Next Week's Maker Faire in San Mateo Could Be Bay Area's Last - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Next-week-s-Maker-Faire-in-San-Mateo-could-be-13836040.php <comment><USER2> It's a shame - in 2008/9/10 it was really something to see, but as a few other commenters have said, it's (and a lot of the maker movement for that matter) have declined a bit.

I personally think this is due to the infantilization in part of a lot of media outlets, where the emphasis has been placed on getting the ideas into the most hands possible instead of folks who'd actually benefit. Focusing the faires around 3D printing geegaws and cosplay items is fine if you want to make numbers, but you get consumers and the followons, and not creators from that.

You can think of it in the same vein as Marvel movies or Harry Potter books - low content, low thinking media that raises insane amounts of money based on appealing to the mass market and the wannabe 'geek' crowd that doesn't tend to do much innovating except in consumption methods.

<comment><USER3> The culture has changed a lot. _Geek_ originally described loners with unreasonable passion and knowledge about a specific niche. Now it's a codeword for capitalist cattle. It's the _Big Bang Theory_ crowd that turned consumerism and brand loyalty into a point of pride: I wonder what Nietzsche would say about that.

<comment><USER2> I'd almost argue that we need to find a new word for it but at this point there's not much to it. I've had the discussion a few times about how Big Bang Theory is basically a minstrel show about smart people instead of your choice of minority group and while some folks get the comparison, most just glaze over.

<comment><USER4> "Yeast life" works for me. Mass consumerization of everything from neck tattoos and facial piercings to "geek culture" is covered by the phrase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I first went to Maker Faire in 2012 or so, and it was incredible - the variety I saw was unreal, with so many smaller and interesting projects. I've gone three more times since then, and each time it's been less and less inspiring.

More uniformity, more emphasis on unrelated consumer products like pre- prepared food offerings, less emphasis on interesting electronics kits. Maybe I became jaded, but maybe Maker Faire has tried to target a lower and lower common denominator in an effort to boost revenues.

<comment><USER6> Yes, the last maker faire I went to had what I both loved, and hated, about it summed up in two adjacent booths.

One was a young girl teaching passerbys to sew a purse together using recycled jeans and fundraising for animal rescue missions.

The adjacent booth was to pay $15 for a "crystal therapy healing and ionic rebalancing" session.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I helped present a Tesla coil demo at one of the first Maker Faires (maybe 2006 or 2007?) and it was an absolute blast. It was also decidedly no frills, focused on the artsy, crazy, creative projects. I don't recall much, if anything, in the way of commercial products.

I wonder if it would be financially tenable if they scale it down and get back that home grown feel. Then again the bay area is a very different place now.

<comment><USER8> Only one I attended, I remember this. Thank you for the fun time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is such an epic, annual celebration of learning and creativity. Losing it would be a tragedy.

How do the economics not work out here? 100-150K visitors/year, each dropping (on average? $20 for entrance ticket)?

Don't they require commercial presenters to pay for their space?

How much does it cost to rent the San Mateo Fairgrounds?

<comment><USER10> I can't find any info on how much the event space actually costs, but based a few tidbits from the article it sounds more like the organization that runs the faire let expenses get out of control. If they laid off 8-10 people, that means they had significantly more than that, all of whom were ostensibly drawing a salary on top of likely increasing event space costs.

<comment><USER11> There's actually tons of other costs besides renting the space. Many exhibits require large amounts of electricity and space. Not every exhibitor can fit within a small booth. Not to mention liability insurance, since some exhibits have things like fire.

As a exhibitor myself, I've seen how the event has changed over the past few years, and the loss of sponsors such as Intel have definitely hit them. I just hope the event can continue, it's really the highlight of the school year for me and my peers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's been terrible for years, the last time I went a major automaker had taken over a huge swath of parking lot and was giving test drives, I think it was Chevrolet IIRC.

Long ago it was full of grassroots makers showing off their DIY stuff but it quickly became a commercialized trade show targeting these folks and their audience as consumers instead of hosting them.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm heartbroken that Halted closed. Is tinkering with physical stuff in the bay area dead?

Or well, scaled back significantly in comparison to a decade ago.

<comment><USER14> Definitely a trend. There's also the TechShop bankruptcy and the subsequent "TheShop.build" clusterfuck, MotoGuild shutting down, etc.

<comment><USER15> Yes. Maker spaces in Silicon Valley are doing very badly. I was a TechShop member for most of a decade. They went bankrupt, in a very messy way. I'm currently a "TheShop.build" member, at least for a few more days. They closed their San Francisco location months ago, despite it still being listed on the web site. The San Jose location got a 3-day notice of eviction from their landlord, but they seem to have survived that for now. Rumors of unpaid employees, and former employees removing equipment they'd loaned to the shop indicate that the end is probably near.

The new nonprofit shop, Maker Nexus, is below critical mass. Only 50 or so paying members. (I tried to join, but their outsourced signup site can't send me a confirmation email. So I didn't join.)

What happened? The "maker movement" fad declined. Etsy changed their policies - you no longer have to make it yourself; you can outsource manufacturing. TechShop SF used to have six CNC laser cutters busy cranking out "handmade" crap for Etsy. That stopped. The rest of the place mostly turned out stuff for Burning Man. Rising rents forced shops out, of course.

TechShop tried to pivot to "STEM" or "STEAM" education. In practice this meant teaching middle schoolers to wire up Arduinos. That's fine, but a huge mismatch with the tools available at TechShop.

Autodesk's previous CEO, Carl Bass, thought 3D printing was going to be a big deal, and put money and software into TechShop. His successor decided that wasn't happening and pulled the plug.

It's been a long time since there were people building parts for X-Prize entries.

I don't think there's any public space in Silicon Valley which has everything you need for surface mount soldering. Which is embarrassing.

<comment><USER14> Circuit Launch has hot air rework stations, apparently.

<comment><USER15> I'd hope so. Those are cheap. Since their business is supposed to be electronics prototyping, they should have considerably more than that. Like a prototype pick and place machine like a Liteplacer, a surface mount soldering oven, and the setup for using a stencil to apply solder paste. But no. Just basic bench tools.

I once tried to sign up there. I drove up to Oakland, and even though I'd made an appointment, no one was there to let me in and nobody answered the phone or door. Then my car was rear-ended on the freeway, and when I pulled off at the next exit, the other car kept on going. So I had to report a hit and run. While I was doing this someone approached me and hassled me in what seemed to be the run-up to a mugging. Got rid of him and drove back to the Peninsula.

If those guys were on the other side of the bay, I'd be using them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good. It's become an over commercialized, over crowded mess.

</comment><comment><USER17> There's something ironic about a "Maker Faire" that depends on a commercial organization with many employees.

<comment><USER18> Managing events is hard work.</comment></comment>


Which AWS certification to choose considering my stack? - <AUTHOR> We currently use Rails and React to build our apps. Some solr envolved.
I've been encouraged by my team to learn/do more with aws, so I was wondering what is a good way to learn it properly.<p>- what to learn?
- how to learn?
- should I get aws certified? AWS Certified Developer vs AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate ? <comment><USER2> I guess the first question is: What do you want to do with AWS?

Do you want to have a good understanding of the breadth of services, or do you want to learn how to leverage AWS to help in your development?

CSA will give you a good overview of the main services AWS offers: You'll learn about EC2, S3, VPC networking, security and access management, etc. You'll also learn about costing holistically, and how to make well-architected systems.

