Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue - <AUTHOR> http://www.sergioschuler.com/startup-lessons-learned-from-my-failed-startup/ <comment><USER3> This is a fantastic writeup (and like nearly all worthwhile writing on the subject, I don't necessarily agree with all of it).

Two elaborations:

1) General advice to non-technical founders, not specific to this post: If sales is one of your primary skill sets, and you cannot sell one developer on working for you, you may want to have a brief heart-to-heart with yourself on whether you are sufficiently skilled at selling to build a company which will live or die based on your sales ability.

2) His advice about starting with 1 anchor client for a SaaS, expanding to 10 via expenditure of shoe leather, and _then_ starting to worry about scalable approaches to customer acquisition is very, very good. (I don't know if I definitely would endorse the "An Indian company expressed desire to buy something from me other than the thing I was building, so I should have built that instead." That would turn on a lot of things, including how serious that company was about actually buying the thing. There is a world of difference between "I would buy a Widget from you" and "I commit to accepting delivery of a Widget from you, where a Widget broadly does X, my timeframe is Y, and your payment will be $Z." I'd be looking for a letter of intent or a check as a filter for seriousness following that Skype call before making a bet-the- business decision on it, personally, but I obviously don't know the specifics of what was said.)

<comment><AUTHOR> You are absolutely right on both comments! And additional comments:

1) I am not a developer, but I believe having an idea -> finding a developer is the wrong flow. It should be like this: 1. Have the idea. 2. Get customers who give you real money to build this idea. 3. Get a developer by telling "I already have paying customers".

2) Absolutely agree. When I say "I should build that", in fact what I wanted to say was something like "I should have looked for more X prospects that would pay for what they wanted, get their money and then build that".

<comment><USER4> >>I am not a developer, but I believe having an idea -> finding a developer is the wrong flow. It should be like this: 1. Have the idea. 2. Get customers who give you real money to build this idea. 3. Get a developer by telling "I already have paying customers".

Actually, I disagree. Even if you're not a developer, you should still strive to learn enough development such that you can push out the first version of the product yourself, even if it's imperfect. Doing so will have several advantages:

1\. It will make it easier to find a developer (they will respect you a lot more)

2\. It will make it easier to get customers

3\. It will make you appreciate the technical aspects of the business

Number 1 is the most important. The reason non-technical people have difficulty convincing developers to work on their ideas is that developers tend to look down upon non-technical people, especially "sales types." In addition, most developers have a thousand ideas of their own - you need to give them a reason to work on your idea instead. And that's a lot easier to do if you already have a version 1.0 out there that you have developed and have customers paying for it.

<comment><USER5> As a developer and solo founder, I just can not finish a serious project in one year. For example, it took me two years to get version 1 of torapp guilloche designer (www.torapp.info). We did not get consistent/significant customers and we need a new product to survive.

To evaluate more ideas and to be familiar with respective areas took me another year easily (without deep knowledge in the area, how can you beat your competitors?).

So how can you guys roll out a product in 3 months? How can you quickly pivot?

<comment><USER6> >So how can you guys roll out a product in 3 months? How can you quickly pivot?

Tooling. To elaborate, if you're hand writing code to call an API, then you're doing to much. This is a 15 minute task at most, and that includes production level validation, security, etc. on both the client and server.

Also, basic code quality checks should be running non-stop in a separate terminal and automated tests should also be running. Plus the core automated tests should themselves be automated.

Developing an API is again a 15 minute task.

To be totally clear, proper tooling will take you from prototype to (early) production. Obviously, tooling does not write your application for you, but standing up a basic app where you can use the UI and move data to/from the backend needs to happen with a minimum of effort. Once the core design/structure is done, you can spend your time on value add activities such as UI customization, custom business logic, and so on.

<comment><USER7> Its relatively easy, but far more than 15 minutes. Think about authentication, design and testing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand people's (not necessarily the OPs)utter obsession with philosophies. Especially in the startup world when being adaptive and surviving is key.

Lean Startup, great book, decent ideas, not the religion that it's become. I'm sick of hearing, hey do this the lean way and it'll "significantly improve" how well you do, after all it's the blueprint for success. Personally, I don't buy into that. Here's my view of success in reality: do whatever works (that's legal & up to your moral standards), be opportunistic and get lucky (yes, hard work and measuring metrics alone don't do crap).

MVP and idea validation are great concepts & helpful common language. In hindsight all "successful" startups seem to have a "pattern", but in all seriousness, there isn't a friggin algorithm for success in startups, otherwise algorithms would've replaced entrepreneurs a long time ago. (Although selling success patterns & software based on such to wantreprenuers is a great idea)

I'm sorry the Sergio's experience happened. It's easy force cause and effect onto a narrative. It very well could have been that the developer Sregio met was at a point in his life where he really just wanted to build something great and did end up building the awesomest thing. Instead of trying to dissect the reasons his startup failed, had luck been a little more favorable, we might be trying to analyze how it became a huge success.

Bottom line, my heartfelt congratulations to Sergio on being successful at stepping up, despite the risks and having a crack at it. If you had never stepped up and we all gave in to our negative biases and overanalyzed the crap out of everything before we started we'd still be polishing stone wheels.

I know how shitty it feels. But remember, hindsight is 20-20 and cause and effect should really be cause+luck and effect. Hope you're a better entrepreneur and will be back in the game soon.

</comment><comment><USER9> "The developer had no intention of being the project's developer (?) he was not really a developer, he was a computer science graduate who owned a webdev shop and was used to managing, not coding."

Heard this story so many times. Amazing how many people join a startup and don't want to do the actual work. Remember that scene in The Social Network where Mark Zuckerberg calls his outsource team about progress on that latest feature? No? Me either.

<comment><AUTHOR> BAM!

</comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands "Since we were 3 business people, we spent all this time into idiot plans, budget forecasts, BUSINESS CARDS, fancy website… all useless things which in the end did not contribute to anything."

I've been apart of a lot of startups and this is far and away the best advice. It was a common theme with two startups I worked for during the boom years. One CEO's hubris was stunning. 10 million privately funded and he blew most of it on season tickets and suits at stadiums to "entertain" big prospects (nevermind we didn't have any "big" prospects at the time!), remodeled the office to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars, it goes on, but you get the idea.

When you're in a startup, it really is about getting your product shipped, and making sure that's where the focus is.

Great writeup and glad you saw the errors of your ways. Lots of people never gain the wisdom you have until after two or three failed attempts.

<comment><USER10> Did you work at Entertainment 720?

<comment> at-fates-hands Nope.

One of the startups was a telecom company, the other an educational software company.

The telecom company was the one that burned through all the millions. They had an exclusive contract with one of the regional bells and were trying to make high speed internet accessible to the masses. They were banking on fiber instead of the existing DSL which ran over copper. Essentially using T1 fiber to give high speeds at the cost of copper DSL.

They thought they had a home run with a growing base of clients, and were trying to get acquired more than build the next Frontier Telecommunications.

They had a crazy story, maybe sometime I'll let the details go. That was a crazy time for sure.

<comment><USER11> I think you missed the reference. They were referring to a company from the TV show Parks & Recreation. See here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX0ZF8f8G0A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX0ZF8f8G0A)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Instead of surfing the wave and adapting my idea to what a real prospect client was telling me they wanted"

FFS don't do this. There are far too many startups beached on the shores of "well, this one SRS BZNS client wanted us to change what we were doing so we did. Where'd all the rest of our clients go?"

I'm not saying "don't pivot", but "just making what they wanted" (where N(they) = 1) turns you into a poorly-paid contract developer who's also paying to host the result, not an entrepreneur.

<comment><USER13> I don't think you have to ask "Where'd all the rest of our clients go?" when you don't have any clients to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I want to shine some light on one side problem, scratched here:

The problem today is (out of the perspective of a developer): To many companies rely on just "hire any (cheap) developer" to ramp up the product. I see it all the time: Quality is not asked for, many companies (specially in the web business) just want the cheapest developers. They search for a student (at best), because he is cheap and will just make a small time estimation and an even smaller fixed price offer for the project. The student will happily work overtime that is not covered by the initial estimation.

Than the companies go mad, when either the programmer is running away or the whole project runs into a blind alley (or both at the same time), because the "totally expensive" programmer had not enough experience e.g. with database development and the database structure just lets you shiver. Then the shouting and anger is big: "Damn programmers -- all are liars and lazy!"

What went wrong, stated Uncle Bob correctly in his Blog: [http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle- bob/2013/11/19/HoardsOfNovice...](http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle- bob/2013/11/19/HoardsOfNovices.html)

But the "cheap, cheap!" culture seams to be unstoppable. If you tell people in advance about "quality" and "professionalism", they don't listen or just laugh at you. It seams, all the people just have to find out the hard way -- but I guess, even than most of them will not learn at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe this is a marketing problem (from the developers). See, I am a non- tech founder, I don't understand why X is cheaper than Y. If I perceive the same benefit, I will get the cheapest one.

(This is hypothetical, but not so much: I understand a bit of tech and even so I don't have so much clue on how to judge a developer besides what he shows me he had done).

<comment><USER14> You are right, that developers are most of the time bad marketers. But I must disagree with the notion "... besides what he shows me had done" (I admit that might not have been your point, but I still want to loose a word or two about it).

