo ultrasonic transducers, about 4000 of them, you could get to their claimed 155dB level. But it would take about 2KW to drive the thing, comparable to a small clothes dryer. Their new figure is 3KW, a medium- sized clothes dryer.

They claim to be able to deliver 1.5W (not KW) to a device, for an efficiency of 0.05%. The rest of the 3KW will heat the air. The energy has to go someplace.

As I pointed out last time, this thing can potentially transmit some power, but it's an insanely inefficient way to do it. It can also double as a space heater and steerable ultrasonic welder.

I'll bet we'll see a demo of this at a trade show, with about a 2-3 meter range, a transmitting array about a foot square, and some mobile device with a special case as the target. The demo will work. The transmitter will draw about 300W, and deliver a few watts at the target end. It will have enough smarts to turn off if you put an obstacle in the beam. You could build that right now from off the shelf parts. As a deployed technology, it's unlikely to be useful.

Remember that guy who demoed power transmission over a few meters by ganging up enough WiFi transmitters to get some real power? Whatever happened to him?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10421628](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10421628)

<comment><USER3> With a 1M^2 array, would all 4,000 transducers need to be active simultaneously to achieve 155db? I ask because it seems part of their core IP is the beamforming technology, which could mean physically steering the transducers towards the receiver, or only activating those transducers which point directly at the receiver.

<comment><USER2> Yes, they'd all be active, and at the same frequency, but in different phases. Beam forming is done by adjusting the phase of each transmitting element so that all the elements are in phase relative to a surface aimed at the target. See [1]. Each transducer has a relatively wide output dispersion, but the entire array produces a much tighter beam. This is a standard technology for radio, radar, and sonar.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they can somehow overcome the focusing of sound problem and get it to work... what remains are other issues with this technology.

One thing that is not discussed enough when talking about uBeam are health effects of high-energy ultrasound. The kinds of energies that uBeam is talking about can destroy or seriously damage human hearing. [1]

I don't even know if there is any research out there on what effects high- energy ultrasound can have on animals and pets (many of whom have sensitive hearing; much more sensitive than humans).

In any case, uBeam has a lot of problems ahead and I don't think they have raised nearly enough money to meet all these challenges.

[1]: [http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/crr_pdf/2001/crr01343.pdf](http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/crr_pdf/2001/crr01343.pdf)

<comment><USER5> The TechCrunch article [1] referred to a study in pig tissue as but the article is paywalled. I'd love to take a look... but not so much that I'd pay $40 to do so.

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0041624X15...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0041624X15001973)

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/08/how-ubeam- works/](http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/08/how-ubeam-works/)

<comment><USER6> Here you go:

[http://docdro.id/J8cWQCj](http://docdro.id/J8cWQCj)

<comment><USER7> 600 mW through 10 to 15 mm of tissue. That's a pretty hefty limitation. For one that's a short distance, second tissue will conduct ultrasound a lot better than air.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't see anything new here on top of what the skeptics have postulated.

In particular the 145-155db number does not look 100% safe for me. This is not going to burn your skin but you might end up hearing it anyway, feeling uncomfortable or who knows what. Various opinions about the safe level for ultrasound are in the 100db-120db range so you are talking like 300x the intensity.

Looks like Theranos 2.0.

<comment><USER9> Sure, it might be dangerous, but at least you wouldn't have to plug in your phone anymore.

<comment><USER10> I read that in Archer's voice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "When skepticism based purely on vague assumptions leads to premature > conclusions, it becomes blind cynicism."

That looks more to me like perfectly valid critique based on simple assumptions arising from an understanding of physics and engineering, hardly "blind cynicism". I'd instead say that this TC article itself is an example instead of "blind faith" by taking uBeam's claims at face value.

I'm still waiting for uBeam to even attempt to address the nonlinear effects of their proposed ultrasound frequency and power in air. Ditto for actually addressing safety concerns head on rather than casual dismissal.

I won't be surprised if they can power a cell phone in a controlled environment. I'll be mildly surprised if they can power one in a real-world environment, say sitting on a coffee shop table. I'll be amazed if they can deliver more than a couple watts, to accomplish (as appears on their website)

        A world in which every electronic device - hearing aids,
        tablets, sensors, light bulbs, computers, flat screen TVs -
        could be powered simultaneously with one simple device.