Certified Developer will give you a deeper dive into the development-centric aspects of AWS. You'll learn stuff like specific details about RDS and Dynamo DB (manage SQL and NoSQL databases, respectively), how to build CI/CD pipelines, ECS (Elastic Container Store), etc. It covers fewer products (but at a deeper level) than the CSA.

With the CSA you'll learn which use cases you'll want a relational DB or when you want to go NoSQL. You'll also learn what DB engines are available in RDS and Dynamo DB. With the Developer, you'll be asked more detailed stuff like read/write units, eventually vs. strongly consistent reads, how DB throughput is calculated, etc.

How to learn? AWS Whitepapers and ReInvent videos on Youtube are both free. Linux Academy has great courses on AWS. acloud.guru fills in some gaps Linux Academy may leave out, but overall I find acloud.guru to be less feature-rich and somewhat underwhelming.

A lot of people use Whizlabs for practice tests, but I've never used them.

I encourage getting AWS certified. The certifications are really hot right now, and it'll validate that you have at least the base knowledge. There's a lot of fakers out there, and AWS certification helps you overcome that hurdle somewhat.

\--3x AWS certified, including CSA Pro.</comment>


Crossrail: The monster tunnelling under London streets - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150602-crossrail-the-monster-tunnelling-under-london-streets <comment><USER2> The BBC did a fascinating series of programmes on Crossrail over the winter.

At one point, the new tunnel was being cut past an existing underground station (I forget which one). It had to be threaded in 3D between a few access tunnels carrying passengers on their way up or down, and at one stage came within 5-6 feet of them, all without them knowing.

Edit: for those who can access it [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04b7h1w](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04b7h1w)

<comment><USER3> It was Tottenham Court Road station when they were boring under Soho Square. It had to go below the escalators but above the Northern Line.

<comment><USER2> That's the one. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reading about this sucked me into an hour of reading about Seattle's "Bertha" debacle. If you want to hear about a parallel universe account of a project like this going straight to hell…

disaster predicted: [http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/what-could-possibly- go-wr...](http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/what-could-possibly-go- wrong/Content?oid=4399657)

disaster realized: [http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/12/16/guest-e...](http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/12/16/guest- editorial-seattle-pull-the-plug-on-the-tunnel-unless-you-can-answer-these- seven-questions)

<comment><USER5> I think claiming that the "disaster" has been "realized" is premature. They're repairing the tunnel boring machine now. If they are able to restart the machine and complete the tunnel, then is it a disaster? Heck, even if they end up completing the tunnel several years late and a billion dollars over-budget, it still wouldn't be a disaster.

<comment><USER4> I hope you're right, but they've experienced all these problems and setbacks and got only 10% of the tunnel dug. The remaining 90% of the dig had better be nearly problem free or maybe even hollow...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting article. I was surprised by how mature and automated the technology was, given how relatively few tunnelling operations of this scale have been attempted.

Also, the concrete slabs, and presumably therefore the tunnel, have a projected lifespan of 120 years [1]. I wonder what use the tunnels will be put to in 2120?

[1] [http://www.railtechnologymagazine.com/Rail-News/Concrete- seg...](http://www.railtechnologymagazine.com/Rail-News/Concrete-segments- produced-for-Crossrail)

<comment><USER7> _relatively few tunnelling operations of this scale have been attempted_

More than you think, I suspect; TBMs are a fairly mature technology. Crossrail is not as impressive as the Channel Tunnel, which is a major feat of alignment as it was tunneled from both directions to meet in the middle.

<comment><USER6> _" More than you think, I suspect"_

That is very likely.

Wikipedia has a list of long tunnels [1]. And "Tunnel Talk" lists what the world's "mega TBMs" are up to [2] (frustratingly they quote tunnel diameters but not lengths). Seems like these machines are kept very busy, which makes sense given their cost.

Edit: Even more tunnel-related stuff at [http://tunnelbuilder.com/](http://tunnelbuilder.com/)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_tunnels_in_the_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_tunnels_in_the_world)

[2] [http://www.tunneltalk.com/Discussion-Forum-Mega- TBMs.php](http://www.tunneltalk.com/Discussion-Forum-Mega-TBMs.php)

<comment><USER8> _Seems like these machines are kept very busy_

I believe that many of them are actually single-use. Some (or perhaps all?) of the Crossrail TBMs are being buried at the end of their tunnel. Apparently the effort of removing them isn't worth their resale value?

That tunnel talk page does mention that several TBMs are being reused though so perhaps this is changing with newer/larger machines.

<comment><USER9> At least one of the Chunnel TBMs was also driven in to its own grave.

<comment><USER10> If you do not take them out (which would have meant dismantling them and dragging the parts through kilometers of tunnel), they have to be, or they would block the tunnel they dug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While it is pretty cool, Crossrail and HS2 piss me off to no end as despite being an project that only affects england, the entire UK foots the bill. Wales, Northern Ireland and Scottish taxpayers foot the bill, under the pretense that this affects the entire UK, that it is a project that benefits the whole country.

And that's half right, most cities untouched by these projects have been predicted to lose out economically, as the south east beast grows ever more engrossing.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24589652](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24589652)

<comment><USER12> So you're saying infrastructure projects which definitively cannot benefit everywhere equally should never be funded by central taxation?

<comment><USER13> They are probably referring more to infrastructure projects being disproportionately focused on the south east, rather than only executing infrastructure project with macro economic effects.

<comment><USER12> Crossrail, I can understand - it overtly benefits London alone.

However, given that one of HS2's main objectives is to free up freight capacity on the WCML which benefits most places from London up through to the North West and beyond, I'm struggling to see parent post's perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm fascinated by the idea of exploring the underground layout of cities interactively in 3D. Is there anything that offers that experience? I expect geographic data might be available for tube lines, for example.

<comment><USER15> There are 3D tube maps:

[http://brunoimbrizi.com/experiments/#/07](http://brunoimbrizi.com/experiments/#/07)

[https://vimeo.com/67869313](https://vimeo.com/67869313) (last one seems to be only available as a video)

Also, just as a tangential point, you may be interested in the BBC documentary from last week about underground spaces in Rome, which was excellent. It's called "Rome's Invisible City", and there are a couple of copies on youtube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QAaYi0Zt4I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QAaYi0Zt4I)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting I was walking near mansion house (in the City) yesterday and could feel something rumbling underneath my feet through the pavement which I assume was Crossrail.

<comment><USER17> More likely the underground I would think.

<comment><USER18> Most likely that was the circle/district line. It's only one flight of stairs down from Cannon Street and Mansion House. Not sure how many metres, but it isn't far down at all.

<comment><USER19> Someone managed to run between them actually, leaving the train at Mansion House and catching up to it again at Cannon Street! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH_Z8Ghuq6E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH_Z8Ghuq6E)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> you wait to crossrail 2 if that ever happens, the same sort of thing, but from the SW to the NE.</comment>


Humble Weekly Bundle: Telltale Games - <AUTHOR> https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly#

<comment><AUTHOR> This is one of the few Weekly Bundles with as much value as a typical Bundle. $4 for the _entire_ Walking Dead game series is insane. (heck, it sells quickly at a $12.50 sale price!)

No separate Steam keys: just one for the normal Telltale Games, and one for Walking Dead when you beat the average.</comment>


Faster R-CNN: explanation of the state-of-the-art model for object detection - <AUTHOR> https://tryolabs.com/blog/2018/01/18/faster-r-cnn-down-the-rabbit-hole-of-modern-object-detection/?HN <comment><USER2> Great post. Thanks for sharing!

