We did Not get 100,000 downloads for our Windows 8 app - <AUTHOR> http://www.emadibrahim.com/2012/11/11/we-did-not-get-100000-downloads-for-our-windows-8-app/

<comment> mkr-hn > _I am TIRED of Microsoft disappointing me over and over and over_

Were you expecting Microsoft to promote this for you?

My eBooks have less than 100 sales. Is that the fault of Amazon's KDP? The website doesn't say what your app is. You didn't say what "GTD" means.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not disappointed at Microsoft for my sales. I am disappointed that windows phone didn't succeed, that surface RT is slow and overpriced, that web development is always catching up to rails, php and python frameworks, that azure is several years late, that they still don't have a good respone to the ipad or the iphone, that bing doesn't match google, that web office sucks, that IE sucks, that there is no answer to apple tv, that i spent 45 minutes trying to play a video from my surface on my xbox then gave up, switched to apple tv clicked 2 or 3 times and 10 seconds and $4.99 later my movie was playng etc... etc...

This is coming from a .net developer, so I DO WANT microsoft to succeed. I want some good competition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> OK, maybe you should do a _little_ marketing. I have no idea what GTD stands for, why I should care if your app is the best "GTD" app, and why I should get a GTD app in the first place.

And I may like it if you explained it a little bit!

<comment> mkr-hn Back when I still followed blogging blogs, I saw a guest post on ProBlogger (an old, somewhat past-its-prime blog) extolling the benefits of PLR. PLR this, PLR that. The author _loved_ PLR and wanted to tell the world how great it is.

The post was followed by 100 comments asking the author to define PLR.

<comment><USER3> Private Labelling Rights?

<comment> mkr-hn Yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "THE BEST GTD© APP ON WINDOWS 8"

This may be relevant or it may not but: The homepage of their website I think needs some work. The above slogan is all the text apart from the carousel. I had absolutely no idea what GTD was (as it was not explained) and no idea why it was copyrighted. Then I did not want to click the link to get it now as I did not know what I was getting.

</comment><comment><USER5> I really thought about getting into Windows 8, sadly Microsoft disappointed me several times. The biggest one was the Windows Phone 8 launch, which made my development device (a HTC Titan) stuck in WP 7.5.

I've been successful on Android, but I really hate the fragmentation.

I've tried BlackBerry development (got a PlayBook to develop on) and after 2 months working on a app using their HTML5 library bbUI.js my app started to misbehave because of a bug on that library. After 2 more weeks trying to correct this problem I couldn't correct the bug and my problem just became bigger. So I rage quit.

I've been trying a bit of iOS development, but Objective-C is giving me a hard time.

<comment><USER6> That's funny, coming from Objective-C I find programming for Android difficult. Xcode is so friendly. The tools for making programming for Android easy don't seem to be there (from my limited experience). What's giving you trouble with ObjC?

<comment><USER7> I still don't see what is hard with Android development, but maybe it likes on my liking for Java/C++ development tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apart from explaining what GTD is, you might wanna make new screenshots. From the third screenshot on the website, it makes it looks like over 75% of the screen is about GTD and Getting to Know the app. It looks like some info handout for GTD and your app - maybe make some dummy todo tasks which users can relate to?

The disappointing sales is totally your fault. Measure what you did wrong and fix it - before a million other great GTD apps come to Win 8. The GTD apps on every platform are unbelievably powerful and don't make mistakes you're making. I for one, will not let a product handle my life whose creator did not care to spend more than 5 minutes taking app store screenshots.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have 5 screenshots in the store so I am not sure what you are talking about. Can you elaborate?

see [http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en- US/app/taskorami/62a3828...](http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en- US/app/taskorami/62a38283-5793-4e7e-94d0-9f05cae01b76)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I missed the point of this post. I felt like it was going to point out something Microsoft did wrong, but it didn't.

Other than some publicity for the app, I don't know what this article wants to accomplish.

</comment><comment><USER10> For the mystified, apparently GTD® stands for Getting Things Done and is a "groundbreaking work-life management system".

<http://www.davidco.com/about-gtd>

<comment> mkr-hn Which introduces all kinds of questions not answered on the product page. Good case for hiring a copywriter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for making me google to try to understand what the hell GTD means.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for sharing your experiences. It always helps to hear all sides of the story.

</comment><comment><USER12> What is a GTD app? Failing to explain a key acronym is not inspiring.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks for all the comments and suggestions. I know the website and copy needs work and I know I need to do some marketing... We will get there...</comment>


India's starry dwarf frog, lone member of newly discovered ancient lineage - <AUTHOR> https://www.phys.org/news/2019-03-india-starry-dwarf-frog-lone.html <comment><USER2> Outline'd it [https://outline.com/uncc3e](https://outline.com/uncc3e) since the webpage seems to leak memory? I saw the RAM usage for the tab in Firefox (w/ uMatrix) shoot up from 26 MiB to 100 MiB in 15s and somehow slowed down entire browser to a crawl after a minute or so.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be more interesting if it turns out the digitized CT scans and photos were faked by a team wanting to track up new species finds. Note that at least one researcher in the artie gushed about how he had never physically seen the frog and how neat it is that once digitized you dont need to.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is not clear to me why they think that those animals are adult or if they had being DNA tested. The problem is that without DNA tests could be also a juvenile of another poorly known frog species. I hope they had double checked that in the article. Of course just some photos is not enough.</comment>


What Are Apple's Intentions for Applebot? - <AUTHOR> http://arc.applause.com/2015/05/06/applebot-apple-search-engine/

<comment><AUTHOR> Just for Siri? Finally kick Google/Bing out of iOS/Mac OS? Build better machine learning and AI? I suspect we will learn more at WWDC.</comment>


Another round of image bugs: PNG and JPEG XR - <AUTHOR> http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2015/03/another-round-of-image-bugs-png-and.html <comment><USER2> Now that we have an OCaml SSL implementation, has anyone put together a roadmap for building up to a complete browser in OCaml?

It would be the work of a decade or more to rewrite image parsing, HTML rendering and all the rest of it, but I honestly think it's the only way we're ever going to get decent security.

<comment><USER3> Last I knew they didn't have much in the way of defence against timing side- channels, which pretty much rules it out for any real deployment.

<comment><USER2> Don't they? I'd think someone would crack the bitcoin piñata if so.

<comment><USER4> Bitcoin piñata [http://ownme.ipredator.se/](http://ownme.ipredator.se/) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9027743](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9027743)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think I need to write a "C Programming Language Considered Harmful" essay. In this era, using a language which allows buffer overflows, heap corruption, use-after-free, integer overflow, and eliminates "undefined" but security- critical code, is utterly irresponsible for anything where security matters - and that is virtually anything, given the complexity and interactions in modern systems.

All code should have mandatory, compiler-enforced integer overflow and bounds checks at the very least.

<comment><USER6> This was already clear to many of us Modula-2/Turbo Pascal developers back in the mid-90's, but then C won thanks to UNIX adoption.

\- Array implicit decay into pointers instead of requiring an explicit "address of" operator

\- No bounds checking

\- Implicit conversion between enumerations and numeric types

\- Implicit conversions between numeric types

\- Null terminated strings

Every time I had code in straight C, I made it look like Pascal by validating all the parameters, compiling with all warnings enabled, warnings as errors, using ADTs with no field access to structs.

A static analyzer is also compulsory.

The amount of money caused by bug fixing in developer time, creation of C memory corruption detection tools and paying for them is just endless.