That's a problem intrinsic with software: What you "see" is not what you get. You see a perfect polished UI, but you get a sack of bugs! So this criterion is not usable at all. The intrinsic values of a program are not visible to non-developers at all. Even software-companies have a hard time, deciding which criterion to choose as a base for decisions.

I think, when you look at cars or houses, people are more likely to ask a professional to decide about the condition of the car or house. Also everybody that loves his car (and life) will bring his car to some person that has read some books about motors and does repair the brakes "half-prize" in his back- yard. But in software practice, you just want to see some polished front lids of cars and decide that the brake repairs will be fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do people find it really ok to have video and a website spelling "try it free" and then have only an email input form ? I know that testing if demand exists is important, but doesn't it have adverse effect on your reputation to somehow lie to your prospects ?

<comment><USER16> I think you're saying its a lie because there is no product yet? I can see how you think that. If he did build the product first though and one person signed up and he had to pivot to something fairly different, that'd be a lie too then effectively. Except, now he wasted a lot of time building. My POV is if you're only taking email addresses for people to know when it's available anything on the site is just your plan. Plans always change.

<comment><USER17> I wonder how the returns work out for sticking 'Email me to when it's ready to be tried' or something. I can see you getting fewer numbers, potentially, but I wonder about the people who are actually interested in the product vs drive by triers.

At least seems more respectful of people's time than 'try it free' just for them to have to click through and find out what it's about.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be frank, I think that is exactly what I used. I just didn't judge was important enough to mention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Really great writeup, thanks for sharing.

I'm left wondering, though, what you _actually did_ over the two years? You imply that you were working on it full time. Two years full time is a __lot of time __. You can do pretty much anything in that time (including, as others have mentioned, learn to code).

> idiot plans, budget forecasts, BUSINESS CARDS, fancy website [and writing > articles]

I find it hard to believe you can work on those things for two years, day in and day out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hardly, no, one mistake that I didn't mention (because I am still processing it) is how long we took to have v1 (more than a year). This was a mix of my incompetence, too many features and also an inexperienced developer (in fact we changed developers once too).

So, yeah, a looooot of the time was put into building the product, refining it, getting bugs out of the way, testing it again, finding the same bugs...

Then there was marketing. Finding more clients, because we believed finding more people meant someone would buy the product.

PS: I was not completely full time, the developer was. In those 2 years, I have been freelancing (one needs to eat).

<comment><USER19> 1 year? Just ship product regularly brother.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A business person trying to start a tech startup.... It's like a business person looking for musicians to start a band. This is beyond ridiculous. Either bring some skill to the table or go create a "business startup" and stop polluting the industry with yet another failed idea and even worse a "post mortem" of why it failed.

PS: This includes Marketing, Managers as well as the Business peanut gallery.

<comment><USER21> Disagree.. tech startups needs a very good seller.. to hire employees, raise money, sell to customers. And developers are notoriously bad at selling!

<comment><USER20> Don't generalize. If anything sellers have drowned big tech companies with unwanted contracts, long term support of legacy products. You are driven by "making money" which is ultimate greed. Thanks but no thanks. I'm more than happy making one customer at a time happy then having you guys whore engineers out.

Sellers as the peanut gallery, should be kept in check.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Good article but I would look at this "failure" from a glass half full perspective. You "won" because you've learned valuable lessons you can take to your next idea. I've had many products that have not gained many users in their respective marketplaces but I learned from each and everyone of them. All these experiences has brought me where I am today (CTO of a 45+ employee company). No failures in my past as far as i'm concerned; just lots of self teaching (that you can't get in school).

>> ""An Indian company expressed desire to buy something from me other than the thing I was building, so I should have built that instead.""

I may be the minority but I agree with him but on one condition. If this Indian company wanted to pay a small monthly subscription fee for your product I would never have agreed developing "their" ideas. I would have taken their feedback and put in the big pile with all the other feedback I gathered up. But I would have pitched this Indian company a different story, I would have pitched them a professional services contract instead of a product. I did something similar in the past and it worked out very well because in a business money is king. With no money you can't do the things you need to do, like attend conferences to sell your idea, buying adwords, hiring solid developers, paying yourself a salary so you can devote your time to the idea.

In my case the customer was willing to pay ~$10k a month to get what he wanted. We built it for him while building our own product. Once we got big enough and could sustain ourselves without our original customer, I gave the customer away. The developer who maintained the project was interest in taking on the project himself. We came up with a 6 month transition plan, including lots of product/project management help, office space, etc. It was a win/win situation at the end.

Doing this is not for everyone though. There are many days I cursed this customers for taking up the majority of our resources. We had to be very good at differentiating between their requirements and the markets requirements. We weren't perfect at it but it worked out in the end.

</comment><comment><USER23> There are a lot of things I'm interested in but would not pay for online, but good failed startup stories like this is not one of them.

Seriously, if somebody could cull 2 or 3 of these a day and deliver in a weekly or monthly format? It'd be worth a subscription.

Thanks for the article!

<comment><USER24> Why do you need so many failure stories?

One failure story per week should be sufficient to be constantly aware of typical problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> _... one of the prospects was an HR person from a huge Indian manufacturer. They wanted the system NOW and wanted to speak to me. [...] I just needed to build what they wanted._

I know startups that charged down the other path, being hyper responsive to their big customers, and they suffered for it because their biggest customer steered the product vision straight to crazy town. Such startups essentially become the contract development shop of a few big customers, living and dying by the whims of those big customers. Yes, you can pay the bills, but you're essentially working full-time for a few customers rather than building your own enterprise.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder how much their conversion was impacted by internationalisation problems. It looks like they were attempting to target the US, but their pricing page wasn't localised for that market. Unless they really were charging one thousand nine hundred and ninety dollars per team. Price is shown as £19,90 instead of $19.90

Also due to what I perceived as a thousand separator, not a decimal mark, I initially read the price as nineteen thousand and nine hundred dollars!

<comment><AUTHOR> I forgot that one! I have even a saying for this learning "be local before being global".

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> A mistake I made early on was trying to provide a product as cheap as possible. Constantly worried that no one would pay what we asked for.

Basically being afraid to ask for the value it was really worth.

I think there was a comma/period swap, but if I'm reading correctly it looked like the product was positioned at $30 / mo?

Assuming that's correct - it's really not a meaningful amount to any company that has enough employees and management to actually be a user of the product.

I think a $30 / mo with a free 30 day trial period (once product launches and they can actually try it ;) ) that requires a credit card for the trail could have worked.

Would still need a product to actually try, but that's not much different than saying get a free trial and just taking in email addresses.

If anyone remembers the Minimalytics / Small HQ folks - I thought they did a good job with their signups. The only thing for me was I disappointed by how minimal their product was in beta. It was so basic I didn't have any use for it, and running our own startup, didn't have time to wait. We ended up building it internally.

I probably would have converted to a paying user if it was more developed at beta. Not their fault though, they did a good job I thought(if you're reading Small HQ).

</comment><comment><USER28> Firstly, the Indian corporation which contacted him, apparently was asking for something totally different. If they were asking about 3 or 4 features that could be added, I don't think that it would be a problem. But the author didn't do anything wrong there. They were looking for a developer probably not a product or not _his_ product whatsoever.

If you accept his argument as true, that he should _switch_ and follow the tide, then you might as well start looking for freelancer developer job.

< J/K> Awesome quote:

> The result of this was that in the end we had to hire a full-time (and paid) > developer. So we had zero revenue, 4 co-founders and a paid employee (which > was effectively the only one doing real work).

I laughed really hard reading this line. My girlfriend came from next room to make sure I was okay!!! That's awesome, like 4 guys watching a movie, say the 'Social Network', and deciding to do a startup!!! </ J/K>

Jokes apart, I think the author has got it all wrong. There are ten million reasons why a small startup failed. Most of the time is hard to tell _exactly_ why.

But seriously, only people who have proved time and again their ability to deliver a product to the market and are famous for turning ideas into money, are able to struck deals before having a product. And we probably all know them (Jobs, Musk, etc). For the rest of us that's not how things work, I'm sorry to say that he is still getting it all wrong.

In the real world, you can't sell something that doesn't exist, these things happen only on Wall Street.

</comment><comment><USER29> Thanks for the write up - It's always better to learn from other people mistakes. I think however you and the most of the other posters miss the most basic problem because they mostly seem not to have tried the site and that is that, to me at any rate, it seems the product is not very good. It seems to be basically a 40 question form with questions like "People in the team know the weaknesses and strengths of other team members." that you mark from 1-10 and is not customizable. Personally I hate that stuff - you spend ages filling the thing out and then when you find the average response is say 7 what do you do then? There's not obvious action. If you had a form with a question saying say "what do you thinks the biggest problem with your team?" and people were able to say anonymously that say "there were four founders without the right experience and only one dev really working" then that would at least be useful. I think before worrying about the market etc you should have tested your system on real teams to see if it actually helped them much. This could have been done with zero or little tech - say either a paper questionnaire or just write your questions in an email and have people email their answers back to you. The fact that 200 people tried the product and none bought does imply a product problem but it if you define your product as trying something to fix team management problems then I think the issue is not that there is no demand for that but that your product does not work in that regard. If it was me and I could code a bit, rather than scrap the thing I think I might try changing it to see if it could be made to work at the team improving level. You could say cut it to say five 0-10 type questions and five "what's the biggest problem?" type questions and then try that with a couple of real teams and see if they found it helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your evaluation certainly have merits and a lot of it we confirmed when speaking to clients later. Just one thing to make clear: I have 5+ years of team management/leadership development and I used a similar tool I created and evolved (in paper form) to improve a loooot of teams. So the tool works - <USER2> you are correct, it is a pain to apply and you probably need consultancy to get out of the team management hole if you are not a skilled manager.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think for first time bootstrappers, investing some time in a quality blog on a particular field you would like to build products for is really really useful. Apart from having a good audience to launch your first product, it helps you interact with people _before_ you have something to sell to them. You learn more about their problems, the existing market, competition and so on.

