Swift-X tool to cross compile Swift and Objective-C(++) code to Android - <AUTHOR> http://swift-x.org/?p=17

<comment><USER2> When I wanted to code a foundation of reusable code for different devices I would either do it like Dropbox and use C++ as the most common layer [http://oleb.net/blog/2014/05/how-dropbox-uses-cplusplus- cros...](http://oleb.net/blog/2014/05/how-dropbox-uses-cplusplus-cross- platform-development/) or use Javascript (which I can also use for web pages) for the program logic like described here [http://www.skyscanner.net/blogs/developing-mobile-cross- plat...](http://www.skyscanner.net/blogs/developing-mobile-cross-platform- library-part-3-javascript)

Also interesting [http://kivy.org](http://kivy.org) allows you to use Python for iOS, Android, OS X and Windows.

I would not bet on Swift and cross compiling it today... too bleeding edge. But interesting project... hope it matures. Good luck!

<comment><USER3> (This is a reply to this whole sub-thread, not just this comment.)

Most well-known approaches to cross-platform mobile app development have left me dissatisfied. The root problem is the required bridging overhead between the cross-platform code and the platform's native runtime (the ObjC runtime on iOS; Dalvik/ART on Android). Using C/C++ for the cross-platform code is the lowest overhead approach on iOS, but it's suboptimal on Android.

So why does this matter in practice? A few reasons:

Multiple coexisting memory management systems: In general, my understanding is that a garbage collector behaves best when all memory, or very near all of it, is under the collector's control. My fuzzy intuition is that the least optimal situation is two coexisting garbage collectors, e.g. Xamarin.Android or a JavaScript engine other than Rhino on Android. But mixing a garbage collector with reference counting or manual memory management, such as with native code on Android or RoboVM or Xamarin.iOS, also seems to be suboptimal. If a significant amount of memory is allocated outside the scope of the GC, then the GC doesn't have as much information with which to intelligently decide when and how much to collect. Also, in hybrid systems like the ones being discussed here, objects under the GC's control sometimes have to be pinned so they can be accessed by the outside code; this interferes with copying or compacting collectors.

More information:

[http://developer.android.com/training/articles/perf- tips.htm...](http://developer.android.com/training/articles/perf-tips.html) (see the section "Use Native Methods Carefully")

[http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/android/advanced_topics/...](http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/android/advanced_topics/garbage_collection/)

[http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross- platform/applicati...](http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross- platform/application_fundamentals/memory_perf_best_practices/)

[http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=360](http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=360)

Basically, having two coexisting memory management systems is messy. I'd rather avoid it.

Bridging adds overhead: Consider the cost of copying strings between the cross-platform component and the native string implementation, or mapping an array of cross-platform objects to a native array of wrappers so the objects can be used from UI code. There's always some overhead for marshaling. Maybe it's not much in practice, and I'm just being anal. But just knowing that it's there bothers me. The best way to keep software fast is simply to minimize the amount of pointless crap it has to do. So it seems best to minimize indirection and overhead by having just one implementation of strings, collections, etc.

Heavy use of external functions obstructs whole-program optimization: The Android performance tips document referenced above mentions this in the context of JNI methods and JIT compilation. I imagine the same applies to ART's AOT compilation, since the native methods are still opaque to the compiler, unlike the Dex bytecode. And for combinations such as Xamarin.Android or a JS engine other than Rhino on Android, there are two JIT compilers working suboptimally, because neither of them can see into the other's world.

Hybrid setups thwart obfuscation on Android: It's common for Android developers to use ProGuard (or its commercial big brother DexGuard) to shrink, obfuscate, and optimize their apps. Having a significant non-Java component in the app seriously limits the effectiveness of this practice.

Hybrid setups limit the usefulness of debuggers: If you're mixing Java and native code on Android, or using Xamarin, RoboVM, or a JavaScript engine, can you get a single useful stack trace across the platform-specific and cross- platform components when something goes wrong, as it inevitably will?

So are we doomed to rewrite the same common logic in Objective-C for iOS, Java for Android, JavaScript for client-side web apps, and (C#|JavaScript|C++) for Windows Phone, if we want that code to integrate well with the host platform? Luckily, no.

RubyMotion has the right idea, I think, and there's apparently an Android version on the way, but nothing for Windows Phone/WinRT or client-side web apps.

Another option is to write common code in Java, then use J2ObjC for iOS, IKVM.NET for Windows and Windows Phone, and GWT for the Web. Some teams within Google are doing this (minus the part about IKVM.net on Windows, AFAIK), including the team that developed J2ObjC. This approach certainly doesn't have the polish of a commercial product like RubyMotion or the Xamarin tools. But on the other hand, all the tools are free, so this should appeal to cash- strapped indie developers. One thing I don't like about J2ObjC is that the JRE emulation library has a larger footprint than I'd like. On a more aesthetic level, I don't like the fact that this approach takes Java, which is designed to be a platform unto itself, and tries to make it work on other host platforms.

And then there's RemObjects Elements ([http://www.remobjects.com/elements/](http://www.remobjects.com/elements/)), a compiler toolchain with two language front-ends and three platform back- ends. On the language side, we have a choice of C# or Oxygene (a language based on Object Pascal). Either of these languages can be compiled to .NET bytecode, JVM bytecode (and from there to Dalvik bytecode for Android), or native code for the Objective-C runtime. (Note that the C# language front-end only provides the language; it doesn't attempt to bring the .NET class library to the other platforms.) Each platform back-end uses the target platform's preferred memory management system. That means GC for .NET and Java, and automatic reference counting for the Objective-C runtime. There's a cross- platform standard library called Sugar for things like collections, date/time manipulation, making HTTP requests, and XML, but emphatically _not_ UI. Sugar has a very small footprint; in fact, many Sugar classes and methods are mapped to their platform-provided counterparts at compile time. Like the Xamarin suite, RemObjects C# and Oxygene are commercial products, but the pricing is very reasonable. I'm looking forward to trying this toolchain on a real project, probably using the C# front-end.

I know this has been a long comment; it covers a topic I've been thinking about a lot for more than a year. I know a lot of developers will just accept the added complexity and inefficiency I've described, for the sake of getting things done, i.e. accepting complexity and runtime inefficiency in exchange for developer efficiency. But then, added complexity translates to developer inefficiency at some point, especially when something goes wrong. And inflicting runtime inefficiency feels wrong when the machines in question aren't ours. That is, the trade-off between programmer time and machine time is different for client-side apps than for server-side apps. Luckily, it appears we can have the best of all worlds, especially with the RemObjects products, at least if we're willing and able to pay for excellent tools and accept that some of those tools will be closed-source.

(I guess readers will have to trust that this whole comment isn't actually a marketing piece for RemObjects. I just discovered the RemObjects products last night, and they don't seem to be well known, so I'm excited about them.)

<comment><USER4> Having worked on mobile code sharing a lot at Dropbox, I would say that the bridging overhead may not be a huge issue depending on how you structure your code. The approach we took was to keep all the UI completely native in the platform's native language, and put only the networking/database/model logic in the shared code. This means that typically you only have to cross the bridging layer when you hit disk or network, which is already going to be heavily IO bound anyway.

I've heard of companies being successful using C# as the shared language, but in our case we wanted to distribute SDKs, so we picked C++ since it wouldn't require us to include a runtime with the SDK. It's definitely not the easiest way to do things though if you're not already familiar with C++.

I'm not as familiar with Android compared to iOS, but ease of debugging is definitely a real problem with C++ on Android. I haven't tried very many of the other cross-platforms options, but would consider ease of debugging as one of my highest priorities since it's one of the hardest things to engineer around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the project's GitHub page, some more details on what it actually does:

 _swift-x is a python script that simplifies the compiling of Swift and Objective-C(++) code into object files._

 _... [It] is a two stage wrapper for clang and the swift compiler that uses the Android NDK tools to produce android compatible .o files._

 _The first stage uses clang or swift to compile source code and emit LLVM-IR code which is passed to the Android second stage tools which compile the IR into .o files._

So you get working object code, but you still need to figure out how to get Android versions of the Cocoa Touch libraries if you use any of those APIs.

<comment><USER6> You can't just take a Swift app for iOS and compile it for Android, sure.

But this could be useful for people who enjoy Swift, and want to reuse blocks of logic from their iOS app to an Android port.

I'm wondering though, I thought Swift compiled down to code that uses things like the Foundation framework (NSString etc), which would also be missing on Android. It would be hard to do anything without these classes, wouldn't it?

<comment><USER5> There are several independent open-source implementations of Foundation like GNUStep and Cocotron.

Once you have the Obj-C runtime and cross-compiler working, porting either of those to Android should be fairly simple... But I suspect that Swift may have dependencies on new or recent Foundation features which could be missing from the open-source versions (for understandable reasons, they lag behind Apple by several years).

<comment><USER7> These guys already did port those frameworks to Android: [http://www.apportable.com](http://www.apportable.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> FWIW I took a recent look at porting the Apple Objective-C runtime to Linux (with the vague idea that if Apple open source Swift, it might be easier to get it working with their own runtime rather than the GNUstep one).

One nice thing about clang is that there's no problem outputting Objective-C code that uses the Apple runtime on other platforms: just use -fobjc- runtime=macosx. The catch is that because class, protocol, etc definitions are just data, you need a way to get notified by the runtime linker when an object is mapped into the process address space. (You could scan the current address space at startup, but that makes it difficult to support dynamic loading, although probably not impossible now that I think about it. I thought I was nearly there with ld.so audit interface, but audit modules are loaded into their own namespace, so you can't easily communicate with the global libobjc.)