</comment><comment><USER12> Trouble is, it doesn't prove anything, or even come close to proving anything. The "uBeam FAQ" document, which is referenced multiple times to show the "cynicism" of the doubters, raises many issues which are not dismissed by this article. [http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/the-ubeam- faq/](http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/the-ubeam-faq/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Nothing in this article addresses the skepticism in [http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/the-ubeam- faq/](http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/the-ubeam-faq/). Read that document and you will see.

The "uBeam FAQ" document admits that it is technically possible under _very_ limited conditions but mostly uses physics to claim that it will have tons of other issues such as _massive_ power use, short range, potential safety issues, huge cost and other bad things. Basically that even if you did make it, it would be quite inferior to any other charging technology such as, say, wall outlets.

</comment><comment><USER14> Let's say that uBeam's claims are true. Is it still viable from a commercial standpoint?

Wireless phone charging cases? There are already battery charging cases which would likely be the same price and provide power everywhere.

IoT? Not with the line-of-sight restrictions.

Large power consumers such as TVs? As noted in the eevblog forum post, the amount of energy required would make it impossible to provide constant power over a large distance...and having the device at a small distance mostly defeats the point.

When uBeam did demos, they did it to prove that wireless power is _possible_ in controlled situations.

</comment><comment><USER15> What uBeam needs is not "technical details", it's a credible witness reporting that they saw a working prototype. I am confident that will not materialize.

<comment><USER16> I disagree completely with this. Past claims that uBeam is infeasibly have rested on discussions of physics not engineering. Refuting these claims with physics is perfectly reasonable.

<comment><USER7> That gets you only so far. A working prototype would instantly silence all critics and since they have a patent there is nothing that would stop them at this stage from demonstrating such a prototype. uBeam seeks the attention and they seem to be upset that some of that attention is skeptical in nature. That's the problem of trying to stir up a whole bunch of press for something that you can't show yet (or maybe even at all) for whatever reasons. Some people - rightly or wrongly - will question your assumptions going on their own knowledge and understanding of the limitations of the technology as it is presently understood. The explanations that uBeam gives are grounded in physics but only if you take on the extra qualifier 'within laboratory setting'. And that is where the whole thing derails, the critics are making claims about real world settings whereas uBeam is talking (mostly and as far as I understand it) about whether or not their technology could work in a theoretical manner.

I'm fairly sure that given a $10M budget you could create a working device in a controlled setup. Whether that same device could then be generalized to the point where you can slap it in a home or a coffee-shop and expect to power the vast majority of the devices present and all that without inconveniencing or endangering people and other creatures present is exactly the point of contention. And I don't think anything short of a working demo will be enough to convince the skeptics.

So uBeam should either put up or shut up, no amount of PR fluff will move the needle, unless of course the world at large is not actually the intended audience of these publications.

<comment><USER17> _A working prototype would instantly silence all critics_

I'm not sure it would. The general view seems to be that this is feasible in the sense that under the right conditions you can indeed transmit power via ultrasound. (See below)

The issues are more around the fact that the energy loss is massive, and the there are genuine risks to human (and animal) health.

So a prototype isn't the solution, unless that prototype is a lot more than a trade demo, and actually operates in a normal home/office, over an extended period of time.

Evidence that many people think it's possible to produce a prototype, but not possible to produce a viable product:

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527361](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527361)

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527712](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527712)

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527607)

<comment><USER7> I think there is some confusion here about the difference between proof-of- concept and 'working prototype', those are most definitely not the same things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article itself is typical TC: a credulous PR puff-piece, not journalism of any kind. The best way to prove that something works is a demo. This story is about documents that could as well be science fiction, not a live demonstration of working devices. And the specifications they have published don't do much to allay the safety concerns that have been raised based on patent filings; if anything, they confirm them. The only really new piece of data here is that the frequency is much lower than previously speculated, which will reduce attenuation at the cost of being well within domestic animals' hearing ranges.

All UBeam has to do to put a stop to accusations of fraud is have someone independent demo and use the device in public. If it exists. It's that simple.

<comment><USER12> Agreed: with several years and tens of millions in investments, if it was possible, they would have some kind of demo.