</comment><comment><USER31> __If there is just one thing you should learn, it is: Just speak to prospects and extract their pain, then sell the painkiller (before building the product). If they are willing to buy, do take their money and invest that money into building the product.__

This advice always seemed like a stretch to me. Does anybody pay for a product that's not ready yet?

<comment><USER32> "Does anybody pay for a product that's not ready yet?"

Isn't kick starter build around that concept? If people think something is looking good and might help them considerably they might be open to pay for developmental costs.

<comment><USER33> Kickstarter isn't designed for business, but rather it is designed for art in the general sense (which sometimes has business applications), so I don't think Kickstarter is a good example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is a great article full of truth. My respects to the author because it takes courage to accept one's mistakes, but it's critical for getting up and moving forward in a better direction. How many ideas are sitting in my brain, but all I can think of is how to exactly am I supposed to validate that any of them are worth my life?! I mean, really, a startup will mean I will have no life. With my loved one in a startup already, I don't know if I could really start something without the support. Looking back, were any of the big companies that started as a small STARTUP founded by poor people? I think not. I haven't heard a single story of an actually poor person, who founded a startup and is now rich.

</comment><comment><USER35> You want to know how to validate your idea faster? Don't have a free plan. Will people give you their credit card... that's what you want to know. And those are the people you want feedback from.

<comment><USER36> exactly. that's what he says in the article, no? :)

<comment><USER37> Yes. He says that instead of having a "Try it for free" button he should have posted the price and seen how many are interested in the product then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> >> "SEO and social media bullshit"

This stuff does seem like bullshit when you're working on it, but it's unfortunately crucial these days. It takes so long to build up the brand and visibility that I don't believe you have the option to just do it once you've got the product right. Unless you've got the investment, firepower or notoriety to get chins wagging then you've got a long road ahead of you. Good SEO actually sounds like one of the things you got right to me. But maybe you spent too long on it

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand where you are coming from. I agree it is essential for any business that uses the web. But if you have the wrong product, no matter the amount of SEO, you will get nothing out of it.

What I want to say is that SEO is important, but not more important than finding the pain and the product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Questions for peer founders:

As a developer and solo founder, I just can not finish a serious project in one year. For example, it took me two years to get version 1 of torapp guilloche designer (www.torapp.info). We did not get consistent/significant customers and need a new product to survive.

To evaluate more ideas and to be familiar with respective areas took me another year easily (without deep knowledge in the area, how can you beat your competitors?).

So how can you guys roll out a product in 3 months? How can you quickly pivot? (pick up ideas and evaluate them quickly)

<comment><USER39> It certainly will depend on the actual product A LOT.

A vector editor is very complex compared to the typical CRUD-based with a little business logic that lots of SaaS products are in the end.

<comment><USER40> "typical CRUD-based with a little business logic that lots of SaaS products are in the end"

Isn't the market for that sort of thing getting crowded by now ?

<comment><USER39> Not quite. I think that most startups where technology is not their raison d'etre still fit that bill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Lesson N+1: Hacker News can break your blog's webserver. That's one you only learn through experience.

[ETA: which is sad, because I want to read it!]

<comment><AUTHOR> Damn Bluehost, hehe. I wish I knew how to fix it, but a few refreshes seems to go through.

<comment><USER42> I wouldn't blame your host, actually. It's WordPress. It's a shame it's so often given a free pass on these issues when it really isn't good at handling peaks in traffic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any alternatives?

<comment><USER43> Using the popular caching plugins...W3 Total Cache ([http://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total- cache/](http://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/)) or Super Cache ([http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super- cache/](http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/)) seem to be well liked and I've used both of them without too many issues (I have some weirdness in my WP upgrade path). My blog has been on HN and reddit a few times and has never crashed, even though I'm on the cheapest Dreamhost hosting plan with what seems like 5 to 10 second response times for non-cached pages.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will try, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The last para - If there is just one thing you should learn, it is: Just speak to prospects and extract their pain, then sell the painkiller (before building the product). If they are willing to buy, do take their money and invest that money into building the product.

Is that really possible? Making someone pay for a product that doesn't yet exist? How can you do that?

<comment><USER45> This concept really is the holy grail of people who like to talk about startups.

I think there are some mis-perceptions about the idea. Here is how I how found the concept useful, in my company.

Startups who focus on revenue rather than growth can use this technique as a success metric (duh). Rather than using active users, etc., as proxy metrics for success, this method is a very direct one to measure how marketable your idea is. Get one success banked, then you can start to optimize -- pretty neat!

However, it's also incredibly difficult to do. So the second purpose becomes this: a proxy to evaluate the importance (in your customers' eyes) of the problem you solve. If you're solving a problem that everyone in the banking industry desperately needs solved, they will be more willing to try something that isn't feature-complete (or in existence).

So while few people will actually buy your product before it exists, using that as the goal can help you in your business development. You can figure out the problem's importance (and, believe me, it's better to solve a hair on fire problem than to solve a minor inconvenience). You can get feedback from people who are actually willing to pay -- this signals they are probably your customer! (So it helps you prioritize feedback, and sort people you talk to into actual / window-shopper type customers).

What the gurus don't tell you is this is very difficult to actually accomplish, at first. But after several iterations, you can get valuable feedback from people who are closer to having skin in the game.

And, of course, there is the chance that someone will have such a big problem that they want to pay you to solve it right now. If you can find that big fish, and their problem is similar enough (or uses core technology sufficiently similar to your "productized" version), then you can partially pay to make the product. (This comes with the caveats about how you don't want to be a slave to a single customer, etc. But we're having luck developing our core technology in the process for the big customer, and will re-use it for our product.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think a more important lesson to learn here is to have the uncomfortable conversations ASAP. The sooner you communicate clearly, the fewer opportunities there are for misunderstandings.

If I had to give founders one piece of advice it would be, "Just Ask"... Ask for the sale, ask what youll get in exchange for equity, ask, ask, ask...

</comment><comment><USER47> I would like to thank everyone who posts these failure stories. We get too many effortless success stories here and often forget that failure is the norm and not the exception. It's a bit like how those books on software anti- patterns are so helpful. Sometimes it's more helpful to focus on what not to do.

</comment><comment><USER48> Great write up, I think this point is crucial: Founder roles and expectations.

Even if the goal/role is to be the non tech founder, it's important to learn the basis of html, CSS and Javascript. It will give you another perspective when you think about how to implement an idea.

<comment><USER27> I learned this one the hard way. Started as two founders, one techincal, one biz dev (I'm the biz dev).

We brought on a third (largely my doing), as more of the operations / finance side. Didn't set roles, and my biggest gaff of all was to not make him vest.

After a year, the third founder turned into a maniacal control freak and almost sank us. Finally departed, but took his equity with him.

My biggest lesson so far is be very careful who you partner with and ALWAYS vest. Or another way to put it, you don't need to worry about the good times, it's the bad times you need to consider and pre-negotiating the divorce is critical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Damn that's well written. Of course I can also show some business cards and some bull. But when push came to shove, my target market were not prepared to pay.

As always, I am always keen to connect with bright people and good ideas.

</comment><comment><USER49> The website was down for me at first but after 27 refreshes I managed to get it. Here's a mirror: [http://pastebin.com/avMpRwrU](http://pastebin.com/avMpRwrU)

</comment><comment><USER50> I just love the brutal honesty expressed compactly. Full of useful information for all startup-founders. I'm sure many are currently making the exact same mistakes.

</comment><comment><USER51> Thanks for sharing your experience and insights Sergio.

It takes balls to do that shrinking ego experience in public.

I'm sure something good will come out of it.

</comment><comment><USER52> Great insights, thanks for sharing, Sergio.

</comment><comment><USER53> This is such a great article, thanks

</comment><comment><USER54> Four business guys? That's four too many. Just learn how to code and build your own stuff.

</comment><comment><USER55> Priceless lessons from the real world for the people who want to build a product. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER56> Such a great write up, thank you for sharing.

Question: what are you going to do with the product now?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing. It is just sitting there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I made all of those mistakes, and also learnt the hard way. Great post.

</comment><comment><USER58> OP, your biggest mistake is not taking the time out to learn how to code yourself. You said it went on for 2 years, that was plenty of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> INDEED! In fact I started. Did One Month Rails (a couple of months ago). My github (please don't laugh, but do give out advice): [https://github.com/sergioschuler/](https://github.com/sergioschuler/)

<comment><USER59> Excellent attitude, and good luck. Honestly, when the ratio of 'business people' to technical people in a start up is that high, that raises all sorts of red flags to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Thanks for sharing this man!