Quick question. Which are the main reasons behind using Faster R-CNN instead of other models such as SSD for instance?</comment>


It Sure Feels Like the Headphone Jack Is Dead - <AUTHOR> https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/samsung-puts-the-final-nail-in-the-headphone-jacks-coffin.html <comment><USER2> With the state of bluetooth I still love my headphone jack. It works with my Truck, my Car, my phone, my laptop, my computer, my tablet, my bicycle speakers, everything!

Bluetooth is great, but dang if it isn't a hassle. The bluetooth dongle in my car is always having issues, my bluetooth headset randomly sounds like garbage when it changes over to another codec for "Phone". Re-pairing to change between devices is a PITA too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Meanwhile, outside the world of overpriced fashion-statement status symbol flagship smartphones, on the long tail of cheap devices that normal people actually buy, the headphone jack is alive and well, and will continue to be as long as people want 50 dollar Android phones that play music. You can't kill something so cheap and ubiquitous and functional by pretending it doesn't exist.

\---

>There are still approximately 600 bazillion devices that still feature the headphone jack. A total and complete phase-out, if it ever truly happens, will take years if not decades to truly take effect

Yes! Precisely. But then:

>The fight to save the headphone jack is over. It sure seems like we lost.

How does that remotely follow?

<comment><USER4> > How does that remotely follow?

Because the author lives in a bubble, as everybody does. If all your friends have devices without head phone jack's, you probably don't realize that all of them are rich and have brand new upper class devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, right.

People seem to have forgotten that not long ago, cell phones _did not had headphone jacks_. Chargers were proprietary, and so were headset interfaces.

Then a new, revolutionary feature came: the headphone jack - and for a brief moment of sanity, we could use our favorite headphones with cell phones.

That moment has passed.

We are still better off than before: at least the USB-C is more or less the same across devices, as are the dongles.

But I'd still bet on a _brave_ company introducing the headphone jack alongside USB-C in five years.

Meanwhile, in the world of pro audio, nothing will change. The 3.5mm / 1/4" is here to stay.

</comment><comment><USER6> But where are the cheap USB-C headphones?</comment>


Show HN: Unlimited Web-App Testing Service starts $99/month. First test is free - <AUTHOR> https://www.testrise.com/ <comment><USER3> Looks like an interesting service, but...

1\. Testing isn't always as easy as following a list of steps, and when it _is_ those get to be technical. Explaining those as text instructions could get harder than what most expect if they are to be useful.

2\. This is a lesson learned from experience - unlimited plans rarely scale. Instead, they make those who would fit into an entry level (aka just a few tests) feel like they're paying a premium and those who will fit a large plan not pay nearly as much as what they consume.

Not only that, but when the founders realize this they'll have to change it and users will be upset, so they'll grandfather them and we're back to the beginning.

Side note: I love "breaking" new features personally and know it's not a straight forward process. If all this aims to do is replace selenium I don't see the need for it — selenium tests are very predictable where text-to-human isn't. If it aims to go beyond, that can't happen without real knowledge of the application.

<comment><AUTHOR> Arielm those are all good points.

1\. I completely understand, being a software tester for over 10 years. We are going to build in functions in the software that will make it easier for users.

2\. The unlimited plan is limited in the launch phase to certain number of companies already. We are going to shutting down sign ups after hitting that level to avoid disappointment as you have mentioned.

3\. TestRise isn't a replacement for Selenium. While automated tests have their place, using real users with real devices brings up a lot more edge cases.

Would be great to hear your thoughts in detail and swap notes about your experience with prior similar services. I can be reached at analyn (at) testrise (dot) com

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was just thinking about this the other day. I think you are on to something here. We do have test suites but at the end of the day having real people test things out is the only way to catch certain bugs and UX stuff. I mean a robot will understand everything you tell it. You don't know how a human is going to think in which combination they are going to click.

A friend of mine hacked together something like this with mechanical turk. This seems like a much more polished version.

I hope you succeed! When I launch our product will definitely try your service out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks artellectual. Looking forward to working with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Tests run on Launch plan take 2-12 hours to execute." \- i normally run my test suite several times when developing and i'm sure i'm not the only developer that does this. having to wait 2-12 hours per run is completely incomprehensible and unacceptable. with that in mind, how and where do you see a service like this fitting into the development life-cycle?

my thinking is that this a late stage April Fools day prank.

<comment><AUTHOR> TestRise is a fit for applications that have launched and say do weekly deployments to production which need to be periodically tested. The client can use our service to test their staging environment first and after all their tests have passed, they can get us to test production afterwards as well.

Companies who require faster turnaround times will be able to do so in the future as well. The Unlimited plan with a single parallel test works very well for early stage startups that can execute the tests at the end of their workday knowing that when they come back the next morning they will have their results.

The unlimited plan is not a good fit for people who are deploying multiple times a day and need much faster turnaround times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do you differ from [1] Rainforest QA?

[1] [https://www.rainforestqa.com/](https://www.rainforestqa.com/)

<comment><USER7> At a glance, it appears there's a limitation where the service runs only one test at a time. As your product and thus your testing requirements grow, this becomes infeasible. Additionally, the FAQ states that you may not get results back for 2 hours to as long as 12 hours. Both of those limitations can apparently be overcome by giving them more money for parallel tests and/or faster results.

The reason you're running tests is to view the results and then quickly fix any bugs, re-running any failed tests to verify. Given the serial nature of testing and the turnaround time, you're losing far more in productivity than $99/month. And if they get a sufficient number of signups at that price point, their ability to service tests is going to be severely impacted to the point where it becomes unusable.

They should really change this model and offer a limited offering for the $99/month. Keep the one-at-a-time model, but also limit the number of tests per day to something reasonable. Then introduce a $999/month plan which is unlimited. This is still way cheaper than even a part time QA tester, but as soon as you start firing sufficient load at the service you run into capacity limitations. Of course, at that point it makes sense to start offering dedicated resources for those who hit those capacity limitations, which results in a few additional offerings of $X,999 per month for various values of X. Assuming they can offer 24/7 coverage, screenshots, recordings, variables, API, etc. they'll perhaps become a viable competitor for Rainforest QA [which I used at a previous job].

<comment><AUTHOR> Biot you made some excellent points. The pricing at the moment is definitely exploratory. Our goal is to limit the number of people we sign up at this level and learn from the process.

I think your idea of limiting the amount of tests is great and something we will definitely explore. When we were running the service for clients manually we did something similar. As for services such as 24/7 support along with neat features like variables and interacting with API's they are on the roadmap. We are bootstrapping this at the moment and looking for our first 10 - <USER2> customers to work with us as we refine the service. They get a very affordable QA service and we refine our process.

Biot if you have used rainforestqa before would be great if I could ask you a couple of questions over email if possible. I can be reached at analyn (at) testrise (dot) com. Your help would be greatly appreciated

<comment><USER8> Recommend reading this re pricing: [https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/saas](https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/saas) pricing, I know you are experimenting but a single, unlimited plan is rarely a good idea.