</comment><comment><USER9> I got some minimal Objective-C code running on Android a while ago, see [http://blog.metaobject.com/2012/12/android-ndk-now- includes-...](http://blog.metaobject.com/2012/12/android-ndk-now-includes- clang-with.html)

This tool appears to fix the problem with the NDK make tool not recognizing .m files. I worked around this once by naming them with the .c extension and using compiler flags to set the language to Objective-C. Another time, I think I hacked the makefiles, but that was extremely painful.

Of course, there's apportable ([http://www.apportable.com/open_source](http://www.apportable.com/open_source)), their low-level stuff (runtime, Foundation) is open-source.

</comment><comment><USER10> Its great to see work being put into building community tools like this for Swift, thanks for the contribution.

BTW if you are in SF, we are running a Swift hackathon @ GitHub HQ in a few weeks: [http://www.swifthack.splashthat.com](http://www.swifthack.splashthat.com)

</comment><comment><USER11> Anything that makes it easier for entrepreneurs to make their apps available on both iOS and Android is productive and welcome.

</comment><comment><USER12> Super nice work. Thanks for posting.</comment>


P2P Web Apps - Brace yourselves, everything is about to change. - <AUTHOR> http://happyworm.com/blog/2011/03/07/p2p-web-apps-brace-yourselves-everything-is-about-to-change/ The old client-server web model is out of date, it's on its last legs, it will eventually die. We need to move on, we need to start thinking differently if we are going to create web applications that are robust, independent and fast enough for tomorrow's generation. <comment><USER2> This reminds me of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2245149>

All of this talk strikes me as coming from people that have implemented neither large web applications nor distributed or p2p applications at all dreaming up schemes with no idea of how they would actually work.

I think an illustrative example is how Twitter spends significant engineering effort (with Cassandra and now Rainbird) just to implement a _counter_ in a scalable fashion.

</comment><comment><USER3> The OP is ignoring a total deal-killer for this type of model: Proprietary code needs to remain so. It's what brings value to a service like Twitter. It would be great for open-source apps, but that is a small slice of the web's pie. Does he really think that Twitter will distribute their server-side source to browsers to execute locally? Even if it were compiled, the risk is too great for a company who relies on its unique property being the only differentiator in the marketplace.

<comment><USER4> The upside is you can run your code on other people's hardware and bandwidth, so you don't need revenue just to keep running.

I think a bigger problem for a lot of applications is security. Distributing your app where anyone can modify nodes and data arbitrarily is fine for some applications, but not all.

Down the road, something like Byzantine Paxos might help.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think whoever implements this type of model will eventually have the upper- hand, open-sourcing your code seems a small price to pay for robustness, auto- scaling and performance.

I don't think Twitter's success is down to its code being proprietary. I think you're selling them short.</comment>


Patreon lays off 13% of workforce - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/21/patreon-lays-off-13-of-workforce/ <comment><USER3> I have no idea about the financials of Patreon but their site leaves so much room for improvement. It's actually pretty awful.

There are lots of independent artists running Pateron accounts with 200-5000 patrons. Fans sign up to support them but also to get access to their library of content.

Patreon provides a piss-poor UX for getting to this content. There is no list of content. There just "here's the stream of posts by the artist". The stream is JavaScript driven so if you want to go 100 posts back you have to page through multiple pages of posts. If you want to do it again tomorrow, or if the site crashes which it does, you have to start over at post 1 and page through again.

It's telling that so many artists use google drive, dropbox, mediafire, or mega to distribute their works. This seems like money Pateron is leaving on the table if they'd provide for a similar service at similar prices. They do provide a way to upload media but the UX is awful compared to Mega which has arguably the superior UX of those 5 options.

Worse, because these artists are using these separate services there is no way to limit who accesses them. In other words a bad user can share the links with others where as if they did this through patreon you'd have to log in to access the media. Of course bad users can still share the media they downloaded in other ways.

Further, and I don't know if this has been fixed, but I know what one time they only billed once month so bad users would sign up in the middle of the month, download everything, then cancel their patronage and avoid having to pay at all.

I can certainly imagine a service that's significantly better Patreon for this use case.

Let me also add discoverabilty is horrible. Maybe this is mostly on the artists but the #1 way I find one is off of patreon. Compare to say youtube where the #1 way I find anyone is on youtube itself.

<comment><USER4> > In other words a bad user can share the links with others where as if they > did this through patreon you'd have to log in to access the media. Of course > bad users can still share the media they downloaded in other ways.

They do. There's a popular website I won't name (----.-----) that has users provide their Patreon logins, and it goes and auto-scrapes all post content from people that login supports and mirrors it for free. Almost every artist with more than 100 subscribers is illegally shared there. It's really quite sleazy when you consider most of the artists let you see their entire catalog for a $1 or even $5 tier. Cheating someone out of thousands of hours of labor for $1 is particularly low.

I know it's the internet and you can't really stop piracy, but I'd like to see Patreon being proactive against a service that hurts both itself and its creators like that.

<comment><USER5> Yes, water marking downloads with account details and charging for this sort of thing would help put a stop to it...

<comment><USER6> A PDF I bought on sellfy actually did this. It stuck my email address in the footer of every page.

That email was tied to a transaction in paypal, making it highly traceable back to myself. In 30 seconds, one could easily remove that from the PDF in Acrobat, but that doesn't mean there aren't other hidden watermarks in the file.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > In March, Patreon wrote in a blog post, "Not only are patrons not leaving > the platform, we've even seen many of them upgrade their tiers to support > their favorite creators during this challenging time." Additionally, the > average income for creators was 60% higher in March than in previous months, > according to the company.

> Around that same time, however, Patreon said it saw patrons exiting the > platform more than usual due to financial hardships. Still, Patreon said > churn rates were stable.

These two paragraphs are one right after the other. How do you reconcile the two? How is it not at least a question posed to their spokesperson of which is the case?

<comment><USER8> The key to reconciling is seeing that "due to financial hardships" is a dependent clause. When patrons leave, they are asked to give a reason why. The % of those leaving who give "financial hardships" as a reason, is increasing. However, as also noted, the total churn rate (people leaving for any reason) is stable.

They're not saying that more people are leaving than usual. They are saying that of the people leaving, more are offering financial hardship as a reason for leaving, than usual.

A corollary would be that the % of people leaving for reasons other than financial hardship has decreased.

<comment><USER7> Mmmm yeah I would believe that. I guess it could've been better written with something like "even so, some users are leaving and the ones doing so due to financial hardships..."

Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Patreon's problem, I think, is that they've taken enough VC money to be at a kind of "half-unicorn" status -- and there's no possible way for them to return on that investment unless they start wooing megastars to their platform. The majority of creators are always going to be way back in the long tail, but the folks at the top of the curve need to be bringing in a lot. Like, _a lot._ A million a month or more.

And I can't help but suspect that this realization necessitates changing, if not the business model, the business _strategy._ Patreon in 2017 is fine with Chapo Trap House and Amanda Palmer as the top moneymakers; Patreon in 2020 needs the next Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga. (Better yet, the current Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.) That doesn't mean they have to actively drive out the podcasters and comics nerds and furries, but it probably means they have to put all their resources into going after whales.

<comment><USER10> A middleware that can be described as Wordpress with access control and Stripe integration, but worse in terms of performance and UX; somehow takes on $165 million in funding [1] and describes their business model as "not sustainable" [2].

Patreon is a low touch SaaS platform that charges up to 12% PLUS payment processing fees. They do not provide any meaningful level of discoverability: you must build your audience yourself.

I wonder how the business would be doing if it disregarded that "raise money and spend money at all costs" model, that Softbank exaggerated? What if it had a WhatsApp-size of team: ~20 employees using sensible and well-architected tech stacks (not chasing the latest shiny thing just cuz its hip or cool)? I'm sure they'd be outrageously profitable.

[1]: [https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/16/patreon- raises-60m-series-...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/16/patreon- raises-60m-series-d-targets-international-growth-and-more-customization/)

[2]: [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform- patre...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/crowd-funding-platform-patreon- announces-it-will-pay-out-half-a-billion-dollars-to-content-creators- in-2019.html)

<comment><USER11> There seem to be a lot of businesses out there, that should be cash positive. Yet, the VC funded ones (also the ones you read about), aren't. No idea why, maybe easy access to VC money, and VCs themselves, cause them toneglect cash flow?

I also saw this effect with Chinese manufaturersofsolar modules, whatever amount of cash they need, they get from Chinese banks. In their day to day operations, cash flow doesn't really play an important role, as long as they are marginally profitable at the end of the year.

<comment><USER12> Employee count seems to be the major problem. The current Patreon site doesn't seem to justify more than 50, and I still feel I'm being generous; I really want to say 20. A couple of web people, contract out any design work you need, some sales staff, a few support people, definitely some business people and support people to deal with chargebacks and the credit card company, and I'm having trouble finding how they have 5 times that many.