</comment><comment><USER61> Very nice article Sergio.

</comment><comment><USER62> good stuff man</comment>


Irish ISP Eircom Agrees to Disconnect Internet Users After Three Copyright Violations - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/01/irish-isp-agrees-to-disconnect-repeat-p2p-users.ars

<comment><USER2> Similar issues but probably worse in NZ. <http://creativefreedom.org.nz/>

"news that National say they plan to go ahead with the Guilt Upon Accusation law Section 92A that results in punishment before a trial and before any evidence has been held up to court scrutiny"

edit: I submitted here too <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=457472></comment>


LG Chromebase hands on: More room to work but at what cost? - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2014/01/08/lg-chromebase-hands-on-more-room-to-work-but-at-what-cost/

<comment><AUTHOR> My guess price is $599. Would it offer a tough competition to Apple's iMac? Yes and No. It depends but If I could get the same experience of iMac on a similar device for $500 or less, I probably would buy this device.</comment>


Ask HN: Master's degree vs. MOOC for a full time software engineer - <AUTHOR> My motivation of asking this question is not about finding a job. I am already a Senior Software Engineer at a startup in the Bay Area. I am looking to advance my career and solve bigger problems. I've been taking ML/AI courses from Stanford on YouTube/Coursera and from Georgia Tech on Udacity. Suppose money is not a big concern to me, (i.e. I am willing to pay for high quality education) how should I pick between accredited CS MS degree and MOOC? Which one do you think will add more value to me down the road? There are 3 options available to me at the moment.
1.) Stanford online MS degree (Expensive $$$) 2.) Georgia Tech online MS degree (Strongly recommended by coworkers) 3.) Multiple Nanodegrees from Udacity
Practicality is good but at the same time, I'd really appreciate the depth of MS courses such as the mathematical derivation of batch normalization, backpropgation and etc...I'm hoping HN would give me couple tips and advice. <comment><USER2> [random remarks from the internet]

In addition to everything else it may be, Master's degree is a public achievement. It has about 900 years of history [1]. It confers a social status (that may or may not be valued by another individual). There's nothing wrong with assigning a non-nil value to any or all of those things. If a person does, then a master's is non-fungible with a nano-degree.

The other thing a Master's is more likely to provide than a nano-degree is a network of other students and the program's professors. And of course the Stanford and Georgia Tech alumni networks are meaningfully stronger than Udacity's. [2]

The third rail is an on-campus graduate education. I mean if your working at a startup and what you really want is to learn, then on campus is more of what you really want. And it opens up many many more educational options. Specific professors. Specific topics. All over the world. [3]

Good luck.

[1]: It's also formal, like this citation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%27s_degree#Medieval_era...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%27s_degree#Medieval_era_to_18th_century)

[2]: Though an online degree almost certainly creates weaker network connections than an in person educational setting.

[3]: If you want to advance your career through education, on-campus full commitment.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am at Georgia Tech on-campus and can definitely recommend the MS CS program here. I believe online also has a similar standard to on-campus.</comment>


Electric Car Charging Technology Is About to Surge Past Tesla's Superchargers - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedrive.com/tech/20245/porsche-vws-electrify-america-to-surge-electric-car-charging-past-teslas-superchargers <comment><USER2> Couple of points here

Firstly, this is still years off and you seriously expect Tesla not to be developing the Mega-charger? Well here's a big hint, it has a fucking massive electric truck that will need to be charged somewhere and a supercharger is not going to cut it

I like the fact I can go to any gas station and not have to worry about which nozzle fits my car, why cant all these guys just agree on something, I thought Tesla had open-sourced its patents for this so anyone could make the supercharger adapter or was that just BS from Tesla?

Tesla seriously needs some competition, I'm seeing a digital camera replacing a film camera moment of history in action with EV's but the auto makers and gas stations are still scratching their arses or in denial or just promising us cake tomorrow, until I see this in the flesh it is nothing more than a marketing FUD.

<comment><USER3> _I like the fact I can go to any gas station and not have to worry about which nozzle fits my car_

In seven years of ownership of a Nissan Leaf, that been neither a concern or a problem of mine. Every public charging station I've used worked fine with the Leaf. Not that I use them all that often because the "gas station" I go to most often is in my garage.

<comment><USER4> This. The infrastructure to fuel the cars of the future already exists. A basic 120v outlet charging for 12 hours afterwork and through the night nets most EVs about 60 miles of range. That covers the roundtrip commute of 90% of the population[1]. A 240v outlet completely charges a battery overnight – even huge batteries like on the Model S or Bolt.

[1] [https://www.statisticbrain.com/commute- statistics/](https://www.statisticbrain.com/commute-statistics/)

<comment><USER5> That actually sounds terrible, 5 miles of range per hour? I assumed most ev could charge faster than that...

<comment><USER4> Yes, it is slow on a basic outlet. But they are capable of charging much faster on higher amp circuits. A 240v 32-40 amp outlet, like a clothes dryer outlet, pushes 20-30 miles per hour. This is what is called Level 2 charging and the majority of public charging stations are at this amperage.

Level 3, also referred to as quick charging, is typically 50-100 amps, and can get you 100 miles in 30 minutes. It is for a different use case, like a road trip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The entire sitution is such a cluster fuck now. There are way to many different standards[1] some with the same plug but different protocol!

This is the 1990s cell phone charger debacle all over again. Can't we just all agree on a nice global standard? Additionally let's not build another bluetooth please...

[1] [https://greentransportation.info/ev-charging/range- confidenc...](https://greentransportation.info/ev-charging/range- confidence/chap8-tech/ev-dc-fast-charging-standards-chademo-ccs-sae-combo- tesla-supercharger-etc.html)

<comment><USER7> Well to be fair they didn't for phones either, the EU had to slap them into it

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sponsored article with clickbait title.

tl;dr: VW (via American subsidiary "Electrify America") has put out a vaporware announcement that:

• Their proprietary charger plug will supply 350 kW possibly at 800 or up to 920 Volts and 350 Amps using a liquid-cooled cable

• May build 1000 stations (over an unknown period of time)

• Mention is made of the IONITY charging network in Europe, without mentioning compatibility

<comment><USER9> Proprietary plug? Compatibility? They are following the CCS standard.

May build 1000 over unknown period? Did you miss the Walmart announcement yesterday? And electrify America has their timeline well defined on their website

<comment><USER10> But we've already have many companies claiming they would build nationwide networks and it never happened. They are broken, etc. Only tesla has build a worldwide network that works well, and has stood up to the test of time.

<comment><USER9> Can you give examples of broken promises? I think evgo and chargepoint have held true to what they promised. And I don't think Volkswagen and Porsche cancelling their plans (after VW being legally mandated and Porsche designing a 800 volt 350kw level3 charging car)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Distributed Neural Networks with GPUs in the AWS Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/02/distributed-neural-networks-with-gpus.html

<comment><USER2> Isn't this infringing the recent patent of Neurala? [http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8,648,867.PN.&OS=PN/8,648,867&RS=PN/8,648,867)

<comment><USER3> Holy crap. Am I reading this correctly? Is this really a patent for running learning algorithms on the GPU?

<comment><USER4> I don't see how the patent office didn't just google for 30 seconds...

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031320304...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031320304000524)

Maybe the patent has interesting twists and turns, but applying known algorithms on previously known architectures doesn't seem like the innovation that they should hand out protection for 17 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Netflix tech blog goes into more detail about running deep learning on Amazon's cloud servers.

[http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/02/distributed-neural- netwo...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/02/distributed-neural-networks- with-gpus.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this really a good idea? I thought neural networks didn't do as well as other methods outside of image classification and problems like it. Many of the advancements in Deep Learning were learning to extract features from unlabeled data. I assume all of Netflix's data is labelled.

EDIT: The deaded comment below me makes a good point, but they still have labels in the sense of what everyone watched and for how long.

Also the new title is terrible. Oh I guess it's a different article now???

<comment><USER7> Feature extraction can be aided by unsupervised data but will certainly work with labeled data. One of the advancements bundled under 'deep learning' is how we can leverage unlabeled data (which is much easier to come by) to improve performance. And of course you can always do unsupervised learning with labeled data, just toss out the labels ;)

It's actually the multiple layers hidden units that perform non-linear feature extraction and the unsupervised pre-training is simply a means to do this better (theoretically, although we don't really know what's happening as much as it would seem).

Most of the current research shows deep neural nets to be state of the art in image classification and nlp. I don't know that it is the case that deep learning techniques do not work out side this area, it's just there hasn't been much published on it either way. Although I do believe the Kaggle Merck contest was neither of these, and deep learning out performed all other techniques [http://blog.kaggle.com/2012/11/01/deep-learning-how-i-did- it...](http://blog.kaggle.com/2012/11/01/deep-learning-how-i-did-it-merck-1st- place-interview/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Has any large-scale genetic algorithm infrastructure been developed? I've often wondered if EaaS (Evolution as a Service) could ever function successfully. Surely it has potential.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wish Netflix would just give me a list of genres I could browse through and stop with the oh-my-so-clever recommendation engine. Maybe I want to stretch my viewing habits... how am I going to see what is on offer if it is always filtered through what I chosen before?

