Ask HN: SaaS pricing for B2C && B2B (ex. 37s, Wufoo) - <AUTHOR> If you go to http://basecamphq.com/ you'll see a lot of top-tier company logos.  If you proceed to the famous "See Plans & Pricing", you'll see the max plan is $149/mo.
Similar story with Wufoo: Clients (http://wufoo.com/clients/) -> Pricing (http://wufoo.com/signup/).
The max plans are largely 'unlimited', which brings me to my question: are 37s and Wufoo really only extracting $149/mo or $199/mo out of these Fortune 100/500 companies?  If not, what do you think they're doing? <comment><USER2> (Long comment here. Hear me out :)

When you see a Big Corp logo on a small-ish SaaS company site, it's not the whole company using it. Just a small team.

Even when a plan says "unlimited," I can promise you multiple people in the same company are buying overlapping services. Why? Because folks want their own username/password/account management. (Plus they probably aren't even aware somebody else in their giant company is using it. I can pretty much guarantee they aren't IT-driven purchases. Not that they shouldn't be.)

As somebody else pointed out, employees can buy pretty much anything up to $1000 without approval from a higher up.

When things truly are being used by an entire large company, (driven by IT) they usually have some sort of account management/identity system that can hook into the company's own system (almost always Active Directory). Things like Google Apps or Salesforce, where you really don't want overlap (because you want to manage groups and permissions) have this capability AND don't have tend to have unlimited plans. (Unless specifically negotiated, you pay per seat.)

(In the future, OpenID or whatever evolves from its principles may replace it. But in the enterprise, SAML/AD/LDAP is kinda it for now.)

SaaS offerings that talk to these systems and are sold to Fortune 5000 corps typically start at $250,000. Somebody much smarter than I has outlined this strange enterprise price gap ( < $1000 or > $250,000). It was possibly Joel Spolsky. It's not a crazy theory, it's real. (As somebody else in the thread pointed out, anything above $1000 requires approval and lawyers, and is a really expensive for you as a vendor to deal with this for anything less than $250,000).

Tangent:

If you're a SaaS developer and want to sneak into the enterprise, get into Google Apps Marketplace. If you hook your app into Google Apps, any company already using Google Apps can use your app with a little less work (for them) than if you were just a regular web app.

As of summer 2010, there are about 30 Million Google Apps "premiere"(paying or enhanced) users.

</comment><comment><USER3> Selling to an enterprise at enterprise rates involves a particular kind of sales force and development plan that adds additional costs, decreasing net profit more than you'd expect.

It would detract focus from the core mission of the software — simple communication for small teams. They'd lose their story, which is what sells the product.

</comment><comment><USER4> Chances are they are getting multiple accounts from each company. In companies this large I imagine that multiple teams would want their own basecamp/wufoo accounts instead of trying to share one huge one (which basecamp/wufoo aren't really built for).

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes sense ... but of course even then, what would the total be? $300, $500, $1,000/mo? None of those numbers are exceptionally large are they? For a company the size of Kellogg's, et al?

<comment><USER4> That's the idea, they don't want Kellogg's paying them 50k a month because then if Kellogg's tells them they need feature X they are going to end up doing it to keep that business. This way worst case scenario they lose a couple hundred bucks a month. 37signals covers this in Getting Real I believe, but I can't find the section now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely get the concept, but there's a large range between 500 and 50k; just wanting to make sure I'm not missing something.

<comment><USER5> There's an old rule of thumb I read somewhere (can't remember where) that says the maximum amount of money you could charge for "consumerish" software sold in the enterprise was the per-purchase limit on the average manager's corporate credit card. As soon as you went over that it meant getting approval up the org chart chain, and getting approval up the chain meant having a dedicated sales staff to work that chain. As soon as you need that sales staff, the price of your software need to go up to pay for the additional staff. In other words, it's just as hard/expensive to sell a $2,000 product as it is a $20,000 product, so charge $20,000.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the better question is "Are they really selling any of those high-end plans". I would guess very few people/companies actually buy those, but I don't know. Anyone have any info on this?

<comment><AUTHOR> On his Mixergy interview, Kevin of Wufoo said they sell "the least" of those, but of course that isn't saying much. He might have said more, I don't quite remember.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've done consulting for MINI, Ford, Pepsi, and talked with CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, Discover, major music festivals (Bonnaroo) and museums (Tate Modern). My SaaS is used by several large companies and quite a few major educational institutions.

Let me tell you about working with bigco's.

You are never important to them. So, if you have XYZ as a customer, chances are, it's some dude or dudette in one department who uses it for their specific team for their specific thing. It's not as if XYZ USES YOU EXCLUSIVELY!

That's the kind of thing you'd look to charge thousands for. But they don't use you that way. Not unless you're very, very lucky -- or, as I'd look at it, unlucky.

You'd also be surprised at the paltry budgets these bigco's have on offer - because, of course, they're bigco's! Think of the prestige! The esteem! The fact that every major TV network wanted to put something specially crafted by me on millions of television screens, to show they're serious about social media but, uh… the $20k minimum project made them ALL stop calling. Which is why I always brought it up early so they'd stop wasting my time.

Selling to bigco's is crap. Unless it's a nice friction-free couplea hundred a month.

</comment><comment><USER8> At $199 a month, most businesses don't need any executive approval. They can buy it right there on the spot with a company credit card.

The entire process changes when you get into a particular range, it varies but for the most part $500 to $2000 seems to be the common upper limit. Anything above that can take days, weeks, sometimes even months of going through the process.

I did some consulting for a large company and it took 4 weeks for them to go through the process of sending me around 2-3 grand. It wasn't even "approval" that took so long, it was just the process of going up the ladder and waiting each step along the way.

If the company is large enough that I will never be able to directly talk to the "decision maker" then I pass on it. I don't have the patience to let them run me around in circles.</comment>


Prosecutors Ask if 8 Banks Duped Rating Agencies - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/business/13street.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I going to go with yes - although "duped" should probably be replaced with "incentivized" or "bullied"</comment>


Facebook's Open Compute Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2011/04/09/facebooks-open-compute-project

<comment><USER2> This strategy can be used by smaller startups too. Open source your interesting technology so you can show off what engineers get to work on at your company. It's also a good retention incentive; recognizing good technology is a big motivator for engineers, and open sourcing the technology is a great way to do that recognition.</comment>


Show HN: KivaSort – sort and filter Kiva field partners - <AUTHOR> https://kivasort.americancynic.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote a simple jQuery plugin [1] based on DataTables [2] that fetches data from Kiva's API [3] and makes it filterable/sortable. (Being a jQuery plugin it makes it easy to add a table of sortable field partners to any HTML document [4]).

1: [https://github.com/cristoper/jquery- KivaSort/](https://github.com/cristoper/jquery-KivaSort/)

2: [https://datatables.net/](https://datatables.net/)

3: [https://build.kiva.org/api](https://build.kiva.org/api)

4: For example see section three of this article "Some thoughts on Kiva's interest rates": [https://americancynic.net/log/2018/12/6/some_thoughts_on_kiv...](https://americancynic.net/log/2018/12/6/some_thoughts_on_kivas_interest_rates/)</comment>


Ask HN: How you get Ideas - <AUTHOR> It looks very stupid question.But I really got frustrated. I really want to do something. I want to spend my time in some productive work.But I am not able to find the ideas for my side project. I want to work on anything which will be worth to give time and if have consumer market that it is really good. I am app developer and have very good knowledge of mobile platform. There are so many thing and stupid apps which makes money. I really want to do something. I do not know how to start. I want to ask this question to you How do you get ideas for your side projects or any thing intrested? How do you know I really want to give time to it ? If you know I really want to give time to it but that thing is really impossible(or great minds solving puzzle) than what you do? How you get motivated to do things? Please help I am getting burn out. Any suggestion help appreciated. <comment><USER2> I keep an ideas.txt on my computer (synced to my phone in Dropbox). When you're out and something strikes you (something frustrating? interesting? could be made better?) just jot it down. Capture it in the moment, don't wait until the end of the day (you'll forget).

Over time you'll see recurring themes (you get annoyed by the same issues, the same idea gets written down over several weeks) and it'll be somewhat self- motivating to pursue a solution. Your energy ebbs and flows but if an issue bothers you several times it's likely something you care about.

<comment><USER3> I do the same thing but with a google doc.

I mull over these ideas and decide which ones to pursue. I've accumulated quite a few. I even built a scoring system to decide which ideas to pursue that I was using for a while.

I think the best way to generate ideas is to think about things you're interested in and questions you may have regarding these topics. Write them down immediately in order to preserve and develop them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you reach somewhere or built something?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> \- Read PG's essay on coming up with startup ideas ([http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)) and books on startups (Start Small Stay Small, Lean Startup, Rework, Zero to One, Abundance).

\- Read Edward DeBono's "Serious Creativity" \- the most brilliant book about generating ideas I've ever encountered. Not about startups or apps in particular, but _very_ interesting.

-There are startup ideas threads on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836508](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9836508)

and [https://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/)

\- If you're good at android development - please, PLEASE build a good text editor. It is the most important app for me, the first thing I look for in any new device, and all android text editors suck SO MUCH. I would easily spend $10-$30 if you would build something like Editorial, that would be convenient to use on android smartphone.

\-----

\- Think if there's something in your life that's missing, some tool that you would like to use, and build that.