I feel I need to expand that because that's going to read to a lot of people as "Patreon shouldn't need more than 20 or 50 people." But it actually makes sense to me that Patreon could have 250 people. There's plenty of ways for VC- fueled growth to indeed take over this market and become the household name as VC-style growth intends to do. The problem is that _what I see from them_ doesn't seem to justify that. The complaints that people are posting in other comments have been like that for _years_. Discoverability of artists is awful. Obvious places to list patron-only media are missing, let alone any sort of hosting. Community features are very perfunctory. Their outreach seems to be stalled out; the top of the patron chart seems to gas out weirdly, where I think there ought to many dozens of people making $10K/month by now by the way the economics of this should work. Patreon today hardly seems any different than it was three or four years ago. As a startup with a couple hundred people, I'd expect to see it moving fast and breaking things and rolling out new features every couple of months, if not weeks, not being so stagnant.

I mean, I've worked for a "startup" [1] that had ~200 employees. It had several products, each of which pushed significant updates around once every two months, sales staff, support staff, physical manufacturing staff... it moved fast and sometimes broke things. In any six month period you could take any of the products it had and there were clear changes and improvements, probably a new model, probably starting up a new product since then. Totally different business, my experience is not entirely applicable of course, but Patreon from the outside feels like a business that is already running a bare bones staff as it treads water while the business winds down, not an exciting startup getting things done. Where's the features? Where's the improvements? I don't just mean techical, either, I mean business improvements too (better deals for the users over time, better business partnerships for the aforementioned content hosting, etc.) Why is it still possible to effectively set up a feature-parity competitor to Patreon in a few months with just a few people? Shouldn't they have both technical and business features that make that harder by now? Where's the output of all those people's work? I dunno. I don't expect to be able to see all of it anyhow... but I don't see much at all.

If that ~200 person startup had suddenly been switched to working on Patreon, in a year we'd have a good forum (even if we had to write it from scratch), we'd have some sort of custom content hosting, we'd have listened to our customers and built what they wanted more... & I'm judging it against what we could have done 15 years ago at the time. Today a decent prototype of some of what I'm talking about is 10 minutes with CloudFormation or equivalent, and then you can tune from there (since you may not be able to afford to directly ship that).

[1]: I can understand if you don't want to call that a startup any more.

<comment><USER11> From my total outside perspective to both, development and patreon, it is that there is more to platform business than just reach and number of users. I mean without users, it is pointless. But without value for the users, it is kind pointless as well. Or not pointless, but falling short of the potential.

EDIT: 200 people, depending on the business, is still in start-up teritory if the company is not decades old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is interesting given that, like the article suggests, patron contributions were still growing last month. Seems like they either wanted an excuse to "right-size" and this is a great opportunity, or they're expecting a significant hit to patron contributions on the back of mass unemployment, which would make the rest of the year rather painful.

<comment><USER14> I ain't seeing it. I saw significantly more patron contributions. I guess maybe there's a danger I am just that awesome? ;P the general sense I get is people tend to rally around their creators, and I would imagine that happens across the board, and not just in special cases.

<comment><USER15> The patreon podcasts I listen to have all said they're sorry to see people go but know money will be tight for many, and that if we can stand remote recordings, they'll be making just as much content as before.

Not sure if they're all just spooked or if they've seen hits already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Friends and I were discussing this last night on jitsi. We think that instead of throwing employees to the wolves at a time when getting a job is going to be difficult, many employees would accept equivalent pay cuts to help weather the storm.

In fact I know one company that did just this, with 100 employees. The staff chose a 10% indefinite pay cut over 10% reduction in head count.

Sacking people at this time is awful, and any company who has cash in the bank has options other than bankrupting some of their employees.

I don't care if Patreon had planned this before Covid-19. There are alternatives. These are dark times and companies who sack their employees as a first resort are part of the problem.

<comment><USER17> In Europe most companies are doing this instead of laying off right now. It's a conventional practice that saved a lot of companies during the 2008 crisis and in many countries it's subsidized by the government.

<comment><USER18> If its subsidized by the government, how is it a paycut? Similar programs in the US exist, for example states paying a 50% unemployment payment for employees who have their hours cut by 50%. Its a win-win - <USER2> effectively pay nothing to keep their employees at a full time salary for reduced hours, and the government avoids needing to pay out full unemployment benefits to laid off employees.

Edit: see this for an example of the program in California: [https://www.edd.ca.gov/Unemployment/Work_Sharing_Program.htm](https://www.edd.ca.gov/Unemployment/Work_Sharing_Program.htm)

<comment><USER17> Can only speak for Sweden but you do need to take a paycut as well. In Swedish but you can see the table here: [https://tillvaxtverket.se/om- tillvaxtverket/information-och-...](https://tillvaxtverket.se/om- tillvaxtverket/information-och-stod-kring-coronakrisen/korttidsarbete.html)

For the 60% bracket the company reduces your working hours by 60% and you get a paycut of 7.5%. The government covers the difference, effectively reducing the cost for the company by 53%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't really understand why Patreon needs so many employees. We're talking about almost 300 people to just supervise a fully automated process. The tech has already been built almost a decade ago and hasn't changed much, so it can't require that much engineering work. It's also an easy problem (take X amount of money, divide it between Y people, pay them out) and they ironed out any potential issues over the years.

For what it's worth I've stopped using Patreon when they included some Facebook tracking (among others) on the membership management page that when blocked will crash the entire front-end and make the entire page unusable.

<comment><USER20> I feel like this sort of comment can only come from somebody who's never had to deal with operations.

When you have a lot of users (especially when they rely on you to get money from you!) even 0.1% of them asking questions and having difficulties is a huge work generator!

It's not "oh it's easy to write a for loop". It's "my for loop now has 20 non- orthogonal options, and a user is saying we emptied their bank account and now we gotta make sure if we did". Also a content host, a CMS, and reporting software for taxes and the like.

I mean I bet you could get away with 100 people or something for this but there's _so much_ that can go wrong and would require lots of intervention.

<comment><USER21> If 0.1% of your customers cause 80% of your effort maybe rethink that retention?

<comment><USER20> These customers are usually top billing and are just indicators of going upmarket. They're also probably hitting problems loads of your users are hitting and simply dropping out of the funnel from.

"Fire your users" is a thing, but at one point you gotta actually have things work

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This company never made sense to me from a "venture scale" perspective. It's big, sure, but are the financials really ever going to be strong enough to go public? I guess I don't see it.

Also annoying to basically admit that layoffs were basically avoidable given the "strong cash position" but made anyway to give the company a little more runway. Doesn't look too great.

<comment><USER23> >This company never made sense to me from a "venture scale" perspective. It's big, sure, but are the financials really ever going to be strong enough to go public? I guess I don't see it.

It looks like the company's biggest creator brings roughly $5k a month for Patreon and only one other creator has their financials public and brings in even 40% of that [1]. There is certainly money to be made in that business, but I just don't see how they scale revenue in any large way without pissing off either patrons or creators.

[1] - [https://graphtreon.com/patreon- creators](https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators)

<comment><USER20> That's not really representative. If you sort by publically available earnings, you can see 100 Patreons pulling in $10k/month, another 100 making $5k/month, then another making $3/month. the rest are private.

Assuming this is a representative distribution of the top 1000 (and I bet it's actually higher!):

\- $10k/month * 300 + $5k/month * 300 + $3k/month * 400

\- ~$285k/month for Patron just from the official cut

On top of this, Patreon probably has revenue sharing with the card processors for a small percentage of the fees (let's say even 0.1%), which adds a couple k.

Now people in the high-paying pro plans that get you the 5% rate (the lower end is 12% platform fees!) will pay $300/month.

that alone doubles their revenue, adding $300k/month _for just these first thousand patrons_.

So you're already at $600k/month in MRR. Hell of a lot more than a lot of "serious venture scale" B2B CRMs that are trying to be the next Salesforce or whatever but utterly failing at providing the value add needed to make big billings.

You might not need 300 people for it. And yeah it would be a lot better to make a lot of money. But they're being pretty successful at getting money here. And this is just assuming that they only have 1000 patrons (which is just false)

<comment><USER24> Honestly, $600k/month for 300 knowledge workers is horrible revenue if growth and margin aren't on the right track. This is more like a "20-30 pretty decent consultants in a second-tier American city" number.

<comment><USER22> I think they make more than that. A TC article last year projected $50M in 2019. It also said they were not profitable.

Even then that doesn't exactly cover salary and benefits for 300 employees in SF, let alone everything else.

<comment><USER20> Wait, how does $50M not cover 300 employees? Is fully loaded cost of employees (I imagine most of those 300 are _not_ super high level engineers, but things like CS and admin) in SF really above $160k/employee?

<comment><USER22> Salary + benefits + bonus + stock.

Health insurance is expensive. Don't think many realize how much it costs employers.

Then obviously rent is the other big expense. And cloud computing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> FWIW I'm pretty sure OnlyFans is run by one guy out of London. Maybe has a handful of contracted employees for engineering and support. Basically the same business. Not sure what the payment volume comparison is but must be hundreds of millions a year, at least.

<comment><USER25> There is more than one person working at OnlyFans [1]. Many of these are customers of OnlyFans, but there are others like a Social Media Manager, Recruitment, Marketing etc.

1\. [https://www.linkedin.com/company/onlyfans/people/](https://www.linkedin.com/company/onlyfans/people/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Patreon became successful mostly because of the girls charging money for their nudes. Then they've started to ban these girls because they wanted a clean platform. Guess what, these girls have now moved to onlyfans and they won't come back. Patreon has lost the money bringing members thinking that failed musicians/youtubers would bring them the big bucks.