<comment><USER8> [https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/saas- pricing](https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/saas-pricing)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this Jefro118. This would greatly help us as we are learning from the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why would someone choose your service over a service such as Applause? [https://www.applause.com](https://www.applause.com)

</comment><comment><USER10> Look nice. Do you support recurring tests? Say if we release code every Friday and would like it tested after? If not might be something to think about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we do. You can just run the test that you define every Friday and when you get back to work on Monday you will have everything tested and ready to go for your next cycle. If you have any questions you can email me at analyn (at) testrise (dot) com

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Do you integrate with tools like Jira? That is what we use for our development at the moment.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do not support Jira integration at the moment sorry. It is something we will put on the roadmap if enough users request it. I am building the notifications to be pushed to Hipchat & Slack though. Hope that will be good enough to get you started!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks good- hoping for more details. Just signed up #41!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Lyon, will be in touch with you over email to learn more about your product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Neat! Any plans for mobile apps?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes @spking. In our initial launch, we will be supporting all major web browsers. Mobile apps is going to be released shortly.</comment></comment>


This startup wants to pay you to fly with strangers' stuff in your luggage - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/309185/this-startup-wants-to-pay-you-to-fly-with-strangers-stuff-in-your-luggage/ <comment><USER2> _to avoid unintentionally being a drug mule, for starters_

...and it gets worse from there! Carrying unknown packages from strangers is an unspeakably bad idea. That was the cause of the Lockerbie disaster. That is what is warned against incessantly in airports. _Professionals_ did not spot the Lockerbie bomb, but "Carry" thinks amateurs are going to be able to identify illegal and dangerous packages???

As someone who flies, I hope this fails fast and fails hard. I do _NOT_ want to fly with anybody that is carrying some stranger's packages.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103#Investigation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103#Investigation)

<comment><USER3> I'm going to have to agree - and this is coming from someone who is in favor of Airbnb and Uber. There is a line beyond which a bold idea becomes a bad idea, and I think this one steps over that line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is going to make flying more expensive. If this takes off (pardon the pun) and we have more people putting more things in their suitcase for money, then we can see a future where everyone will pack their suitcase to max allowable weight and size for free. This will add weight to the plane which will cost fuel and thus drive up the price of a flight or cause restrictions on carry-ons.

Additionally, I agree with gvb. I do not want someone carrying something they are taking for a stranger on a plane with me. It goes sharply against my interest.

Lastly, seeing how much people are willing to pay for stuff like this, (the article quotes a $350 transport fee for a cellphone) budget travelers would be doing this constantly to lower the price of travel. I could see a college student carrying packages to bring down the cost of seeing the world to a fraction of what they would normally pay. I'm sure there's an informal amount of this already but, someone formalizing it into a business is scary.

tl;dr - I don't want to fly with anyone "GoCarry"ing.

</comment><comment><USER5> As a frequent flyer, this startup idea interests me. But then seeing gvb's comment .... yeah, this might not be such a good idea after all?

Additionally, in many countries in East (and maybe southeast?) Asia, being caught with drugs is punishable by the death penalty...

</comment><comment><USER6> Link to "startup": [http://www.gocarry.it/](http://www.gocarry.it/)

No personal information of founders on website is definitely a negative signal...</comment>


Daily consumption of tea protects the elderly from cognitive decline - <AUTHOR> http://exactlyscience.com/archives/11342.html <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[http://news.nus.edu.sg/press-releases/tea-protects- elderly-c...](http://news.nus.edu.sg/press-releases/tea-protects-elderly- cognitive-decline)</comment>


Lars Rasmussen: Why I quit Google to join Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/technology/biz-tech/why-i-quit-google-to-join-facebook-lars-rasmussen-20101101-1799q.html <comment><USER2> From the article Lars says that facebook has changed the world. I don't see this being the case. So a lot of people like to see what their friends are doing and play games that challenge the average sheep's IQ, but what does facebook do that is world changing? Aside from keeping an enormous number people 'busy' for hours a day that might otherwise have been spent studying, working or actually doing things? I am skeptical about facebook's benefit to the world as anything more that entertainment du jour. Maybe Lars was just interested in giving wave another try under the facebook brand instead. It certainly might make more sense in a social connectivity company. I'm not arguing that facebook isn't very popular, just with point that it's world changing. Regardless, I wish him all the best in his new job.

<comment><USER3> Setting aside your personal judgments on how other people spend their time, do you actually not think that facebook has had a large impact on how (primarily younger) people socialize, understand each other, and think about their relationships?

<comment><USER4> I don't think so, I'm 20, and I remember when I was 12 or so I had friends that spent hours talking with each other on the phone at night, now I'm pretty sure they spend it on Facebook chatting. I'm not convinced there's been any fundamental change, just shifting some deck chairs.

<comment><USER5> When I was 20 (in 1995), social networking was done through telnet...sitting in the computer lab until the sun come up chatting away with strangers at other universities. I still keep in contact with a few of the people I met that way, but not through Facebook. I still don't even have an account!

<comment><USER6> I was just gonna say... back in _myyy_ day, when I was 12, in 1990, we socialized by dialing into BBSes and spamming Usenet via asynchronous relay. Clearly the GP runs in social circles heavily involved in some sort of ancient technology cult; "tele-phone"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Something I notice in common about many of these stories is how much people cite Zuckerberg in particular as a reason for joining/liking Facebook. I don't see anything like it for Larry or Sergey at Google.

My guess is that Zuckerberg has his own "Reality Distortion Field", albeit of a very different style than the original (Steven Jobs'), and this is a major factor in the recent migratory wave.

<comment><USER8> The incredible potential for growth in stock value can't hurt either . . .

Many folks inside and out think that FB still hasn't found its "adsense" - when and if they do even late comers to the party will live out their days like sultans.

<comment><USER9> Call me a cynic, but I think that Zynga has found Facebook's AdSense.

<comment><USER10> I think you're absolutely right, and given the amounts they invest in customer acquisition for every new title plus the 30% Facebook Credits rake, that's all Facebook really needs.

<comment><USER9> If Facebook is going to become the next Google off of Zynga's crumbs, then screw Facebook: I want to be invested in Zynga.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> After 6 years and after the stressful situation he describes with Google Wave, it is reasonable for anyone to make a clean break and try out something new

Among the things I find interesting - the guy was the co-founder of what is now Google Maps (after Google's acquisition). However, now, he has chosen to join Facebook instead of setting out on his own new venture.

Perhaps he could have a bigger impact if he founded a new company.

<comment><USER12> You mean bigger impact than working together with the #1 website in the past and the #2 of the moment ?

I fail to see how he could possibly hope to achieve that.

<comment><USER13> Isn't that line of thinking antithetical to the startup business as a whole?

<comment><USER12> Not at his level. He'll have all the tools and the manpower at his disposal to realize his dreams. It's not as though having worked at google or sold 'maps' is any guarantee for future projects to be either successful or funded. See 'Cuil'.

<comment><USER14> Well, Cuil is actually a counterexample to the "funded" part of your statement. They raised a crazy amount of money considering their lack of accomplishment.

I think Lars could get funding from just about any investor in the valley, if he wanted to start a new venture. But Norvig said it best (paraphrasing): "If you want to accomplish interesting things, go where the _data_ is." Right now, FaceBook has one of the most interesting data sets on the planet, possibly rivaling Google's. If Lars wanted to replicate that, he needs to build a product that's useful enough to convince everybody to give him their data. That's non-trivial. It's easier just to join a company that already owns the data and then figure out interesting things to do with it.

<comment><USER15> Wouldn't it be possible to make a startup that wasn't based on covertly collecting little worker ants' personal information? I'd like to see something else for a change.

<comment><USER14> In software? What data would it run on? Software doesn't _do_ anything without data.

I suppose you could have something like the PC revolution, where the industry was still based around manipulating data, but the data lives on your personal property. But that ship has sailed: personal computers have been available for 35 years, so pretty much all applications that rely on one person's data being manipulated in isolation by themselves have already been discovered. The interesting work now is when you collect patterns of data among many users, and that requires that many users be willing to give you their data.