\- If that fails - think about the perfect niche, about people you like and respect, who use technology and/or could benefit from it; understand them deeply, identify their goals, problems, challenges; and build something for them.

\- If that fails - look for a different not tech-related hobby. Like music or writing or woodworking or something like that. Whatever makes you the most curious. That will help you with burnout, and will give you a great niche to work in. Then identify the problems you're facing, and solve them with technology.

\- If that fails - talk to other people and ask if there's anything they might need, if there's any problems they have, etc.

\- Also - check out new mobile OS'es, like Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS, etc. These are new, emerging ecosystems, where there's plenty of apps to build. You can simply look at the most successful iOS/Android apps, and copy them to these platforms.

</comment><comment><USER5> Don't think of ideas that might take off. Just build something that solves a problem for you. If it just so happens that your app solves the same problem for others, it will organically take off.

Sitting down and trying to brainstorm ideas will get you nowhere.

</comment><comment><USER6> "We are all dust in the wind"

"We are just dancing on this world for a short time."

A million years from now, no one will know or care what you did with your life. If you do nothing, it matters only to you that you did nothing.

Go for a walk in the park. Go to a movie. Go talk to people outside of your little personal bubble, people whose lives are different from yours. Go try to catch the deluge in a paper cup, drink deeply of it and see what comes of it.

People have all kinds of needs, include things that look "stupid" to you. Many things that seem trivial to an outsider are not trivial to the person engaging in them.

I have a serious medical condition. Playing games is one of the ways I distract myself from pain and keep myself from losing my mind when I feel like hell. Game developers are as important to my quality of life as are medical breakthroughs. Entertainment is hardly a trivial need for me.

There are lots of people in pain, whether physical or emotional. So I am far from the only one who needs distraction or a way to pass the time constructively.

You seem to be getting all bent out of shape over the idea of doing something "important." Just do something. The time passes anyway, whether you did something or nothing with it.

Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ideas come when you are in a really difficult position and need something urgently. You try to find solutions for that problem by trying to see if there is a solution for your particular problem out there. If the solutions out there don't solve your problem, then you come up with your own. Because if the current solutions are not working for you, you can bet it is not working for someone also.

Don't look for an idea just because... If you do that, your enthusiasm for it will/can wane. But if what you are creating solves your own problem, wakes you up at 3am because you are too excited to finally figure it out then you may be unto something.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks first of all. But I know this. You know most of answers in this post is like that. Try to solve the problem. I know this you know this everybody know this. But the thing is that we do not get problems or we get that are already solved in some form till now. Do not get me wrong. But really I think what to do. What is require which other people have and I do not have. When I saw on github or appstore doing things by other people I feel I can do this and I should do this. But when I try to do that I do not know where to start. You know why because I do not know what to start. I do not want to do which other people alerady done. They are doing something unique and I also want to do that. But do not know what. If any body please help I really appreciate. BTW thanks a lot for your answer.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps, you are looking too hard? You don't know where to start because you feel the stupid apps are making money hence the need for you to also make some money right?. Is that a fair assessment based on your post? Don't let that be your only motivation for wanting to build or create an app.

A good starting point is to brainstorm whatever you are thinking off and go from there..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Go to freelancer or a similar site and take a look at what people wants to pay for.

Browsing there 2-4 hours will help you know where's some demand (with cash) and what you can do to aggregate that demand into an interesting project that works for you.

</comment><comment><USER9> Email me at email@example.com

I have a bunch of ideas, problems to solve.

</comment><comment><USER10> > How do you get ideas for your side projects or any thing interested?

Speaking just for myself here:

It's a combination of curiosity and naivety. You know that kiddy question where someone's going "But WHY do it that way?!" That's me. Not on the outside, granted - but it's the same sort of impulse.

Of course, as you get older, you start to learn a lot of the 'whys,' and some of them are sensible. The outstanding 'whys' for your day to day life tend to get resolved to a level that allows you to function one way or another. More precisely, however, they're sensible within a specific context defined by the knowledge and assumptions that the parties involved bring to the table and the limits of the requirements they have for their answers.

So I read, I watch visually interesting films, I listen to talks of people who have interesting thoughts, I learn arts crafts and trades outside of my own to a reasonably functional level - (not quite to the level of making an artistry out of them but to the level where you can perceive why that person's good and you're not and some of the things you'd need to do to approach them.) I try to have a wide context to compare the answers to those 'why' questions to. Because what's sensible in one context _isn 't_ in another.

There are other skills involved. There are bits of knowledge that are general tools. For instance maths, formal logic - I'd be inclined to suggest a surprising amount of the study of workflows (not just in a user interface sense) is worth looking at because that's often generally applicable to the why of things, etc.

I digress: The majority of the 'why' questions have sensible answers. The world would not function acceptably otherwise. That's fine from the perspective of intellectual exploration. If you're wrong you get an answer that will let you ask more 'why' questions, and if you're right you get another answer - difficult to lose with those outcomes.

Every so often a 'why' comes along where the answer doesn't make sense in the context that you've got, and then you've got an idea that's worth trying out. Seeing whether you can take the thing from that other context and put it in the context that seems wrong. Take one concept from one place and use it here instead. That just seems natural when it happens. Ideas seem like it's the other people who've gone off into crazy land, or missed something. For me, it's the same feeling from when I was little and the parents would go 'BECAUSE! Now I've got to go to work!'

And if that idea comes to nothing, no biggy. There'll be another idea along in a little bit.

\---

I'd reiterate I'm speaking just for myself there. It's a thing that seems to work for me, it may not be the optimal thing and it may not work that well or that way for others.</comment>


Computer Chips Seem Poised to Shrink Again - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/science/31compute.html?hp <comment><USER2> This is an awfully non-informative article. But apparently they've done... something! And it involves silicon oxide! And somebody stumbled upon it by accident! But for anyone with a knowledge of chip design beyond the "magic happens here" level, it's lacking in detail, with not even a link to the actual article.

Anyone know what they're actually talking about?

<comment><USER3> >...with not even a link to the actual article.

Incidentally, how is it that a newspaper could _ever_ report on published research without linking or citing the publications? I could never understand how common that is, not could I get a good answer from anyone in the industry.

<comment><USER4> Even the BBC, usually so good, is terrible about this. And it's not like people haven't told them, they're just terribly intransigent about it.

[http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/trying-to-get-the-bbc-to- li...](http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/trying-to-get-the-bbc-to-link-to- journal-arti) is Ben Goldacre writing in to the Beeb.

He later had a response ( [http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/no-movement-on- the-bbcs-biz...](http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/no-movement-on-the-bbcs- bizarre-links-policy) ):

"Many thanks for your message, and interest in the site. The issue of linking to specific research papers, rather than the journals in which they appear is something with which we have long wrestled.

Linking to the journal gives the reader the chance to look at the source of the story, understand something of the wider context and get an idea of whether the research is peer reviewed. It also gives a chance to read associated information in editorials, etc, which often may be of interest. It is also a way for us to credit the journal.

We accept that linking to the specific research paper itself is often a desirable thing to do, and it is certainly something we will try to do more of in future. However, we don't believe that it is something we can do on every occasion - for instance many papers are available on the web via subscription only, while others give only an Abstract summary. In these instances, the vast majority of our readers would not be able to read the full papers, without paying for access, even if we provided the relevant link.

In addition, we do have finite resources, and our view is that our top priority should always be to provide authoratitive, accurate and attractive reportage. We have to balance that against the desirability of providing a link on a story which is likely to be of use only to a small number of our readers.

We have sent out new guidelines to reporting staff summarising our position, and stressing that linking to individual papers is something they should consider as an option on each story."

Which he (and I) thought was a bit rubbish. So it goes.

<comment><USER3> Wow, thanks for that. Those are exactly my feelings.

Incidentally, that (rubbish) response doesn't address the fact that at the very least they could include a citation without a link, exactly as the economist does when it discusses a research article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> People can engineer technologies on nanoscales, but they can't pretty much repair the human body to make it last forever.</comment>


Decipher an oracle bone character, earn $14,700 - <AUTHOR> http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2016-10/28/content_27203697.htm <comment><AUTHOR> "The oracle bone script (jiǎgǔ wén 甲骨文), which dates to around 1200 BC, represents the first-known stage of the Chinese writing system. Mysteriously, it seems to have arisen full-blown, without any as yet identifiable local precursors.

The two concluding paragraphs of the China Daily article offer both encouragement and a warning:

[The museum] encourages oracle bone enthusiasts to use cloud computing and Big Data to analyze and support their interpretation of a particular character."[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=29069#comments](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=29069#comments)</comment>


Ask HN: Looking for a Technical Co Founder for a B2C MarketNetwork - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Php, laravel, rest apis, machine learning, git, java, python.

And yes, marketing and business development is a huge part.

Trying a new marketing technique and the technical co founder should be very good at tracking user's behaviour to promote sales.

Let's connect if you are interested or recommend someone?

Cheers, stay safe!

</comment><comment><USER2> Not to sound condescending, but what skills or contacts, etc. would you bring to the table?