<comment><USER27> They also banned Carl Benjamin, leading to a mass exodus. They justified this by citing his use of a racial slur in a YouTube video, although the word was not used in the context of a racial slur.

In the USA there is some kind of Voldemort status given to this word where you cannot even use it out of context - it reminds me of that Jehovah sketch in Monty Python where that parody has now manifested itself into a reality that seemingly changes the course of companies.

<comment><USER28> For context, here is a censored version of the transcript that caused Carl Benjamin to get banned:

"I just can't be bothered with people who chose to treat me like this. It's really annoying. Like, I — . You're acting like a bunch of n-----s, just so you know. You act like white n-----s. Exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with the Alt Right. I'm really, I'm just not in the mood to deal with this kind of disrespect."

"Look, you carry on, but don't expect me to then have a debate with one of your f--gots.…Like why would I bother?…Maybe you're just acting like a n----r, mate? Have you considered that? Do you think white people act like this? White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another, and you guys can't even act like white people, it's really amazing to me."

Seems quite ban-worthy to me, but of course each individual can judge for themselves. Do note that the whole section has a sorta racist slant best exemplified in the contrast between "white people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another" and supposed "black people" behavior.

<comment><USER29> Patreon and other platforms that engage in this kind of moral policing are always going to have an issue in that they must continually get more strict. As a platform, you can't easily defend to your profit source picking an arbitrary line between one offensive behavior (racism) and another (eugenics). At first that seems fine - nobody is going to defend racism or eugenics.

But remember that Patreon has a diverse user base and some of those users will be very offended by things that don't offend you or I such as drinking, same sex relationships or transgender rights. If Patreon (as a profit seeking entity) sees financial risk, it's always going to engage in the most aggressive enforcement of any potentially profit affecting content. This is happening with Youtube now with the crackdown on firearms content, legitimate coronavirus talk and swaths of political content on both sides of the aisle.

At some point we need a way to have platforms that allow any legal content, even when that content is really reprehensible. I don't know if that solution is legal or just an incentive problem, but the mainstream-ification of all internet content at some point needs to be halted before free speech is genuinely quite harmed.

<comment><USER30> Any platform that wants to can host all legal content. Nobody's preventing them, as an outside force - people are complaining, but the complaints have no force, other than people don't want to be there. Platforms with explicitly free-speech agendas (see: 4chan, voat, gab.ai, hatreon) have reputations as absolute cesspools of hatred and bigotry, and people who don't want to deal with that choose on their own not to go there.

<comment><USER29> I'm not saying platforms should be forced to host all legal content. Well moderated communities (HN as an example) have a lot of value.

The issue is that right now those platforms can't really exist. Even if the platforms themselves had an incentive structure to do so, credit card processors would cut them off or heavily punish them in fees and rates.

Let's say you wanted to legally sell NSFW content. Perfectly legal, nothing morally objectionable. Well, you can't host it on several server providers immediately because their TOS/AUP restrict it. Some providers may allow it with significant restrictions.

Once you find a place to host, you still need to accept money. Paypal, Amazon, Google Pay, et al are right out. You can't use Stripe last I checked. You may be able to use Authorize.net or another middleman but you'll have to post a bond and pay a much higher rate. They may still cut you off.

And that's all for perfectly legal non-morally questionable content! That's for porn which 80%+ of the population indulges in.

> Nobody's preventing them, as an outside force

Except practically yes, they are.

<comment><USER30> You can't have it both ways. If some site can choose not to host some content, then so can some server provider, some DNS provider, some colocation operator, some payment processor, and so on. It's the same deal.

And the above platforms DO exist, people CAN use them, and by God there's no shortage of porn on the internet.

(ccbill for NSFW billing, btw)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> >This decision was not made lightly and consisted of several other factors beyond the financial ones

>Still, it's peculiar timing for Patreon, given the company touted an increase in new memberships during the first three weeks of March.

Peculiar indeed. So what is a factor not yet mentioned?

69 days ago, I was net downvoted after pointing out specifically what trouble was coming for Patreon.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22316071](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22316071)

>>I wonder if consumers could use forced arbitration in the same way.

>They can. Patreon is about to be hit really hard for playing thought policeman.

Now we are here.

</comment><comment><USER32> seeing news like this really brings me down, no matter what i hate when employees take the hit and i sure hope they can find another job sooner rather than later.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think there should be a music service that works exactly like Spotify / Apple Music / Google Music but with these differences:

1\. No free tier

2\. Your views determine which artists get your money.

AFAIK all of the above mentioned services pool views and give your money to the artists with the most _overall_ views. If I listen exclusively to Scatman John's _Scatman 's World_ then I would have expected his estate to get all my money minus maybe 5% admin fees.

<comment><USER34> What's the difference? Maybe I misunderstood but isn't pooling the views and then giving money weighted by views the same thing?

<comment><USER35> Slightly different. Example if the service only has 2 users:

I listen to artist A's song 1 time, you listen to artist B's song 9 times. We listen to no other songs for the month.

With pooling, A gets 10% of the money, B get's 10% of the money.

With their suggestion, they each get 50%

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> But I thought Patreon never took more than a 12% cut...

<comment><USER37> Sign of the times

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Somehow I thought Patreon was just a small service built by like 4 people...

<comment><USER39> I thought similar. Four developers/full-stack, but then a customer support function that'd roughly 0.X scale with users, then marketing - could double- hat that, then certainly a legal/compliance team after some scale, also finance which probably doesn't need to scale linearly but should be a couple of people at least and no double-hatting on these at their size. So, thinking a bit, perhaps more than four.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm slightly surprised by Patreon's pricing, given they're not a discovery platform - it's really just subscription payments and some simple CRM stuff...

It's pretty easy to make a simple facility for accepting subscription payments.

You can do this with any website, plus a tool like Trolley [1] - of which I'm the creator, btw - with no technical knowledge. The fee structure (2% for Trolley, plus your Stripe fee of ~2%) comes out less than Patreon, and you're not inside a walled garden.

Use the webhooks to link to it a CRM of your choice - probably on a free plan - and you're golden (yeah ok, maybe this bit isn't entirely non technical)

I should probably write a blog post about this, tbh :)

[1] - [https://trolley.link](https://trolley.link)

</comment><comment><USER41> Given the purging of creators for arbitrary and political reasons, I can't say I feel sympathy for this company's collapse. Ideally it'd go out of business entirely. Creators should be cutting out the middleman anyway.

<comment><USER42> I don't really understand pateron when I have a donate button..but I imagine people who use pateron are doing better..

Gamification?

<comment><USER43> Single place, consistent UI, my credit card details are already there. I can change my card / address for everything in one go. It removes a lot of friction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> What alternatives to patron exists today?

What happened to those French guys patron alternative for open source projects? Libre-something was is name...

<comment><USER45> How about Gumroad? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19105733)

<comment><USER46> Gumroad is working on something that can potentially replace Patreon, but as it is Gumroad's different features lack the integration that makes Patreon what it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> It seems they still hiring: [https://boards.greenhouse.io/patreon](https://boards.greenhouse.io/patreon)

How is it possible?

<comment><USER48> Two possible reasons:

\- They may have interviewed for those roles internally but not found a fit

Or,

\- Those job lists are "continual" in other words fake so they can increase their applicant pool and possibly use it in the future (or they haven't taken them down)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> One of my pet peeves.

If you sign up with Patreon to get perks, you're not really a patron any more. You're a customer.

</comment><comment><USER50> This was not unexpected at all. They ended up shooting their own legs by harassing lewd artists off the site.

</comment><comment><USER51> unfortunately this is just the beginning

<comment><USER52> Not the beginning. There has been a steady stream of layoffs happening for a couple months now.

<comment><USER51> 2months is nothing. dark times ahead unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'm dead

</comment><comment><USER54> Patreon shouldn't have any more than half a dozen employees. But alas, they joined the VC exit cult.

<comment><USER55> This always gets said, have you ever looked at all the documentation and helpful materials they've put out?

If they just wanted to be a payment processing platform they would just be a payment processing platform.

Instead it's guidance and education to help content creators create more and learn more.

<comment><USER22> Documentation doesn't take 300 employees either.

Pretty sure onlyfans is basically run by one guy out of London and maybe a handful of contractor support staff for essentially the same business.</comment></comment></comment>


Uber shuts down self-driving trucks unit - mark-ruwt https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/30/ubers-self-driving-trucks-division-is-dead-long-live-uber-self-driving-cars/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've always felt that self driving trucks make the most economical sense to automate. A self driving truck would get to its destination faster (saving money) and without the need for a driver (saving money). And the majority of their time is spent on relatively predictable interstate roads, not the chaotic roads of a busy downtown, so they'd be simpler to automate.

Otto (the self-driving truck company that Uber bought and is now shuttering) was the first I'd heard of that. It's a bit sad that they're shutting down.

<comment><USER2> What do you mean by "most economical sense to automate"? It seems like everything about automating a truck would be more expensive (cost of 1 truck = 5-6 cars), the insurance and maintenance on the truck and hardware, the potential for catastrophic failure (1 runaway car doing 70 = bad, 1 runaway truck doing 70 = REALLY bad), the extra complexity of pulling a trailer and monitoring the trailer as well as the truck, monitoring the size and type of load of the truck and modifying the driving characteristics to match the load, the extra regulations that trucks are subject to (what roads they can be on, what loads they could cary on certain roads, what time of day they can drive on said roads, when they can or can't use engine braking).