<comment><USER5> Oh, right, I forgot about null-terminated (aka "C") strings! But you'd have to get rid of them for bounds-checks anyway.

<comment><USER7> Nah.

You can deal with null-terminated strings.

You "just" have to be able to prove that all operations ensure a string remains postpended with a null, and doesn't get extended beyond the length of the underlying allocation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems that Safari 8.0.3 on OS 10.10.2 is also affected by the PNG bug. Although it has a variable number of variants each time the page is open/refreshed (don't have access to a vulnerable IE to test if it has the same behaviour)

<comment><USER9> It might be the case that the variants aren't exploitable – Safari uses CoreImage and that framework tends to bend over backwards to support malformed images so I wouldn't be surprised to see it render differently for each slightly different test image even if none of them are exploitable.

<comment><USER10> But isn't the idea here that all the "variants" are actually the same exact .png byte stream? So any differences are the result of leaking memory...?

<comment><USER9> You're right – the random call is just a dodge around caching. It could be leaked memory or possibly something like an address dependency but I'd hope that he submitted it to Apple along with the other browsers he's been testing.

<comment><USER10> It's also acting up in iOS on mobile safari. And, even more interestingly, if you long-tap a few of the images and save them to the photo stream, you'll see them change "live" in lots of applications like the photo browser, photo editors, pasting in an iMessage, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yep, another example of C features.

I am really looking forward that the likes of D, Go, Rust, .NET Native, Ada, ParaSail, Chapel, Java (past v10) and many others help reduce even more the need for C to the same level as Assembly use nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER11> Seriously, how does one go about discovering obscure exploits like these?

<comment><USER12> Well, fuzzing, apparently:

> Similarly to the previously discussed bugs ... these two were found with > afl-fuzz.

[http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/](http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's an important problem that more people should work on? - <AUTHOR> I'm not interested in building an other B2B Invoicing SaaS app. Instead I'm trying to look for pressing problems, where I as an engineer could potentially contribute to. What do you feel is an important problem that, when solved (or at least worked on) could make a big difference in the world. <comment><USER3> One strategy that I adopt is to think of industries that are highly manual labor and dream of ways to fix that. I forget the name of the company, but there's a startup in the Bay Area that builds drones for farmers. Right now, farmers wake up early in the morning and drive through small sections of their fields and spot check things to decide what needs water or fertilizer or what- have-you. They have to spot check, because some of these farms are so large that it would take a prohibitively long time to check everything. As a result, a small patch of plants that might need more water might get some water, but the nearby plants that are already well-watered might get too much water. With these drones, the farmer can wake up, hit a button on their computer, go make coffee, and by the time their coffee is ready, the drones have uploaded photos of every square foot of the farm onto their computer. Software can analyze it to see what needs watering and fertilizing, what's ready for picking or for planting, etc.

That's the kind of thing that gets me excited about the future of technology. How could we automate or ease the jobs of farmers? How can we automate going to the DMV? How can we streamline flu shots? Can we write software that can organize resistance to Ebola outbreaks or malaria? Is there some software that can get the people of Flint access to clean water -- or can we write software that will prevent a Flint-like crisis from happening again? Can we identify bots that might be trying to affect our political processes? What about making sure kids in schools are well fed, since we know that hungry kids perform worse in schools? Can we solve that somehow?

I don't have answers to any of those questions. They are what I call "Epic Problems," and I think about them all the time. Unfortunately, the solutions are several orders of magnitude more involved than a standard CRUD app.

One thing to do is pick an Epic Problem, then work in an Agile mindset to tackle it. That's what Planet Labs did when it came to satellites. They have hundreds of shoebox-sized satellites in space, putting them up there at a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost of what it takes to put a traditional satellite in orbit.

What else could you do that with?

<comment><USER4> Expanding on that from the opposite direction, what new industries can be created that can employee the previous workers disrupted by new technology? He who figures that out will never be for want.

(This isn't an argument against the parent comment at all, as I agree with them too. Their comment just got me thinking.)

<comment><USER3> Excellent point.

I sort of got into this discussion a few minutes ago with a friend of mine, but I think part of solving Epic Problems is revisiting the notion that one must work in order to survive, and particularly revisit the 40 hour work-week idea. If we can automate a farmer's job so that he spends 4 hours a day instead of 8 hours a day, does that change the value he provides to society? Of course not. His earnings shouldn't be dependent on hours worked, but rather productivity to society. If that farmer can employ 5 farmhands instead of 10, do the five that lost their jobs really need new jobs? Can we recognize that the economy doesn't need them anymore? Or can we cut the hours so that each farmhand works half-time?

Mind you, we're getting into UBI territory which is outside the scope of this thread, but... How many jobs can you think of that were created in order to maintain or grow a budget? How many middle managers aren't really necessary? Do we really need cashiers at Walmart or Target or the grocery store?

As automation accelerates, we're going to find ourselves more and more in a position of struggling to find new jobs for displaced workers... and I think we should challenge that premise from the start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Make a website that brings transparency to your local political candidates and votes. In many places it's very difficult to find any real information on what we're voting on and the props themselves are ambiguous or confusing. And the candidates themselves also often have no online presence and no real scrutiny as to whether they're full of shit.

</comment><comment><USER6> Homelessness induced by mental health challenges. I know this isn't exactly what you were asking, but this is an area in which creating engineering solutions can go a long way. As suggested - think geographically local. Improvements in the way our society handles these issues, proven to work on a local scale, can be adapted and replicated globally.

<comment><USER7> That's solved in every industrialized country besides America. It's an issue of political will. I think it's a great thing to work on, and desperately needed in the US, but it's not a question of how to implement it but rather the political change to implement it.

Edit: it's not even, strictly speaking, nation-wide. Idaho for example, does a great job on this. California had most of its mental health facilities shut down during the 1960's when Reagan was Governor to save costs.

<comment><USER6> >>That's solved in every industrialized country besides America.

Whoa. That's an interesting unsubstantiated statistic. A quick (albeit unnecessary) Google search begs to differ: [https://homelessworldcup.org/homelessness- statistics/](https://homelessworldcup.org/homelessness-statistics/)

<comment><USER7> It's really not. First, I said _industrialized_. I know that homelessness is high in some poorer countries. I'm talking about the wealthy countries such as most EU countries.

Switzerland, for example, doesn't remotely have this problem.

<comment><USER8> I can only assume you haven't spent a lot of time in the EU... Switzerland (which is not in the EU) is the only European country I've been to that does not have a very visible population of homeless people.

<comment><USER7> 20 years in Europe. I've _never_ _never_ _never_ _never_ tripped over crazy homeless. It's all I do in Berkeley and SF.

It's not a small, nuanced difference but literally night and day. Have you _really_ seen tents downtown in any city in Europe?

I'm American but most Europeans I know struggle with living in the Bay Area because it's such a shock for them.

<comment><USER8> The parent of my comment was claiming that it is a _solved problem_ everywhere outside of the US. My claim is simply that it is far from solved, and if someone thinks homelessness is "solved" in the EU, I can only assume they haven't been there.

You're saying it's worse in SF/Berkeley, and no doubt it is. But it's not "solved" in the EU.

<comment><USER7> That was me. I said, "Homelessness induced by mental health challenges" was solved in every other OECD country -- and it's true. In those countries there are programs to make sure people with significant mental health issues, especially those which would lead to homelessness, are placed in special care.