<comment><USER7> This is where it gets tricky. They said they had a working demo (and this is corroborated by a number of investors) on which proper DD was performed prior to investing. I'm really not sure what to make of this. On the one hand it has me very skeptical on the other hand the number of reputations that will be tarnished forever if this turns out to be vapourware is substantial. You'd hope that those people putting their money and reputations on the line really did do their homework, uBeam would not deserve to get out of the gate let alone raise capital like that if their prototype never worked in the first place, it's not that easy to rig a demo for a savvy tech DD team (though I can assure you it has been tried).

What bugs me is that uBeam is on the defensive all the time they should just show their tech or be very quiet. No need to tell the world it works if you can't show it, who is the intended audience of all this 'good news'? Or do they have a bunch of unruly investors to keep quiet who are getting antsy and are starting to pick up on the skepticism? That might actually explain all this attention diversion, attention that might be better used elsewhere (assuming this thing can work at all).

<comment><USER2> They had a working demo in 2012. Here it is.[1] You're looking at a single big ultrasonic transducer sending to a bunch of little ones. The little ones are the same ones RobotShop sells.[2]

They're very vague about how much energy went in and how much came out. The big heat sinks on the sending side suggest that a few hundred watts are going in. The meter on the receive side is just showing voltage, so there's no indication of the actual energy transfer. There's no beam forming or steering.

Anybody could reproduce that demo, but it doesn't prove much.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoHxyweJcZI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoHxyweJcZI) [2] [http://www.robotshop.com/ca/en/hc-sr04-ultrasonic-range- find...](http://www.robotshop.com/ca/en/hc-sr04-ultrasonic-range-finder.html)

<comment><USER18> Right, to me a useful demo has to have several attributes to prove the concept:

1\. It has to take place in a real-world setting, perhaps a vacant hotel room or a coffee shop that has closed for the day.

2\. It has to be monitored by independent technicians who can verify that the energy transmission is occurring via ultrasound, not some other means.

3\. The transmitter has to be plugged into a normal wall socket (to establish a lower bound on efficiency).

4\. The receiver needs to show how much electrical power it is producing, and that needs to be at least 3W.

5\. The receiver needs to be held by a human, and for part of the demo the human should be walking slowly in a straight line.

After all, it's not that the transmission of energy via ultrasound is physically impossible. No one is asserting that (including, hilariously, the professors this "reporter" got to acknowledge is within the laws of physics). The question is whether they have the technology they claim, such that a reasonable person might plausibly hope to refine into a marketable product.

To me, a demo showing all of that would prove the key technologies: namely, beamed power transmission via ultrasound to a working receiver, receiver tracking, and at least basic short-term safety for humans. That doesn't mean there's a viable product here, of course; such a device might still be unsafe in many ways, it might be a hazard to animals, it might be far too inefficient to be useful, it might not be able to track more complex motion reliably, it might not work well or at all with multiple receivers, etc., etc., etc. That's the "multiplicative risks" people mention and many of the objections to a marketable product would still apply. But many companies have technically functional products they fail to bring to market or make a profit from, without being fraudulent. Multiplicative risks apply to almost any new product concept. Having a device that, whether marketable or not, clearly has the essential attributes that they claim would at least quiet the charges of fraud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm a skeptic. I'd be willing to bet a lot of money on an idea futures market against them ever turning it into a successful product.

What I don't understand - if they are going to the trouble of tracking devices, why not use a laser to charge the phone? It would be way more efficient and all it needs is some human avoidance tech. To a laser/ccd people are huge so that shouldn't be too hard. The system would probably also be able to double as a pest control system for small insects too.

That reminds me, I bet their beam forming tech is legit but I'm pretty sure it's been done before. I remember reading awhile back about a tech company that developed a weapon for the military that let them put a voice in your head with focused sound that no one else could hear. I remember it because of how freaky/interesting/evil it was. But I bet even that would kinda suck in the field because of the line of sight problem they'd have. Pretty sure even your typical mujahideen would start moving his head around quite a bit if his god started talking to him.

</comment><comment><USER20> > > If uBeam can deliver that amount of power to a phone with reasonable > efficiency, reception, and electronic management, then their system does not > violate the laws of physics.

> While he can't vouch that the technology does work, he concludes that given > the specs, it's not infeasible. It will just be very tough to execute.

No, he concluded that he cannot rule out that it's feasible, not that it is feasible and is now just a matter of time. Works if you could just do "X" applies to a whole lot of ultimately infeasible technologies.

edit: formatting

<comment><USER7> That's almost straight from Douglas Adams. 'If it is virtually impossible that means it must be possible...' or something to that effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > uBeam promises it will being showing demos to people outside of its team, > investors, and partners next year.