Don't get me wrong I believe marketing, business development is huge part of something like this. In fact I would argue its a bigger part than development.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Php, laravel, rest apis, machine learning, git, java, python. And yes, marketing and business development is a huge part. Trying a new marketing technique and the technical co founder should be very good at tracking user's behaviour to promote sales. Let's connect if you are interested or recommend someone? Cheers, stay safe! reply</comment></comment>


From Node.js to io.js and back again - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.christmas/2019/13 <comment><USER2> Seems like the fork was more for the way to govern the project and less about the tech itself

<comment><USER3> Yes, you are absolutely correct. It was mainly a governance issue that hindered further technical development.</comment></comment>


Friday's Most Read Letter: Ban Cryptocurrencies to Tackle Cyber Attacks (FT.com) - <AUTHOR> https://t.co/39kKNrSqli <comment><USER2> Also, ban the weapon industry to tackle wars.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure if this was flagged because of the subject matter or because of the use of the link shortener. Did you use a link shortener to bypass a paywall here, or for some other reason?</comment>


What's New in jQuery 3 - <AUTHOR> http://developer.telerik.com/featured/whats-new-in-jquery-3/ <comment><AUTHOR> Man, I remember when jQuery 1.0 was released. I didn't immediately switch, but I thought it was nice to have another library option. (I had previously hand- written basically 100% of my JS, including the DOM and AJAX stuff. I eventually caught on...)</comment>


K-means clustering using sklearn and Python - <AUTHOR> https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/k-means-clustering-using-sklearn-and-python-4a054d67b187 <comment><USER2> This just seems like an advert for a mailing list and some ML platform I've never heard of, the article content doesn't offer anything new over the million other beginner sklearn tutorials out there.

<comment><USER3> Yes and the bait and switch from business for flowers?

And K-means??? Why not HDBSCAN?

<comment><USER4> Each time somebody points out K-means, I show them this clustering benchmark by the scikit-learn project: [https://scikit- learn.org/stable/_images/sphx_glr_plot_cluste...](https://scikit- learn.org/stable/_images/sphx_glr_plot_cluster_comparison_001.png)

<comment><USER5> Any accompanying text for the image?

<comment><USER4> Yes, here's the context: [https://scikit- learn.org/stable/modules/clustering.html](https://scikit- learn.org/stable/modules/clustering.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I see a lot of people asking for more advanced notebooks.

Recently I was asked to participate in a competition to identify brain hemorrhages ([https://www.kaggle.com/c/rsna-intracranial-hemorrhage- detect...](https://www.kaggle.com/c/rsna-intracranial-hemorrhage-detection)). It turns out jhoward has published a lot of Kaggle notebooks walking through the entire process of gathering the data, cleaning it, implementing a learning algorithm, and submitting an entry.

If you're trying to do practical end to end machine learning, these are definitely worth studying.

Notebooks:

[https://www.kaggle.com/jhoward/from-prototyping-to- submissio...](https://www.kaggle.com/jhoward/from-prototyping-to-submission- fastai)

[https://www.kaggle.com/jhoward/cleaning-the-data-for- rapid-p...](https://www.kaggle.com/jhoward/cleaning-the-data-for-rapid- prototyping-fastai)

[https://www.kaggle.com/jhoward/some-dicom-gotchas-to-be- awar...](https://www.kaggle.com/jhoward/some-dicom-gotchas-to-be-aware-of- fastai)

[https://www.kaggle.com/jhoward/don-t-see-like-a- radiologist-...](https://www.kaggle.com/jhoward/don-t-see-like-a-radiologist- fastai)

The last one is particularly interesting, and proposes a new color map for seeing 65536 different greyscale values. Turbo is also an alternative: [https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/turbo-improved-rainbow- col...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/turbo-improved-rainbow-colormap- for.html)

<comment><USER7> I haven't looked at them carefully but two things jump out at me:

1) there is some very useful stuff there, particularly for someone new to consuming medical imaging data. The writeups are aiming to be fairly complete

2) there are some things jhoward is being naive, e.g. CT image scaling, where the advice could give you trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can implement it, albeit more slowly, in pure python using just 20-30 lines of code. I wrote a blog a while back showing how kmeans can be used to identify dominant colors in images. It has many applications and is a handy tool to use for roughly grouping data. Care is needed to pick the optimal starting centroids and _k_.

<comment><USER2> > You can implement it, albeit more slowly, in pure python using just 20-30 > lines of code.

This is a good exercise for anyone starting out learning about machine learning, but I'd always stick to a well known library if I was actually using it for something else.

> Care is needed to pick the optimal starting centroids and k.

Definitely, and I think that speaks to the laziness of the linked article that they just say "Use the elbow method" for choosing k. In my ~4 years of being a data scientist I've never seen or heard of this working for any "real world" problem. Metrics like silhouette scores are much more useful and quantifiable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are like a million blog style posts for these basic intro to ML with pandas & python type thing. It's so prevalent that I am starting to wonder what the motivation is?

<comment><USER10> They're basically just ads for whatever the author is selling, since you obviously couldn't just post a literal ad to hackernews, people make simple how to articles (they have to be simple to reach the most people) and post those instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I should start calling myself a ML expert? I'm 32 year old and most of these "ML algorithms" are called statistics for me. Maybe I'm missing something, where is the LEARNING on k-means? Numerical solutions seems to be on rise now.

Nice write for someone starting, more details about details of algorithm steps would greatly attract more readers.

<comment><USER12> >I should start calling myself a ML expert? I'm 32 year old and most of these "ML algorithms" are called statistics for me. Maybe I'm missing something, where is the LEARNING on k-means? Numerical solutions seems to be on rise now.

Yes, you can. I have studied statistics and I cringe at the watering down of what "machine learning" and "AI" has become; simple statistics.

>Nice write for someone starting, more details about details of algorithm steps would greatly attract more readers.

I disagree, making it even simpler would attract more readers. You see the same with Youtube tutorials that have 22 parts. The first part has 200.000 views, the second 150.000 and the 20th part only has 400 views or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This was one of the first lectures in my ML course back in university. We didn't even have pictures of grapes or the local farmers market back then. Also, we implemented this stupidly easy algorithm without any libraries.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sorry if I've hijacked the article, but is K-means really relevant? My teacher in 2008 enjoyed to use it for everything and it is very basic and easy to grasp, perhaps not even worth an article on it. Are people writing very amazing AI using it? So, why do people like writing about it so much?

<comment><USER15> Yes, very relevant. You dont always need advanced models. You can accomplish quite a bit with classic models. I used it for two separate customer projects recently in two different industries.

<comment><USER16> SVD is also simple and versatile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> john-rowa I liked the Elbow method implementation part, which is designed to help find the optimal number of clusters in a dataset. Thanks.

<comment><USER17> Did you create this account just to make a positive comment on this article?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are many developers who might not have done K means clustering or unsupervised learning at all. We should think about them as well. And I think the article did a good job of explaining related concepts. I liked it.

<comment><USER19> I don't know - he didn't explain how the algorithm works, what it does, or anything you couldn't just have gotten out of the scikit docs. Would have been much better if it actually described the algorithm or presented an implementation of it (which isn't that complex, BTW).</comment></comment>


Why capitalists hope you have a short memory - <AUTHOR> https://theweek.com/articles/841296/why-capitalists-hope-have-short-memory <comment><USER2> It's the communists who hope you have a short memory.</comment>


Waifu Labs – AI Generated Custom Waifus - <AUTHOR> https://waifulabs.com/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20511459](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20511459)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great! What about licensing? Can I use the generated "drawings: in games?</comment>


Panasonic creates artificial photosynthesis as efficient as real plants - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/news/panasonic-creates-artificial-photosynthesis-as-efficient-as-real-plants-20120731/ <comment><USER2> I am not a chemist, but wouldn't this have to produce oxygen as well?

       2HH0 + 2COO = 2HCOOH + O2</comment>


France confirms that Google must remove search results globally or face big fine - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2015/09/france-confirms-that-google-must-remove-search-results-globally-or-face-big-fines/ <comment><USER2> It's so tempting to imagine Google just shutting down operations in France, blocking all French traffic from using its products.

I wonder how CNIL would feel about its stance then.

<comment><USER3> I imagine the cost of shutting down datacenters/laying people off might even outweight paying any fines.

Google would take a huge economic hit (no businesses from an entire country purchasing ads...) but I can't help but wonder if the _country_ would take a larger economic hit than Google would.

It's a _very scary_ to know a company has that much power/control. It would be a huge economic setback for a country if Google decided to just up-and-go. Leave them with inferior search engines/products or force a population to use proxies/alternative methods to access Google at all.

I don't think its a good thing when a single company could strongarm an entire government.

<comment><USER4> > I don't think its a good thing when a single company could strongarm an > entire government.

You know what scares me more? That a megacorp seems to care more about human rights than a first world western government that professes to obsess over them.

<comment><USER3> Oh - and I agree there. In case my post seemed supportive of the U.K/Frances "Right to Censor Information". I don't agree with it in the slightest. From _where_ they are trying to argue from, I can at least _understand_ their viewpoint. I simply don't agree with it or how it is being done.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


UK Gov Admits Its Test and Trace System Is Unlawful - <AUTHOR> https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-government-admits-its-test-and-trace-programme-is-unlawful-12032136 <comment><AUTHOR> I misread this as 'admits its test and trace system is awful'. Both seem to be accurate.</comment>


NREL graph: Cost of solar headed for parity with coal & gas - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/slideshows/renewable-energy/important-graph-cost-solar-headed-parity-coal-and-gas/

<comment><USER2> How does sunshine figure into this graph, e.g. what assumptions were made about where the solar cells are deployed?</comment>


Why it's so hard to innovate in the e-mail space (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@collinmathilde/why-its-so-hard-to-innovate-in-the-e-mail-space-9874e08e3426 <comment><USER2> It's hard to make money in that space, yes.