I've spent 20 years living in various countries in Europe. I stand by my statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am going to focus on US centric problems. Here are the two areas I think Americans could use the biggest help:

1) Personal finance - Americans across the board lack basic financial competency. This effects the US across the board, people take on too much credit card debt, school debt, etc. This problem is across all classes (lower, middle, upper) - Americans do not understand basic things on how to budget, how much debt they can take on, how credit cards should work, how to invest, etc. We need financial education happening at the high school level so that the next generation of Americans don't make the same financial mistakes we have (taking on too much school debt, using credit card as loans, not taking advantage of employer 401k, buying houses you can afford, etc)

2) Diet / Eating - If you look at the list of the most common sources of death for Americans, almost every issue is linked to lifestyle (diet, smoking, alcohol, etc.). Our diets have spun out of control; Americans lack basic knowledge on what is healthy or not. I've had many friends who struggle with weight issues who lack even basic knowledge of how calories work, what their daily needs, what are necessary nutrients, etc.)

<comment><USER10> Wouldn't that come under education though?(Australians have the same problem).

I didn't realise how bad it was in Aus until I moved to Japan.

Edit: I was referring to your first point, sorry.

<comment><USER11> Ideally, I agree it should be taught in school. But frankly, our education system is so screwed on even teaching basics, I don't think it could handle something as critical as this.

What about something that would get both parents and their kids involved? This is a multigenerational problem and it might help to get everyone involved on both points.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Batteries. Batteries are the number one technical problem right now. A battery with energy density approaching crude oil would revolutionize the world beyond even what the Internet did. We really don't have an energy _generation_ problem, we have an energy _storage_ problem.

<comment><USER13> "Batteries" is a pretty good answer, but I'd argue that getting cost down is more important at this point than raising energy density. Tesla proves that you can make long-range vehicles with today's battery energy density. The batteries are just too expensive at present to deliver an under-$20k-USD vehicle that can sustain 5 hours of freeway driving between charges.

For grid scale storage, which would be needed to get to really high penetration levels of renewable electricity, energy density is even less important. A paltry 50 watt-hours/kg would be _perfectly fine_ if the battery also offers low capacity fade per deep discharge cycle and low costs.

A battery with really high energy density, but per-kWh costs higher (or at least no lower) than today's batteries, would be revolutionary for aircraft and an extremely welcome improvement for mobile electronic devices. But I don't think that it would have the same breathtaking macro-impacts on world energy systems as making much cheaper batteries could.

<comment><USER14> > For grid scale storage, which would be needed to get to really high > penetration levels of renewable electricity, energy density is even less > important. A paltry 50 watt-hours/kg would be perfectly fine if the battery > also offers low capacity fade per deep discharge cycle and low costs.

For grid scale storage there's also options like pumped hydro storage. Cost / kwh can be much lower than batteries, depending on site and scale. Might need to start with a budget of $50m-500m though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I see two things:

1) making data and facts more available and easier usable for everyone. This includes good sources, polished data streams and - the most neglected thing I suppose - good UI for non-techs.

2) Decentralize applications, plug in interoperability. OStatus is a good example of this. We need to reduce datasilo hoarding monopolies. This also partly plays into 1)

<comment><USER16> Was going to post about more decentralized fundamentals on the Internet; identity, file storage, basic data, etc. But I'll piggyback and upvote this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "I'm not interested in building an other B2B Invoicing SaaS app"

I think I made the very 1st one of those and I'm working on an upgrade now. lol.

A few areas come to mind that are obvious, like food, shelter, income, energy.

There's a lot of work being done on growing food for personal and community use with controlled systems but there looks (to me) like there's plenty of room for improvement and innovation there still.

From what I've read recently inexpensive, durable, and accurate soil moisture sensors are needed. It looks like a "Pick one feature" situation there right now. I've been pondering that a bit lately.

I've seen some interesting innovation in how weeds are managed in large scale agriculture that include using organic "grit" to "sandblast" weeds with remote controlled mechanically articulated nozzles using image recognition software to direct the blast. This eliminates the need for herbicides so it attempts to solve a very pressing issue.

I recently saw a robotic "weed whacker" on a social funding site that got a lot of attention, but the prototype they showed didn't inspire confidence in me that it'd do much.

Pest control is another obvious pressing problem in agriculture, as is efficient use of water.

I'm currently designing a simple experiment to grow salad veggies outdoors in the winter using low hoop row covers and passive solar heating.

Growing food closer to where it's consumed has the potential to greatly reduce costs, environmental impact, and hunger, and it looks to me like there's a lot of headroom there for improvement.

<comment><USER18> I couldn't agree more re. growing food for personal and community use. I'm currently in the very early stages of designing an app for small farmers and CSAs. Hard to get many farmers to respond to giving me input and share their knowledge. I see a tremendous scope for improvement in the entire user and customer experience of finding and signing up for a CSA (from the end customer side) and then effectively managing and nurturing your customers and reducing churn (from the small farmer's side).

<comment><USER19> Not sure how you're soliciting feedback but you'd probably have pretty good luck volunteering for them and observing/conversing while getting first hand experience. Plus you'd make some friends (beta users).

<comment><USER18> yep- much harder to find the time to go volunteer but you're right on that. I don't consider myself a good salesman but I need to sell the idea that doing this would improve their bottom line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A big difference how? You could work for the NSA and make it easier for the government to know people's thoughts, that would sure make a big difference in the world.

Or you could build an information sharing and vetting platform which could use proofs from multiple independent sources to certify data as true by tying it to factual evidence, a kind of scientific reddit to combat disinformation. You could use it as a backend to Wikipedia to vet and prove information, or disprove. Extend it using multiple dependent proofs to support another and you might be able to provide a platform on which to fight for political issues based on reams of certified data.

Also, jobs. It's hard to give some people jobs. People need jobs, and they need to make money, in order to fuel an economy and sustain a society. As an example, in a country with some 6 million felons, it's hard for them to get jobs, so they become a strain on the economy (among other things). Make a thing that helps people who have a hard time getting a job to get a job.

<comment><USER21> I suppose you're referring to wikitribune?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> When a scientist wants to make progress in some field, the scientist first educates herself on the state of the art, and then does novel research that pushes the frontier.

When you have a discussion on facebook/reddit/HN about your favorite political issue, you just post your gut feeling and what you heard on TV instead of educating yourself on the issue, learning what the foremost experts are currently debating and what arguments are already refuted.

Super shitty example fix: Facebook Clippy "It sounds like you're having a discussion about abortion - are you aware that the smartest people on this topic are not actually discussing X, but rather have moved on to Y?"

Side problem:

When we DO make some bump of progress, only a few people benefit (the people reading the thread, at best), and everyone else does not. A million parallel discussions rehash the issue until after a decade, "culture" incrementally improves. How can my facebook discussion, in which I made a good point, prevent that same discussion from ever happening again?

<comment><USER23> Well education is how you solve this but we chronically underfund it and every kid is a blank new mind so progress is lost when we don't teach.

In the West we have two general views on the nature of humans; intrinsically good or fundamentally bad. The rest of modern politics is shaped from this.

The internet and Facebook helps to find a diversity of thought but also in general does not promote critical thinking skills (which you're suppose to learn in high school)...

since as we've seen facebook just degenerates into an echo chamber where blatant propaganda is unquestioned and in fact promoted. Critics are fake news and we refuse to critically debate. You see this in Congress where they blatantly lie about tax cuts, health care etc...

<comment><USER22> Education doesn't fully solve it. Education remedies the deficiencies.

To use PG's method: in 200 years, do you think that we will have 100M parallel, entry level discussions about the merits of abortion (or the political issue du jour)? No, obviously our discussion experience will be augmented such that we are easily led to the forefront of the debate and build on top of the pertinent points and progress being made. How do we invent _that_ future?