In May 2012, more than three years ago, Michael Arrington, who participated in uBeam's seed round through CrunchFund, wrote "In a year or so when this thing is productized you'll be hearing a lot more about Mary" on his blog[1].

[1] [http://uncrunched.com/2012/05/23/serendipity/](http://uncrunched.com/2012/05/23/serendipity/)

</comment><comment><USER22> I've flagged this post because it has no actual science behind it, and just seems to be PR fluff to further spur investments.

I'm sorry, but _any_ sound at 150dB is going to cause harm to humans, no matter how high the frequency is. I will not buy any product using this technology (if any such thing ever happens, which I believe has an extremely low chance of happening), and I will suggest to everyone I know to also not buy it.

I'll support something like Rezence (longer distance/higher power competing standard against Qi), or just keep using Qi (which I have a Nexus charger for my Nexus 5, which is Qi).

</comment><comment><USER23> A dog's hearing goes as high as 60Khz, and this this is transmitting at 45kHz to 75kHz...at 145-155db. I have a dog.

<comment><USER24> With one of these things going, one wonders how long your dog would continue to have hearing at 60Khz...

<comment><USER25> Seconds, minutes at best.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some napkin math - they claim a device could get (at least) a 1.5W delivered.

They vary from 360W/m2 to 3kW/m2 (by the article). We could fit 83 galaxy notes 2 in one square meter (it is 0.012 m2).

360/83 = 4.3 watts that reach said device. 30% efficiency seems fine.

The problem is that the extra energy must heat something. And it will become worse with increasing of the power transmitted.

<comment><USER27> Heat is only a problem if you need to cool your space. Here in the Northeast it could be considered a happy side-effect for nine months of the year.

<comment><USER26> What about cooling my device? Dissipating a couple more watts while working will really be pushing the thermal envelope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> From uBeam's website:

"Through process of logical deduction, acoustic energy is the only type of energy that can be used for over-distance wireless power transmission. Since uBeam owns the entire ultrasonic wireless power space from an IP perspective, the world will have to leverage uBeam's technology."

</comment><comment><USER29> To preface: I find it extremely unlikely that this will ever see widespread consumer adoption if any at all. If it is indeed feasible to transmit power via ultrasound, there are additional hurdles to overcome. It will likely be high cost and reliability is an issue, and there is the question of limited appeal or application space. Everything I have that needs power has an outlet or easily available place to charge. I'm suprised they were able to trick not just people like Cuban into investing but also Marissa Meyer?

 _I can however see some use cases for this tech_ but just not for your average consumer. I bet someone could invent a surgical instrument that needs power wirelessly or there could be some equivalently niche use case for this kind of tech.

<comment><USER30> They are wealthy enough that the investment price means nothing to them if wasted, but if successful, this will affect technology on a fundamental scale

<comment><USER29> True, I didn't really think about also the possibility of backward linkages and the ability of the company to be worth it's investment value in terms of research and patents that can be applied to other use cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How is this better than a solar-powered (USB) charger? E.g.: [http://www.outdoorgearlab.com/Solar-Charger- Reviews/Buying-A...](http://www.outdoorgearlab.com/Solar-Charger- Reviews/Buying-Advice)

Light is a much better energy transmission medium than sound, it can be visible or invisible, focused, transmitted in a straight line (laser), easily routed via a simple mirror or encased in a glass fiber, and (with some notable exceptions) harmless. Also solar light is abundant during the day, as is indoor (albeit not nearly as powerful).

</comment><comment><USER32> I was reading their website

>The most recent paper to investigate the safety of ultrasound was just published in the January 2016 issue of Ultrasonics.

Wow Jan 2016? Are these guys from the future?

<comment><USER33> No need, it's out now: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0041624X](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0041624X)

If you find this puzzling, read: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_date](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_date)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It would take God himself to change any of the immutable, set-in-stone facts below:

1\. Seven billion people cannot read the word "UBeam" without instantly knowing that they must be sold an acoustic charging solution, and would be confused and never buy anything other than an acoustic solution from such a company.

The idea of "UBeam" ever selling anything other than specifically an acoustic solution is as impossible as the idea of a Tuberculosis brand of cough medicines. It's happened before: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayds) , a brand of appetite suppressant candies which enjoyed strong sales in the seventies and early eighties. You can imagine what happened after that.