Edit: even on 'simple' point A to point B route that involve 99% highway, what happens when a small part of the highway shuts down for whatever reason (flooding, multi-lan accident, fire, etc) and all traffic is routed on smaller adjacent streets, or forced to share a lane with oncoming traffic. Automating a truck is as hard or harder than automating a car, since you're dealing with the same external variables but have more internal/attached moving parts.

<comment><USER3> Trucks often drive mostly or only on major thoroughfares and often on extremely long and tedious routes. A self driving truck that could drive 50 hour stretches without getting tired or making mistakes would be a huge improvement in efficiency.

<comment><USER4> I could see there being a nice "hybrid" avenue, too: Have a human driver in the truck for managing all street level driving, overseeing loading/unloading, refueling, etc. And then let them take a break, or work on their side hustle or master's degree or whatever, while the truck is on the highway. And either pull off the highway or have the human take over if conditions aren't favorable.

Self-driving taxis, OTOH, feel like they've got a much longer way to go before they can generate any real profit.

<comment><USER5> AFAIK this is the accepted path forward (minus the side hustle aspect). Automate that which is easier to automate: the long distance highway driving. For the first/last mile, let a human do the work.

<comment><USER6> I think what is going to happen is people are going to realize robot cars are death traps. Not because their rate of accidents will be any higher, but that when they do have accidents they will seem bizarre and inhuman mistakes that even the most incompetent human driver would never make.

Driving on the open road requires real intelligence. Not the pretend intelligence that modern AI gives, but real understanding of situations and terrain. Before that happens (which is basically skynet, and a very very long time away) all you have is a bag of tricks cobbled together. Those tricks will miss things and get confused and make mistakes. Maybe not very often but definitely in strange ways that are frightening.

The unknown is scary. Drunk drivers, tired drivers, old drivers, et al. are plenty dangerous, but they still behave in ways that can be understood. AI mistakes will be / are / have been strange unsettling things that can't be reasoned about if you're a person in the area of the misbehaving vehicle.

<comment><USER7> > Driving on the open road requires real intelligence. Not the pretend > intelligence that modern AI gives, but real understanding of situations and > terrain.

People used to say this about every single thing that computers can do better than people.

In my college town, some pedestrians got ran over by a driver who later pled insanity due to "caffeine-induced psychosis". I think you're seriously overrating the predictability of human failure modes.

<comment><USER8> > People used to say this about every single thing that computers can do > better than people

Even if that's true (and I doubt it is), there is ample precedent (AI winter) for the industry dramatically overestimating what computers can do.

I bet if you time traveled and showed Siri/Cortana to an AI researcher from 1960 they'd be incredibly disappointed.

<comment><USER9> Not sure why people are disagreeing. That seems a blindingly obvious comment. There's so much today that would seem almost like magic to pretty much everyone living in 1960. But coice assistants? (And even just voice recognition.) almost certainly seemed like relatively "easy" problems. Perhaps less so to AI researchers than the general public but still.

<comment><USER8> I don't know about "magic." A modern smart phone might be "magic" to someone in 1860--it operates based on technologies that didn't exist back then. But by 1960, the building blocks of modern computing were already in place: digital von Neumann computers built out of transistors, radio communications, signal processing, etc. AT&T used frequency-division multiplexing of multiple voice channels in phone transmissions in _1918._ The mathematical framework for modern technologies like LTE was in place by the 1950s and 1960s. Would it really have surprised anyone that transistors would continue to get smaller and faster, allowing higher complexity, higher-throughput signal processing, which would allow Facebook?

<comment><USER10> I remember reading a dreamed up device that would hopefully show up some day written about in 1960.

Weight ~1 ton, cost ~1 million dollars inflation adjusted, non toxic, delivery date ~1990. What did they want? A 1 GB random access HDD.

A 32 gigabyte micro SD card for 10$ would have blown their mind let alone a smartphone.

<comment><USER8> They were off on size/weight, but they guessed the capacity just about right (IBM 0681). I don't think extrapolating out pre-existing trends, for sophisticated people, be "mind blowing." Would your mind be "blown" if you learned that by 2048 you'd have a 100 petabyte drive using, say, magneto- resistive memory (or something else based on anticipated, if not fully developed physics)? Seems like hyperbole (and setting a low bar for peoples' imagination).

Reading stuff written in the 1960s about what today would be like, what strikes me is that technology is so incredibly _not_ mind blowing compared to what we had back then. _Even_ in the area of computers. Hell, we haven't even come up with an input device that beats keyboards, which were invented in the _19th century_ (electro-mechanical keyboards, not typewriters).

<comment><USER10> They where vastly off in terms of size, weight, transfer speed, latency, and cost. In 1990 you could get a cheap RAID array so pick do you want 100x that capacity for far less than that price and weight.

<comment><USER11> No way that you could get a _cheap_ raid array with 1GB capacity in 1990. My pc had probably a 40MB HDD at the time.

<comment><USER10> Cheap in terms of multi million dollar hardware budgets.

1980: IBM introduces the first gigabyte hard drive. It is the size of a refrigerator, weighs about 550 pounds, and costs $40,000.

That's ~1/10the the cost and 1/4 the weight they where looking for. You really could do vastly better in 1990. For ~2,300$ you could get a 700 MB HDD buy 3 and your talking 1.4 GB with redundancy for ~1% of his budget.

PS: If I extrapolate current trends and say we might get a self driving 400 HP Honda Civic in 2050. Then someone says sort of a Tito costs 3,000$ has 50,000 HP but nobody drives that under powered piece of crap. It would be a shift in how you think about things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The new CEO continues to impress. When he took over, Kalanick had Uber in something like a hundred side-businesses, a massive waste of focus, effort, brand and capital. This isn't the first or will be the last black hole side venture Dara is getting Uber out of. And he's already established his 100x better at PR and building/protecting the brand than Travis was.

Uber never needed to be in the automated trucks business, there are zero synergies with their core business, and it's not even clear that will ever be a good business to be in. Is Uber Eats next on the chopping block? That would probably be my choice.

<comment><USER13> > Is Uber Eats next on the chopping block? That would probably be my choice.

Are you saying this because you don't use Uber Eats and don't see a value for it? I and people I know in my city heavily use Uber Eats and it provides Uber drivers who are already on the road (here in over abundance to the point that they're barely making any money) additional income.

<comment><USER14> I don't think Uber Eats has any specific pros over the million other food delivery startups

<comment><USER15> It does on the supply side. It keeps drivers on the Uber network, which is good for both the rides business and the Eats business due to more consistent supply, and good for drivers due to higher total volume of work.

The eventual result is that Uber can operate more efficiently than competitors that only do rides or food, allowing them to compete better in both markets.

(I used to work at Uber)

<comment><USER16> exactly.

ubereats is a flanking product, meant to protect the core business. strategically, uber really only has market power on the supply side, and ubereats is primarily about protecting that advantage and less about being a standalone business (although i'm sure they'd be thrilled if it succeeded as a standalone business).

i'd be surprised if ubereats went away any time soon. at least, not without something else replacing it.

<comment><USER17> In European markets there is literally no overlap between Uber Eats and Uber. Uber drivers are driving Toyotas, Uber eats drivers are riding mopeds and bicycles. You can't just switch from one to the other.

<comment><USER18> Same in Asia

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm generally pro-self-driving vehicles, and while I don't want to underestimate the difficulties, given how far related tech has gone in recent years I think it'd be a mistake to assume any of this is "never" going to happen.

Despite this, I've been very nervously watching how truck driving and self- driving interact. I feel like city-to-city long haul driving will have a very rapid turnover once a certain tech threshold is hit. That threshold might be 5 years out or 20 years out or even further, but once it is reached a lot of jobs cease to be as profitable very quickly.

Trucking is a major source of strong employment for those without a college degree. It is a significant source of employment all across the US, and there are related effects - entire small towns and certainly many small businesses rely on the income from truckers. (Everything here is about the US because I know too little about non-US to have even these vague reactions)

Miners have become a synonym for workers displaced by technology - yet mining was always 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than modern trucking and took multiple generations to decline. Trucking could lose a big chunk of the industry in the course of a decade or less, to the tune of a million drivers or more. Having a million or more drivers that are suddenly unemployed or under employed would have a huge impact on the economy and public faith in the economy. Having this occur is predictable even if we can't predict when. Yet how many have given serious discussion on how to handle the reaction once this starts coming to pass?

Could be confirmation bias on my part, but I see cases like this - where the effort proved to be more complicated than expected - to falsely create the narrative that this is not a real problem to consider, which just makes the eventual impact worse.

EDIT: Please stop thinking I want to "protect" trucking or "stop" self-driving technology. I want neither - I just want us (society) to take advantage of the time when we know a change is coming but isn't here yet rather than deny it as "not yet real" and then wring our hands in despair over the consequences once it IS real.

<comment><USER20> You're absolutely right! Trucking is a _major_ sector of employment.

It's also a major source of life-shortening occupational health problems. The life expectancy of a trucker is _16 years_ shorter than the norm. Why are you so eager to protect jobs that are measurably killing the people who work them? Do you value these jobs so much that you're willing to pay for them in human lives?

For my own part, I'd rather have a million former truckers who need retraining and new skillsets than a million dead truckers. But that's me, and I'm known to be weird.

<comment><USER21> Great redirect, but you failed to answer the actual question. But first a rebuttable.