<comment><USER23> I don't think it will happen that way. The courts already ruled in roe vs wade and yet people still go back to first principles to argue.

<comment><USER22> People can disagree with Roe v Wade. There's still a foundation, that I think you're not noticing - we as a culture have made progress on it, the arguments are not the same as they would have been 100 years ago. More dramatically, the arguments about slavery are not the same, we are past it.

<comment><USER23> There's a legal foundation but it's still an active political argument as is teen birth control. We have made progress but I wouldn't say anything is guaranteed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In the software space, I think that the world could use high-integrity reader/renderer libraries for common file formats. It's embarrassing that e.g. TIFF and font file readers/renderers have enabled arbitrary code execution, years after the formats were standardized, for inputs that aren't supposed to contain any interactive functionality.

Of course it's pretty obvious why nobody has done this before: almost nobody wants to pay for high integrity software unless compelled by law.

And there's obvious problem number two: even if you find a philanthropist to pay you to write this software and give it away under the most liberal license, it'll take effort to switch away from existing libraries. You might be able to imitate the structure of e.g. LibTIFF but everyone who was handling TIFF with another library will find it hard to switch.

</comment><comment><USER24> The one that you understand and have skills, knowledge, abilities, or relationships that you can apply.

I know that's kind of cliche but there are opportunities and/or places to help all over the place. It's a matter of finding the ones that you can a) get passionate about and b) be successful at. And this applies to startups, non- profits, or even that internal project.

Personally, I work to support Austin Disaster Relief Network - [https://adrn.org/](https://adrn.org/) \- which is a group of ~150 churches in Central Texas that come together to help people during flood, fire, hurricane, and anything else. We are background checked and badged to cross the emergency tape and help the Red Cross, local PD, or whoever else is on the scene. The focus first is helping people immediately.. while their house is still on fire. And then help them get back on their feet.

While I have first aid training, my specific role is helping on the technology side. When something happens - like Hurricane Harvey - we can stand up a 25 person call center in under an hour. It's powered by Cisco phones plugged into a local Asterisk/FreePBX server connected to Twilio. (I'm a former Twilio employee but they're not involved.) In the field, ADRN uses simple web and mobile apps to collect victim info and issue gift cards. It's tied into geolocation services and person databases to reduce fraud. There are online/offline modes for when you're in the field where there is no connectivity. There are a ton of technical roles required!

And the underlying aspect of all of this is that we design, build, and deploy technology with the _HOPE_ that it never gets used. If it's used, that means something horrible happened.

And btw, Harvey isn't over for people in the field. All help is appreciated - [https://adrn.org/disaster-relief/hurricaneharvey/](https://adrn.org/disaster- relief/hurricaneharvey/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Economics. A problem that has come with increased inequality is that the allocation of capital has gotten further and further disconnected from people (the human capital) who have a more direct link to knowing or exploring ways of developing fundamental value generation. I suspect we are seeing this in metrics like decreasing productivity, decreasing new business generation - <USER2> seems like financial capital isn't mixing with human capital nearly as efficiently as we might hope. Is there a way to relink the two through an new or modified economic channel that dramatically facilitates this; and maybe even helps rebalance inequality by making invested human capital more consistently yield hands off dividends like invested financial capital.

<comment><USER26> Put ownership of productive goods and services in the hands of those who are actually creating those goods/performing those services. This would empower each person to push the investment of capital to what matters most to them-- namely, themselves. When the consensus is formed, a lot more money will be devoted to maximizing human capital and a lot less toward the overhead (massive paychecks for a few, crazy cycles of bureaucracy) that are the hallmarks of today's economic goings-on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There are probably huge strides that can be taken in healthcare, food, energy, transportation and finances. The challenge is that most of these industries are heavily regulated so you go in optimistic then get inundated with endless waves of bureaucracy, and end up making a new version of Twitter.

I'm personally fascinated with the transpiration industry. Everything from city bikes, to self driving cars, to hyper loop[1], to super sonic transport[2], to intergalactic transport[3].

[1] [http://hyperloop-one.com](http://hyperloop-one.com)

[2] [http://boomsupersonic.com](http://boomsupersonic.com)

[3] [http://www.spacex.com/mars](http://www.spacex.com/mars)

<comment><USER28> Definitely feels like SpaceX just ate Boom's lunch last night.

<comment><USER27> Tell me about it! I think it's going to come down to cost. If SpaceX is anywhere near $2,500 a flight, it's going to be a tough slog for Boom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Journalism!

If you haven't noticed, the world around us is falling apart. Personally, I consider this malady of discontent just a result of letting every idiot post their comments on the internet. But that doesn't change the fact that something needs to be done, and I think it's more of a problem of teaching people how the process works, not so much to change the outcomes. Generally, I see people reaching for conspiracy theories or accusations of corruption whenever they don't understand the complexity of a problem. I. e. "Why don't they just build nuclear power plants? It's CO_2 neutral, and Obama's solar power mafia is just trying to stop the neutron-emitting pebble-fusor that will be 10x cheaper! Scandalous!"

Unfortunately, I haven't found the silver bullet to do this. So, second best: somehow help today's quality publishers to survive, and hope they have better ideas. There are two tech/business ideas I would love to see:

a. "The world's worst ad-blocker"

Currently, all ad blockers are focused on blocking as much as possible. That, and speed, are basically the metrics they show you.

I think (hope) there's a sizeable fraction of people that wouldn't mind unobtrusive, non-spyware advertisement if it helps their favourite writers to make rent. What's needed is an ad blocker that constantly evaluates parameters including the page publisher's reputation, the ad network, the product/company being advertised, the file sizes, ad positioning, movement and/or sound, and privacy implications. Then allow. the user (some) leeway to influence it to their liking.

b. A netflix-like subscription

This is more of a business problem. I guess publishers are afraid of losing their current $200/yr subscribers to a service that only pays them $10/yr or so, because it divides those $200 among a number of publishers.

They may be right. But personally, I have just one subscription, and that's the really cheap New Yorker, which I bought just to not be a complete free rider. I have a few hundred $ for whoever wants it, and gets me the NYT/Economist/WSJ/FT/etc. as a package deal.

<comment><USER30> Agree, somehow, high quality journalism sources like the main broadsheets need to move away from the cathedral-website model to a pay-per-article model. Realistically, people aren't going to spend more than $20-$30 per month on journalism. And realistically, given the enormous variety of high quality (and often free) content available, people certainly aren't going to spend that $20-$30 on a subscription to one or two newspapers. Healthy society needs free journalism, journalists need to be paid, people nowadays ain't gonna buy subscriptions to entire websites when they can read, like, the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The easiest you can do is probably to look locally.

I'm sure there are a lot of non-profit with horrible websites, architectures, communications, etc. which you can throw a few hours at and help a lot of people.

</comment><comment><USER32> Make formal methods cheaper and easier to use.

<comment><USER33> That's the wrong way to frame that problem. Formal methods generally have a mindshare problem that underlies their cost problems. Make formal methods more accessible to the average programmer.

<comment><USER34> It's not clear to me that you're disagreeing. "Cheaper and easier to use" and "more accessible" could be the same thing.

<comment><USER33> In the end, it is. But maybe not on a micro level, which keeps environment designers from doing the right thing to get more mindshare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Automatic translation/interoperability between programming languages. The fragmentation of software into dozens of major languages hurts software quality, limits language choices, limits adoption of new languages, limits availability of software on new/less popular platforms, increases cognitive load for developers and sysadmins...