<comment><USER15> _In software? What data would it run on? Software doesn't do anything without data._

You say it like our personal information is the only data in town.

Of course, _any app_ needs data, but it can be _anything_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm always a little sad to see good talent go to Facebook, because I have no intention of using their products. I would rather see that talent working somewhere else.

<comment><USER17> Right, like Diaspora, or any of the many Facebook alternatives, for a start.

<comment><USER18> I am guessing he means social networking sites in general. (if not then its only my opinion :) ). IMO facebook et al are not that "productive" as compared to google. Sure it does add value to your social life but compare it to the technologies created by google . which really have changed our lives .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The cynical side of me imagines all these people are joining FB for its inevitable blockbuster IPO. But then another part of me wonders if FB is coming out with something completely revolutionary. Something so amazing that all these smart folks cant wait to work on it.

<comment><USER20> I think FB _is_ coming out with something revolutionary. However, neither they nor anybody else know what it is yet. It will only be apparent after it has been released. That's why people are joining FB; they all want to help _discover_ the new revolutionary idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've done this myself: "I've got a job description of 'come hang out with us for a while and we'll see what happens'"

It didn't really out. Best of luck to him.

<comment><USER21> I meant "work out"

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Surprised to hear him say he thought Wave just needed more time and Google wasn't patient enough.

Wave was brilliant, but Google definitely made the right decision there.

<comment><USER23> I think Wave needed more time _in stealth_ , before the big announcement, beta client, invite-only service, etc. Wave _should_ have gone to different companies (like Facebook) and made itself their new platform, such that, all at once, Google could flip a switch one day and you'd realize that all your activity on Facebook, MSN, Exchange, YouTube, etc, was all really going on in Wavelets all along.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Email had a metaphor, your mailbox.

Wave has no metaphor, it is complete non-sense to my mother. Neat idea, totally useless in reality. What worked (real-time collaboration) should be (has been?) ported to gmail and google docs, period.

I love Google products and I didn't shed any tears when they shut down wave...

<comment><USER20> Every new idea has to start somewhere. What is complete nonsense to your mother makes perfect sense to the next generation. Eventually somebody will re-invent Wave when the time is right, and then it will _be_ the metaphor for future products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I found it interesting to hear that the size of the company (2.5K employees) would feel very different to that of google (25K employees). Does this size difference simply mean that google has one extra layer of management (many centers) compared to facebook, or is there some other difference? The author speculates about the compensation, including stock options, but is there anything else?

<comment><USER20> I don't think there is much intrisincally different between Facebook and Google. That is, when Google had only 2.5K employees it was attracting people like Lars from other companies like MS and Yahoo, and for the same reasons. The problem is scale. It's much easier to find 2.5K smart people than it is to find 25K smart people, and so when you're at 25K the average intelligence of your population is much lower. I don't think it's so much the extra management than the reduced signal-to-noise ratio that Lars is referring to. If you've worked at companies of different sizes (I have) the difference is tangible.

<comment><USER26> In your opinion, is there anything a company can do to keep or improve the average level of employees as the company grows, or is it just inevitable?

<comment><USER20> Interesting question. I think it's possible to maintain and even improve the average level of intelligence of employees, but past a certain size it's so ridiculously difficult as to be infeasible, practically speaking. Also, I'm not convinced that it's in the company's best interests, but I guess that depends on what the goal of the company is. If, like most companies, it is to make money, then having too many smart people could be a liability; after a certain point you want to hire people for reliability and teamwork rather than individual intelligence. Even if the company has some other goal, I would say it's probably easier to try to keep the company small and automate as much work as possible than it is to keep hiring really smart people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> My take on it is this:

As someone else noted thoughtfully in this thread, Norvig once said "Go where the data is." [extreme paraphrase]

Google's data isn't largely proprietary. The web is accessible for any to crawl. Google Maps is based on essentially public data, or easily obtained data. A savvy and well funded enough competitor could enter these markets.

Facebook's data is proprietary and user-created. The users have built-in inertia for Facebook 'cause they sure as hell don't want to abandon the three years of content they've built on a whim.

Add to that Google's recent missteps like net neutrality, and their insane and technocratic hiring policies, and I don't think I know a single truly bright person who would want to go to Google right now.

Facebook, however, is looking pretty damn sexy... all that data that the users forked over... hmmm... Not to mention the fact that if you're a social person, Facebook is FUN.

<comment><USER28> Interesting point, but Google has much, much more of _my_ data than Facebook has. FB has a few likes of mine and around 200 friends, with a relatively small number of messages. Google has my multi-year mail history (content plus a pretty big social graph that means far more than a few old school friends), my searches (and therefore interests), what adverts I've clicked on, which pages get the most traffic on my websites. It has documents I've worked on with friends and associates. It has my calendar. I've got a bunch of sites sitting on Google servers. When I use my iPhone, Google provides the maps and knows where I'm going.

<comment><USER27> This is a really good point, and highlights a major difference between information derived from users based on them asking for services and explicit data users have "declared". The derived information may actually be more valuable, as you say, but because the declared data is more direct and voluntary, it has higher PERCEIVED value (at least it did to me). This may be one of the reasons FB is more attractive then Google right now- and perception is everything when it comes to valuation. Great post, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Facebook really changed the world, as far as new advertising platforms go.. as for communication, it is funny how many of us continue to use IRC just as effectively as 15 or so years ago.

</comment><comment><USER30> "I've got a job description of 'come hang out with us for a while and we'll see what happens', which is a pretty exciting thing."

He took a job without having any idea what he will be doing? And why would that be an exciting thing?

<comment><USER31> It's also well known that many Googlers love their 20% personal (pet) project time and this job description sounds like it took that 20% and juiced it to 100%.

<comment><USER31> True. However, you did ask specifically why this would be an exciting job title. This is my interpretation on why this job title is actually "kick ass."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is a great move for Lars. Look for him to integrate his Wave vision with FB chat. Wave wasn't bad it just never came close to critical mass and with Facebook he gets that instantly.

</comment><comment><USER33> One could say Wave failed because of a lack of users. Especially users meaningfully connected to each other. Really it doesn't matter if the software is shit. Millions of people flock to crappy PHP forums all over the world. Facebook has those users with reasons to talk to each other.

Whether that makes Facebook more important than Google I don't think is what's really going on here.

</comment><comment><USER34> r.e. Wave, visionary != incomprehensible.

</comment><comment><USER35> Apparently, Lars Rasmussen is NOT a pirate. he isn't even in the club. <http://tcrn.ch/acPtMa></comment>


Huawei Banned, So Let's Invade Taiwan to Take TSMC? - <AUTHOR> https://chinatalk.substack.com/p/huawei-banned-so-lets-invade-taiwan <comment><USER2> thanks for linking my stuff!</comment>


What Makes Machine Learning in Healthcare So Powerful? - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-makes-machine-learning-healthcare-so-powerful-adrian-raudaschl <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all,

My name is Adrian. I'm a medical doctor turned software developer/product manager, but am constantly getting involved up in the healthcare world in the UK (NHS). I wrote this piece as an introduction for people wanting to learn the exciting potential of machine learning in healthcare. Hope you enjoy it.

