Curation is the New Search is the New Curation - <AUTHOR> http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/01/curation_is_the.html <comment><USER2> Chrome just needs to put a 'mark as spam' button right in the browser which could then be used to augment their current ranking system.

Isn't that pretty much how spam filtering for email works? If enough people say something is garbage, it goes in the toilet. The user is still free to look in the toilet, but usually they don't need to.

<comment><USER3> This isn't necessarily false, but I think it's too simplistic to work well. How long before it too is being gamed?

The current PageRank system is essentially that the creators of web content vote for what ranks highly based on what they link to, with the strength of their vote based on the strength of their incoming votes. Seeing that this difficult to compromise system is falling to pieces, I worry that an easy to game system such as you suggest will be laid to waste within days.

Email filtering is a bit different, since you can only vote down the things that you've been sent. It's difficult for you to mark your competitors correspondence as spam since you never have a chance to vote on it. Whereas with search, you can vote on anything you choose to search for.

There's also the question of whether it's really in Google's best interest to remove the spam. It's a plausible argument that they have no easy way out --- if they remove all the links to spam sites hosting Google ads, it's entirely possible that their revenue would fall precipitously. To argue that they need to remove spam, one first needs to conclude that they benefit from doing so.

I have more hope that a 3rd party might be able to solve this. Offer a series of browser plugins for Firefox/IE/Chrome that will allow you to black list sites from search results? Everything you mark is blacklisted for you forever, and once there is a consensus (likely with human oversight) it's globally blacklisted as well? AdBlock essentially works on this model, so it should be possible.

ps. Google already offers an official Chrome extension that does much of what you suggest: [https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhja...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhjafeidhfbojhnfiepj?hl=en). It's somewhat ironic to note that many of the 'user reviews' for it on that page are actually spam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It amazes me that Yahoo doesn't want to keep/use delicious. What an amazing database of user voted content.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but it's only a matter of time until it gets gamed. Google could index it to find less spammy content for a while.

Ultimately you need to know who is who, who is posting what. Is that what their internet ID lobbying is about?

<comment><USER6> That's the real problem. The stakes are huge, so eventually most systems get gamed by spammers.

Maybe they could have meta-moderators (crowd-sourced?) like Slashdot has (had? haven't been there in a while). People who review what people have reported as spam, and only the top 5% most trusted and consistent accounts would be used to actually influence live rankings.

For a spammer to get there, he would have to do lots of good work for a while, and risk losing that top spot as soon as he starts trying to do spammy stuff.

Maybe it would work... Any obvious way to game such a system?

<comment><USER7> /.'s system works because the number of users who want to have a discussion outnumber the people who want to shout obscenities in all caps. That is only true because there is no money in shouting obscenities in all caps on /.- but there is plenty of money in upvoting spam on Google. If they switched to crowdsourced curation today, you'd have have a spammer to user ratio of 10:1 before February 1st.

<comment><USER6> Very good points. Thanks for the reply!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It makes me wonder: how true is it that the web is too large to curate by hand? It's remarkable how fast a human can determine that a site is spam, and with the exception of a few large user-created sites once one has determined that a few pages on a domain are spam you don't have to look farther.

Kedrosky uses the number (unsure from where) 234 million sites. At $1/site you could have a number of quite well paid people checking off whether a site is 'real' or 'spam' at a price that Google could easily afford --- if it would improve their bottom line.

Even if you went page by page, you could figure out a way to build an index of spam-free pages. But would this really provide sufficient economic benefit? I think the answer is no, otherwise it would already have been done. What can be done to change this?

<comment><USER8> I wonder if you would even need to pay people---someone (google would seem like an obvious candidate) could write a browser extension with a "total crap" button. I know I'm sufficiently annoyed when I land on some spammy garbage that I'd like to punish them with a consequential down vote.

Hopefully you could get enough legitimate uptake to make paying people to fraudulently vote wouldn't be worth it.