Clearly it would take God himself messing with the minds of everyone on the continent before the syllables "ultrasonic transducer" weren't called to mind whenever anyone read the word UBeam. How can it mean anything else? It can't.

2\. The Founder would instantly be imprisoned for shipping any wireless product that did not use ultrasound. No company has any right to pivot to making the exact same thing in an even slightly different way. The founder would be imprisoned so fast the trial could be argued in three days and a grand jury could make a decision in seven to ten minutes. Actually, I doubt even God himself could change the mind of a district attorney on this one.

3\. $24 million is not enough to ship a wireless charging solution. Except ultrasound. This isn't something SMALL like the $5.5 million NASA just awarded Firefly to launch a small satellite to space - [http://www.mynews13.com/content/news/cfnews13/news/article.h...](http://www.mynews13.com/content/news/cfnews13/news/article.html/content/news/articles/cfn/2015/10/14/smaller_rocket_launc.html) \-- we are talking about building something, say, as demonstrated in 1893 by Tesla, and ON EARTH. How would you do that with only four times as much money ($5.5M * 4) and change as a satellite launch, where by change I mean a remaining $1.4M ($5.5M * 4 + $1.4M = the $23.4M raised.) When you have a global headcount of twenty engineers on staff to maintain. God himself would have to change the rules of accounting so that twenty engineers and twenty million dollars would make it possible to ship any product. (Except ultrasound.) It's impossible.

4\. No consumer wants any wireless charging solution, except ultrasound.) God himself would have to change these preferences so that people who wanted to charge their devices wirelessly could do so even if the technology were a hair off of what UBeam started with. It would be as absurd as thinking that anybody who had been buying a spinning-harddrive music player would also buy a flash- storage based music player from the same comany! In fact, I think God himself could not change people's preferences this strongly - after all, He has maintained free will.

6\. No wireless charging solutions are possible. (Except ultrasound.) Now, it would be silly to even suppose that God could change the laws of physics themselves, just for one company. But let's assume that He would. It would take God himself to turn something that Tesla's photographer photoshopped into his studio, and make this magical parlor trick function. Would God step out of his way to make any other form of power transmission possible? No!

....

But Oh, if somehow God could step in and save this startup! It is as though they were stuck in a prison of their own devising; except it's not psychological, they are not free to step out of it. It's part of the laws of God and the physical universe.

Tragically.

<comment><USER34> looks like you guys seriously don't get it. Nothing stops them from pivoting to doing any other form of power transmission, they have the brand, and the money, and it's possible.

They just don't want to. Like someone _insisting_ on releasing a certain specific technology instead of anything else in that space.</comment></comment>


On pricing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.historio.us/on-pricing <comment><USER2> I'm not sure if this helps in your pricing analysis, but personally I'm always looking for a discounted annual rate for services that are around your price range. Thanks for offering one. It's a big plus in my mind.

As I subscribe to more and more web services I frankly get tired of _seeing_ the recurring fee show up either in my inbox, or in PayPal or on my CC statement.

There is definitely value to me as a consumer to pay for a service as I consume it, to spread out cost and risk, but there is a threshold where the convenience of an annual payment outweighs the pay-as-you-go pricing.

I just don't want the monthly reminder that I'm paying for something. Keep in mind, that before SAS, apart from recurring utility bills and rent/mortgage, most people's model of a subscription was a magazine. Most of those are annual payments.

BTW, I think the annual vs. monthly threshold for me is somewhere between $40 and $70 per year. It's dependent on the service itself, but for services in that range I'd opt for annual.

Edit: Removed duplicate word.

<comment><USER3> We realise that, and that's exactly why we offered the discounted yearly rate. Another reason is that payment services charge too much for payments of $2-3, so we save more money with an annual rate and can pass the savings to you.

Of course, there's the old "one in the hand, two in the bush" aspect as well, which gives an added reason for a discount.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd find the number intersting how many users would pay, if there were no free option available - my take is that it would be much more than the one percent of users that seem to be the rule in the freemium model. Of course a free plan attracts more potential users in the first place, which means the cake is smaller, so it's hard to evaluate what yields more paying users...

The more important factor to me, though, is cost and that usually not only involves storing some data as in the case of historious, but also support requests and scaling costs - when you have a paying user base scaling just won't be that much of pain point.