-Adrian</comment>


Avenger Controller guy tries to apologize. - <AUTHOR> http://penny-arcade.com/2011/12/26/an-update1

<comment><USER2> I hope he's getting paid well for this. It's a masterful way of keeping attention, if indeed he's doing all this intentionally.</comment>


Partnered with ABC15 – Belongery - <AUTHOR> http://Belongery.com <comment><AUTHOR> Ran an Ad with ABC15 in Arizona after the believed the mission to foster a community where members belong was awesome. Sign up and share a time when you felt like you belonged! Cheers!</comment>


Ask HN: How does my startup get access to the Interbank foreign exchange market? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I was wondering what the simplest way was to get access to the IFEM so I can swap USD with Tanzanian Shillings. It doesn't seem like any of the popular forex sites list this pair (and they all seem sketchy anyways).
What is the best way for me to access to this currency pair? Should I just talk to a bank? Do most of them offer this service? <comment><USER2> I would suggest asking a bank that has a branch in both your country and Tanzania, or even try the national bank.

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

[https://www.bot.go.tz](https://www.bot.go.tz)

However if you just want to buy and sell the currency pair rather than making transfers to and from Tanzania I think you may have to use a forex broker as I don't believe most banks offer such a service. I could be wrong though obviously.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Should I just talk to a bank? Do most of them offer this service?"

If you haven't asked your own bank, i.e. the one your startup uses for day to day transactions, then it's worth asking them first. Unless your country has sanctions against the destination country, they should be able to send money to a bank account in any country.

(I'm assuming that's what you mean by 'swap USD with TZS', but perhaps you want to just swap them and hold them in a local TZS account, for hedging or speculation purposes?)</comment>


Significant scientific achievements or breakthroughs in 2014 - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-significant-scientific-achievements-or-breakthroughs-that-have-taken-place-this-year-2014?share=1 <comment><USER2> "Science journalists" continued to misrepresent science on a regular basis.

The list is pretty good, but mesons are an entire class of particle, not a particle, so although the new particle discovered is _a_ meson it is not _the_ meson.

And Lockheed-Martin did not claim to have invented a working fusion reactor. They claimed to have an approach that they believe will lead to a working fusion reactor in five years or so.

Those are just two that caught my eye. It's been a good year for science, and for technology, and for humanity (mod some nitwits who think that violence and faith are good ways to improve the human condition) but science journalism is still a terrible mess.

<comment><USER3> To add to this list, the gravitational waves interpretation of BICEP2's B-mode polarization signal is incorrect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The story about the three girls producing a breakthrough crop yield is complete nonsense, they didn't invent anything new.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2heown/16yearold_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2heown/16yearold_irish_girls_win_google_science_fair/cks43u1)

<comment><USER5> A lot of the headline-making science fair projects are complete BS. It's a shame, too, because there are actually a lot of novel and interesting research projects at high-school level science fairs. The good ones win reasonably frequently, but they're realistic enough not to make click-winning headlines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This list is also good and cataloged for other years :

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_in_science](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_in_science)

<comment><USER7> Thanks. I got quite excited for a moment, but the list is actually full of things thats don't qualify as 'science breakthroughs'. Example:

"16 February – American science educator and engineer Bill Nye (presenter of Bill Nye the Science Guy) debates global warming with congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN).[74][75][76]"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Many of the mentioned "breakthroughs" are not even science but engineering.

</comment><comment><USER9> The biggest CRISPR breakthroughs were all in 2012 and 2013- while it's an exciting up and coming biotech application, it wasn't a breakthrough of 2014.

</comment><comment><USER10> Tokyo is saying they will have robotic Olympics in 2020 and it doesn't seem that far off.</comment>


Nameko for Microservices - <AUTHOR> http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2015/4/8/microservices-with-nameko/ <comment><USER2> _It 's a bit disappointing that Python's async story is so diverging between different Python versions and frameworks, but eventlet and gevent are by far the cleanest and most practical implementations, so for most intents and purposes the eventlet base in nameko is probably the best you can currently get for async IO._

If I'm not mistaken, eventlet/gevent aren't really the direction that Python is heading. The recent stuff seems to emphasize "explicit" concurrency much more.</comment>


Seven tough lessons from ten years in bootstrapped business - <AUTHOR> https://likewise.am/2018/12/01/seven-tough-lessons-from-ten-years-in-bootstrapped-business/ <comment><USER2> I've been running my own consultancy for around 10 years as well. All of this rings true.

The work I do is incredibly profitable in small bursts. This is because I've spent years developing software which mostly automates the task.

My problem in developing a product on the side is that I cease hunting for acquisition - savings dry up - and then I drop the product as I scramble to find more work. I've been close to failing before, but luck has always intervened.

I'll spend a year building up 6 months runway, build something 70% and run low on cash - go back to consulting for a few months - and then completely forget what I was doing on the product side. By the time I get back to the product the momentum as been lost.

Rinse, repeat.

<comment><USER3> Oh, yes, the schizophrenic whiplash between consulting and product work based on cash levels is painfully familiar as well, and has certainly characterised much of my product development. I should have talked about it more explicitly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Point number is painfully true from my experience. I say that as someone who has been a consultant for more than a decade, and worked on tons of side hustles. From "never got off the ground" (most) to "making six figures in revenue" (current one).

Juggling client work and my own profitable and slowly growing projects for the last few years has been one of the most difficult things I've ever done. Really hoping to hit escape velocity in 2019. But I said that about 2018, and 2017 too.

Sigh...back to work.

<comment><USER5> One of your side hustles is currently making 6 figures in revenue, but you're saying you haven't hit "escape velocity yet?" I'm curious if your goals are more ambitious, or perhaps 6 figures of _revenue_ isn't necessarily profitable enough to sustain you?

>But I said that about 2018, and 2017 too. Rings so true for me as well, unfortunately! This tweet from Justin Jackson has been making it's rounds the last couple of days, maybe it will be encouraging to you: [https://twitter.com/mijustin/status/1068773791952584704](https://twitter.com/mijustin/status/1068773791952584704)

<comment><USER4> Combination of a few things :)

1\. I have good margin and am profitable, but not enough to cover lifestyle. See below:

2\. I have a high cost-of-living, deliberately. I live in NYC, have a kid in private school, and travel a lot.

Now, I fully recognize that I could lower my project risk by living a more austere lifestyle, but I'm comfortable with the tradeoff that I'm currently making.

Of course, I'm still stressed and impatient, but that's more of an internal problem :)

<comment><USER3> Yep, that's basically been my boat. I've not lived in a high-cost city per se, but I've always had big sources of personal drag, partly by choice, partly not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another self-funded business founder here. One thing which rarely gets mentioned is the incredible feeling of loneliness which you have to be able to cope with. It's not just that solo entrepreneurs usually work from home. On top of that they have problems that none of their peers have, and often also use technologies that are not common at larger companies (you have to use newer/better tech to gain an edge).

As a result, there is no one to talk to. No watercooler, no peers that understand you.

There is a certain subgroup of self-funded businesses that are strongly marketing-oriented that has organized itself around Microconf. There might even be a community of sorts. But not everyone is that strongly marketing- focused and not everyone is even at a stage when they have the means to attend a conference like that.

The article resonated deeply with me: I went through many similar issues as the author did. Perhaps it is time to form a community of sorts?

<comment><USER7> Curious if coworking centers/hacker spaces can be solution for this..

<comment><USER8> I and many self funded entrepreneurs are too cheap for this.

The best thing I've done to meet people is hosting in-person Indie Hackers meetups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm in a pretty similar situation, but it's actually working really well for me because of some important things.

1\. Having a healthy amount of savings before embarking on a bootstrapping business. There has been never a point where I have had trouble paying bills. I have 5-6 years of expenses saved up.

2\. Doing the research in terms of how to run a business. I have an accountant, I did tax planning from the beginning and I make sure to evolve on the business operating side constantly. (use software that makes the process easier, such as automatic invoicing, working with an accountant, working with a lawyer.)