(and JavaScript as the most popular transpiler target today is depressing)

</comment><comment><USER36> From the variety of answers showing up in this thread, one wonders if there is some tool to help link qualified people with problems they can solve.

</comment><comment><USER37> Work on LARGE scale, e.g. pick a project from pg's frighteningly ambitious startup ideas ([http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html)). This was from 2012 so a bit dated now but the general thought applies. Disrupt a segment, but one where there aren't huge clear antagonists that can squish you immediately, e.g. healthcare.

Two examples that are important to me:

* Investigate the rising cost of higher education. Start with public data (for state universities), create a nice visualization on where the money is going. Extrapolate to private colleges. Then find ways to attack and change the status quo.

* Increase quality of education of poor kids (not just inner city, but that may be easier to start with). For example, can the shuttered grade schools in poor areas be repurposed into startup spaces, providing office to startup at very low cost, but they have to provide tutoring teaching for local students.

</comment><comment><USER38> A better way to connect funding with research.

This applies to many fields, but in general the academic and R&D funding process feels broken. Researchers and scientists spend a disproportionate amount of time writing funding applications, rather than researching or doing science.

</comment><comment><USER39> Create accessible tech that:

1\. amplifies people's abilities to reasonably assess evidence on topics of significance, analogously to how literacy has amplified collective memory.

2\. enables online collective environments that cultivate the capacity to use such amplified abilities in interaction between non-like-minded people, along with related attributes such as curiosity and humility.

You'd probably need to be some kind of genius to pull either of these off, though the type of genius required is probably not that of engineering.

It's what I'd do if I had the concrete ideas but, unfortunately lacking genius (of any type), I don't.

</comment><comment><USER40> A service uses Russell Conjugation [1] to detect bias in news sources.

[1] [https://www.edge.org/response- detail/27181](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181)

</comment><comment><USER41> Anonymous employer review system for US teachers and education administrators.

Teachers throughout the US are not treated equally, but because everything about them is open and publicly available, there is no way for them to review their experiences and forewarn other interested candidates until it's too late.

Glassdoor is "fine" except it's not really oriented towards education, which is quite a world of its own.

I tried to work on this concept two years ago, but didn't get very far. Authenticating teachers anonymously is difficult.

Feel free to email me for more info.

</comment><comment><USER42> Healthcare. The issue with 'important problems' not only that they are much harder to solve, but also that lots of people will ignore your project.

Personal example: I started [https://www.juvmed.com](https://www.juvmed.com) (it's not ready for Show HN yet). Shared on my facebook, got 4 likes, no comments. My selfies get 50 likes. Demotivating.

Btw, any feedback on that project is welcome. Thanks

</comment><comment><USER43> Autonomous cars. Traffic is bad for the environment, safety, and psychological health of drivers. Let's reclaim years of our lives that are spent in traffic.

Litter drone. Design a solar powered robotic beach sweeper, to identity and collect the trillions of plastic chips that are covering the beaches. Extend the idea to a fleet seaworthy drones to remove floating micro debris and call in help for large floating debris.

Thanks for asking!

<comment><USER44> This is one of my dreams. Helping myself with the udacity nanodegrees

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It sort of depends on what you bring to the party of course. But it is always a good question to consider and fun on a Friday afternoon.

Education would be a big one for me. Part of the issue with today's world is that we see the world differently through the lens of how we were educated. If we ever hope to have a planetary wide society we need to start with a common understanding of the world.

</comment><comment><USER46> The lack of empathy that online communication encourages. Empathy defined as conscious attempts to think and feel what the person you're talking to thinks and feels. It's quite natural with in-person and even voice communication. An extension of this problem is the lack of empathy online bleeding into offline communication.

</comment><comment><USER47> Improving existing software stability/security. Dive into the OpenBSD project and stay a while.

Yep. The totally unsexy answer.

</comment><comment><USER48> in general abstract terms, important problems have solutions that:

\- improve security and efficiency (which is also security :P )

e.g.: umbrellas prevent you from getting wet, the judicial system (intends..) to enable the public to trust one another, your skin is a firewall against pathogens, sleep cleanses the brain of metabolic byproducts, dreams (ostensibly) make it more likely that your awake mind will succeed more..

\- address shortcomings of previous attempts, or otherwise explain that the problem was previously underrated (if it isn't a solution that just happens to have astonishing luck :P)

\- punishes gamblers that speculate without paying the price and instead do it at the expense of nonparticipants

\- even better if the solution to the problem enables mutually-beneficial interactions at the atomic level

\- and 10x as better if it avoids growing into a benevolent dictatorship

</comment><comment><USER49> Verifiably true facts on the ground. Like, verifiably true video footage. If we see reporting that something has happened, how do we know it actually happened? This is going to become a much bigger problem - today's "fake news" is just the tip of the iceberg.

</comment><comment><USER50> Reinvent information access ("search") for the mobile world. The current paradigm google mini-me model, or even glorified chatbots like siri, are nowhere near where they should be. This necessitates a complete rethink of the search<>browse paradigm.

<comment><USER42> >The current paradigm google mini-me model, or even glorified chatbots like siri, are nowhere near where they should be

What's your vision on better information access?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The biggest problem we are currently facing, as a species, is self- destruction. The two problems are:

1\. How do we stop destroying our climate and planet as quickly as possible?

2\. How do we look for new planets to colonize?

<comment><USER52> It seems like Elon is trying to make impacts in both of these with Tesla and SpaceX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I would be interesting in knowing a major pure programming problem, not one motivated by the outside world. Like the open problems of pure math.

<comment><USER54> Better tools for the "non-professional programmer"

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Making good financial advice and planning accessible to everyone, especially those who need it most.

<comment><USER54> It's not clear what that means. Frequently the "financial planning" drumbeat seems oriented towards doing what is good for Wall Street.

<comment><USER55> You're right, I think it's broad and there are several subproblems. For some people it might mean: opening their first savings account, teaching them to grow a safety net, introducing retirement accounts and their benefits, helping people understand tools like HSAs, helping people understand and take advantage of credit card rewards, coming up with approaches to pay down debt, understanding the repayment of student loans in fields that are special cases like education.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Optimizing human health through nutrition, robotics, human colonization of space and the planets.

</comment><comment><USER57> Human population control. We are not on a sustainable population growth track.

<comment><USER58> Really sad to see this being downvoted.

Overpopulation is the root cause of many other serious issues such as hunger, lack of access to sanitation/medical treatment/education. We live in a world with finite resources, so the more of us there are, the less each of us gets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Nuclear fusion power.

<comment><USER21> Seriously, I don't understand why EMC2 (the polywell team) still relies on the pennies they receive from the Navy. We should be investing at least $200 million into polywell research.

</comment></comment><comment> bra-ket translate cognitive psychology to code

<comment><USER60> Can you elaborate on this? Are you saying replace therapists with a software product?

<comment> bra-ket I'm talking about general AI as an engineering challenge

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Whatever interests them the most.

</comment><comment><USER62> A fair economy.

</comment><comment><USER63> Hangover free booze.