I've considered merging mail and messaging, so that email protocols are used to do the things people do with instant messaging, Telegram and such. The first step is to get away from queuing mail.

A first step is a new kind of mail forwarder, one for machines that don't have local mailboxes (which is most non-mail servers). It acts as an SMTP server and client. When an email comes in, and the sender reaches the end of the DATA section, the forwarder checks its forwarding list to see where this mail is supposed to go. It opens a SMTP connection to the destination and sends the email. The incoming SMTP connection is held open while this is in progress. Any problems are reported back to the sender immediately with an SMTP status code. There are no bounce emails, no queuing, and no possibility of joe-jobs. All mail is handled immediately or rejected immediately. (This only applies to single-address messages, and only to "To" addresses. Everything else is bulk.)

The next step is an IMAP server which has the same immediate orientation. When it gets an incoming email, it sends a push notification to any connected clients, while holding the incoming connection open. If at least one client is responding, a SMTP success status is returned. Otherwise, you get some status such as 251 (User Not Local, Will Forward.)

Then, a threaded email client. It would help to have the convention that an email with subject but no text, text but no subject, or text the same as subject is displayed like an instant message.

All of these can be done independently, and are backwards-compatible. If you have all of them, email is equivalent to instant messaging - you can tell if it was delivered, it goes through immediately, and it works like a conversation.

Of course, there's no big-money startup in this.

<comment><USER3> I tried some similar things when making Zombition, but I found that blurring the line between email and instant message mainly results in a more complicated UI and more details for end users to remember. For example, with instant messages you generally have some status information about whether or not the other user is online, whether or not they may have read whatever you just sent them, and whether or not they're typing a reply. If you want to add that into a email interface, how do you indicate to your end users that another user will never have associated status information because their account is on a server that is incompatible with the method you proposed?

Plus the behavioral differences between email and instant message didn't blend well: was I going to wait in a mixed email/instant message conversation for a response, or was I going to move on to the other conversations in my inbox and send a reply or archive each so that I could move on to doing other things? And if I wanted to temporarily leave an instant-message-like conversation so that I could deal with some more email-like conversations, would the person I was chatting with know whether or not I would return?

Eventually I stepped back to look at what additional value a user gained by blurring instant message and email in this way. Fundamentally they're both asynchronous text-based communication, and the things you can actually do with them aren't strikingly different. The biggest difference is in the expectations that a user has for each.

Anyway I still wanted to "innovate in the email space", so I decided to go a more extreme route, and I made my own pull-based protocol (superficial similarities to IM2000 - [http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html](http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html)) that retains backwards compatibility with email while adding abilities like stateful plugins (JavaScript apps/widgets) that can share data through the new protocol, editing messages after they're sent (SMTP recipients receive the new version after the update), and inline replies to parts of messages to enable nested conversations. If you're interested, I posted it earlier this afternoon here ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10693535](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10693535)).

<comment><USER4> > inline replies to parts of messages to enable nested conversations.

Just to be sure: You know that that is really easy with email as it existed until about 20 years ago, including BBS networks, usenet, etc., and that it is still trivial with good email clients? That was a solved problem that made email really efficient, until some clueless developers and users came along and disinvented (is that a word?) the solution in order to make email easy to use (or so they claimed).

<comment><USER3> Actually I didn't know; thank you for telling me! (That also makes me realize that I could likely do it in a much easier way than I currently am...) What are the email clients that allow that kind of behavior?

<comment><USER4> Well, essentially, all of the traditional text-only clients do (such as Mutt, which is what I use), I think Thunderbird does as well, beyond that, no clue, but there probably are others.

Traditionally, if you chose to reply to an email, the mail client would put the mail you were responding to into your editor, with > marks in front of every line. The only socially acceptable way[1] to write your answer was to insert your responses in between those quoted lines, without > marks, and to delete everything of the original mail that was irrelevant to establish the context for the reply.

That's how easy it is.

Usually, a good mail client would also color quoted lines so that it's easy to see and read only the response lines in a received email, so you'd only have to read the quoted text if you weren't sure about the context.

Clueless developers and users around the turn of the millenium then somehow didn't understand the purpose of providing you with a quoted version of the email you replied to, and started putting the reply above the quoted mail, thus ending up sending a copy of the mail they just received back to the person they received it from ... and nobody seemed to notice how idiotic an idea that actually is, and so it became sortof the new norm in large parts of the internet to attach large blobs of completely useless and often close to unreadable text to every mail, up to the point where some people even invented justifications for the behaviour that mostly tend to describe how this "feature" allows them to work around the lack of proper thread handling in their mail clients.

Obviously, easy quoting traditionally relies on plaintext only mails with fixed (short) line length, but format=flowed encoding has since been invented (the original RFC is from 1999) to accomodate screens and windows of variable width while maintaining backwards compatibility with old clients.

[1] [https://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote2.html](https://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote2.html)

<comment><USER3> Ah right. I was meaning something more like this so that you can skip the quoting business entirely and have the visual hierarchy match the conceptual hierarchy: [https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/zombition- static/20151208...](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/zombition- static/20151208/inline-reply.gif)

> Clueless developers and users around the turn of the millenium then somehow > didn't understand the purpose of providing you with a quoted version of the > email you replied to, and started putting the reply above the quoted mail, > thus ending up sending a copy of the mail they just received back to the > person they received it from ... and nobody seemed to notice how idiotic an > idea that actually is, and so it became sortof the new norm in large parts > of the internet to attach large blobs of completely useless and often close > to unreadable text to every mail, up to the point where some people even > invented justifications for the behaviour that mostly tend to describe how > this "feature" allows them to work around the lack of proper thread handling > in their mail clients.

Yes, I think the rationale must run something like "What if user A deletes the entire conversation they were having with user B, and user B replies to the deleted conversation, but user A doesn't know what the reply is about because they deleted the entire conversation, have a terrible memory, and are too embarrassed to ask user B to explain what's going on? Let's just send the entire conversation as quoted text every time."

<comment><USER4> > Ah right. I was meaning something more like this so that you can skip the > quoting business entirely and have the visual hierarchy match the conceptual > hierarchy:

Well, if it's supposed to be compatible with all the HTML crap out there, and even most MUAs' broken encoding of plain text email, it might be hard, but in principle, I'd think this should actually be rather simple:

Simply specify an algorithm that defines how to segment a text/plain body into paragraphs and how to thus generate MIME object-scope IDs per paragraph (by simply numbering them) and use that same structure to provide UI elements per paragraph. Then, if the user writes a per-paragraph reply, generate a multipart/alternative body, with one text/plain part in traditional quoting style, optionally with format=flowed, and one alternative application/fancy- paragraph-foo part which contains in some sort of serialization format references to the message+paragraph IDs, that paragraph's text, and the corresponding reply text. This way, a receiving MUA that doesn't support application/fancy-paragraph-foo will display an ordinary quoted plaintext body, and also, if a communication partner uses different MUAs, you can still reply to an email sent using an MUA without application/fancy-paragraph-foo support and still have the feature work if the reply is then read in an MUA that does understand it. Also, including the text of the original paragraph makes sure you can still display a message sensibly when the displaying MUA doesn't have the mail it's in reply to - you'd just have to be careful to not misrepresent the authorship information as reliable.

> What if user A deletes the entire conversation they were having with user B, > and user B replies to the deleted conversation [...]

* g * (is there any way to escape asterisks to their literal meaning?!)

Well, the rationale I've heard is that it's easier to make sure new participants in a conversation can read up on what has happened so far ... which obviously would be solved far better by attaching a thread of message/rfc822 attachments when adding a new participant that the recipient could navigate using their MUA's usual UI instead of having to read a close to unreadable unstructured mess of emails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice article. But I think there are a few other things they missed out that make building an email client so difficult:

1\. Consistency. Okay, this is always going to be a problem, since rendering anything more than plain text in emails is a minefield that makes the bad old days of Internet Explorer vs Netscape Navigator look like a utopia. But people still expect their Amazon/eBay/Google/whatever account/confirmation emails to look decent, so you have to figure out a basic HTML parser as well. And then try and make it somewhat work with people who are designing their messages with stuff like Outlook's Microsoft Word engine in mind.

2\. Spam. I'm surprised this wasn't really mentioned in the article, but it's arguably the biggest issue any email provider, client developer or email server software maker has to deal with. You have to make sure your software can figure out what messages are unwanted, then either send them to the spam folder or delete them. Most startups don't have to figure that out, since their systems are closed and spam prevention can be done on sign up. Not so much if you're building an email client where any Tom, Dick or Harry can send messages to anyone with no real way to verify if they're human or not.

So yeah, few other issues.

<comment><USER6> Unless you're building an MTA from scratch, I feel like the spam problem is solved by addons the MTA has, like SpamAssassin for Postfix.

<comment><USER7> If I ever get a chance to revamp an email system I will probably use rspamd instead. Those "add-ons" are painful.