So, I'll go with a free 30 Day trial period after which the user has to decide, whether he'd like to sign up and pay. That way I can easily handle a couple of thousand users on one server and have more time left to spend on development instead of suporting nonpaying customers.

Free or Freemium only makes sense to me, if the presence of more users provides value to paying users, e.g. okcupid, Skype, and other network-effect businesses.

<comment><USER5> I'm not a big fan of the 30 day trial because I think it adds extra friction to the signup process. Especially when a credit card is required.

Isn't it better to offer an unlimited, resource constrained plan? Note: you can still let them use all the features but with limited resources.

Advantages: 1\. You get permission to send them product related emails. 2\. They hit the resource limits quickly thereby encouraging them to upgrade.

We do something similar at Trafficspaces and it works well for us. Unlimited free trial but with very low resource usage.

Just my 2 cents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would like to see a comparison of Free Trials vs. Free Plans. And upgrades from each.

<comment><USER3> We don't distinguish between the two, our free plan is resource-restricted, and can thus be thought of as a trial...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Upgrade to support can be a revenue stream for a small startup but in the long run obviously you can't rely on that.

Hardest bit about fremium model is where to draw the line.

<comment><USER8> For most consumer-facing sites, I think paid support is a non-option, and might even drive people away. The users tend to treat these services like they would a utility company, albeit, a free one. They just expect it to always work, all the time, and if anything goes wrong it's _your_ responsibility to drop everything you're doing and fix it immediately.

<comment><USER7> I agree, although to be completely free either you'll be next big thing (or fairly big) like delicious in this case or you'll have a premium version.

<comment><USER8> Maybe I misunderstood your initial statement. I thought you were suggested a "paid support" model, where the users pay to get technical or customer support, much like some hosting companies charge.

By "paid support" did you just mean premium accounts? If so, I 100% agree that premium accounts are a great idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> We would greatly appreciate it if you could take a minute to answer a four (EDIT: turns out it's five)-question survey on pricing here:

<http://bit.ly/b2AUz9>

We plan on giving back to the community for this help by posting the results on our blog. Thanks!

<comment><USER9> I just filled out your questionnaire but I don't think I'll submit it, my thoughts don't really fit into the few fields provided, if I put that $2 is what I'll pay it won't make sense. I don't know if you remember me, but I asked about subscriptions back before you offered them and signed up once they were live. For me historious is something that's neat but something I can go with out, so sure I can afford the $6/m you're charging now but how little I use it makes it really not worth it for me. I've been a member since you posted about it on reddit and I have 166 historified sites, I use it to bookmark interesting sites that I might need in the future, I don't care for RSS feeds or auto-tweeting.

I'll probably cave and go for the $6/m thing, but I don't _need_ any of the features so it feels like I'm paying for something I'll never use. The free package would be fine for me, all I want to do is use it to historify sites and search them. I think you need to find a balance between the features required for users and pricing. It might sound stupid, but to me if you had 2 feature for $6/m and I used them both I'd be more likely to buy than if you had 10 features and I used 2 for $6/m, because the "smart spender" in me thinks "Why pay for 10 features when I only need 2? That's me wasting $4 a month!".

The price doesn't matter to me, I love your service and I'd pay $20 a month if that's what you requested, but when you're selling 6 features and I need 2 it seems poor value for money, and what matters to most is value for money, however silly that is.

<comment><USER3> Hey Sam! Of course I remember you, thanks for subscribing (I'm also Poromenos on reddit).

Psychology has a lot to do with pricing, what you say is true, as silly as it sounds. The problem is that someone might find that the two features that work for him are different from the ones that work for you, so it's a hard problem :/ The best solution is to have pricing packages, but we don't have a clear hierarchy of things that are more important than others, so it's not very easy there either.

Also, aren't you paying $3/mo? The new prices shouldn't affect you, and we sort of ended that experiment and reverted back to the old prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Excellent analysis here. The cost of the free users really made me cringe. For what I'm doing, cost for free and premium is pretty much the same (a couple database rows), so I can afford to carry a lot of freeloaders. I can't say I planned that, though. I got lucky.

<comment><USER3> Yep, most services won't have anything approaching our cost. A commenter on the blog offered a good compromise: Send the user an email after, say, two months of them not logging in, saying "click here to keep your account or wait 30 days to have it cleared out".