First of all the life expectancy between college education and highschool education is 12 years. So that's only a 4 year shorter gap. (Perhaps universal medical care would fix this problem)

Second, do you seriously think the US has the capacity to handle 2 million unemployed truck drivers in the course of a couple years? That's a 10% increase overnight, and I have news for you, schools are already overburdened. (Perhaps free college education would provide the money to improve capacity, and fix two problems with one stone)

Third, the real problem is the jobs. What job are they going to do once they get their degree. Millennials are already one of the most highly trained yes underpaid generations yet, and they have the advantage of youth. The jobs aren't coming back from these sorts of events. (Perhaps a universal basic income would fix this problem)

And finally the real question was: What are we going to do about it. It was a request to have a conversation about the solution. Not to stop it from happening. I've provided my solutions, in the spirit of _conversation_ I would be curious to see what you identify as problems, and your proposed solutions.

<comment><USER22> Comparing college vs high school graduate life expectancies isn't valid because truckers aren't a subset of one or the other; they have a good proportion from both groups. Taking off 12 years is the maximum effect assuming there isn't a single trucker that has a college degree, which of course isn't true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the sad result of this story is that they are going to keep going with the self-driving car technology. During the investigation into the fatal crash accident they had, they showed how reckless they are. It would be great if they learned anything from the death of that person and rethink QA and decisions, but I doubt it. Time will tell.

<comment><USER24> I really thought they'd pull out of self-driving tech after that. It's insane that they're right back on the roads a few months later. There's no way that's enough time to be sure your broken software isn't going to kill again.

<comment><USER25> It certainly isn't responsible. But it's their only moonshot route to profitability, so innocent lives be damned.

<comment><USER26> Did you know that 1.3 MILLION people die in car accidents on a yearly basis? There are extremely good reasons to believe that a mature, self-driving car industry will lower that figure by orders of magnitude.

It is a shame that there have been a few accidents now that the technology is in its infancy, but it is very short-sighted to wish that Uber halts its experiments and delays the technology from taking off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's kind of surprising, I always imagined self driving trucks to be a more profitable business and "easier" challenge.

<comment><USER28> If you limit the trucks to only highway driving and design depots for them they might be easier but I think once you start trying to drive them on smaller roads there's a lot of issues that crop up. First and foremost is that there's a lot more vehicle to keep modeled and the dynamics of how to drive the cab to safely maneuver the trailer might require a way better model of the environment and the position of the trailer.

<comment><USER29> Why wouldn't Uber just do long haul to a distribution point near a city and hire drivers for the last mile?

<comment><USER30> Thing is this puts it in a narrow band of competitiveness between human-driven trucks (less capital-intensive, more expensive over time) and trains or sea ports (more capital-intensive but still cheaper than automated trucks). A lot of bigger cities where it makes economic sense to have this kind of hub-and- spoke model will already have trains and ports too, so it's a bit dicey.

<comment><USER31> What you can do, is to have the driver sleep in the cabin during the long leg of the journey and then drive just between highway and hub.

This means that instead of two drivers, you're not just paying two.

<comment><USER28> Doing that would require 100% autonomous and the legal allowances across the whole nation. There's also some very specific rule around what counts as rest for drivers and I'm not sure that would qualify as rest under the current rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Meanwhile, Waymo is expanding into self-driving trucks, saw them on 101.

</comment><comment><USER33> Having experienced a winter car accident on a highway involving a semi truck where the truck wasn't damaged but my car was totaled, I am extremely grateful the truck stopped and its driver allowed me to wait in the heated cab while waiting for police to arrive.

The idea of all these massive trucks autonomously operating on our highways strikes me as a very dystopian future. I appreciate the humans in the machines accompanying me on cross-country road trips. Without the truckers, much of these vast spaces will become far more desolate and dangerous to travel through.

I'm fine with technology assisting truckers, but am hopeful there will continue to be a requirement of people being present with ultimate authority over the vehicle.

<comment><USER34> Great point. Out of curiosity, what happened in the accident that the driver was comfortable inviting you into his car? In many environments/scenarios that would seem risky, particularly after a traumatic event like a car accident.

<comment><USER33> He had almost crashed into me by suddenly changing into my lane on a snow- covered highway.

I braked to avoid the collision, he swerved back into his lane having seen me brake, but my car rotated from the too-agressive braking. I was able to prevent a spin, instead limiting it to some highway-speed unpleasant fishtailing, but the whole ordeal had brought my car awfully near his trailer which was now next to my car again due to his decelerating.

There was a lot of snow/slush accumulated between the lanes, and this kept pulling the right side of my car closer to his trailer, regardless of what I did, before the tires of his trailer struck the rear corner my car, violently forcing my car under the trailer, shattering the driver and passenger windows from the compression. At that point it was pure chaos from above and the steering wheel was ripped from my hands by a frontal impact with the landing gear.

Somehow after what seemed like an eternity my car broke free from captivity under the trailer and shot out the side and off the highway, through the air, before landing on an embankment and sledding down to a frozen water retention pond where it circled a few times before coming to a stop in complete silence.

I can't speak to what was going through the trucker's mind when I knocked on his passenger window and told him I was the luckiest person on the planet, and asked if I could wait in his cabin until the police arrived. My car was not even visible from the highway. He claimed to have no idea what happened, just that he saw my headlights disappear after he swerved. He had no idea my car had been under his trailer. Typing this story has been surprisingly emotional.

<comment><USER35> I'm a truck driver, and I was a little sickened reading it. Still am.

Back in driving school one of the other students was out on the road with an instructor and two other students in the back. A driver was texting, and ran into the back bumper of the trailer (the iron work below the back door), embedding the car by the engine under the bumper. The car was dragged from that point until the truck stopped.

The story the student and instructor told literally involved the phrase "... did you feel something?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think to do this right (safely) we need to start looking at how to integrate roads with self driving cars and trucks and at vehicle to vehicle communication.

At some point there needs to be standards set for these kinds of things and, really, the sooner the better.

I think we, as consumers, would be better served with a vehicle that could safely drive down the highway for long distances right now than a car that can drive us to work and back on city streets 10 years from now.

And if we integrate roadway to vehicle communication from the highways outward the transition will be more efficient, especially for trucks.

<comment><USER37> I agree road and vehicle to vehicle comm is important, but the work being done now by these companies is comparatively much more important. If there is an implementation bug on either side of one of these integrations or if the communication medium is bogged down, then what?

These systems must be able to handle diverse and unpredictable situations without being able to communicate directly with other agents in the environment, and must be able to act safely relying solely on their own percepts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The only thing that made less sense than Uber focusing on trucks (Uber Freight, AV Trucks) is Uber Elevate (flying cars). The days of Uber testing crazy, new ideas is over.

The downside is that some of them actually worked. I can't see Dara ever green lighting Eats, which is now a great business. Note that Dara & Expedia completely missed the AirBnB phenomenon and had to play catch up many years later.

<comment><USER39> Eats is the biggest success for uber besides ridesharing. It's got huge potential.

<comment><USER40> The market Eats is in has huge potential, but Uber had lots of competition in that market and no moat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Could it be that losing the self driving car market to Waymo is more of an existential threat than not being first in the trucking business?

<comment><USER2> That's a really good point. I also wonder if the cyclist accident changed the mood and/or culture at Uber when it comes to autonomous vehicles. I have to be honest that it would absolutely gut me inside to know that my software caused a death.

<comment><USER34> I understand your point but the software didn't exclusively cause the death.

The software was known to be unreliable. In that way it did contribute to the person's death. But so did the driver tasked with correcting the vehicle (who was watching Hulu), the technicians who disabled emergency brakes, and the company culture/management that thought this was safe in the first place.

On a side note, my iPhone X knows when I'm looking at the camera to use FaceID. If I look away, am asleep, or otherwise occupied, it won't open the phone. I'm not sure why Uber doesn't use similar technology, in conjunction with steering wheel sensors to identify hands on the wheel, to force operators to stay alert. This seems particularly important if the software is unreliable.

<comment><USER42> If the software was known to be unreliable, then it shouldn't have been on the road. Everyone at Uber who worked on that project shares the blame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Hmm, so the only self-driving part of Uber that was working gets shut down and put under dysfunctional part. I love corporate politics...

</comment><comment><USER44> I suddenly have the urge to research "Why was an interstate system built vice an interconnected railway system?" I'm guessing that the auto industry lobby team was stronger than the rail lobbyists, even though at this point it seems like the rail was the better choice economically.

<comment><USER45> One of Eisenhower's goals for the Interstate system was building emergency takeoff/landing strips for aircraft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Is this in any way related to the Levandowski lawsuit? The thesis of that suit was that Uber only bought Otto to get a hold of Levandowski and his Google knowledge...

</comment><comment><USER47> Since autonomous driving technology is not there yet, I believe truck OEMs should focus on ADAS to enable lane keeping and lane change on highways only, as this is the easiest part of the job. Drivers would be require to intervene as soon as the truck exits the highway.

I presume this is what Tesla will do with their trucks although I am very concerned by their very dubious marketing when it comes to autonomous driving technology.

</comment><comment><USER48> It seems like a smart transition technology would be truck driving roads. Basically install sensors on major freeways for longhaul routes which allows the road to take the wheel. You could have on/off ramps for this so people could take over the last mile.

</comment><comment><USER49> I wonder how long it will take until public press will admit that the autonomous driving hype was just that, a hype to generate investor money. We aren't there yet, it was obvious already a few years ago when google and tesla began to push the media.