[https://rspamd.com](https://rspamd.com)

[https://rspamd.com/rspamd-slides.pdf](https://rspamd.com/rspamd-slides.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Check out Haraka, built by an old SpamAssassin developer (ie me). It's all that and has custom anti-spam features like the Karma plugin too. It's in place at some large installs (eg craigslist, who went from 20 postfix servers to just 7 Haraka servers).

<comment><USER7> I'll look into it, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm trying to build an email platform too, yes it's hard. But I thought it was only because I'm a beginner and 1 man team.

Some of the reasons why I think it's hard:

* I don't think security was a big deal to many of the mail applications when they were being built. I tried and gave up so many times trying to find a strong hashing algorithm that both dovecot and ruby supported. There was practically no documentation on this and it felt like I was venturing into territory never before seen.

* Parsing emails to be display correctly seems impossible. Sometimes emails have "<br>" in them and sometimes they have "\n". But what if the "\n" doesn't mean newline but it's just what someone wrote in the email? They come in a variety of mime types and formats. It sometimes seems impossible to do this.

* Not everyone uses the RFC standards! I thought the RFC said that a subject can only be 78 chars long. Yet I get emails all day long that go way beyond this which cause major problems in my code. AM I THE ONLY ONE AROUND HERE THAT CARES ABOUT RFCS?

<comment><USER7> Look at [http://archiveopteryx.org/badmail/](http://archiveopteryx.org/badmail/) for your storage backend.

Strict RFC implementation, email normalization. Bad emails won't kill your email client 30 years from now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> At a very high level, email is primarily used for discussions. With this view, successful innovation in the e-mail space requires innovation in the nature of discussions themselves. Tinkering around with better usability or feature improvements will not be sufficient to overcome the massive inertia of 'traditional e-mail'.

We are a startup that just launched ([https://tmail21.com](https://tmail21.com)) that aims to rethink the discussion itself. In our view, one of the major problems of e-mail (and chat for that matter) is that the discussions are not goal-oriented. So, discussions/threads can meander around with no outcome or accountability.

So, we enhance the notion of discussions to be goal-oriented.

Now, once one has the notion of goal-oriented discussions, a natural next step is to evolve a goal-oriented discussion into a Lean Process (which is basically a goal-oriented discussion with more structure) . Examples of a Lean Process might be a Blog Article process, a Product Deployment Process, a Feature Design Process, an Issue Escalation Process etc.

We've done all this in an email-LIKE interface. I guess we'll leave it to others to decide whether this constitutes innovation in the e-mail space :)

<comment><USER10> Pretty good endeavor that you essentially created a BPM application, that is only as if email used as a BPM platform which is seen prevailing in corporate than other enterprise tools (SAP, Oracle etc.)

I actually propose instead of re-inventing email, create addons to extend what email message can be used/read/interacted with. For example, high school teaching today has been reliant on gmail for offline homework assignment and discuss between teacher and kids. There are some tools in that space aggressively exploited by schools to conduct their "innovative" teaching efforts.

Gmail, or microsoft outlook would be the best go-to destination for the majority of who can afford an in-house IT team, or shadow IT in large enterprise who's tired of the lack of evolution from SAP, IBM etc.

Still, Gmail and outlook are slow in adopting or providing email as an open extendable platform for BPM application purpose.

Then there are everyday use of email other than BPM, notification, online purchase receipt, offline discussion, even transmitting files, photo etc. via email are somewhat common with email client.

The longevity of email is exactly the lack of rigor of the intended use of it, BPM or not, email is flexible to conduct any discussion to an open goal, or without a goal.

To understand email better, one has to compare email to SMS, and social media along with how mass used these tools.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for your insights bitcuration. I agree that email is flexible enough to do things like goal oriented discussions, but it is just so painful. The best one can do is fling attachments around and hope to get all the versioning right and avoid inadvertent branching.

TMail21 does other email-like things like transmitting files, notifications, full search etc.

It also does interesting things like giving every thread a unique tracking number, which allows it to be tied into the broader enterprise ecosystem. The idea is that just like the URL transformed the Internet (i.e. the web), Tracking numbers can transform 'email'. Now, TMails can be referred to from Chat, Voice, IM, Apps, Spreadsheets etc.

Another thing we do that is very hard to do in email is things like Certified Mail, Certified Forwards, Transactional Guarantees, Certified Diffs, Non- repudiable audit trails etc.

All of these capabilities are however means to an end to make TMail21 the first true BPM tool for regular business users (rather than for coders and 'process analysts)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are tons of reasons why this is so hard. Leaving aside all of those there are 2 that I see as the biggest:

* A 100x improvement over current email is needed for a switch.

* It has to be 100x cheaper than the current product.

While you can't multiply by 0 and I meant that facetiously, users won't pay for the software or only niche consumers. Which is why email providers that get paid focus on things like security, collaboration and and backup. These products are essentially 90% other things and 10% email. examples:

* dropbox * slack * telegram * silent circle * sms

obviously I am not going to name everything in the space. I can't think of a company that has email at it's core. maybe 'hushmail' or some small encrypted mail providers but what profitable business is at it's core an email provider

<comment><USER12> MailChimp? Constant Contact? I may be wrong, I'm not terribly familiar with either, but I believe they're largely focused on email.

<comment><USER13> Mailchimp and such aren't for everyday emailing between you and me. They're for emailing large lists of users one email a day or week or whatever and using tracking information based off referral links users click on in the email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why are messages separated by transport? That is, why are messages sent to/from me via one transport (e.g., SMTP) read and composed in one application, and those sent via another transport (e.g., SMS, Twitter) read and composed in another? Why, as a user, do I give %#@%! what the underlying transport is?

I think the focus on a particular technology (SMTP) rather than a service (messaging) is why email clients don't advance. Bizarrely, three other transports often are integrated into email clients: NNTP, voicemail, and fax. I can only guess that it's because of a completely arbitrary reason: They are older.

Probably chat clients should also be integrated. I should be able to send my contacts an instant or time-shifted message.

<comment><USER15> Because the different transports have vastly different abilities and limitations that are a source of frustration if you attempt to obfuscate the differences between them and aren't served by a unified UI?

<comment><USER14> Could you be more specific? For example, comparing SMS and SMTP, the two most prominent transports?

<comment><USER3> SMS is used to send tiny chunks of text, and SMTP can be used to send message content in HTML format and rich text in addition to plaintext. I haven't worked much with rich text format, but HTML format for sure would be relatively impractical via SMS (XML adds a lot of characters, so you would have a lot of little chunks to send if you wanted to send HTML over SMS).

<comment><USER14> I agree with that. I don't mean that I want to send my email messages visa SMS. I mean that I want all my messages sent/received and read in one messaging client, whether they are transported via SMS, SMTP, etc. If the HTML message should go via SMTP, I expect my software to deal with that. I want the content; the transport is an obscure detail for developers to worry about (speaking as a typical end user).

<comment><USER16> You're asking for a magic genie content router that does not exist. It does not exist because _its a hard problem_. Not only would you need to interoperate with open standards, you'd have to attempt to integrate with unwilling participants (Facebook, Google Hangouts). Are you prepared for that level of pain?

<comment><USER17> You also have to consider that facebook already do this. They tried to wrap up email, messages and an SMS replacement on your phone into a single package where they own the whole thing.

I look at iMessage and I think it works pretty perfectly, SMS when no internet or to a non apple user, iMessage whenever possible. What I want is for whatsapp (and I suppose facebook and plausibly email) to do the same all in my single messenger application.

But. Ignoring the need to get the tech owners to consent to this new "trillian", I'd also have to trust the app itself. Good luck making money on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It will be easier to build a new email spec that's more feasible/modern with security built in mind than it is to build a sustainable email client that tries to comply with various email services (GMail is the worst offender for not being consistent with IMAP spec).

Mailmate is my fav OS X client that focues more on power user features but it has a boring classic interface which doesn't bother me at all. Despite having integration support with SMIME/PGP, Markdown reply, powerful search features, and so on that makes me productive, the only thing I hear when I recommend this to other people is that its UI is ugly. :|

<comment><USER19> It's not as ugly as Thunderbird or a web-app. At least it follows most of the OS X conventions. Anyway the existence of Mailmate shows how the premise in the article is totally wrong - it's not hard to create a decent modern email client - it already exists and only takes one developer.

A better title would be: Why is it so hard for users to use a good email client?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't this taking a somewhat narrow definition of "the e-mail space"? Slack, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. all seem like successful innovations that lots of people use to communicate instead of email.

</comment><comment><USER21> The biggest problem is that E-mail demography tends to be broader than many of the other services.

Some of E-mail users are very conservative and specific about how they handle their E-mail. (Some of which are very risky behavior, which I actually tried to correct by explaining why that's bad idea, but ultmately given up...)

There are demography between novice and expert. Novices tend to not care about changes so much; some even won't notice changes, as long as features are somehow accessible. Experts may have some particular tastes, but they'd be quick to find solutions to change things around when they have to. But people in between tend to be very vocal about any changes and they can't (or not willing) to find and accept "solutions" \-- they will be the first one to complain when UI elements like buttons shift around the screen. Unfortunately, as universal E-mail gets, a lot of E-mail users fall under category. (Though, in different ways, "experts" can be very particular about how they handle things can be very stubborn when there's no good reason presented to change -- but it's a bit different context.)

I can't even imagine how tough it will be to migrate some of people I know to anything other than what they are used to.