3\. Working in a start-up environment and learning how to prioritize work.

4\. Reading The Great CEO Within from Matt Mochary, there's so many tips in there that have been amazing and helpful

I'm definitely struggling with the scaling issue of consulting tho. It's great and all, but I find it a struggle to add people to the company because of how specialized and good I am at my work. I'm generally the selling point.

I am working on 2-3 products on the side of the consulting work with the hope that the products eventually become the focus. I do understand the downfall of the consulting taking a lot of my time and not spending enough on product work, but somehow I've been able to keep up.

The great part about doing this is that you work with a lot of different companies and you actually get to learn a bunch of of things that work and do not work. You get to see how different business models work and scale and it's very enlightening on your own company.

For example, I'm averse to starting any sort of agency in terms of web development, since I've seen multiple of my clients have issues with scaling the business model and retaining customers.

Overall, consulting has been a pretty positive experience. I've only been doing it for 2 years, so we'll see how it works in the long term. But my side product is generating $800 / mo in income and I hope to scale it to cover all my expenses and then I'm more able to work on products and do less consulting.

<comment><USER10> Thank you for sharing where you are at and your struggles. I am having a similar issue going from a one person shop to hiring people. Mainly because I too realize that people are buying me because of my skill set and communication. I don't want to be hands to the keyboard for the rest of my life though so I'm trying to figure out how to move forward from here. Do you think reading The Great CEO Within would help?

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure how much reading that book would help in terms of creating a sustainable business model that does not require significant daily work from the founder and also allows you to scale in a reasonably way.

It does help with the operations side of running a business and does give you insight on how some other CEOs might run certain parts of the company (such as marketing, hiring and finding product market fit.)

I've been looking at similar business models outside of software development (such as law firms.) to get a better idea on how this business model could scale.

Long term tho, I do not plan to scale the consulting side of the business, but hope to phase it out since I believe products are probably a better way to scale a business.

I don't think consulting is entirely a bad thing for us tho, I still strongly believe it gives you insights into other companies and allows you to see other companies mistakes every day and that's super useful.

Good luck to you.

<comment><USER3> You raise an interesting point with your mention of law firms.

As I implied in the article, I've not wanted to scale out consulting far beyond myself; it's a means to an end. But if I did, I think the way I would do it is to try to build a partnership with other consultants like myself in my specific area.

Professional associations such as law firms have all kinds of partnership mechanisms, but a common one is something like: there are four partners, every one of them has a monthly quota of hours to deliver to the firm. For every one of those hours, (let's say) 50% goes to the company and 50% goes to the partner. For every hour beyond the quota, the partner gets to keep, say, 80% and the firm gets 20%. Then the firm's annual profit is distributed among the partners at the end of the year, month, whatever. And although partners are presumed to be able to generate their own business, common resources such as marketing, administration, etc. are pooled and paid from the firm's common funds.

The key issue with a partnership is that it really has to create (ugh, I cringe at a non-ironic use of the term) synergies. Every partner's earnings have to be greater enough in the partnership than they would be on their own to warrant the bother. Otherwise, you end up with the all-too-common best-case scenario of two partners who together double the revenue, but each take half the profits, which makes it a bit of a wash, notwithstanding some small gains in economies of scale through expense sharing.

<comment><USER11> Great article, it resonated a lot with my experience.

This book is quite good on the standard parts of managing professional firms e.g. accounting and law: [https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Professional- Service-David-M...](https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Professional-Service- David-Maister-ebook/dp/B00120955I/)

Technical consulting has significant differences, however. There is a big separation between the sales and requirements side of the business and the solution/execution side.

One of the things that most resonated with me from the book is three kinds of consulting companies: expertise, experience and execution.

Expertise consultancies solve complex problems that require non-standard solutions, e.g. a big merger/acquisition or designing a complex software solution. The boss typically has decades of experience, and the "juniors" have a decade.

Experience consultancies solve semi-custom problems, things that are amenable to process and knowing the answer to common issues in a domain. An example might be setting up a new legal entity for a startup, or building a custom website to handle e-commerce.

Execution companies handle well understood problems at lower cost than it would take to do in house, e.g. monthly book keeping, building WordPress websites for small businesses.

In the book, he talks about a number of standard ways of splitting up profits in a partnership. A lot depends on the goals of the firm based on its stage. So the partners might value individual billable hours, managing staff that are billable, bringing in business, or being the "managing partner" who makes sure that the rent gets paid and the copy machine works.

It's possible that you have a mix of Expertise, Experience and Execution in one firm, but one basic rule is that in order to be a partner, you should not be relying on another partner to make your team work, e.g. bring in sales.

This is one reason that technical consulting firms are different, because being great at technical execution does not mean that you are good at sales and relationship management. In fact, it's negatively correlated, and essentially impossible to hire for. Anyone who can do the job well can run their own consulting company.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the book recommendation! It looks interesting.

That said, there seems to be a bottomless opportunity in business writing in offering taxonomies of things. I'm not saying the taxonomy is a bad one in this case, just that there are perils in boxing things into the mental categories someone else has set up for you to sell a book, as a very general principle.

That said, it seems like a reasonable way to break down consulting firms...

<comment><USER11> The useful part is that each of these has a certain business model, and depends on ability to hire and/or retain people to do it.

My own company is a combination of me doing expertise consulting and the rest being experience consulting, and we don't do execution, as it's a commodity.

Running a McDonalds is different from running a fine French restaurant. The McDonalds likely makes more money, but requires a lot more scale. It's not very satisfying if you are a chef.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm 29. I've been self-employed since I left high school. I've gone through virtually all the emotions and experiences described – the struggle between maintaining a consulting practice and building a product, the loneliness of self-employment, and the mishaps caused by poor tax planning.

I don't think I've quite figured out the solutions to these problems, but I can say that 10+ years of self-employment have instilled a hard sense of discipline. I've tried out more routines than you can imagine; the only one that seems to work is waking up very early (5-6AM) to get 2-4 hours of product work in before heading off to consulting responsibilities

Another key learning from these 10 years is the importance of organization. It's so easy to miss everything from project deliverables to tax dates when you're working on your own. I've taken to maintaining copious notes and spreadsheets that keep everything neatly organized. This didn't come easy to me; I'm not an organized person by nature.

If I had to do it all over again, I'm not sure if I'd recommend people to take the same path. You're likely better off in a good traditional job. There is the upside of making a lot of money IF the product hits big (or in my case, even bring in a substantial passive income), but that upside might not be worth the long hours, discipline, and loneliness of this line of work

</comment><comment><USER13> > I'm out to help promote a new, brutally honest way of writing about life in > the trenches.

Thank you. This is superbly well-written and incisive. Accurate too.

As someone with a decade plus of continuous self-employment, one other challenging (demoralizing? LOL) aspect is never being able to really, completely, and truly take time off.

When you get sick, your money comes to a grinding halt, but your bills and client support tickets keep piling up.

When you're on "vacation" you keep your laptop charged and ready to go in case your phone lights up with notifications that a server is down.

Your brain is constantly adding up the next invoice, making the next sale, coding the next method, etc, etc. It can be unrelenting.

You can make excellent money consulting, but to make a ton you either need to scale a team, be absolutely world-class at a specific technology, or go the cult of personality write-a-book/hit-the-speaking-circuit route. Otherwise you're going to max out in the same range you could fairly easily get working a 9-5, but with way more volatility, risk, and stress.