<comment><USER9> Suppose the 4chan hivemind decides to mass-spam your startup with hundreds of thousands of downvotes over the next few weeks. How would you have any recourse in situations like that?

<comment><USER8> You'd probably have to have a trusted human-in-the-loop. I.e., if a site gets enough down votes, it would trip some internal procedure to review the site.

I think also if you didn't generate public feedback (i.e., you didn't list the most down voted sites for example) you'd avoid the kind of Beiber-to-DPRK stunt that 4chan would be interested in.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stop telling me to go to college - <AUTHOR> http://www.teknically-speaking.com/2013/07/stop-telling-me-to-go-to-college.html <comment><USER2> You could entitle the post "stop telling me to do something I don't see the value in."

I don't have a degree, and work exclusively with people with degrees, and they complain bitterly about the costs associated with education and frequently comment that I was the lucky one.

Do what works, don't worry about choices you could have made(you didn't make them!). If a degree looks like what you need to take it to the next level, do it, otherwise, who cares?

<comment><AUTHOR> You missed the point of the post. It wasn't about how I don't like people telling me to do something I don't see the value in. It was about people dogmatically asserting the necessity of a process which has been fed to us by society without reason. Yes, college is great for some people; but society today has almost turned it into a religious thing. We're told "you have to go to college to get a good job" or "you have to go to college to be successful", essentially "you can't be smart without college". That's what I don't like. Many people instantly look down on you or assume you are less-intelligent if you don't have a degree.

Maybe you haven't had the same experiences, but I've definitely had the debate with quite a number of people who religiously insist that I should go to college, but can't reason with me why.

<comment><USER3> The academic education has two purposes:

1\. To instruct you in a systematic manner. You can do a good job by yourself but for someone else who might depend on your knowledge and experience, it is easier to trust an institution to do that than to trust one to do it by oneself. There is the inherent risk of erratic learning. There are reasons to prefer having a guide or a mentor. This is not to refute any of your arguments. You may find free mentorship, your autodidact ability might be of high quality and the academic institutions may as well violate the trust of the benefiting parties - both future employers and future employees.

2\. To asses in the end the quality of your enlightenment. Because the academic system's interests depend on this, it might be a faulty process. For one, the competition game and the perceived self value/image involved in this is driving the education prices like crazy (which is not like the other competition-ruled areas, mind you), and for other - the "propaganda" that is meant to keep the high demand for education, sadly regardless of its quality. Yet, the value assessment is a hassle into which many employers do not want to get involved. This is what maintains artificially the value of a degree.

The academic system has its dirty game and you were smart enough to reap its promised benefits without being played. Congratulations! I am sure you'll find a way to deal with the after-effects of those who didn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was in a similar situation, except that I saw the need to get a degree so I could get past the HR checklist. I was able to do it in four years while working full time and managed to leave college with a whopping $1500 in debt.

I think it was worth it for me, because it opened some career doors that would have remained shut, and I learned some things that my self-education had skipped.

On the flip side, I don't require a degree when hiring developers. It's nice to have, but to be quite frank most developers that didn't learn to code before they started college are generally (there are exceptions) not the type of people we hire.

I'm convinced that if you were to drop one of my people on a desert island, they'd build a computer from scratch and be programming again in 6 months. It's just what they love to do, and that's what we look for.

</comment><comment><USER5> Going to college made me realize that I wanted to study computer science. If I had never gone to college I may have never known that. I agree that it's totally possible to educate yourself at home, but for some people (like me) who had no idea, college is a great place to access those resources and network with people in the field.