<comment><USER10> It has that at the top of the page

<comment><USER11> Yea, but it's harder to get the specific ones like 'gritty crime dramas from the 80's with strong female leads'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The best possible side-effect from this? That we finally figure out a universal theory of film production and consumption. The social scientific/cultural sociological significance of this is quite lovely.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sadly, the Recommendation Engine is only of limited use...and I hate to be one of those naysayers as I understand the economics and contractual issues here...the movies that Netflix thinks I would really enjoy _and_ are available for streaming _and_ I haven't seen (I watch a lot of movies but am by no means prolific) goes downhill after a couple dozen.

It used to be that on the iPad, at least two bottom rows were dedicated to "New Releases" and "Recently Added"...sometimes neither of those rows seem to show up, and so I find myself logging into the web client just to see those listings, and -- I assume this is why they aren't as spotlighted in the iPad app anymore -- there's generally not much new to see. While I like House of Cards, I think Netflix would appeal to me much better if it spent that money on 200 - 300 _good_ recent releases, or holding steady on to some of the great classics (there used to be more Akira Kurosawa and Woody Allen movies on Instant).

<comment><USER14> I don't find the recommendations very useful either. Maybe the secret value of the recommendation engine for Netflix is evaluating movies outside of their catalog. When considering how much to pay for the streaming rights to a movie, they can use the recommendation engine to determine how well received it would be by their membership and bid accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Really a good news. Looking something like this

</comment><comment><USER16> What is it's first recommendation? Add more DRM into the web standards? Subvert the open web further?</comment>


Andreessen Horowitz Leads $1.75M Round In Freebie Marketplace Listia - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/19/andreessen-horowitz-leads-1-75m-round-in-freebie-marketplace-listia/?utm_source=pulsenews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Twitter <comment><USER2> Listia is YC S09: <http://ycuniverse.com/ycombinator-companies.php#listia>

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a huge fan of Listia. It is really impressive how they have turned giving away free stuff into a real business. Listia seems to really understand giving away badges and coins.

<comment><USER4> Does that mean you use the service?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is no such thing as a "free". And even though people aren't paying cash for these things, they're still having to earn money (listia credits) one- level removed from cash.

Having said that, these marketplaces make sense. It'd also be great if they offer even more interesting data to understand just how far consumers' irrationality goes. Understanding that alone makes this a valuable business in my mind.

</comment><comment><USER6> Congrats guys.

</comment><comment><USER7> A&H has been making some big investments, but this looks to be smaller, safer and perhaps a better bet for them.

<comment><USER8> In general the big investments are "safer" since they're in later stage companies. For instance I'm pretty sure Zynga will IPO, Listia's a long shot right now.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure they won't make 1000x on Zynga. If Listia IPOs they might do better than that.

Smaller bets are higher risk, higher ROI.

<comment><USER9> Usually people talk about ROI in terms of percentage, but that does not mean much. 3x return on a $50M investment is much better than a 100x return on a $0.5M investment, but in terms of percentage, the latter soudns nicer.

<comment><USER10> I'm confused by how the percentage doesn't sound as nice. It's about risk vs. reward, raw monetary return doesn't really give you that. Raw profit completely ignores the risk the investor put in initially. I'd rather have the 100x return since I risked a lot less to get get it.

<comment><USER9> I think there are more risks on the 1M dollar level. If a company raises north of 25M (in our industry) this is likely to be a C round at which point they are likely to have proven a market and a solid income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Who pays for shipping?</comment>


Holm–Bonferroni method - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holm%E2%80%93Bonferroni_method <comment><AUTHOR> This method is one of the ways statisticians combat the problem of multiple comparisons. Misapprehensions about multiple comparisons ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_comparisons_problem)) have been coming up fairly frequently in the news, so I wanted to point this out. Conceptually I think this is a pretty powerful tool to have in your mental tool box.</comment>


Show HN: Browser extension for playing emoji sounds - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ApoorvSaxena/Somoji <comment><USER2> Clever and stupid... super obnoxious. I like it.</comment>


Harvard Mark I - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I <comment><USER2> A fun thing about this computer is that you see it (for free) every time you're in the Science Center at Harvard. You don't have to go to some special museum.

<comment><USER3> But it wasn't actually a computer. It was technically just a calculator. The way it was designed meant that it was not the Turing-complete and/or von Neutmann-type machine that we now describe as a computer. It did some things very very well, but was not a general purpose machine capable of running any program asked of it.

<comment><USER4> Well, it was still more than a calculator, since it was programmable: a calculator can add or subtract, but can't be instructed to do one and then the other without human intervention.

<comment><USER3> Yes and no. It is a programmable calculator, but it cannot run an unending program. It doesn't have the "go to X" functionality to bounce back and forth along a long tape of instructions. It can run a sequence of tasks, much like a player piano can, but eventually gets to the end of the program and is therefore limited. A proper computer can calculate anything. It might take trillions of years to complete some tasks, but a proper "computer" can run programs with no defined end. Calculators can only run sequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If only WW2 lasted another 5yrs I'm curious what else would have been accomplished in that timeframe. They were all just starting to perfect some advanced technology.

The motivation from people dying and patrotic goals, combined with budget (but a constrained one) and every person in the country attempting to contribute to the effort seems like a good recipe for new technology development. Especially for finding the stuff that will actually do something useful today and not in 10yrs, since it was already needed yesterday.

Obviously the costs of the war outplay the value from this but it's interesting to think about.

<comment><USER6> There are other alternative paths of technology that we could've went down. A turing machine is isomorphic to lambda calculus and possibly isomorphic to many other machines.

Like how javascript is an arbitrary way to do frontend programming, it's possible the current computing paradigm is also arbitrary.

<comment><USER7> "it's possible the current computing paradigm is also arbitrary."

I think that's true. Makes me wonder how things would look if you redesigned things with today's knowledge if you didn't have to worry about existing infrastructure.

<comment><USER6> Not just that. Arbitrary choices are made at every level of computing from even logic below the turing machine all the way up to javascript for browsers.

Imagine if they decided to use 3 voltages to represent numbers. Instead of 3.5 volts for 1 and 0 volts for 0 what if we had a trinary representation 5 volts for 2, 3.5 for 1 and 0 volts for 0.

Or what if analog computing took off instead. Instead of trying to make everything digital we built machines that are functions of analog voltage waveforms and poured all of our abilities into reducing noise instead of upping clock speed.

Is the technology we use now the result of arbitrary choices made out of pure luck or given enough time all civilizations will develop digital computing due to inherit limitations of the physical world.

<comment><USER8> No need that imagine. Ternary computers have been built. They do work but are less practical than binary.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer)

<comment><USER7> Question is : are they really less practical or have we just put a lot of effort into binary and with the same effort ternary would be better?

<comment><USER9> The beauty of digital is you are avoiding the "linear" portion of transistors and are always running them saturated. A ternary machine would require running the transistors in the linear region - which ultra small transistors are terrible at.

There are alternative designs using +/0/\- saturated signaling but those have higher voltages and larger transistor counts.

I've played around with linear designs which can indeed use fewer parts but you need high quality transistors and they'd still be slow. [https://hackaday.io/project/3628-trinity/log/11995-2-transis...](https://hackaday.io/project/3628-trinity/log/11995-2-transistor- carry-function)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> TIL "patch" and "loop" didn't used to be metaphorical -- they did it physically with punch card tape!

Also, that has to be the classiest enclosure ever made. Check out some of the designer's other work: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Bel_Geddes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Bel_Geddes)

</comment><comment><USER5> > After two rejections,[4] he was shown a demonstration set that Charles > Babbage's son had given to Harvard University 70 years earlier. This led him > to study Babbage and to add references of the Analytical Engine to his > proposal

It's amazing how old rediscovering old ideas can create scientific/technology revolutions.

</comment><comment><USER11> This was in the lobby of the old Aiken Computing Center my undergrad years, but moved out when they built the new "cheese wedge" Gates/Ballmer building on the same spot.

Always entertaining to walk by and see the "bugs" (moths) in the (then already defunct) relays...</comment>


Ask HN: How to handle customers that I lose money on? - <AUTHOR>

I've got a SAAS product that is doing pretty well. I've been getting better at doing customer analysis and I've discovered that about 8% of my customers who pay a monthly fee for the service actually cost me more than what they pay. Is this just a "cost of business"? Do I attempt to contact them directly to tell them I need more money from them? Can I tell them to no longer use the service because they are costing me money? <comment><USER2> What's their lifetime value? Is it still negative?

At the very least, this might be a sign that you should change your pricing structure so that future customers don't end up in that same unprofitable category.

You might also just consider it a cost of doing business. I've heard that Backblaze tolerates a certain number of unprofitable customers because it gains overall from having a single flat unlimited-usage plan.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you'll find it hard to get them to pay much more for your service, especially if they've been paying customers for less than a year.

I'd advise seeing it as a learning opportunity, how much of a loss do you make on these users? Are there any ways you can cut costs to compensate?

Other wise, try raising the price for new customers to a point that if the old customers were paying that you'd make a profit. I bet you won't see a drop in revenue

</comment><comment><USER4> Can't you just shoot them a polite e-mail.

Say you're bringing your pricing structure inline to be fair across the board.