<comment><USER54> Already there in the form of partial agonists for the benzodiazepine receptor. It won't ever get approved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Improving voter turnout. Enabling food ingredient dissemination. Job and educational opportunities for ex cons and poor disadvantaged people. Doing something modern with all those idle train tracks. 100x roi blood tests (the thing theranos lied about). There are dozens of big problems. Please share what your short list is and please tone down the saas put downs. A lot of good people have put a lot of their life into building honest businesses.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you get a tech internship in high school? - <AUTHOR>

Without any concrete proof of technical skill, it's hard to prove to a company that they should take me on as an intern, especially when there is a low chance of me returning to the job immediately. My resume is actually pretty strong - I have some quantifiable work experience with Linux and website management (2 separate projects) but no useful JOB experience. In addition I live in an area with access to a large tech center that has a lot of interesting software and hardware companies.
How would you go about applying to these companies? I already understand hiring basics like how to construct a resume, cover letter, interview procedures etc... but I'm wondering what I can do to increase the chances of getting a real call back from tech companies.
What companies would you apply to? My guess is that monolithic companies with complex hiring and internship tracks won't want to deal with an oddity like my application, so I have been targeting small teams that are more agile as well as medium-sized companies with distinct teams. Is this a good plan? Should I just apply everywhere?
If you were reading applications at a tech company, what would make you consider a high school student? <comment><USER2> I'm in high school and just started a front-end development internship. I got it by simy giving a specific piece of feedback through an HN post, and then I got contacted from there about my work. I'd suggest using mediums where your technical prowess is more obvious than your age or formal experience, such as HN. That way, the company, if interested, will initiate contact, find out about your skillset, and then after all of that if you mention your age, all the technical details will make them ignore it in favor of their impression of you before age came into the picture.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is good advice, I will try to be proactive in my commentating on places like HN where I would traditionally lurk. Unfortunately this is a bit of a moonshot!

Perhaps I should attempt to seek out places where my skills can be applied to problems and discussions. I'm surprised there hasn't been a prominent website or platform for intellectual / Socratic argument since the waning of discussion groups.</comment></comment>


Alien life could feed on cosmic rays - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/alien-life-could-feed-cosmic-rays <comment><USER2> yes but those cells evolved from cells that originated in deep-sea vents (according to the most-likely metabolism-first origin of life theories). This meant their ancestors already had mechanisms for repairing DNA damage, error- correction etc

<comment><USER3> That's the order it happened on Earth, but it doesn't mean it's the order it has to occur everywhere else in the universe.</comment></comment>


Ask / Offer HN: Startup for hire? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, we are the team behind kenHub - (www.kenhub.com).
TL;DR - Talented team of 3 looking for a short-term project (Ruby on Rails / Django) to do from Berlin, Germany.
Longer version:
Our project is going for about a year now, and we see good traction and growth. However, it still has some way to go before we are financially stable (hopefully in about 6 months according to our estimates).
Meanwhile, we ran out of cash. We can look for investments, but decided that we are much better at building apps than convincing investors and negotiating deals. Our startup is not looking for exit. We're trying to build a business to help students study anatomy. This makes us much less attractive for investment anyway...
We work great as a team, use agile methodologies and can deliver high quality code fast.
We have great experience in RoR, Django, HTML5/CSS3, responsive-web-design, system architecture, security and more. To see some of our work - please check out our product at http://www.kenhub.com. We also created the open-source project Giraffe http://kenhub.github.io/giraffe/ and contributed to a couple of other open-source projects.
If you're looking for a small team to help out, build your prototype, help optimize a bottleneck or make some great coffee (we are also skilled at latte-art) - then please get in touch.
or if you have some bright idea on how to sky-rocket our startup from growing 8% per week to %800 - we'd be happy to hear from you... <comment><USER2> Some unsolicited advice:

Don't sell to students. Or teachers. Students and teachers don't have money. They won't convert from free. big institutions do. Parents do. Tutorial programs do.

Sell to text book companies or departments/schools, or parents/tutoring companies.

Easiest way to pivot is towards parents/family. Make it easy for parents/grandparents to give an account to their kid or kids.

Alternatively you could try to get a research grant funding a comparison of class of students learning with your software with a class learning without it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Isiebert. You raised some very valid points there.

Universities / publishers is probably a better model for the future. But selling to them however is very hard and long, and our content currently covers around 30-40% of the whole anatomy. So universities/publishers are reluctant to buy-into this right now. Also without some research to 'prove' that it works better it's even harder.

Parents/grandparents are a good angle too - but we're not exactly sure how to reach those. Reaching students, who might be actively searching for anatomy learning material, is hard enough... Reaching their families might be even harder. And how would those family members _know_ that this is what their beloved actually need?? So it's a tough problem for us right now.

On the other hand, we have students who are willing to pay for this. Even when we had around 10% of the content, perhaps because it was good enough for them. And we see a pretty steady week-on-week growth in our active subscriptions of around 8% per week. Those students already pay for anatomy atlas and textbooks, so it's not unheard of for them to pay for the learning materials to help them study.

The numbers are still low, and that's why we're looking for some sort of a stop-gap funding via some freelance work. But we believe, and our data so far suggests, that within around 6 months we should hopefully be "ramen profitable"[1].

[1]<http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html>

<comment><USER2> Don't assume parents need to buy this for kids who need it for their current classes. Plenty of parents want to encourage their kids to be doctors. Facebook might be able to target this, but I'm not a marketing guy, just spitballing.

One niche might be immigrant communities and developing world middle class families in places like south asia. It might be relatively cheap to get an advertisement in an immigrant newspaper, even if you have to pay to have it translated.

You could also see about bundling with other complimentary educational offerings, and combining advertising dollars.

In any case, I think you have a good product that most people currently never hear about. That seems a shame, and free lance, funding, or whatever I hope you succeed. Please post again in 6 months with an update.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Your product looks quite good, though I can't say I'm too keen on the name! If you're not already, I'd suggest aggressively reaching out to any educational establishment that might have an interest to solicit feedback and sell your product.

Speak directly to lecturers and provide them with unique discount codes to offer their students. Maybe setup an affiliate system? Give people a reason to sell your product for you.

At any rate, good luck - I can see a lot of effort went into building this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! we're already doing some of that, but there's certainly more that we can do. Currently, we can't imagine a single thing will suddenly bring us a flood of subscriptions... hence the more realistic / pessimistic post on HN to get a project going to help us fund this.

</comment></comment><comment> JoKer--777 Hi, my name is Johannes. I'm also part of kenHub. Just wanted to mention here that even though your background might not be in the medical field and you don't have to learn anatomy, you propably know people who are. So you could spread the word over the known channels about us. This would help us a lot.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would convert from a B2C to a B2B company. Focus on partnering with existing medical school on a subscription basis to supplement their textbook. Easily charge $10 / student / year. While in the end, the same student is being helped, the rate of adoption skyrockets due to a "me-too!" affect. All medical schools are in a race, and if one school has a tool, the others just have to have it. All you need are two or three schools to get started, and you can give a discount for it initially.

In the meanwhile, I am also working on a project myself, and could use an experienced team to help build the prototype. Let's discuss both projects! Email in profile.

edit: This is essentially SRS for anatomy? Cool, good idea. Nice detailed pictures as well.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hey guys, my name is Spencer Hawkins, I'm the co owner of hawki games and a google glass explorer. We've got a medical app for google glass that you would be perfect for. And are you interested in selling that anatomy app? I'm going to be a med student next year and could sell the hell out of it. I'd be interested in buying equity either way. You should change the name to something descriptive yet simple and make a big push into social media. All med school classes have Xxxxx school of medicine class of 2017 groups on Facebook this time of year. Infiltrate! Advertise. Your product is amazing and I'm going to sign up myself.

firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER6> Good luck with your startup guys. Obviously it's a small market, but the world is just waiting for better educational resources. Do you have any plans to expand and offer more topics? I could see your startup being a kind of premium wikipedia.