</comment><comment><USER6> Another alternative would be to attempt a degree part-time, which might reduce the financial/time burden. I just realized this comment might be violating the title of the post. Oops

<comment><AUTHOR> As I mentioned in the beginning of my article, that's what I did. It took me about 30-40 minutes to get to school in the mornings. I had classes from 8am-1pm. Another 50 minutes or so to get to work. I would then work until about 10pm. I would go home and take care of the things I needed to for life, go to bed, get up at 6am and repeat. I didn't have much time for homework or study and I was sooner going to sacrifice my school work than my job. Luckily I realized the futility of the process.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, I didn't catch the 'some' college part. It's too bad you couldn't find a way to reduce the commutes. Classes 8-1pm sounds like a full load. I was thinking about 1 class at a time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So brave

<comment><USER8> HN is not Reddit.</comment></comment>


Tesla is opening the Model 3 configurator to everyone starting Tuesday - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-model-3-orders-open-configurator/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0b&linkId=54067181 <comment><USER2> As a New Zealander I'm probably number 420000 on that current list even though I reserved on day 1. I think the 2019 date I have on the web site is looking a tad optimistic

</comment><comment><USER3> At their current pace of 5000 cars a week, it'll take about a year and a half to fill their 420,000 remaining pre-orders.

Hopefully, they reach 10,000 cars a week later in the year.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what percentage of people with reservations are waiting to reserve the base battery version (which still won't be available for "6-9 months") My guess is a lot, so Tesla is opening the premium version to non-reservation holders to try to get as many of these sold as possible before they even start on the 35k version.</comment>


HTML5 Drag and Drop in detail - <AUTHOR> http://ajaxian.com/archives/html5-drag-and-drop-in-deeetail <comment><USER2> (2009)

<comment><AUTHOR> Still relevant. Very. In particular if you are using canvas (where the first solution applies inside it, whereas the html5 DND support doesn't, even though they both are on html5 spec).</comment></comment>


The Defeat of Reason - <AUTHOR> http://bostonreview.net/science-nature-philosophy-religion/tim-maudlin-defeat-reason <comment><USER2> Eh.

The author claims that positivism has been debunked "by philosophers". Certainly there are semantic arguments to be had if one wishes, but the broad outlines of positivism are widely accepted by scientists and engineers.

Also, the authors' discussion of the wave/particle description leaves a lot to be desired.

And the article hardly explains how reason has been defeated. It barely mentions the propaganda machine (Fox, Limbaugh, etc.) that played the biggest role in impugning the idea of truth.

<comment><USER3> > but the broad outlines of positivism are widely accepted by scientists and > engineers.

I don't think anyone doubts that a positivist framework is useful for science and engineering, but why should it hold elsewhere? Scientists and engineers are also stereotypically bad at social skills and politics. Perhaps because a different, non-positivist epistemological framework is required to thrive in other fields?

<comment><USER4> _Scientists and engineers are also stereotypically bad at social skills and politics._

That is a narrative whose sole purpose is to disenfranchise and disempower the STEM community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _> People are gullible. Humans can be duped by liars and conned by frauds; manipulated by rhetoric and beguiled by self-regard; browbeaten, cajoled, seduced, intimidated, flattered, wheedled, inveigled, and ensnared. In this respect, humans are unique in the animal kingdom._

a lot of this could be mitigated through better awareness and early education. Unfortunately "how to think" or "how to reason" about logic is not something most of us learn from their parents or from the education system (even though it would be trivial to do so).

If you know your Kahneman, Tversky (and others) and learn and understand Cognitive Biases the advantage is huge. It's like Neo in the Matrix when he picks the bullets from the air :-)

But it needs to be applied continuously using practical applications (not just by reading 2 papers). People don't have to be an expert on psychology, game theory & risk but at least should expose themselves to the basics (preferably at an early age).

If you want to get beyond the basics then read also D Hofstaedter, D Dennet, K Popper, B Russell, NNTaleb. I wish I would have come across this when I was 10 yro not in my 30ies.

<comment><USER6> That has not been my experience, I'm afraid. The impression I keep getting is that (with due respect to "the power of the context" [http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf](http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf)) teaching someone about fallacies automatically makes them about 15 IQ stupider. In general there's a lot to be said for this oversimplified mental model: "exposing a human being to moral or logical education just leads him to spin out more alluring and more effectively deceptive rationalisations for the stupid and despicable things he was going to do anyway".