<comment><USER50> From what I've heard in the news, waymo seems to be fairly far along.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Waymo is developing a self driving truck. With Uber out of the game, there's more upside for Waymo.

</comment><comment><USER52> This is surprising to me as well. I have seen first-hand how tedious it can be to find reliable truck drivers, particularly in the Midwest. I am eager to see how this industry shifts in the next couple decades.

</comment><comment><USER53> Article didn't actually say why they're shutting it down. Is the tech not feasible?

With the Otto lawsuit settled and Levandowski gone it should have cleared the way. Focusing instead on self driving cars doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER35> > Article didn't actually say why they're shutting it down.

It did. They want to consolidate limited development resources, and flesh out the tech in the easier car segment before then applying it to the superset truck segment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Instead of fully automatic it would be good if they could be remotely operated for a short period of time, this would give the driver a chance to check their; phone, paper work, pee in a bottle.

</comment><comment><USER55> I think they should focus on just one segment at a time and this is a good decision by them. They have the market to put self driving car in use but they cannot do the same for trucks.

</comment><comment><USER56> Does this mean Otto is being shut down?

</comment><comment><USER57> so all of that Levandowski kerfuffle was for nothing? dear me, what a waste!

</comment><comment><USER58> How about we start with self-driving _trains_ that don't fly off the rails when some train engineer ignores the speed limit, and don't run into each other due to mis-routing. That'd be a good start for this whole "self driving" thing.

</comment><comment><USER59> Soon to be followed by: Uber shuts down, full stop. Sure, Softbank shoveled another shipload of money into the gaping maw of this capital furnace, but they're still burning it. Now, in addition to a tragically bad main business, they also don't have the fairy tale about how autonomous vehicles will eventually make them win.

<comment><USER12> Nope, this is actually a sign of Uber finally having adult leadership. Dara Khosrowshahi has only been there 9 months but he's doing an outstanding job, getting Uber's priorities straight and refocusing the company.

And their core business is a fantastic business. Bookings is still growing faster than 50% annually. It cut it's burn rate to $300M last quarter, despite the bleeding at dozens and dozens side projects like Trucks, Eats, etc, and still has $6B in the bank. Dana is getting them laser focused on their core business again, and they'll be profitable before you know it.

<comment><USER60> Are you at Uber? Speaking as someone who is at Uber, I wouldn't say this is the case at all. Dara's successes have largely been on the PR front (huge successes), some good partnerships and an exit in SENA which was probably the right move given circumstances but shouldn't have happened in the first place.

Things he hasn't done: 1) Kept Uber moving faster than competitors 2) Hired necessary leadership (CFO, CMO, CPO [he tried but the guy he hired originally was a total fraud. Huge swing and miss], etc.) 3) Driven focus on anything other than loyalty which is itself shaping up poorly 4) Gained back market share 5) Kept the best leaders. Losing Aaron Schildkrout alone was a massive loss, but there's been PLENTY of other leaders taking their sabbaticals and then quitting

Turning to Eats, if we got rid of that (no way we would) we would lose the most dynamic and fast moving part of our business. It's the only place that still has the talent and structure of Uber 1.0 but without the awful cultural problems.

<comment><USER12> I might be wrong on Eats, but I'm not wrong on the rest of the side businesses.

And Dara has gotten the most important things right in the few months he's been there. You don't have choices in keeping foreign subsidiaries if your predecessor put the business on the route to bankruptcy, you shed what you have to shed before your cash on hand gets so low you lose all leverage in keeping the business financed.

And if Aaron Schildkrout was so great, why was he working for Travis Kalanick, Stockholm syndrome? Why would you work for someone who constantly tarnished the company brand you needed in order to succeed in your job? It really sounds like Uber needs a complete house cleaning of it's entire upper ranks. You can play the "I was just following orders" card, but it also disqualifies you from being a true leader.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: StreetEasy Plus – Chrome Plugin for Better Apartment Hunting in NYC - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@polymermallard/chrome-plugin-streeteasy-plus-3bbbfc1d9b9c <comment><AUTHOR> This is a plugin that extends the website StreetEasy.com which is used for apartment hunting in NYC / NJ area.

I was recently on the hunt for an apartment and thought of a bunch of features I wish the website had, so I wrote this plugin to add what I could.

Decided to share in case someone needs to use it, or it can inspire someone, or if anyone thinks of anything additional that would be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks neat, thanks</comment>


CloudFlare Is In Talks to Raise Funding At Near A $1 Billion Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/17/cloudflare-billion-valuation/ <comment><USER2> $250,000 revenue. $1 billion valuation. W - T - F. This better be a bloody joke.

The more I read the article, the more it seems that the article is definitely masterful PR from CloudFare. K.M. Cutler either took the bait hook-line-and- sinker (comparing vanity metrics for a proxy service to service sites, etc.) or the bubble is way worse than I imagined.

<comment><USER3> But it's "Cloud," very different from the .com a while back. I heard it on TV and read it in a blog.

<comment><USER4> Has anyone filed the ~$200K ICANN application to get the .cloud TLD going yet?

I can see the Superbowl ads already: "It's not really the cloud unless it's _dot_ -cloud."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is is April 1st yet again?

That's 1/6th the Akamai market cap.

You know, Akamai. That other little CDN. The one that happens to make 4000x the revenue of Cloudflare.

Ah well, it's probably justified. Cloudflare insists they're not a CDN after all. They only happen to offer the exact same services by accident.

<comment><USER6> Lets all wait until they actually get valued at $1 billion before getting all excited.

This is from techcrunch and not confirmed...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've had terrible experiences with cloudflare, a fellow HN user uses it and I constantly have problems connecting to his site (cloudflare telling me it's down) when it's definitely up and accessible by others. I definitely see the value in their product (idea) though.

<comment><USER8> Some big swings in the opinions on CloudFlare in this thread so far. I've used CloudFlare on a site with low traffic and I liked the results and so I just recommended that a publisher client who gets around 20,000 daily uniques should use it too.

On reading some of the criticisms here, I'm concerned I made the wrong recommendation - but at the same time, I'm also seeing comments like "CloudFlare is fantastic". Can anyone weigh in with what I really need to know about CloudFlare in order to ascertain if it's a good choice for my client or not?

<comment><USER9> I used it for my low traffic personal site and thought it was great. But then one my posts got on the front page of HN and the traffic triggered CAPTCHAs for everyone. I dialed down the security settings and the CAPTCHAs went away, but still, that was annoying. And tech support wouldn't own up to their software thinking an HN spike was an attack.

Then I used it for my startup, which was using an SSL cert, and it had major problems on launch day because of that (ugh). It continued to have SSL compatibility issues for a week, so I've only been using it as a DNS since. As a test, I enabled it on staging and have left it off on production. To their credit, it seems like the SSL downtime issues have gone away.

It's been fine as a DNS, but I don't really have any desire to enable the CloudFlare features again. I love the idea of it keeping me safe from spambots and DDOS. At the same time, it really is a single point of failure, and it's failed more than any other technology in my stack. And the caching layer is way too brittle. I've set up rules to turn it off in staging.

<comment><USER10> I hate their stance toward SSL. When one of the sites on Cloudflare needed SSL the only thing you could do was turn off caching for HTTPS.

Since then they've added an SSL service where you can get an SSL cert from them. It only SSL's the traffic from the client to Cloudflare, not from Cloudflare back to the server so you've still got part of your transport not secured. I wonder how many people bought into that service without realizing that. (You can have Cloudflare connect HTTPS back to your server, but they still offer that partially covered option for some reason).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article is littered with inaccurate comparisons. Getting to 400M uniques for them is completely different than facebook or twitter. It should be better compared to how long did it take google analytics to hit 400M uniques.

I do like the idea of what they are doing, the DDOS protection alone makes their service worth at least $100/Month to most revenue generating sites. If they are signing up 30k new customers per month, and 1% pay $20/month, then you're talking about growing by $6k/revenue or more a month. compounding that adds up. I'd be surprised if they didn't break $1-2M in revenue in 2012. (pure speculation, no insider info. I do use their plugin on my blog)

<comment><USER12> "Getting to 400M uniques"

It's not even 400m uniques unless you consider delivery of a cached page a unique where the end viewer of the page doesn't even know he is served by cloudflare. Other than hijacking the 404 pages (which would be a percentage of the uniques) there isn't any value that I can think of to that. It's like serving up dns queries in a way.

<comment><USER11> I was thinking exactly the same thing. The value is compared to the commercial DDOS protection services that many of these hosts offer like liquid web <http://www.liquidweb.com/services/ddos.html> ($$$)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cloudflare is a frigging nightmare if you're outside the US and on a dynamic ip(which includes pretty much everyone in India.) I keep having to enter a captcha on links from HN, because a lot of people apparently use them.

Things like these(although probably helpful to the site authors) are actually breaking the internet unfortunately.

<comment><USER14> FWIW, Cloudflare lets you configure how aggressive you want it to be in blocking "threats." The default seems a bit strong, but there's an option labelled "essentially off"

<comment><USER15> I don't think that option was there initially, at least not for the free tier. It's nice that it's there now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> People who are looking at the revenue and think this valuation is outrageous probably have a fundamental misunderstanding of the CDN market.

$1 billion is high, but not outrageous.

Akamai is the market leader, and currently valued at ~$7 billion. They recently bought the most innovative player in the CDN market (Cotendo) for $250 million.