</comment><comment><USER22> As the article mentions Unibox: If somebody is interested in giving the beta version of Unibox for iOS a try, send me an email: email@example.com.

Unibox groups emails by person. It's different, but it really helps you staying organized.

[https://www.uniboxapp.com](https://www.uniboxapp.com)

</comment><comment><USER23> Because. It. Doesn't. Need. It. Email isn't broken.

<comment><USER24> Not necessarily broken, but certainly outdated. What do you think about spam, encryption, attachment sizes?

Imagine being able to publish your email address online without worrying about spam; even in your profile you've been forced to obfuscate your own a little. Or to know that every message you send can only be read by the recipient and nobody in-between - without having to explain PGP to non-techs. Or being able to send a 50-100MB file without resorting to third party or public hosting - any of those features would be a bonus, in my view.

Not broken, but can be improved, don't you think?

<comment><USER23> You make a good point. Why would I obfuscate like that? My email is out there in git logs, mailing list logs, lists stolen from other websites, lists bought from other websites.

I can't see that encryption will ever work end-to-end as we want. People are too stupid to learn most things. Technical solutions rely on big corporations that we trust to do the Right Thing(TM). The Right Thing(TM) is impossible from US companies and probably impossible from European companies.

Attachments. I don't remember the last time I sent a large one. As far as I know most of the size limitations are artificially implemented by companies that don't want to spend that much on storage. Other limitations such as Gmail's block on executables is because people are stupid and will run everything they get sent.

People will never not be stupid so we can never have nice things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Such a great timing for this post, as Dropbox announced that they are shutting down Mailbox: [https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2015/12/saying-goodbye- to-...](https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2015/12/saying-goodbye-to-carousel- and-mailbox/)

</comment><comment><USER26> E-mail as a paradigm has been optimized about as far as it can be. We need a new paradigm. It shouldn't look like e-mail.

Google Wave was an attempt, but the chemistry wasn't right. Someone one will find the right mix...

</comment><comment><USER27> Mixmax. Unrollme. Sanemail. Zapier mail parser. There is more innovation taking olace than many realize.

</comment><comment><USER28> This isn't thats complicated:

Because email is dying and is already mostly optimized.

<comment><USER29> Email is most certainly not dying.

<comment><USER28> Yes it most certainly is on a secular decline. It is no longer growing at rates that are keeping up with the online user base. New internet users are no longer even setting up email accounts.

Email is dying. Its not dead, but it is no longer the go-forward internet communication platform.

<comment><USER30> > New internet users are no longer even setting up email accounts.

What percentage of new internet users do not have any email accounts? I haven't been able to find any reliable data.

<comment><USER31> Seems like a strange claim, considering many sites that new internet users use will not let you sign up without an email account

<comment><USER30> I agree. I'm skeptical and would like to see what data might support that claim. I've not been able to find any myself.

<comment><USER28> 1.2 Billion Whatsapp users with phone number only

800 Million Messengers users as phone number only

20+ Apps with 100m + users as phone number only.

Together these PN based winners outstrip the combined usage of almost all web apps. I mean you are all downvoting me -- but its kind of funny how out of the loop the thinking is here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why do people blog about what their company is building without so much as mentioning the name of their company or product or even a hyperlink?

In the author profile at the very bottom of the page, in small letters, there is a URL (but not a link) to

[https://frontapp.com/](https://frontapp.com/)

and the email client the author works on is apparently called Front. But why should her readers ever care about that?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. When I wrote this article I was more interested in replying to Des Traynor's article than promoting our product. I've added a link (even if I'm not sure people care)

<comment><USER33> Front is a great product. It lets us manage emails and SMS support together!</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: RandomStartup.org – Refresh the page to discover another startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.randomstartup.org/ <comment><USER2> When is a startup no longer a startup?

Should mint.com (acquired by Intuit five years ago after raising thirty million in five rounds) or redfin.com (ten years old, and has raised a hundred million dollars in seven rounds) really be considered startups?

<comment><USER3> I think a reasonable point at which to consider startups just normal companies is upon IPO or acquisition. That's certainly the end goal for most startups, and when the structure really changes.

<comment><USER4> ...unless they don't IPO, or they aren't acquired. Hopefully there are less grim options for startups to be validated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks like a collection of startups whose web site is vulnerable to click jacking [1]: they all allow to be embedded in an iframe.

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

<comment><USER6> Seems crazy that sites need to individually opt in to anti-Clickjacking with CSP, instead of modern browsers disabling it by default.

In other cases, the default is to not let a page mix origins: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-origin_policy#Cross- Origin...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-origin_policy#Cross- Origin_Resource_Sharing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought this is a really good startup generator, until I realized it's real ...

<comment><USER8> Same here. A generator was posted a few days ago and it took me a couple of startups to realize this was not a (far) better generator. Great initiative though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Simple and useful, very cool.

One thing I thought was interesting as I was clicking around was how so many of the sites have "converged" to a single UI design style, e.g. full screen photo background overlaid with a short blurb about the site, and a big slightly rounded-rectangular "start" button (sometimes some text fields), then as you scroll down you usually get a couple horizontally laid out big icons, etc. etc.

Of course, this isn't surprising, but it just becomes so apparent as you click refresh. Just thought it was interesting, that's all.

<comment><USER10> Most sites seem to look like a Bootstrap template, even if they don't use Bootstrap.

<comment> vhost- Just goes to show the impact those guys from Twitter have made. Whether that's a positive thing or a negative thing, it is still massive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very addictive and a neat way to see what is going on out there with a quick browse.

I'd suggest more modern look and feel for the top bar, maybe something like a black bkgd with opacity? Currently it pulls the feel of the site down a bit.

</comment><comment><USER12> A mechanism to flag sites as 'not a start-up' would be good. There are already sites like 9gag and upworthy in the mix. (4 & 144)

<comment><USER13> What counts as a startup? Both 9gag and Upworthy raised many VC millions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Neat! It's like Stumbleupon for Startups. Also, I tried to add mine, but it's restricted?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, it's restricted :| I'll fix it soon. Sorry for the inconvenience.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's fixed now!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was thinking on making something like this, I am happy you beat me to it. Just remember, this should be used for discovery.

Scratch that, google docs for submittal :) seriously?! Even graduates from devbootcamp's can do 100 times better and we should give them some slack.

<comment><USER16> What's wrong with Google docs for submitting? By using it he was probably able to whip this site up in a few hours instead of a day or two. Why waste time building something you won't end up pursuing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good job! How do you check if the startup's site can be embedded into your iframe?

<comment><USER18> i check for the x-frame-header

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice, simple, and addictive! If you don't mind, adding it to startuplister.com

</comment><comment><USER20> It is kind of addicting.

1)The top bar can be improved.

2) Hackerrank constantly refreshes for me. Some sites do not load properly.

3) Lots of startups appear again, if a startup site has been shown can it be removed from the queque?

</comment><comment><USER21> You could add a link to the startup in question to the panel. Sometimes the startup's page doesn't have a clear link to click on.

EDIT: Noticed that you can click the #<number>

</comment><comment><USER22> I actually like this. Although it "feels" a bit slow when loading up the page, its compensated with a smooth scrolling experience which is not choppy.

</comment><comment><USER23> Strangely enough, the first startup that was shown is the only startup from Arkansas that has gone to Y. I am a developer in Arkansas. Creepy.

<comment><USER24> It's just a coincidence. The selection of the startup to show is done randomly on each request.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Similar to: [http://startuptabs.com/tab/](http://startuptabs.com/tab/)

<comment><USER18> Yup, there's also a chrome extension available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Would be good if considers user location. I'm not interested in startups outside of my country =)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've built this over the weekend so that I get a chance to play around with Node.js

<comment><USER27> Awesome. Hook it up to Angel List and you'll have made a fun sweepstakes investment game for VCs. How do you add a startup?

<comment><USER28> Definitely! Angel List has a really simple REST API, it shouldn't be hard to do.

I used it with my (fake) EdTEch Startup Generator[1], to check if my fake startup is actually a real startup. I was surprised how often it happens.

[1] [http://eduwampus.herokuapp.com](http://eduwampus.herokuapp.com) *

* May load a little slow, it's on Heroku free tier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Everything looks fine. Please try to modify the css of the top frame. It looks little old. You can try modern flat colors.</comment>


People seem to think Corona beer is related to the deadly coronavirus outbreak - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-corona-beer-not-related-google-trends-2020-1 <comment><USER2> Business insider doesn't know what a meme is? People are probably just trying to find images and not remembering which beer. My ad hoc guess isn't worse than theirs at any rate.</comment>


Show HN: Backmail – Automated Gmail backups - <AUTHOR> https://backmail.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hi All ,

After reading across various comments in HN about google locking email accounts, and people setting up Gmvault for backing up gmail at home servers, i started working on this side project , which is ready to be Show HN'ed - Backmail - [https://backmail.io](https://backmail.io) . Backmail is a service, which helps you take a regular backup of your Gmail accounts (both personal and custom domain gmail accounts). Lot of exciting features are planned in future (like restore to another account with a single click , personal encryption key, 2FA etc), but would very much like to get your feedback on this MVP.

Thanks in Advance, OP</comment>


Regarding Objective-C & Copland 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/168

<comment><USER2> In 2005 I heartily agreed with John Siracusa.

From early 2006 to late 2010 I worked for Apple.