I'm guessing that would take care of cleanup very very well, while not inconveniencing users in the least. Users who use the service frequently will never even see the email, since only inactive users get it.

We might implement that very, very soon.

<comment><USER5> _One way to deal with the "stale data" problem is to prune old users from the system, but many people will be understandably dissatisfied with this, and it is not recommended._

I don't think you should worry too much about this. Someone who abandons a free service for an inordinate amount of time shouldn't expect to see their data. Especially when the cost of storing such data isn't nominal.

Send them one or two reminders and you should be fine.

<comment><USER3> Yep, that makes sense. We're actually just implementing this now, hopefully it will solve our problem (it looks _very_ promising, from some initial data crunching we ran), and is very easy to implement.

We plan to send an email one month after the user's last activity, and then delete the documents (just the documents, not the account, just in case) a month after that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would add a pay per use plan. once user runs out of 300 marks he can buy X for Y usd. also a small one time payment to permanantly store user data.

<comment><USER3> That's a good idea, and very easily implemented. We will pursue it, thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I didn't realize all pages were cached. I figured they were indexed and either discarded or tossed into storage

<comment><USER3> Nope, all the pages get cached and you can optionally publish them to get a persistent URL to which you can link from anywhere.</comment></comment>


Companies That Sell for Less Than Their Cash - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_43/b4105000168724.htm?campaign_id=rss_topEmailedStories <comment><USER2> I completely agree with Business Week. This stock market is oversold.

For instance, Yahoo is definitely worth more than a 16 X P/E, no internet company of Yahoo's reach and size should be worth 16 X P/E. $2B in cash, $4B in liquid assets, and only $2B in liabilities. $1B in profit, every quarter. It's just a function of the rest of the world going online and using existing web portals, a lot of them are going to use Yahoo. That, or they'll receive another offer for a buyout, which is highly possible.

Another good stock buying technique is to buy small chunks of the stock market over a set amount of time, I believe this is called "averaging down". It relies on the fact that you don't know where the bottom will be, so it averages that risk across multiple investments, which is a lot safer than just placing 1 bet for where you think the bottom will be. I think that if you were to average down into a leveraged index ETF right now (ie. MVV), you'll be making buttloads of money in 5-10 years, with an averaging down investment schedule to take the money you want to invest, and split that investment up over a 2 year span.

Of course, I'm just a lowly tech entrepreneur that has also lost a little bit of money in this recent downturn, so what do I know, haha

<comment><USER3> I heard that the strategy of investing the same amount of money every month ("stock goes up, good, stock goes down, you just bought more shares, good") is not actually a very good strategy at all. Supposedly, brokers use it to get you to spend money with them on a regular basis, especially if the fund or broker makes commission or a fee per trade.

<comment><USER4> How could it possibly be a good strategy?

<comment><USER2> It's all about risk minimization. Assume for a second that you don't read the news and all you see are numbers. (This kind of scenario is kind fairly accurate for most investors because most investors don't beat the index, so they might as well be news agnostic anyways.) Right now, in our hypothetical, you want to invest in the market. You saw that it fell 30 odd % since the top and that if you compare that % to previous great depressions and recessions, it's on par with the bottom of those analogous situations. If you buy in at one single point, you have a high risk that the stock market will drop and you'll lose a lot of money. But if you averaged in, you'll minimize the risk of catching the exact bottom of the stock market, and overall, should increase the average buy-in price.

The main reason why this works as opposed to just reading the news and choosing based on logic is because more than 50% of professional investors fail to out-invest the index. That means that you have a much better chance of catching the lowest buy-in to the stock market than if you were to use "logic".

It's pretty counter-intuitive, but it makes sense if you just come to the realization that we're not that good investing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Notwithstanding debt"

This entire article hinges on those two words in the second paragraph. Sure, these companies are holding some cash. But if I have $10,000 in my checking account and owe $100,000 in credit card debt, does that make me solvent? No -- especially if I have negative income as many of these companies do.

</comment><comment><USER6> It doesn't sound like this metric means you could buy one of these companies for the current market price, liquidate it and come out ahead since they don't take debt into account. Or am I reading it wrong?