<comment><USER7> That's a great way to put it. That's not to say that reason cannot be learned, but that it isn't a subject in itself, there is no such thing as a 'critical thinking' curriculum. You learn critical thinking by thinking.

<comment><USER8> There are courses that try to teach applied rationality. I don't know how successful they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The two books under consideration here bring the paradox home, each in its > own way. Adam Becker's What Is Real? chronicles the tragic side of a > crowning achievement of reason, quantum physics. The documentarian Errol > Morris gives us The Ashtray, a semi-autobiographical tale of the supremely > influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. > Kuhn. Both are spellbinding intellectual adventures into the limits, > fragility, and infirmity of human reason.

The author claims we're currently in an age which doesn't accept an objective reality outside our own desires, and ties this to fights in physics (and earlier in philosophy) whose echoes are still being felt.

<comment><USER10> Quantum mechanics may have defeated the notion that reason applied to intuition is not the way to enlightenment, but it appears to be a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when reason is applied instead strictly to observables. Unfortunately, if Adam Becker is correct, this may have led more to a rejection of reason than to a critical examination of intuitions.

<comment><USER11> But the uncertainty principle says there's a limit to what observables we have access to.

<comment><USER10> That might not be the universe of your intuitions, but it is apparently the one we have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A remarkable review, this. (It's _so_ rare to see _Lakatos_ quoted!)

One of my favorite reflections out of this period belongs to Werner Heisenberg:

 _What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning._

If we have a dilemma (two theories), it's 'Not nature itself' at fault.

</comment><comment><USER13> While classical locality is not possible, quantum nonlocality is interestingly local and not. Causality is local but correlation is not.

Nonlocality where both are nonlocal would be conseptually easier to understand.

</comment><comment><USER14> Humans are the only animals who can be fooled? I pretend to throw tennis balls to watch dogs run across the yard for my own amusement all the time!

The author doesn't even make an attempt to defend what on the face of it seems like a pretty ludicrous assertion. I know this isn't the central thesis, but, not off to a great start

</comment><comment><USER15> > All that was left was to ask nature herself. In a series of sophisticated > experiments, the answer has been established: Bell's inequality is violated. > The world is not local. No future innovation in physics can make it local > again.

This is a Copernican revolution.

</comment><comment><USER10> From Maudlin's telling of the story, in which "Einstein won—and would continue to win—all the logical battles", you would never guess that Bell actually refuted the claims made in the EPR paper.

</comment><comment><USER16> Forgive me for saying so, but this whole premise seems like bullshit.

>logical positivism has been killed many times over by philosophers.

Clearly the author, or the philosophers, do not understand what the word "killed" means.

</comment><comment><USER17> Eh.

I thought this Article is about Reason ML.

</comment><comment><USER18> Author seems to be a heavy user of thesaurus.com.

</comment><comment><USER19> reason is not defeated and to the extent it would be it would apply to _anyone_ of us. Not just the trailer trash, the trump supporters, the religious people etc. but all of us.

There is no system of thinking that allow us to be right and so what we are really left with are perspectives. In other words reason do not lead to truth but to perspectives that allow us to better navigate reality.

</comment><comment><USER20> This entire discussion further verifies for me that state of being inside an illusion or Maya, where some things like relativity make sense whilst at a deeper level everything else doesn't.</comment>