Give them plenty of notice - say 3 months. Give them the opportunity to cancel if need be. Even go as far as to recommend another service they can migrate to.

At the end of the day your company would be more profitable without these users than with them. If you can turn them into a profitable customer - bonus!

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the process that I am leaning towards. Changing my pricing means that it affects all users when all I want to "fix" is the few that impact my bottom line in a negative way. I think I've come up with a rolling average of "over use" which will then cause a polite email to be delivered to them indicating the issue and how we can remedy the situation.

<comment><USER4> Sounds reasonable! Also if these are the folks that are using your service the most, it might be good to hit them up for feedback.

That 8% may be your die-hard fans!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Try to apply the 80/20 rule to your customers and ruthlessly cut out all the customers that are costing you more (in terms of money and time) vs. the ones you enjoy having. You already did that with the 8% - tell them to leave, if they don't like the product/conditions/whatever, but tell them in a friendly way. I'd love to give you more advice, if you'd show me the product!

</comment><comment><USER6> Why are they costing more money than they bring in? Is it support? Is it usage? Is it overhead?

</comment><comment><USER7> We need more information before we can give you a straight answer. For example, if the reason they're costing you more than you make is because they're using some resource you offered them, and you cut them, you're going to have a social problem on your hands. On the other hand, if it's because you offer a service for like 15 minutes a month and they're leaving it on 24/7, you can probably get away with metering.

Tell us more.</comment>


Show HN: A Simple Workout App for iOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.strengthclub.co/

<comment><USER2> Nice, can you add your own workout or only use the predefined ones?

<comment><AUTHOR> At the moment only the predefined ones. I will add custom workouts soon™.</comment></comment>


Show HN: One-click send links to your personal newsletter (Chrome extension) - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/itemsy/hgldjebdmbnjjijfpdjoghabodcfohlb <comment><USER2> Why not showing the Firefox extension as well? [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/itemsy/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/itemsy/)

<comment><AUTHOR> It has just been released :) Thank you ohduran!

<comment><USER2> Chrome may have conquered Earth, but one tiny village in Firefox is still resisting...</comment></comment></comment>


Automating receipt processing with deep learning - <AUTHOR> https://nanonets.com/blog/receipt-ocr/ <comment><USER2> What is the point of spamming [1] HN with this low-effort content marketing for Nanonets that barely scratches the surface of the topic but instead is full of obnoxious calls to action?

[1]: [https://i.imgur.com/eIhwtjo.png](https://i.imgur.com/eIhwtjo.png)

<comment><USER3> > Need to digitize documents, receipts or invoices but too lazy to code? Head > over to Nanonets and build OCR models for free!

I think that once you go down the path of OCR'ing your own invoices, you better start a company around it.

<comment><USER4> Gonna be honest, I think it's a dead-end. The solution IMO will come from the supply side; Easier to get receipts digitally from the store / vendor / seller, than to spend all this effort on converting physical receipts to digital.

Sure - there's good retro usage, I'd rather push for sellers to offer you digital receipts.

In fact, I already get that from my local supermarket. My bank card is registered to their app, so every time I swipe my card or scan my app (when paying with cash), I get a receipt on the app, which I can export.

I remember back in college, over 10 years ago, this was a very hot topic. Receipt management was one of those entrepreneur ideas that would always pop up.

<comment><USER5> > My bank card is registered to their app, so every time I swipe my card or > scan my app (when paying with cash), I get a receipt on the app

That's great but why does this need to be an app? Why can't it be sent via email or have a website I can log into? I'm not downloading an app for every company I want to do business with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a nice overview article for anyone interested in the topic of IE from financial documents. However, for industrial level solutions Tesseract does not cut it. Abbyy is the best OCR engine on the market currently. Receipt IE works just fine with rules supported by a small BiLSTM as fallback just because receipts do not contain a lot of text. With invoices this approach is suboptimal. On a general note no DL approach will give you fast and high enough results just because any advanced network would be too slow and too generic. If extraction takes more than 5 sec. it is hard to sell such system.

<comment><USER7> I had abbyy a long time ago and had some uses for it so i went to the website to check out the cost and was met with this monstrosity "Protect your shopping cart downloads with Download Insurance Service. For only £11.00 you will be able to download your files for 24 months, in case you need to reinstall the products. ABBYY Screenshot Reader". Ripoff!!, I've never seen anything like it elsewhere, has anybody else?

<comment><USER6> it is the market leader and monopolist, this is what you get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Probably relevant: [https://youtu.be/c0O6UXrOZJo](https://youtu.be/c0O6UXrOZJo)

</comment><comment><USER9> So what is the state of art? Is there a decent software available, that actually works? An app that a small company could use easily, say, for employee expense reports with reliable data parsing and automatic expense/tax calculations?

<comment><USER10> I've been using waveapps.com. their receipt processor allows me to forward any I get in email via pdf. They have an app to upload a pic as well. Have yet to have an issue. Even the Costco ones that have a line through them. It's been great. And it's "free".

<comment><USER11> I use waveapps too and I'm _pretty_ sure they're Mechanical Turking their receipt transcription. Sometimes it takes too long for it to be an automated process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this dedicated receipt OCR significantly better then the out-of-the box OCR you get from Google Cloud Vision, Abbyy or OCR.space?

As standard OCR gets better and better, the room for specialized OCR solutions is becoming smaller.

<comment><USER6> OCR is not information extraction. OCR is just the first step in a pipeline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sensibill (a former boss designed their system) has done pretty well at interpreting receipts in various formats.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why does the article title on HN omit the mention of OCR present in the actual title.

<comment><USER15> Looks like the submitter is trying some A/B testing on getting clicks to their site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone know where I can find a receipt dataset?</comment>


Bitcoins are like 'glass beads', warns Danish national bank - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/19/bitcoin-danish-national-bank <comment><USER2> that's a fair assessment of them being a commodity. but anyone can make a glass bead so that analogy is wrong.</comment>


Local SEO Best Practices for Google, Bing, Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml#results <comment><USER2> Can we change this to the top of the article instead of the #results? Quite confusing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Old article. A few things have changed since recent change in the 7-pack but a good piece none the less!

</comment><comment><USER4> Stop giving the internet cancer, you SEO bastards.</comment>


The "Game" - <AUTHOR>

Every product or service has two functions: what it does for you and what it does to you.
For years I've been asking myself "why are people still purchasing windows machines?" myself knowing how superior they perform as personal computers it's baffling.
I think I've come closer to the answer… windows users like playing games, very complex, puzzling to the extent of frustrating… games… like a crossword puzzle.
Let me explain.
My mother has envied my Macbook for years and I had talked up the Mac enough that she finally broke down and had me buy one for her. I picked up a Macbook for her and figured I'd be a good son and set it up for her. I go to do so and quickly realize, unlike my days in the windows world, there was little "setting up" to do. So I ran software update that way I could at least feel like I did something.
Then when showing my Mom how to use the Mac I realized… there wasn't much "showing to do". Once she was on the web browser it didn't matter what was "around" the browser… as long as the browser worked without flaw by all means my mom was already a master of the mac. So I twiddled my thumbs.
The Mac is like a blank sheet of paper and a pencil, ready for you to do with it whatever you choose… and for some that can be intimidating, paralyzingly so.
Windows is like a sheet of paper with a tic tac toe grid and one x already drawn, always ready to be played… this is comforting because even if you do not have a task to perform with the paper and pencil you can burn time by playing the game.
So if Mac is "the absence" and Windows is "the game" what is it that is absent from Mac, what is this game that is Windows?
The game could be called "The defragging anti-viral registry cleaning pop-up blocking trojan horse riding Hero and his conquest of Windows".
While many Windows users claim they are frustrated with the annoyances that plague the Windows world (like viruses and all to often system maintenance tasks) I'm not so sure this is true. In fact I'm beginning to realize that they love it!
I'm not saying this satirically or sarcastically, but literally.
Windows users never have to stare at a blank piece of paper. The Windows operating system, with it's myriad of "upkeep" tasks ensure one is never left to his/her own imagination but instead be enticed to play "The Game".
I'm guessing most Mac users have Google as their homepage and that's comfortable for them… it's sparse and ready to be commended to do whatever one so choose.
But most windows users probably have a portal as their homepage, like Yahoo or AOL. Portal sites do not require a catalytic action on the part of the user, the user instead is provoked to act in a predictable fashion: read this article, watch this video, read this email. Always a tic tac toe game with one "x" already marked… enticing you to strategically mark an "o".
In conclusion
There may always be a place for a personal computing design that implies a user act on it instead of just acting with it. Windows user today are going to begin to make a new statement with their choice to continue to use Windows (wether they like it or not). The statement?… "I like the old days when a guy would take care of his computer, clean it of viruses, defragment it's hard drive… it just made you feel good when you knew your's would run better because you took better care of it".
If you have things to do with your computer… get a Mac. If you have time to indulge yourself with games there will always be a cheap Windows machine waiting for you.
post script: technology inevitably dematerializes, loses it's weight and gravity… eventually it becomes ambient: everywhere and nowhere. Google Chrome OS is the eventuality of this movement… an operating system that is essentially a web browser running on lightweight silicon and nothing more. With less becoming less we return to nothing, and we return to a childlike state of curiosity of "what could be". Make no mistake I like seeing people switch to the Mac but my awareness campaign will be over before began as the new choice will be of "which browser" not "which computer". <comment><USER2> Are you familiar with Edward Bernays? Have you watched Adam Curtis documentary 'The century of the self'?