Now, I'd have to say that I disagree. True, technology is a treadmill. What Apple has gotten really good at, though, is moving the treadmill forward instead of running just to stay in the same place.

Everyone knows that computers get cheaper, right? See a model you like; wait 6 months; and buy it for 20-50% less. Not with Apple, though. Instead Apple just keeps the price the same and moves the specs up.

Same, too, with the technology. While everyone else is out there writing hyper-super-parallel-concurrent-evented-message-passing-functional-object- oriented-metapseudotemplate code, Apple is writing code the same way today that they did in 2000...except this time it's running on the computer in your pocket instead of the tower on your desk.

I get it, though. We're engineers. We love design. So we buy Apple kit and we would love to believe that our preferred brand has the same values we do. It certainly did. This is, after all, the company that Woz founded, that employed Raskin and Kay, that still employes Bud Tribble...but I, personally, think that the "glory days" of Apple/NeXT's preeminence in core software are behind them. Of course, UI? UX? Hardware? That's where Apple's engineering focus lies now.

Copland 2010 was avoided not because Apple did something about it, but because they changed the rules completely.

</comment><comment><USER3> Objective-C has many good features - native strings is not one of them. There is no syntactic support for appending two strings by a simple '+', for example NSString* myString = @"This is a " + "string.";

That simple omission introduces a large amount of pain when working with Objective-C for a large class of applications - especially web-aware, but also including code that parses files.

It's the same story with regards to regular expressions - yes there are libraries that can do the job, but they just aren't as pleasant to use as regexps are in the various scripting languages - python, ruby, perl, javascript, etc, where regular expressions are first-class

<comment><USER4>
       NSString *myString = @"This is a" @" string.";

Adjacent string constants are concatenated by the preprocessor. Otherwise, I don't think it's too much hassle to call stringByAppendingString:.

<comment><USER5> True, but adjacent string _constants_ is a totally insane use case that essentially doesn't ever happen. I think the poster was talking about the far more common case of concatenating string _variables_ :

        NSString *foo = @"Hello, " + userName + @"! (^_^)";

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In his podcast, Siracusa also outlines a possible gradual transition to MacRuby, where MacRuby is more of a bridge at first and gets more and more native implementations of Cocoa classes as time moves on. In the end, Obj-C would get deprecated and all the cool stuff would be happening in MacRuby.

Having worked with Cocoa, Ruby and PyQt, I would really really like to see that!

As others have said though, this is a somewhat unlikely future right now.

<comment><USER7> With multiple MacRuby apps shipping in the Mac App Store right now, and rumors of iOS support in the near future, it doesn't seem completely unlikely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Re: Automatic memory management

Siracusa himself concedes in his podcast that Obj-C has garbage collection, but that it was something of a second class citizen. Because garbage collection has been tacked on (and currently not supported on iOS) old pros are unlikely to adopt it. On top of that, newbies who look to the old pros for guidance are going to follow their lead and not use it either.

Siracusa also used the same argument against Obj-C's dot syntax.

<comment><USER9> I think people will adopt garbage collection when it is available for iOS. It is just easier to write without when you might use your libraries in both an iOS and OS X product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like ruby but really don't like the selection syntax mapping used <http://www.macruby.org/documentation/tutorial.html>

It doesn't nest as well and you have to look at two different syntaxes to see one selector. I kinda wish they had done something like object.[selector:value selector2:value2]

</comment><comment><USER10> This is one of the best-written articles on Mac development I've ever read.

</comment><comment><USER11> _The Cocoa APIs basically simply ask the developer to fill out a form when they're asked to do so. I'm not sure how much more higher level and abstracted one can get without relinquishing control of how the data is displayed._

It's been successfully achieved with Convention Over Configuration. See MacRuby's HotCocoa.

</comment><comment><USER12> Regarding concurrency:

      [[^ (Foo*) (Foo* bar) { return bar; } copy] autorelease]

is a pretty ugly way of writing a lambda. It's like arguing that java can pass functions via anonymous classes. Yes, technically you can but it's pretty ugly.

Another underlying problem is that the only language that can call Obj-C libraries is Obj-C.

.NET and the JVM solved this problem long ago, I know that Python/Perl/Ruby also have this problem outside of the JVM/CLR.

As far as GC, Obj-C effectively doesn't have it as most Obj-C outside of Apple is written for iOS which doesn't support GC.

You could create a point system and call Obj-C a modern language but working with it feels anything but. Apple doesn't need any serious rewrite, they need to make MacRuby work on the iPhone. That's it.

<comment><USER13> Objective-C can sometimes be pretty verbose, yes, but that's a very contrived block example, especially since it doesn't really relate to concurrency in any way.

A more real-world example employing blocks with GCD would be:

      dispatch_queue_t queue =
        dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_DEFAULT, 0);

      dispatch_async(queue, ^{
        // do some time-consuming work
        dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue() ^{
          // do stuff on the main thread, like updating UI
        });
      });

That's actually pure C. Typical block usage with Cocoa would be something like:

      [myArray enumerateObjectsWithOptions:NSEnumerationConcurrent
                                usingBlock:^(id obj, NSUInteger idx, BOOL *stop) {
        // do something with obj concurrently
      }];

<comment><USER12> Can you really do the latter in Obj-C? As I understood it you needed to copy and autorelease the block to move it from stack allocation to heap allocation.

<comment><USER13> That's right, but if the receiver needs to have the block on the heap for whatever reason, it's his responsibility to take care of that. Blocks are really no different from any other method argument.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Joel Spolsky: The Day My Industry Died - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090701/joel-spolsky-the-day-my-industry-died.html

<comment><USER2> Waiwaiwaiwaiwaiwait...

What about CityDesk? Wasn't that your first product? Did you really go straight from consulting to a successful product, or did you have a second false start? How'd you guys navigate that?

I know the Inc. audience probably doesn't need the details, but I'd be interested in them.

<comment><USER3> The order was 1) consulting, 2) FogBugz, 3) CityDesk. FogBugz was a side project that grew into a successful product, CityDesk was the first intentional product but it was not successful.

<comment><USER4> Are you sure?

From <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000009.html> (October 2001):

"I've been rather quiet lately on this weblog -- mainly because we've been working so hard at Fog Creek getting ready for the beta of CityDesk, our flagship product."

I have been reading Joel on software for quite a long time, I remember reading that fogbugz was just their home-grown brug tracking system, not intended to be a real "product" at the beggining.

I also remember how Joel used to argue that citydesk would win because no one would like to write a blog using a web interface...

<comment><USER3> FogBugz 1.0 shipped November 2000 (<http://www.foundersatwork.com/joel- spolksy.html>)

Version history (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FogBugz#Version_History>)

Version 2.0 - March, 2001

Version 3.0 - November, 2002

Version 3.1 - February, 2003

Version 4.0 - December, 2004

Version 5.0 - March, 2006

Version 6.0 - August, 2007

Version 7.0 - July, 2009

<comment><USER2> <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000013.html> clears all this up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A nice read but a badly titled article. The truth is Web Consultancy is probably 10,000 times bigger than it was in 2000 it's just decentralized now. So yeah, if you're trying to make it in the bay area as a web consultant you probably don't stand a chance. But elsewhere there's about as much opportunity as you're willing to try for.

The truth is it's so big now that it (sadly) manages to sustain a fairly significant underbelly of complete incompetents along with all the qualified people.

<comment><USER6> I totally agree with you, but they almost _feel_ like different industries. Back then, old media and F500 companies _had_ to hire the consultants because there was no one in-house to do it. Today, most of those corps have entire departments devoted to web design/app development. Sure, they still outsource some gigs, but it seems like the consultancy industry now focuses on smaller companies (even down to the mom-and-pop level).

<comment><USER7> Anecdote from 1996 in the UK, back when web consultancy was still relatively small, but growing: fma (my employer at the time) bid for one web design job against competition. When we got the job, we learned that our bid was the highest by a factor of two! And we got the job because we were "reassuringly expensive"!

Folks who don't understand a new field will throw money at it because they want a serious professional to hold their hand. As the old 80s aphorism put it, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"; an executive at an FT100 company, dabbling in the web for the first time, would _expect_ to spend lots of money at the steep start of the learning curve. But once they began to get a clue about how difficult (or easy) the job really was, they'd start to play hardball.

And that's what the early web consultancies didn't understand: they were living on borrowed time, and basing their growth on a commodity that could only scale linearly (web developer/programmer hours).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I got a job offer from aD back in the day... went for a walk w/ Greenspun + Alex to talk about it. I didn't like how everyone at the company's ego seemed to depend so entirely on programming ability (I was fresh out of college and cared about these things a lot).

His response? "At least it's a meritocracy!"

Not a bad answer, really. I am glad to have participated in that time (1998-2000) + place (Boston).

</comment><comment><USER9> The late 90's was a great time to be alive, and it taught me one lesson that still guides me today:

The dot-com boom was a goldrush, and if you look back to the Klondike goldrush 100 years previous you can notice a pattern. There were two groups of individuals who got rich back then: The guys that got there first, and the guys that sold shovels to everybody else.

It's hard to be that First Guy, but it's easy to notice him and set up a shovel stand.