Ask HN: Better alternative to daily RSS feeds reading? - <AUTHOR>

Every day a few articles interesting to me are being published on the web. What technology do you use to discover them, while filtering out the rest?
I've been using Google Reader for a long time, and while theoretically it should save time by eliminating the need to visit each website individually, I noticed that opposite is sometimes true. The main issues I am struggling with are:
- with more feeds added to the reader, the noise is increased
- the very act of being subscribed to something can create a feeling of "obligation" to check and "clear" the feed.
- the technology fosters the attachment of "checking what's new," in a similar way email does, and that wastes even more time.
Of course, all of those issues can be alleviated by proper feeds curating, unsubscribe mercilessly and insist on discipline to not check the feeds too often.
Anyway, I feel there is a time to discover/invent some new technology to deliver my daily reading to me, something which would avoid the need to subscribe to sources. Recently, for example, I discovered that when something truly interesting is published, it will usually appear on twitter, and also being retweeted several times. I've been quite successful to use twitter search to discover new stuff for the keywords I am interested about, and the services like Tweetmeme are promising, too. But I didn't found yet some service which I can truly replace Google Reader with. Maybe that's also a good startup idea. What's your experience? <comment><USER2> I really don't have a better alternative as I'm kinda struggling with the same problem.

Anyway, my interests are kinda broad, so to use "curated feeds" like Hacker News or basing them on Twitter volume wouldn't really do it for me. Also I quite enjoy finding unexpected things that I didn't even know I'd be interested in.

I'm an information junkie, what can I say.

I DO know quite well what I'm NOT interested in though. Very few solutions let me filter out crap I'm NOT interested in. I think that approach would work the best for me.

I wish information I read was accurately classified using some standard metadata conventions. It'd be so much easier to deal with. Obviously with the sheer volume of data, and the diversity of the sources, that's probably completely impossible to do in any reasonable way. Still, I wonder, if a popular RSS platform would implement some sort of standard, and then let their sources come on board if they wished to...I wonder how quickly it'd be adopted.

<comment><USER3> >I DO know quite well what I'm NOT interested in though. Very few solutions let me filter out crap I'm NOT interested in.

Yes, you know what you're not interested in. But can you express that in a machinable fashion? " <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it> " only helps you after you've already seen it.

Alternately, if you could create the machine to take a human's loose description of what they're not interested in and filter it out, there are any number of ways to turn that into big money AND big benefit to society. (In _very_ loose terms, that's what search engines do...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I moved noisy feeds out of Google Reader and into FriendFeed. I use the FriendFeed notifier <http://friendfeed.com/about/notifier> to have items popup on my screen in real-time. If you follow a few key people & feeds on FriendFeed, all the interesting news should reach you.

It's mostly invasive, and now I don't have to constantly check anything and I don't feel like I'm missing anything either. If it's important it will probably popup more than once. In fact, it's how I noticed this post <http://friendfeed.com/newsyc>

</comment><comment><USER5> I got so tired of this problem I created my own service:

<http://www.ectofeed.com/>

It takes a bit to set up the filters, but once you do it gets rid of all kinds of junk. I've experimented with the services that claim to be able to watch what you read/mark/save and cater your feeds accordingly, and have found them to be greatly lacking. I just don't think we're there yet in terms of what AI and similar technologies are capable of.

Anyway, you're welcome to give it a try. Feedback is always appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have been using Shaun Inman's Fever (<http://feedafever.com/>) recently to try and filter out what is 'hot'. Its an RSS reader but lets you have feeds that are only used as indications to link up other good posts. It works by showing you articles that lots of people are linking to.

<comment><USER7> Fever requires you to create a server from which to run it, pretty shabby for a service you pay for to not have dedicated servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use hacker news. Seriously though, I've been wishing google reader allowed you to rate what articles you like and to what degree you like them, then have an algorithm sort them by how much it thinks you would like them. Maybe I should make that...

EDIT: looks like people mentioned services that do something similar.

<comment><USER4> <http://feedscrub.com> is such a service

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Broadersheet is a startup trying to solve this sort of problem. They have an iPhone app which serves up an electronic newspaper personalised to your interests. (Sadly they don't yet cater to iPhone denialists like me, so I can't report from direct experience how good it is.)

</comment><comment><USER7> Lots of sites listed so far, but not more than one vote for any. Doesn't inspire much :\

You're certainly not alone; too many of us suffer from this problem. Maybe it's time for you to invent something?