From [http://www.perceptric.com/blog/_archives/2008/8/14/3837144.h...](http://www.perceptric.com/blog/_archives/2008/8/14/3837144.html):

 _Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. His family emigrated to the US from Germany by way of England before World War 1. Bernays was the father of the modern public relations business. He used some of the ideas that were the brainchild of his uncle and was able to convince clients of the ways that people thought and how their thoughts could be turned to the benefit of the clients' needs.

One of the clients that Bernays worked for was Sarah Lee. They had a problem. They had created a cake mix that just needed water added to it and then could be popped in the oven. The problem was that housewives were not buying it.

Bernays did some studies and came up with the conclusion that the housewives that the product was targeting felt that they had not personal involvement in the success of the baking of the cake. He proposed that the company change the formula for the product to require the user to have to break an egg and mix that with the water into the cake mix before baking the cake.

The rest is history. The new cake mix took off like wildfire and still today in every supermarket that you go to you will find cake mixes that require the user to break an egg into a bowl and then mix it with the powdered ingredients in the packet._

<comment><USER3> His "Propaganda" book is quite good too. Also he came up with the slogan, "Make the world safe for democracy"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let me save you some time: Windows users keep buying Windows machines because their last machine was a Windows machine and they already know how to use it. You don't need to write a 1,000 word essay to say that.

Alternative choice: A good-enough Windows machines costs less than half of a low-end Mac.

<comment><AUTHOR> You know most average pc users think someone "sends them a virus", they ask "why do they write viruses to attack my computer?". You and I know this is the question of someone who doesn't understand the purpose(s) behind malicious software... but think of how well this image of a hacker writing a virus for your computer aligns with the billion-dollar marketing campaigns of anti-virus software corporations. They don't try to educate users WHY the malware is written, only to position their product as a weapon against the evil-doers.

So it hit me "the malware ecosystem is not as large a detriment to the windows platform as I thought, in fact it has somehow become not only 'ok' and accepted but continues to be proliferated as a 'necessary evil'" (keyword "evil" to imply it's intents are targeting YOU).

I agree with your statement that habit and familiarity play a large part, but what drove me mad was that I know despite the powers of habit and familiarity surely Apple's good word-of-mouth and powerful ad campaigns would educate pc users of a "better way" and they'd take it. But are "switchers" more so motivated by the poor performance of the pc or the great performance of the mac? I think more by the poor performance of the pc (in other words, if they don't feel that the pc performs poorly than they do not have sufficient motivation to take all the (superficial) risks associated with switching). The status-quo is windows, and to gauge how they feel about windows performance they check against the status quo. Those who identify with often breaking from the crowd and rebelling have probably already switched to Mac. Those who gauge their choices against thy neighbors and find comfort in numbers aren't yet convinced Mac is superior and in fact would argue that Mac is only superior because it is not handling "the load" that the windows platform is handling and once it does (if it does) it too will buckle under the pressure.

"good enough" is comfortable for them

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not for one to jump on the OS wars bandwagon, but i think what you're trying to say is: The mark of good equipment is how much it gets out of your way to let you do what you intend to do.

You can take a Pulitzer-winning photo on a point&shoot, but you will have to trick it into behaving how you intend it to behave. Ditto for music instruments, race cars, bikes, or really anything that can be seen as a tool. The "professional" grade of these tools are the ones that usually get out of your way most, be it by giving you more knobs to tweak or less hurdles to jump over.

Since the operating system and the computer are /my/ tools, I want them to get out of my way. My macbook and OS X do that. FreeBSD did that for me before that.

</comment><comment><USER6> >> I'm guessing most Mac users have Google... But most windows users probably have a portal as their homepage

You know, coming to conclusions by starting from guesses and straw men isn't very useful.

For some reason, a lot of people like to say the Mac is inherently a more "productive" tool. Some people also say Emacs makes them more productive. Others swear by Dvorak or Colemak. But the thing is that the user is always part of the UI system and things like familiarity and muscle memory play a big factor in productivity. Not to mention the actual tasks. Not everything can be done easier in Macs than in PCs.

<comment><USER7> Just reading your comment brought back muscle memories - between '72 and '79 I used the first CRT-based text editor I ever saw, and I swear I could sit down at a KSR-33 Teletype attached to one of those old 1 Mhz machines and be almost as productive as with any Mac editor - golly - even the opcodes are coming back - and I can hear the TTY in my mind's ear. Scary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I buy Windows machines because after about 8 years of fighting to get various distros of Linux to do what I want, I realized that XP was as stable as Linux and there was no reason not to move to Windows and stop pulling my hair out.

Most people buy Windows machines because they are good enough. Just like they buy Toyota Camrys and not Rolls Royces -- the Toyota gets the job done.

End of story.</comment>


Dean Kamen's Robot Arm - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/05/dean-kamens-rob/

<comment><USER3> This is why the Segway annoys me so much. Dean Kamen has an amazing ability to create things that restore great dignity to those who have had unfortunate events remove certain biological function. The iBOT, for those who don't know what it was, was a gyroscopic wheelchair that could go up curbs of up to 5 inches, climb stairs, and even allow the person to travel and "stand" at a height comparable to the height of a standing human being. The amount of dignity and function that it enabled was tremendous. Likewise, this new prosthesis looks amazing. Truly a wonderful thing for anyone in such an unfortunate situation. While somewhat odd looking today, I don't think it's hard to imagine it with some flesh-toned cloth over it (or better material) which really helps one both look and function and fit in well.

And that's what annoys me about the segway. Kamen has such a great engineering mind for things that so greatly affect a person's quality of life - <USER2> life-changing inventions for many people. And then there's the segway. The segway doesn't seem to solve any problem - people have legs, there are a number of ways to balance vehicles that don't need something so fancy to stabilize themselves (bikes, scooters, mopeds), etc. And it takes his genius away from building amazing things like this which can transform people's lives in the way I wish I could help and touch someone as much as he can.

The part where the person was able to feed himself for the first time in 13 years made me tear up. Imagine being able to give that back to someone who had lost it. And it isn't just the function - it's the dignity that comes along with it.

<comment><USER4> I think I'm missing your point about "dignity".

As per your sentiment , we should all be doing whatever we can to restore dignity to those that need it.If you ask that of Kamen , you should certainly ask for it from yourself.

You are presumably reading this on a computer you own , and drive to work on a car you own. You can increase the dignity of a number of people by selling both and donating the proceeds to a worthwhile charity. ( I can think of few things more dignified , than say , for a starving kid in India to be able to go to bed with a full stomach for one night). And charities like giveindia.org make this very possible ...

And yet you haven't ... You might argue that there is no way you could do without either.

How is Kamen's "indulgence" in building a Segway any different? The starving people would be annoyed with you too,as you indulge yourself with luxuries like cars and computers , when they have to debase themselves just to feed themselves and their families.

(No offence intended. :) When I say "you" , I mean us )

<comment><USER5> _You are presumably reading this on a computer you own , and drive to work on a car you own. You can increase the dignity of a number of people by selling both and donating the proceeds to a worthwhile charity. ( I can think of few things more dignified , than say , for a starving kid in India to be able to go to bed with a full stomach for one night). And charities like giveindia.org make this very possible ..._

Remember the old saying, "give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and feed him for life"? You're talking about the former. Kamen's inventions that mdasen mentions are like the latter.

Not that helping people out isn't good, but creating tools that let them help themselves is incomparably better. Kamen has demonstrated an ability to do that in ways that most people just can't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can think of no sentence that more sounds like the 2009 I dreamed of than "Dean Karmen showed some video of the impressive, mind-controlled robot arm he's invented".

You look at the video and it's clear that the only thing preventing the creation of gigantic robotic exoskeleton battlesuits is budget.

<comment><USER7> Well, that, and they're not very practical. They're big targets, expensive, and don't provide any real advantages in modern combat.

Sarcos corporation developed hydraulically actuated arms with full haptic force-feedback interfaces.

<http://www.sarcos.com/teleop_videos.html>

I especially like the little video of the large-size arm casually holding an anvil like it's a mug!

If you want mecha, you could do a full-body haptic harness with such existing technology. Make the mecha big enough so that it could contain the pilot and keep his head's orientation the same as the mecha's, and the _pilot's own inner ear becomes your dynamic stabilizer!_

If you want to build a smaller mecha, immobilize the head/neck and put the harness in the belly. It would still have mobility like someone wearing full plate armor.

<comment><USER8> How about... instead of arms, four (or six) legs? Like a dog, but with retractable wheels at the bottom of the feet so it can go a bit faster on flat terrain but use the legs otherwise.

Hang on some sensors. For weapon systems, a small turret with a heavy machine gun and maybe a mortar. Or something.

In sum, a small jeep that you strap yourself into which can go through any terrain, if it so has to climb.

It wouldn't be as visible as a mecha for targeting. Some carrying capacity. It should be able to carry wounded on top.

Nah... it would be an inferior version of this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandvagn_206>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What I find most interesting is that as the test subject is talking it appears that he is unconsciously gesturing with his robotic arm. Apparently then its use is relatively intuitive and natural such that he can use it express himself as well as pick things up.