<comment> brown9-2 This is true of all bubbles. It's what makes a bubble a bubble. See: Housing bubble of mid 2000s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The day I knew things were in trouble was at a party in San Francisco (fall 2000). A recruiter for a "hot new start up" was trying to hire my friend, a history major, as a programmer that did not have to program, guaranteeing that he would make "75k" starting. If he hit his recruitment numbers, a big bonus was in store. He may have been drunk but was sober enough to give my buddy a business card and rough directions to the office.

One of my favorite stories from _those_ days.

<comment><USER11> As an aside - Just because someone is a history major, it doesn't mean they can't program. (Given how many things seem to be invented, then forgotten, then recreated from scratch and shown off as the new hot breakthrough every few years, the field could benefit from caring more about its history.)

<comment><USER12> The problem with that is exactly as Peter Norvig states: learn programming in ten years[1]. I would not argue that some great programmers have never had any formal training. But they worked hard. Really hard. For a _long_ time. To believe that someone who has never touched a programming language before is ready for a developer job after a couple weeks, a couple months, or even as much as a year is just ridiculous.

When CS _grads_ can't even program for years after graduation, the solution is not to bring in people with even _less_ training.

[1]<http://norvig.com/21-days.html>

<comment><USER11> While I'm just one data point, I was a history major, and _I've been programming since I was six_. I already knew C, C++* , Perl, Python, and small bits of other stuff, and majoring in CS to learn Java didn't seem appealing. I majored in history (with a focus on history of science and medicine) and continued teaching myself on the side.

While majoring in CS correlates with previous programming experience, it isn't an absolute indicator. College is probably too late to learn the fundamental techniques and mindset of programming, anyway.

* Inasmuch as anybody can really know C++...

<comment><USER13> Huh. I first learned programming as an undergrad. Why do you think it is too late?

[Edit] Anyway, I think that depends on whether said CS major applied himself in college, don't you? I do have friends who graduated out of CS (well, actually we were in CE, but it's close enough) without knowing, or later forgetting, the difference between a class and a function (true story, that. he asked me that question about a year after working in the industry as a "consultant". the bugger works in a big IT consulting firm you've probably heard of). On the other hand, I discovered programming in university, got interested, and kept pushing. I don't claim to be a programming god or anything, but I do at least know how to do fizzbuzz. :)

It also depends on what sort of programming you're doing. If you're talking about typical web apps, then yes, I would agree with you that experience rules. Knowledge of the tools used in that trade are more important than anything a CS course could teach you. However, let's say you do crypto, or write 3D animation software, or any serious number-crunching/algorithmic app. That's an entirely different ball game. I'm sure there are hackers out there who are autodidacts in advanced algorithms, but CS training _helps_.

Should have made this shorter. In summary, it's never too late and formal CS training helps (if you have interest).

<comment><USER11> It's not impossible - many older hackers learned to program in college because computers were inaccessible to the public - but the people who haven't tried to learn on their own are years behind, and (perhaps worse) less curious/motivated/used to teaching themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> old-gregg Say all you want about Joel the programmer, but Joel the writer is awesome.

Sadly, we're in exactly the same situation right now: after almost 2 years of exsiting life of self-funded young company in NYC, suddenly most of our customers did not renew, our recurring revenue is being consumed by medical insurance and rent and we're brainstorming on new business ideas... This piece gives me hope, because living off your savings in NYC is scary-scary! :)

BTW if someone is working on something cool in NYC let me know [see my profile].

</comment><comment><USER14> I still have my CueCat somewhere :)

It's interesting the idea is sort of making a comeback with QR codes and cell phone readers. Perhaps CueCat was just far ahead of it's time (and flawed by not being portable)

<comment><USER15> I have a couple as well, one still plugged into to my PC at work. I never understood why people thought it was such a terrible idea.

<comment><USER16> Cause of the whole chicken <-> egg problem. No-one will use CueCats unless there are lots of those barcodes online. The barcodes wont appear in significant numbers online unless everyone has a CueCat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This story is kind of more of the same and I'm sure a lot of the readers here have heard it before; if not about Joel in particular, than at least about ArsDigita and Razorfish and this era of the tech boom in general.

What IS interesting though is his mention of the Startup.com documentary. If you haven't seen it, and have any kind of passing interest in the startup space or starting your own web company, I strongly suggest you check it out. It's fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER18> There's something about the stories told by Joel that always feel more down to earth than the typical sensationalist blog write up. Good read.

<comment><USER19> I thought it was a little dry, even for Joel, who isn't terribly interesting. He sure knows how to sell a/his product, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It is strange that City Desk never gets mentioned: <http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/>

From what I recall, that was the primary product and FogBugz was an in-house tool used to track it.

<comment><USER21> Joel uses his articles as marketing tools. FogBugz makes money and CityDesk is part of that industry that died.

<comment><USER22> How is CityDesk part of the dead industry? I thought it was basically blogging software. That industry was just being born at that time.

<comment><USER23> It was Site Publishing software written as a Windows GUI application that generates static files.

At least it wasn't as mindbogglingly stupid as Dave Winer's MacOS/Win32 desktop/server programming-language/blogging-platform/outliner floor- wax/desert-topping

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> These inc articles are just re-hashing stuff that you can read in "Founders at Work" or even Joel's blog. It's a bit disappointing actually.

<comment><USER25> Joel built his business by relating Microsoft gossip and telling programmers what they wanted to hear. It's a marketing blog. Now that his customers are businessmen, he's telling them what they want to hear, in a forum they're likely to read.

<comment><USER26> "Joel built his business by relating Microsoft gossip and telling programmers what they wanted to hear."

I'm pretty sure programmers don't want to hear "you need to be writing functional specs" [<http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html>], "you don't know enough about Unicode" [<http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>], "if you don't 'get' pointers and recursion, you just ain't cut out to be a programmer" [[http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.ht...](http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html)], or "you should never scrap a working codebase and start all over" [<http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html>]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> _The immediate problem all those consultancies faced in 1999 and 2000 was that, like ArsDigita, they couldn't find enough great software developers to handle all the new business they were bringing in, so they had to turn away clients._

I thought the trouble was that they were hiring so many people that they couldn't keep the same company culture and in the end the software devs became outsourceable?

<comment><USER28> In 1999, ArsDigita was never more than 40 people (and probably started the year with less than 20). It's possible at that time that they were turning away business. I joined in Jan 2000. By August the company was over 200 and the sales stream was collapsing. They had massively overshot the demand of the market. (Largely because the market they were serving was other dot-coms, which were now in the process of imploding.)

To keep all those people busy, and in an attempt to shift from a services company to a product company, a "core engineering" team was created with the task of rewriting the ACS in Java. This further exacerbated the revenue stream problems, because the version of the software we used for client projects was now stagnant, making it harder to get or keep contracts.

In the end the rewrite was never finished before the money ran out, although I think it did live on for a while as some sort of RedHat offering. (The "assets" of the company were bought by RH in the end.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> And in the late nineties everybody was making content management systems. Two of my web content management systems became products.

</comment><comment><USER30> Probably one of the more inspirational postings I've seen on HN in awhile. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER31> Oh my god Joel has Spoken. Must worship etc etc. Seriously - why do people genuinely wait on his every word? Atwood is the same!

All they do is spurge illogical capitalist business nonsense for the sake of making a few pounds/dollars/yen etc. The blog is a marketing medium for their products and their mindset. They constantly contradict (think Joel on simplicity a while back).

What about people who do this because they like it and want to help people. What about those people and their motivations. The altruistic nature surrounding these people is far more important than the self-important blog pimps.

And yes CityDesk and FogBugz are crap. CityDesk is a chunk of jumk reminiscent of MCMS 2002. FogBugz is FlySpray with some tartyness and some cost added. So whoopee doo.

<comment><USER31> Modded to -2. Thou must not insult those who are holier than thou.

<comment><USER32> As a matter of fact, the social mores around here prohibit insulting _anybody_. You can disagree, but it must be done respectfully.

<comment><USER31> I noticed. My last 4 posts have been a semi-trolling attempt to see how people react. It's a good indicator on if I can be bothered to read the comments in future.

<comment><USER32> Ahem. news.yc is not here for you to run experiments on. People who don't participate in good faith tend to get banned.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Navajo Nations first solar project is producing enough power for about 13k homes - <AUTHOR> http://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/energy/2017/08/29/navajo-nations-first-solar-project-now-producing-electricity-13-000-homes/613443001/ <comment><USER2> It appears the cost was about $2.20 per watt: it cost $60M and is rated 27.3 MW ([https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/kayenta-solar- project-...](https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/kayenta-solar-project- operational-sending-power-grid/))

<comment><USER3> Seems kind of expensive. Isn't more like $1/watt the norm?

<comment><USER4> You've got to compare solar powered apples to solar powered apples.

The article reads as though the $60 million is fully installed and commissioned.

Sounds like your $1/watt is for the panels only?

<comment><USER5> Module cost this year is about $.35/W.

<comment><USER4> Right, but the solar panels aren't much use to anyone sitting in a dispatch bay at the manufacturer in China.

You'll probably want to get them freighted to the installation site, screwed down to a support frame, wired up to an inverted, connected to a load and / or the grid.

This may drive the price up somewhat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The contractor hired and trained about 200 Navajos to build the plant, said > Deenise Becenti, a spokeswoman for the tribal utility, leaving a qualified > workforce for other projects.

This will be interesting to see how it plays out in future projects. I also wonder what they received for training / certifications. It was probably a requirement of their TERO.</comment>