<comment><AUTHOR> we think so too. Maybe not premium wikipedia (yet), but even a good place to train and improve your memorization could be a good enough start...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have you guys considered releasing this as an iPad app?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our app uses responsive web design, so it works well on all platforms (PC, tablet, smartphone). In future we might want to extend it and build a proper app though.</comment></comment>


17-year old makes $20k/mo via Internet marketing, $370k so far - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/vj4tq/iama_17yearold_internet_marketer_that_makes_20000/

<comment><USER2> Whilst I salute the guy for showing initiative and entrepreneurship, I wish these sort of articles got less attention (everywhere, not specifically on HN).

These sort of articles are starting to get the feel of the 'Get rich quick' or 'Work from home and earn big dollars' ads you see stuck on walls and sign posts - it's the new Amway.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. This article seems highly suspect, and anecdotes about success are not particularly helpful in becoming successful.

<comment><USER4> The guy also admits to knowing barely anything about SEO.

"I have no idea about SEO, but if I can recall it was something about Web 2.0 blog links, high PR domains, etc."

I'm calling bullshit on this whole IAmA

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm relatively young and entrepreneurial, and when I hear about people making loads of money in internet advertising like this (especially young people), my gut reaction is envy and jealously. I think "sheesh, I could totally be doing that"... but I always come to the conclusion that I would be absolutely miserable doing what these guys do, because it's just not something I'm into, and spending every waking moment doing something I hate/despise is certainly not how I want to live my life.

In fact, I cannot imagine being much happier than I am now. I live in Los Angeles, so naturally I am surrounded my wealthy individuals flaunting their money everywhere I go (houses, cars, etc), but despite all of this, I cannot imagine that these people are any happier than I am. Likewise, I don't imagine that I could be happier if I had the material possessions that they have.

This guy says he loves what he does and advocates others doing what they love, which is fantastic advice.

</comment><comment><USER6> Who has a "best friend" who is a fitness trainer at age 17?

He doesn't seem to be US-based (mentions IB, and English is his second language) so not paying (as much) tax must help things.

It sounds like SEO linkbait/blogspam type stuff to me—he mentions surveys too.

</comment><comment><USER7> I note that he claims to have 29 sites, but hasn't listed them. A simple list of the 29 super-duper money-making sites...that shouldn't be so hard to provide...

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't really blame him if it was indeed true. If he did show them, there will be 100 clones for each with a few months because they'd think that _exactly_ the niches he's in must be making him this kind of money, and they won't bother to think for themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> And yet another Reddit post. When did Reddit start spilling out?

Seriously, could we please not encourage posts like this...

</comment><comment><USER10> _I did [PPC] for a month and made around a whooping $2.5. For me this was huge, and I was very happy about it._

I think that was the most important quote from the main article.

It's that type of excitement over relatively small gains (in most peoples eyes) that is one of the key points to becoming an entrepreneur.

</comment><comment><USER4> sorry, but this is just another story about a teenage kid who did "SEO" to reap money from naive people and then brag about it.</comment>


Herbal Supplements Are Often Not What They Seem - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/herbal-supplements-are-often-not-what-they-seem.html

<comment><USER2> Glad someone is pointing this out. Most herbal supplements are basically powdered weeds being sold without any verifiable effects.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be interesting to see which companies these are.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you create a project roadmap and with which tools? - <AUTHOR> I need to create a roadmap, however, I dislike the tools out there and was wondering about a more 'hacker'-like way of creating a roadmap. Any suggestion? <comment><USER2> I doubt there a cli or "hacker" ways of creating a roadmap. For a dead simple roadmap you just need a bullet point list with the items sorted in the order you want to crack them.

I do some personal goals and plans for the year in Evernote, which is to say, not a hacker way at all. But it works and I just need to sync between 2 devices.

Trello, Spreadsheet, and Presentation are another good way to build a roadmap. Again, far from being a hacker way but it works with small teams. In fact, it also works for huge companies. I've seen powerpoint used for building roadmap in a 2K+ person company.

Finally, the least hacker way but probably the most comfortable (when you know exactly what you need) is to use existing tools made for this specifically:

\- [https://www.getshipit.com](https://www.getshipit.com)

\- [https://www.productboard.com](https://www.productboard.com)

\- [https://www.productplan.com](https://www.productplan.com)

\- [https://craft.io](https://craft.io)

\- [https://www.prodpad.com](https://www.prodpad.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> I considered this for a long time, but I found bullet points work best.

My benchmark is Dwarf Fortress: [http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html](http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html)

It's legible enough. Information is clustered into relevant groups. You can see progress by the colors on indents. You can also ctrl+f to whatever you want to search.

I personally keep something that reminds my why I'm doing it so I don't drop off: [https://random-character-generator.com/whatisthis.html](https://random- character-generator.com/whatisthis.html)

then I put the actual short term changelog on a page of its own for those who are interested in that.

If you need deadlines and dates, it's quite trivial to add.

</comment><comment><USER4> Like a product roadmap?

You could try sticky notes on a whiteboard, they're easy to rearrange while you're shaping the roadmap and give you a good high-level overview.

Productboard is quite good ([https://www.productboard.com/](https://www.productboard.com/)), if it fits your requirements - I've made good use of it in the past for product planning.

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22092167](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22092167)

</comment><comment><USER6> I haven't yet used it but its on my todo: roadmunk.com

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been doing this for well over a decade, and I still rely on a text editor and Markdown for nearly everything. My process is roughly as follows, and has over the years evolved into adhering pretty closely to domain-driven design principles and practices (before I stumbled upon the phrase itself and read up on it further):

 _Prep Phase:_

A _lot_ of conversation with stakeholders in the project. My job is overwhelmingly to _ask questions_ , to understand what all the stakeholders are wanting to accomplish with the project. This is the most critical phase of developing any kind of reasonable and accurate roadmap. I say what they want to _accomplish_ , and not what they want the software _to do_. These are not the same thing—especially if the stakeholders are not tech people. I typically work on new projects (from scratch) that are going to run business operations. In talking with stakeholders, they often have different individual needs and goals for what they're trying to accomplish regarding business processes, productivity, profitability, efficiency, etc. You need to understand what each of the stakeholders is trying to accomplish, what goals they have in mind that they believe software to be the answer to. _My job_ is to translate their goals and individual accomplishment metrics into something that software can facilitate.

 _Rough Roadmap Phase:_

1\. I start by dividing the stakeholder input into what seem to me to be relatively logical and separated business domains. This is a high-level grouping of related concepts, features, and functionality that can be directly tied to and communicated about in light of one or more stakeholders' goals. The primary goal for me in this part of the roadmapping phase is to _name things_ —if a group of people are going to be talking about a project a lot, it's going to need to be discussed with everyone using the same terms. This can be as simple as do we call users of the software users, clients, customers, or something else? Ensuring everyone in the project is talking about it using the same language is, in my opinion, critical to success, and helps the project start to take shape in non-tech people's minds before there's even code written.

2\. Once I have the broad shape and some rough initial names of different business domains, I then dive into each of the domains, fleshing out their details. This is where I'll start detailing out various functional components of the project as they live inside a domain. I can keep it high-level at first, but eventually, I will start breaking things down inside a domain with increasing detail. That could mean I start moving toward defining the roadmap in terms of the tech that will be used to build it—for example, I may start naming some different modules or classes, depending on whether a functional or class-based language is being used. I don't necessarily go down to the level of naming _functions_ here, as it's outside the scope of a roadmap at this stage.