<comment><USER10> The brain is very interesting - it doesn't have a fixed set of input/output "ports".

Instead it can use whatever is connected to it.

For example someone attached a vibrating belt that always vibrated on the north side of his body. After a while the person wearing it does not consciously notice it vibrating, instead they basically have a new sense - they just always "know" where north is.

Output works the same way - after playing a game for a while you don't need to think: press this finger or that one - you just want the character to do move, and your fingers do it automatically.

If you use a tool for a long time, it essentially becomes (to the brain) an extension of your body.

So same with this device - it doesn't have to be intuitive - after a while it simply becomes a part of his body. The brain does not see it as "else" it's simply another limb.

<comment><USER11> A fun experiment relating to the brain's ability to rewire itself:

Put your hand under one of these toys like the image: <http://ubuyonline.com.au/images/toys/pictures%20018_0.jpg>

Now put an object or your other hand on the other side of the pins (between the pins and the plastic). Watch your transposed 'fingers' interact with the object. Eventually you will start to feel like your fingers have actually moved to the end of the pins.

I think this is the brain rewiring itself to correlate spacial sensation to what the eyes are observing. No matter what causes this, it's an interesting sensation.

<comment><USER12> In a similar theme, virtual reality has been tested to relieve phantom limb pain from missing limbs.

<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/29102443.html>

It's amazing how adaptable the human body/mind is sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would be scary if it caught those flashing moments of doing something extreme all of us experience and acted on it (ie, walking by a ledge and thinking of throwing your new laptop off it).

<comment><USER14> _walking by a ledge and thinking of throwing your new laptop off it_

Whoa, that just gave me chills. When I used to work for fast food, every time I walked by the deep fryer with a bucket of ice I'd wonder about all the things that would happen if I just decided to dump in the ice.

<comment><USER15> A whole bucket might chill the oil sufficiently to reduce the risk... But I can tell you a single ice cube does make a mess, and a lot of noise.

First the cube sinks, so you won't be able to get it back easily if you want to abort. It rattles around the bottom of the fryer as it melts and then converts to steam. The bubbles of steam rise and splatter violently.

(I got in a bit of trouble that night, as the patrons could hear the commotion in the dining room.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well, I am glad Kamen decided to fall back to his core competency.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd insert a cyborg joke here, but it seems too cliched and insensitive when the invention looks this brilliant!

</comment><comment><USER18> More accurate titles:

 _Dean Kamen's Cyborg Arm_

 _Dean Kamen's Cybernetic Prosthesis_</comment>


Citation Needed - <AUTHOR> http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2013/10/22/citation-needed/

<comment><USER2> It's too bad HN's title policy means nobody here will see this, as it's a really interesing read. Hopefully, the post about 0-based indexes in Python that's on the front page right now [1] will point some people to it. (that's how I found it)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6601515](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6601515)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an excellent example of HN's title policy demonstrably working against good content.</comment>


Design for Software: Typography Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.claritycon.com/design/2011/08/14/design-for-software-typography-part-1/

<comment><USER2> Pointless comment: 11px font size in the body of an article on typography? That must have been a conscious act.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There is an html5 / OSX widget available at: <http://employees.claritycon.com/eklimczak/rhythmandscale/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I didn't read the article yet, but that widget is pretty sweet.

</comment><comment><USER4> The widget is great for generating a starter CSS template

<comment><USER5> Dummy account? Along with the other 3 that were created in the past hour?

<comment><AUTHOR> More like over zealous fans of the original author. And, of course, the original author of the post. I believe new accounts don't have up votes though, so I don't think they can "game the system" if you're worried.

<comment><USER5> Guess that's possible. You don't need upvotes to game the system. I usually don't read a story w/o comments. I'm sure I'm not alone in doing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is more good typography goodness to come...stay tuned.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow, this has proven to be incredibly useful and time-saving for my designs. It is exciting to think that there might be more people using tools like this and creating beautiful typography on the web. Thanks again!</comment>


Why are lectures more detailed than texts? - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/121/media_bias/

<comment><USER2> Some reasons I could think of, off the top of my head..

* Doing a lecture series only takes as long as it takes to film. There is no post-lecture work, such as rigorous editing or re-organization of ideas.

* You can rant. As long as you are speaking and guiding the listener along with you, you can easily make reference to things that are explained later on or go on tangents. If you are publishing an article and go off topic, people might skip it sections all together or become confused by the switch as they only skim text.

* Publishing a piece of text in your name is a bigger deal than posting a video.

<comment><USER3> A few more:

* Lectures let you see how well your audience is getting it (assuming you're lecturing to an audience). So you can tell what's making sense and what's not.

* You can talk faster than you can write. In fact, in my experience, I can talk about as fast as I can think. I can't write as fast as I think. This makes me inclined to skip over some thoughts while I'm writing, simply to keep up.

Incidentally, I don't see why the first point ("There is no post-lecture work, such as rigorous editing or re-organization of ideas") is really an advantage of lectures. Certainly there are many lectures I've seen that could have used some reorganization. And, at any rate, any decent lecturer will do preparation beforehand to organize the presentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While not applicable to other areas, I know that conference papers in CS (and many journal articles as well) have stringent page limits. Thus, given a short amount of space, you have to prioritize what goes in the paper.

Secondly, when writing an academic paper, the primary goal is to keep the reader/reviewer interested. That is why proofs, simple calculations, and other such "trivial matters" are relegated to appendices -- the flow of the main paper should not be disrupted by these.

Finally, one advantage to omitting steps is to ensure that the reader is putting in effort to understand the concepts. Fully drawn-out text would invite people to do conceptual "copy-paste," which would cause problems when they try to apply their knowledge to real-world problems. An analogue of this phenomenon is seen on the web with php programmers, who frequently copy-paste php code found from various tutorials without really understanding what's going on.

However, for in-depth tutorials published online, I agree with the author that super-detailed texts are best. And here, the practical issue of the time spent by the author typing, checking, and revising the tutorial starts to become the dominant reason why tutorials aren't so detailed -- at some point, it's simply not worth the author's time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Verbal communication is just inherently different from communication through the written word.

We've all encountered teachers who lecture "as though they are reading from the textbook". It's the same information, so why should it matter?

I think it has to do with verbal communication being more about interacting with other people. When I see another person lecturing (live or through video), I find it easier to stay focused on what they are telling me. There are all these visual cues that add some extra hooks. And then, of course, the verbal ones. The accents, the pauses, the little jokes or references that are thrown in.

Just think of your favorite stand-up comedian. Compare reading a transcript of your favorite session to an audio recording of that same session to a video of that exact same session. You probably experience them all very differently.

So instead of comparing a text with a lecture, where both share the same subject matter, compare a text of the lecture with a video of the lecture. (Bonus points for comparing a text on paper with a video of some guy reading that paper aloud).

<comment><USER6> <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8860158196198824415>

[http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/documents/steele- oopsla...](http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/documents/steele-oopsla98.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think lectures are better/detailed due to feedback from the audience. The lecturer can guess when to go fast and when to go slow(and explain more) by gauging the audience. In some cases the author of a book can guess what his audience can think and provide explanations in advance. But thinking what your reader might think is hard. I feel in the case of the author of the article it was just an accident that he is very similar to the audience that was present during the video lecture.

</comment><comment><USER8> > _It's especially bad in math, in which writers have a long tradition of > deliberately concealing difficult steps and leaving them "as an exercise to > the reader"._

You're supposed to do those exercises. If you're a programmer think of them as unit tests. In technical subjects, most of the information is contained in the problem sets. For that reason I'd actually say the texts are more informative - more detailed.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, it's ok when you know the answer (e.g. when you have to provide a proof of some theorem), but when you have a excercise section at the end of the chapter some books do not provide answers to those excercises. It's like having unit tests without knowing if the correct solution is e.g. 2 or 5.

<comment><USER8> I'd say I almost always get 70%+ of the benefit just by having an answer. And there's other techniques that help, eg checking one problem against other problems, getting a bound on your error, asking on forums/mailing lists, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


DigitalOcean to Linode to GCP: The Evolution of Healthchecks.io Hosting Setup - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@healthchecks/the-evolution-of-healthchecks-io-hosting-setup-4fa0d249a35a <comment><USER2> Great Tips and Experience from DO, Linode and GCP. Instead of native Loadbalancers, Have you considered running on HAProxy based on a plain VM?</comment>


Kodak bringing back iconic Ektachrome format due to 'overwhelming' demand - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4163944/Kodak-says-s-bringing-Ektachrome-film.html <comment><AUTHOR> Linking to Daily Mail version of this because article has good examples of Ektachrome photographs.</comment>


The Food Gap Between the Rich and Poor Is Widening  - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/access-to-real-food-as-privilege/379482/

<comment><USER2> we see this clearly in the quality of food for sale in different neighborhoods. grocers in poorer neighborhoods don't have the quality of produce, whereas it's almost difficult (although many still do) to find non grass-fed/free-range/organic/whatever in an upper-class supermarket. so if i'm on food stamps, it doesn't matter what types of healthier foods i'm allowed to receive if they aren't edible. do we really expect people on gov't assistance to travel to rich neighborhoods just to buy groceries? i'm sure the locals would love that, too.</comment>