If anybody considering consulting happens to read this, specialize as soon as possible, charge way more than you're comfortable asking, live below your means, and build some sort of redundancy by way of an employee or 1099 partner.

<comment><USER3> Every one of your points made me go "yup". Lived the dream in every one of those ways. Still do.

Thank you for the kind feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Moreover, we're simply not robots; one does not simply do consulting from 9 > AM to 1 PM, then switch one's mind to product coding at 1:01 PM and carry on > until 5 PM. The mind needs time to unwind, recharge, adapt, and get in gear.

This hard lesson does seem to make bootstrapping a risky strategy.

<comment><USER15> It's more that being a solo operator carries overheads which you might not expect if you haven't run a business before.

I thought I'd spend more time coding / designing / researching and less time on unrelated paperwork. I was so very wrong. And the context switch time is real - after a month or two away from the code it takes me at least a couple of days to get my head back into it.

<comment><USER16> If you work with another person you are selling 50 percent of the time. If it's a venture with someone else 75 percent of the time is selling. you will definitely not be coding a lot

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So I've had basically the opposite experience this person has with consulting. The problem with all these retrospective analyses (positive and negative, I concede!) is that they're situational. Scaling up a consultancy is both its own skill and also idiosyncratic to the field you're trying to work in. Maybe IP telephony is especially hard to consult in! Maybe security is especially easy!

So, just some general shotgun-blast responses:

* Whether you're trying to scale out or just keep a steady income for yourself, if you're not specializing, you're going to have a bad time. If you're trying to sell basic IT services on a piecemeal basis, consulting is going to be a drag (but: if you can reliably deliver IT services for 20-60 person organizations, you're I think actually in a pretty good place right now, since a lot of our clients are auditioning firms for just that, and there aren't many good ones!).

* There's a whole spectrum of aptitude and experience to hire in between "entry level" and "fully billable" and part of the basic challenge of running a consultancy is figuring out how to ramp up talent and where on that spectrum to hire people. The basic job of a specialized consultancy is finding sharp people and rapidly conferring on them the tools to get billable work done, and then structuring projects so that everyone cal be billable. The analysis of "you can hire entry level people but then it takes months for them to be billable" is pretty superficial; every serious consultancy has strategies for dealing with that problem (some better than others, but all better than "hire and then wait a year and hope").

* The bit about how scaling consultancies is a matter of creating a big binder of methodology so that an English major can execute your projects is lifted straight from Joel Spolsky, and Spolsky is just as wrong as this person is, at least at the scale consultancies started by HN'ers (for all I know it's actually true at Accenture scale, but it's definitely not true at for-hire DBA or security or IT or distributed systems or iOS development scale).

* The idea that consulting work will sap your ability to build product is a bit of a head-scratcher, or, at least, the explanation this article gives is. The "reliable" way to do a product/consultancy is to use consulting headcount to fund development headcount. Developers aren't billable, full stop. When you've reached the point where you can fund 3-4 full time developers, you've run out of "consulting made this hard" excuses. The simpler reality is: building and launching products is hard, and, by a wide margin, most startups (consulting or otherwise) that attempt it fail.

<comment><USER3> 1) I strongly agree with the need for specialisation, and declared a presumption of specialisation early in the article. I also repeatedly refer to niches and other things which insinuate that the consulting subject matter is not entirely trivial or commoditised.

2) Admittedly, much depends on the talent market to which one has access, but sometimes all the tooling and infrastructure in the world can't make a dent in the fundamental requirement that the junior associates be extensively conversant with the subject matter as well as a variety of technical skills.

I wouldn't know; I have only been able to afford salaries entry-level folk would take. When I say entry level, I mean entry level. Like, "previously cleaned spyware at Geek Squad" entry level.

The upside of this bargain from the perspective of someone in IP telephony is that at least one doesn't have to pay for a raft of highly marketable IT skills (e.g. web development) that aren't needed. That's about the only upside, though.

3) I was referring specifically to the multibillion dollar PWC and Accenture scale, and made examples of them for that very reason.

Did Joel say something like that? It sounds like something he'd say, I guess. I actually know a few fellow humanities majors who went to work for Deloitte—-people as far from a background in financial auditing and compliance as Heaven is from Earth. Yet, clearly, that's what they do, because a group of very smart folks figured out how to dumb down, automate, package and bill that.

4) This article was intended for one-man bands more or less, not for people who have scaled up their consulting enough to fund one or more developers. Although still small and not without challenges by any means, that's a considerably more luxurious place to be.

<comment><USER17> Why is Accenture and PwC at all interesting to the audience you have? Just like the spectrum between "entry level" and "billable", there's a (vast) spectrum between "1 man band" and "Accenture". There are many 10-100 person consultancies, most of them lucrative, and none of them are run like Accenture is. I don't know many people who have attempted to start something on the scale of Accenture, but a whole bunch of people who have managed to get 10+-person practices off the ground.

Also: my whole point is that "previously cleaned spyware at Geek Squad" is kind of a silly hiring premise.

<comment><USER3> It was a rhetorical example about the extremes to which consulting can be processised, precisely to convey that there's a huge spectrum in between. One often delineates things in extremes to demonstrate that something is, in principle, quite possible—-and indeed, to a very lucrative scale. I guess it didn't read that way.

And yeah, hiring that way is stupid, don't do that. This article was largely a list of things not to do. :-) An omitted premise is that I don't (any longer) live in a market with a non-negligible concentration of IT talent. Not that it matters much; I spent the last decade in Atlanta and couldn't have conceivably paid anything remotely resembling a decent IT salary even by those standards.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Spinning a Yarn - <AUTHOR> https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/spinning-yarn/1583953 <comment><USER3> I feel vindicated. The article points out that the ancient tradition of Scottish tartans is actually a commercial invention about 250 years old, with a clear and unambiguous origin story. Hilarious example of capitalism at its, er, most... vigorous. Sir Walter Scott, not fooled for a minute, even plays a cameo role.

What a relief. As a US citizen with extensive Scottish ancestry this has puzzled me because I couldn't find much historical evidence of this practice. While I loved the idea of a family tartan and so did my kids. But I also didn't like the idea of being bamboozled, giving us Yanks an even worse reputation. So much falls into place...

<comment><USER4> The bogosity of clan tartans has been documented since at least 1940; see the footnotes in the chapter on Highland culture in Hobsbawm and Ranger's The Invention of Tradition (1983).

<comment><USER5> > since at least 1940

According to the article, since The Glasgow Herald article in 1895. It turns out that Father Christmas isn't real either, but some things people really don't want to interrogate.

<comment><USER4> The chapter in The Invention of Tradition (there are PDFs of the book online if you're interested in the topic) is about the efforts by Scottish nationalists over the century prior to the Allens to establish the idea of kilts and clan tartans (and efforts by historians against these ideas - <USER2> author of the chapter points to a 1940 book by McClintock as making the case "conclusively"). Clan tartans were not, as represented in the article, "all made up in 1829 by two brothers from Surrey" \- the Allens were popularizers, not the origin of the idea.

I mention this because I think that the whole idea of political "invention of tradition," while it has lost currency because it seems to reflect poorly on anti-colonial nationalist movements, is far more interesting than that of "random people making up stories for gain."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Crucially tartan was banned for about forty years: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dress_Act_1746](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dress_Act_1746)

Not quite a lifetime, but enough to totally disrupt any kind of continuity of history.</comment>


The Untold Story of Larry Page's Incredible Comeback - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2014/04/25/google_s_larry_page_the_co_founder_s_untold_story.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a very long writeup however, worthy to read and goosebumps along the way are guaranteed.</comment>