I still think someone or some group should buy Microsoft outright, halt all R&D and get a nice 20-30% per year in dividends for the next 10-20 years until it dies. (similar idea)

<comment><USER7> > I still think someone or some group should buy Microsoft outright, halt all > R&D and get a nice 20-30% per year in dividends for the next 10-20 years > until it dies. (similar idea)

And what happens to the employee's who get part of their pay based on stock grants? How motivated would you be to work there knowing that you will be out of a job when the owners have milked you for all you are worth, and cut back on all the fun parts of your work to keep their dividends up.

This is a neat thought exercise but would be a complete non starter in the real world.

<comment><USER8> What if they paid you in a different way?

<comment><USER7> Then you still have the thought that your job won't be around long term, that you aren't building something that will last forever, that all you would be doing is maintenance on the existing releases as now that R & D is no longer, no new versions will go out. Remember that any code writing is considered to be R & D for tax purposes (SRED), etc, etc.

It would be a pretty demoralizing job.

<comment><USER6> Welcome to the corporate world, my friend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "either the price is too low or the company should be liquidated."

Either one should buy stock of the company, or one shouldn't.

Information gained: zero.

<comment><USER10> Don't you make money in either case?

<comment><USER9> I don't know, I was guessing that in case of liquidation, investors only get a fraction of their investment back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This old PE firm I used to work with (not for), Platinum equity, was notorious for these kinds of deals. Sometimes they would even get paid to take over the company. I don't think they've ever had a losing deal.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ben Graham was interested in companies selling for less than their net working capital, which is current assets minus current liabilities, not merely less than the cash on their books. Bank of America has 312 billion in cash and 629 billion in debt. The article's "conclusion" does not follow from looking at the market or companies mentioned through the lens of Ben Graham. _sigh_

<comment><USER13> Benjamin Graham looked for equities trading at less than 66% of their Net Current Asset Value.

Where, NCAV (Net Current Asset Value) = Current Assets - TOTAL Liabilities.

Note that Graham calculated NCAV using total liabilities, and not just current liabilities. By using only current assets he also excluded plant and equipment, and goodwill in his calculation of NCAV. This is important, because during liquidation all creditors will demand repayment, but the valuation of plant and equipment will be impaired.

The 66% discount to NCAV provided Graham a "margin of safety".

The modern-day equivalent of NCAV is "book to tangible book value". What you want is equities that have a "book to tanglible book" ratio less than 1, a debt-to-total-equity ratio of less than 1, a price-to-earnings ratio that is competitive with peers in its sector, and a "book-to-total-free-cash-flow' ratio in the low single digits.

See ExxonMobil, for instance.

You can find all of these valuation ratios on the Reuters website.

<comment><USER14> Is it possible to access this information reasonably inexpensively without digging into SEC filings?</comment></comment></comment>


Letter of Resignation from the Palo Alto Planning and Transportation Commission - <AUTHOR> https://shift.newco.co/letter-of-resignation-from-the-palo-alto-planning-and-transportation-commission-f7b6facd94f5?gi=212a49c84059 <comment><USER2> The housing affordability crisis is real and ubiquitous throughout the entire west coast.

San Francisco, los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, any town big or small that is even somewhat desirable out west, all are impacted by this.</comment>


Zuckerberg: Facebook doesn't make real profits, and that's okay - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/16/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-profits/

<comment><USER2> Let's see how ok it is when something else comes along that everyone switches to using instead of Facebook. It is inevitable that it will happen.

I'd be the first to say, "Do something you believe in, not just something to make money." But, not factoring profit into the equation for a company like Facebook is like growing corn just to produce the ethanol to run the tractors to plant and harvest more corn. It's nuts.</comment>


7 bad science and health ideas that should die with 2016 – Vox - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2016/12/26/14005484/bad-science-health-myths-dead <comment><USER2> On GMO : [http://www.nature.com/articles/srep37855](http://www.nature.com/articles/srep37855)

</comment><comment><USER2> On GMO: [http://www.nature.com/articles/srep37855](http://www.nature.com/articles/srep37855)</comment>


Exit Interview: Shopzilla - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2796-exit-interview-farhad-mohit-of-shopzilla- <comment><USER2> Interesting. Since it comes from 37s, there's the expected spin that selling is bad because you lose control, but Mohit says that it would have imploded from internal struggles if they hadn't sold. So it's not pro-sell, but it's also not pro-go-big.

So what is the implicit message here? Taking on the big boys is a sucker's bet. This seems sobering in light of the pushback they gave on Aaron Patzer for selling Mint instead of taking on Intuit.</comment>