CloudFlare may not have huge revenue, but they have something that all the other non-Akamai CDN players would kill for: a huge, quickly growing customer base.

Their lack of revenue is a byproduct of their freemium business model. It's not a big problem, because CloudFlare can change the parameters in that model at anytime, and provided they are keeping customers happy it should be a fairly easy conversion to a paid customer.

People are used to paying for webhosting, and Cloudflare are already building reseller agreements with companies like Dreamhost to build these relationships further.

The biggest problem I see with CloudFlare is that they don't have strong (any?) video CDN offerings. At the moment that isn't a big problem for them (not many of their customers need it since most use SaaS platforms for video) but I would imagine it is an area they are looking hard at.

<comment><USER17> That may be true and they could have out of this world potential but I can't think of any sector or business model where a P/S ratio of 4000 is anywhere close to sane.

<comment><USER16> _I can't think of any sector or business model where a P/S ratio of 4000 is anywhere close to sane._

Drug dealers, if you measured the P/S ratio right after they have given out that first, free hit :)

Seriously, though: that's how freemium business models work. They deliberately delay revenue to build adoption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can't speak much for Cloudflare's CDN features, but they're one of the best free DNS providers I've ever come across - Anycast, web management, and API- wise. I use them mostly for that.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm surprised at a lot of the negative posts about CloudFlare. We serve around 100 million impressions monthly through CloudFlare, and have been doing so for the past year with no issues.

<comment><USER20> The negative posts don't seem to be directed at the company, which probably is a solid company doing great things. Just the crazy $1 billion dollar valuation figure being thrown around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've also had issues with CF. Saying the site is down while I'm logged into the server. Does anybody have any solid alternatives to the bot blacklist? It gets hard to keep up with htaccess ip blocks, and it's more or less all I'm using it for now (apart from DNS which can be changed anyway).

</comment><comment><USER12> The other thing to realize about cloudflare is unless you play with your apache logs any hits coming in will show cloudflare Ip's as accessing pages as opposed to the end users. There are workarounds for this (if you know enough to play with apache etc. config) but the default state when you sign up gives you the cloudflare ips.

<https://www.cloudflare.com/wiki/Log_Files>

<comment><USER22> That's how any proxy service works. It's not just CloudFlare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've been using CF for a few months, and thus far it's been great: I use it to server static files and my bandwidth bill is 100 USD cheaper. I host on linode, and their bandwidth is pretty expensive.

Few users complained about being blocked. I contacted the support, but their answers didn't solve my problem. Finally, I figured out how to add my country to the "trust list" and never heard about blocks ever since.

<comment><USER24> Seems likely that there are other users that are blocked and never complain, and just leave.

I had similar problems with blocked users and site-is-down false positives, so I had to drop it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Did anyone else originally hear about them because the lulzsec page used them?

</comment><comment><USER26> Either this is total BS or some VCs are trying to ride the Instagram wave.

What else could justify such a valuation for a Web security proxy provider?

</comment><comment><USER27> What is the barrier to entry for CloudFlare? Putting a few servers in different colos, buying quality bandwidth, set up BGP anycast, get the IP Geolocation database from MaxMind. We are talking a service that could be duplicated with open source software and about $100K to $250K investment.

<comment><USER28> One of the least informed opinions I've seen on HN.

<comment><USER27> Enlighten me... a 1U server can handle nearly 1Gbps of traffic. BGP anycast - a solved problem. How many different locations do you need? For USA - Chicago, NYC, WashDC, Boston, LA, Phoenix, Dallas. In Europe - Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Berlin, London, Paris, Moscow/StPete, probably a few I have missed. Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, HongKong. Half a rack (20U) in each location would more than cover most, though possibly the USA would require more.

<comment><USER16> <http://fastly.com> does that: Varnish on SSDs.

But Cloudflare isn't just a CDN, it has an application firewall/security thing built in too.

That's important because suddenly you can't get away with just Varnish, and rolling Apache+mod_security out to each node is probably insufficient as well.

Edit: fixed url, thanks.

<comment><USER29> CloudFlare also provides basic analytics, DNS, url rewrite rules, and a fairly decent UI.

The idea of rebuilding it for $250k is ludicrous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I>

</comment><comment><USER31> not a bubble, not a bubble, not a bubble, not a bubble...

no but seriously. sounds like a CDN for your static URLs and maybe combined with a web throttler and web firewall in front of your dynamic URLs. I do see some revenue potential there, especially in providing service to companies with weak/no tech staff.</comment>


Ask HN: Synonyms/Alternative phrasing for end-to-end pipeline? - <AUTHOR> I have been working on some documentation and cover letters. The phrase "end-to-end pipeline" keeps popping up and it seems repetitive. How would you rephrase it? I am suffering from a bad case of writer's block and am probably obsessing over the details, but would appreciate any help. <comment><USER2> "comprehensive solution"</comment>


New Year's Greetings from Jolla - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jolla.com/new-years-greetings-jolla/ <comment><AUTHOR> Quote:

"we are happy to say that we will be shipping an additional small batch of the Jolla Tablet to early backers during early 2016, targeting to send invitations during January. The bad news here is that we are not able to complete the production to fulfill all contributions. In other words, all of our backers will not get a Jolla Tablet."</comment>


Paying Employees More Will Make the Economy Grow - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/companies-need-to-pay-people-more-2013-8?utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=bufferc69e6&utm_medium=twitter

<comment><USER2> "One obvious solution to this problem is for big companies to pay their people more — to share more of the vast wealth that they create with the people who create it."

Would like to see studies that suggest what percentage of income paid to employees maximizes a company's long term sustainability, and the same for maximizing the general economy's sustainability. Of course it wouldn't be two single numbers, it would depend on type of industry and company.</comment>


Standard Libraries - <AUTHOR> http://thelincolnshirepoacher.com/articles/standard-libraries

<comment><USER2> He never tells us what the "real" problem was.

<comment><USER3> "The standard libraries that ship with languages have always struck me as kind of odd. Who maintains the quality of these libraries? What happens if that library has a bug? Do updates only get issued with new versions of the core language? And who determines that a library is a standard in the first place?"</comment></comment>


Tools released at Defcon can crack widely used PPTP encryption in under a day - <AUTHOR> http://www.csoonline.com/article/712429/tools-released-at-defcon-can-crack-widely-used-pptp-encryption-in-under-a-day

<comment><USER2> I wonder how the big VPN service providers are going to react to this, as far as I know ipredator (<http://ipredator.se/>) uses only MSCAP-2.

Also, why is this news not on the top of "hacker-news", it really puts the usefulness of HN into question if news like these are buried somewhere :-(</comment>


Reactors.IO 0.7 is ScalaJS-ready, and works with JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://reactors.io/?v=0.7 <comment><USER2> This is pretty interesting, what would be the best code base to dig through to see it in action?</comment>


Ask YC: I have a twitter account with 1800+ followers, what do you think it is worth? - <AUTHOR>

I'm just curious what the account may be worth.  I've actually had the account less than a week and it has grown quickly.  I remember there was some guy who was trying to sell his twitter account on ebay and the bidding was up to $1500+ (for 1500 followers) before he canceled it.  I know it kind of depends on what the account name is, etc... But I'd prefer to remain anonymous right now and I am mostly interested in a generic $ value/follower figure.  Any best guesses? Thanks! <comment><USER2> $0

I just don't understand the draw of twitter. I guess it's just the old "take some old unix app and make it for the web" thing again. Hello wall 2.0.

ETA: the simple fact that you can get 1800 "followers" in a week devalues the "service" even more to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> just because you don't understand it does not mean it has zero value.

<comment><USER2> but the fact that someone can go from 0 to 1800 "friends" in a week (assuming they are a noone like me) _has_ to imply the lack of value of an account with that many friends (and IMNSHO the "service" itself).

<comment><AUTHOR> "followers" - not "friends." And not necessarily - think about supply and demand. There are a limited number of twitter accounts. If you happen to have a good twitter account name, it may attract many followers and be of value. Plus, it isn't easy to get that many followers. You can't just sign up and make it happen. I think the number of followers would be of value from at least an advertising perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The twitter account is worth nothing, your reputation is what you are attempting to sell.

And as with the offer of a virginity on the open market, the very act of offering it as a commodity devalues it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Assuming that a twitter account is equal to a reputation seems kind of absurd to me. As stated in the subject, it is a twitter account (and not a reputation) that I am interested in finding the value of. Everything has some sort of value - even an empty can in the street. I am just curious if anyone has any idea how to value a twitter account (based on the number of followers).

<comment><USER3> The twitter account is just a conduit; assuming that people are following it because of who is generating it; selling it is an attempt to monetise the repuation.

Now if you did something clever that is automatically pumping stuff interesting enough to follow into Twitter and you're selling that. That's a horse of a different color.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there anything in the Twitter terms which preclude selling an account?

</comment><comment><USER5> How much do you think a news.yc account with 5000 karma is worth?

</comment><comment><USER6> You might want to go the advertising route. Sell one tweet per day or something like that.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd have to agree. I think you might be using the service for the wrong reason.

BTW, i think the auction type stuff happened really earlier when it was hard to get on twitter. the barrier is quite low now.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was actually less than a month ago, and it was the rocketboom founder: <http://mashable.com/2008/04/13/twitter-ebay-sale/>

<comment><USER7> that's a long time in the startup world :)

my bad</comment></comment></comment>