3\. When I feel like I've finished detailing all the critical components and functionality within a single domain, I repeat step 2 on each of the remaining domains. Sometimes, as I'm detailing out the shape of another domain, it helps me realize I missed something in another domain. There can be quite a bit of hopping around, but eventually, the domain map of the entire project starts taking shape.

4\. When all domains have been sufficiently detailed, it's time to start looking at shaping these details into a project roadmap. Assuming a project roadmap is the deliverable handed to stakeholders that will guide development, it's critical that the domain map is turned into a linear time-focused outline. By the time I've reached this stage, I now have a very solid idea of what we're building, and I've created a whole domain language around the project itself. I've detailed out all the various domains, and I should know how they depend on each other. So, for the roadmap itself, I start looking through what I've documented so far, and I start thinking about the _order_ in which I need to build things at the small level to begin building out the various domains up to the high-level. If there are common components used by various different business domains, those typically warrant being built out first. If there are independent domains, it can be a toss up—and the goals of the project and its stakeholders, as well as ideas about releasing in phases or all at once will inform how to pick which independent domains to build out before others.

5\. I often review the linear, ordered outline a few times, and there are likely to be changes. But ultimately, reviewing is meant to ensure that you can read from the beginning of the development roadmap and follow that outline like a checklist, with the final product naturally resulting at the end.

6\. Final step is to then go through the linear, ordered development outline and start putting time estimates on it. As you move from the earliest items in the list to the later items, expect the time to increase if the project is sufficiently complex. _You will encounter challenges and things you did not anticipate or plan for as you start bringing all the pieces together_.

 _Finalizing the Roadmap:_

There should always be a roadmap for me and/or fellow tech/design team members, that may not be communicated to business or client stakeholders—this master roadmap is almost always in Markdown form. I often build it out as a Markdown document per domain. This allows me to create an overview document that links off to all the various domains if I'm keeping the roadmap itself inside the project (and perhaps linked via a git repo README). This usually gets turned into issues for each of the functional domains and their various subdomains, with checklists for all the relevant details to guide high-level feature development tracking.

There is often a roadmap that must be communicated to clients and/or business stakeholders. I typically take all the work done in the Markdown master roadmap (that can have checklists, links, notes, technical details, and so on), and I start trimming that down into a single text document via word processor. The vast majority of the content is focused on detailing out the business domains, their important subdomains, but it usually doesn't document the most technical details—especially if the stakeholders are non-tech people. The domains and subdomains are documented along with total time estimates from the Markdown roadmap, and usually include not only a brief technical overview of the domain/subdomain, but why it's there and what it accomplishes (reflecting back to the stakeholders how it achieves _their goals_ ).

 _tl;dr_ — text editor, Markdown files, break down the project into its constituent parts, order those parts according to how they build on top of each other to create a product, add time estimates once you've ordered the development processes, and then create a final version that is appropriate for the receiving audience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for this great answer! This was helpful and went into the direction of my current developing work flow.

Do you use any type of visualization of your results in?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Spreadsheet</comment>


Reptile: A Scalable Meta-Learning Algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://blog.openai.com/reptile/ <comment><USER2> Trying it right now, let's have some fun :-)

<comment><USER3> Any early feedback? :)</comment></comment>


The Node.js community is "completely feral" - <AUTHOR> http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2468287/nodejs-community-is-completely-feral-and-a-model-for-future-development-says-weaveworks <comment><USER2> I use node (or more correctly I use a small part of it via browserify) and while I like what it brings to the table (mostly the ability to sanely and somewhat cleanly import things in a way that works for me) I find stuff like this [http://i.imgur.com/n92uG9J.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/n92uG9J.jpg) makes my head hurt.

I come from a desktop background originally and I still miss having large (mostly) complete and (mostly) stable standard libraries something I miss.

That and I'm never going to like JavaScript, it just doesn't fit my mental model well at all.

<comment><USER3> It's interesting to me that everyone uses that isArrayish module example as though it represented the downfall of civilization when to me, yes maybe it represents the downfall of civilization a little bit, but it also represents the strength of npm. Absolutely anyone can create code, put it online and then have others use it fast. Of course this means you do end up with a lot of nonsense, but a lot of brilliance too.

Nobody does this with maven because maven and the Java community in general makes this hard. It's doable, but generally takes more work, which is a strength and a weakness for the Java community. You could argue this is "worse is better"[0], making sacrifices, in this case in redundancy for simplicity of use. People should really just write the code for isArrayish if it is this simple, or perhaps the language or babel or whatever should provide such a function.

However no one forces anyone to use these, if you want a standard library, use Lodash, here is its isArray: [https://lodash.com/docs#isArray](https://lodash.com/docs#isArray), it even has differentiations of this like: [https://lodash.com/docs#isArrayLikeObject](https://lodash.com/docs#isArrayLikeObject). Complaints about something like the isArrayish module make my head hurt. It filled a void fast where one existed so people could use it and get on with their projects and subsequently their lives. I just don't see anything wrong with that.

0) [https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is- better.html](https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html)

<comment><USER4> > Absolutely anyone can create code, put it online and then have others use it > fast.

And after 2 years remove or change it in a malicious way and break thousands of other packages and projects. Because it's absolutely anyone.

<comment><USER3> That's a problem with all open source software though. Heartbleed comes to mind. This problem may be compounded a bit by the fact that npm has such a low barrier to entry due to its simplicity.

Though saying other open source software is secure due to a higher barrier to entry feels like security by obscurity. Particularly since that higher barrier is often not higher because it's insisted on being high quality tested code, but just because it involves greater complexity in actually submitting it to be distributed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awful article. This gives no concrete information about the Node.js community apart from the opinion that "they don't know what they're doing".

This is not a defense of Node.js in general but in defense of good journalism; not writing an entire click-bait article off the random thought of an CEO I've never heard of.

</comment><comment><USER6> Such hype, such article</comment>


Ask HN: Why is Wifi in public places so bad? - <AUTHOR> Almost universally the Wifi provided by both public and private entities sucks, often to the point of being an unusable waste of time. I'm surprised that large corporations, such as McDonalds, H&M etc., which usually have their shit together, invest in those access points but then fail to make them usable. Does anyone know what's the problem here? <comment><USER2> It's not the breadwinning part of the business so it get the very least amount of time/money investment to get customers to buy more...</comment>


Swift 5 Module Stability Workaround for Binary Frameworks - <AUTHOR> https://instabug.com/blog/swift-5-module-stability-workaround-for-binary-frameworks/ <comment><USER2> Well, that was possible since Swift 1.0, wasn't it? It is using Objective-C as a proper ABI just like Windows people use COM to mix and match different C and C++ versions. Except that Apple doesn't provide proper dylib sharing (which doesn't really require an ABI in the first place, just versioning).

<comment><USER3> It wasn't possible until Swift 5 because of ABI stability. If we were to do that before Swift 5, we would still have to create binaries for each version of Xcode/iOS.

<comment><USER2> The ABI stability in the article is solely provided by ObjC, not by Swift. The "Swift ABI" of 5 only helps you with not having to embed the Swift libraries within the ObjC shielded module. (it "just" makes it smaller) The point of the article is that you can use the stable ObjC ABI to wrap the Swift incompatibilities. And that was technically possible since Swift v1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title is slightly misleading, because Swift 5 does not have module stability, so the publicly facing code cannot use the Swift interface. It must use Objective-C (C should be valid too, but I don't think the attribute for this is public yet?)

<comment><USER5> Yes, we've reverted the submitted title from "Swift 5 finally makes it possible to build binary frameworks" to that of the article.</comment></comment>