</comment><comment><USER10> Why not use something like www.postrank.com? I'm pretty sure that's why it was made, to solve the problem of reducing all the noise and only showing you the best content.

</comment><comment><USER11> Very helpful, & i'm very appreciative. <http://www.newsbrane.com> suggestion from DTrejo seems 2 be a winner 4 me.

</comment><comment><USER12> It doesn't help that many writers and publications use clever and cryptic headlines that often are the sole way of judging whether an item is worth clicking or not.

</comment><comment><USER13> Tweetie + Instapaper was my replacement for Google reader. I dont have to mark tweets as read as well. Lazyfeed is good too.

</comment><comment><USER14> You might like <http://www.newsbrane.com>

</comment><comment><USER15> <http://www.lazyfeed.com>

</comment><comment><USER16> <http://feedhub.com>

</comment><comment><USER17> Sounds like a newspaper!

<comment><AUTHOR> But how would newspaper know what interests me?

<comment><USER17> Well, I was implying that the newspaper editors would cull the most interesting bits of news for you. Or perhaps you could wait for your mom to clip articles and send them to you in the mail.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Self-taught or college education? - <AUTHOR> Self-taught or college education?<p>Hey there, I am a self-taught programmer and I want to ask you how many of you learned programming by learning it on your own and how much went to a university and got their CS degree. I'm asking you this as I was talking with other fellow programmers about the fact that people prefer the university path because being self-taught is a lonely pursuit. Do you agree? Thanks, Alin R. <comment><USER2> Both.

You learn programming by programming, and this is not something you learn ex cathedra: you have to do it yourself.

On the other hand, it's nice to go to the university to have some human contact with teachers and students. There are also a few things, some know-how knowledge that's best learned amongst peers, than by experimenting alone or from the books.

Then there's yet another option nowadays: MOOCs. There you have almost all the positive sides: \- you learn alone, \- you have a teacher giving ex cathedra lectures, \- you have also some contact with other students thru forums.

And for some of the know-how transmission, some programmers post videos on youtube of their development process; it's not entirely perfect, but it's a step.

One thing for which it can help to learn in the same room as a teacher and students, is to debug your learning process, or to detect the errors in know- how you may have learned: somebody may notice you're doing something wrong and tell you. With self-learning, or with remote learning (MOOC), it's easy to check whether the result you obtain is right or wrong, but if you obtain the result doing the wrong thing, it's harder to detect and to correct. Then it's up to you to experiment a lot and to hope to find a good local extremum of know-how.

</comment><comment><USER3> I learned to program myself and did some small-scale freelancing as a web developer while in high school. But after that I went to university because I felt it would be easier to get a job with an academic education, and also because it's free in my country.

If I had to pay I'd probably not have applied. IMHO you can learn pretty much everything by reading Wikipedia and other free sites, as long as you're able to stay focused. On the other hand, you'll get to know like-minded people in university, and many people find their first job through their fellow students. So there's definitely a social aspect to it as you say.</comment>


Involved in a startup in Pennsylvania? put it on the map: RepresentPA.com - <AUTHOR> http://representpa.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Looking for anyone who is interested to help populate RepresentPA.com with their own startup. I just finished it up, (built with <http://Represent.LA> map) and looking to show the world what PA has to offer!</comment>


Australian Government breaks up Telstra - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Govt-to-break-up-Telstra/0,130061791,339298509,00.htm

<comment><USER2> If this had some meat on it, it'd be huge. From what I can tell, however, there is not much of a breakup here aside from Telstra's divestment of its cable and pay television assets.

I want to see the wholesale and consumer data businesses split up, along with Telstra's mobile assets. These should be three distinct businesses; perhaps then we could see some real investment in Australia's fiber network, and some sane options for consumers. I wouldn't hold my breath, however...</comment>


Boss as a Service – Hire a boss, get stuff done - <AUTHOR> https://bossasaservice.life/ <comment><USER3> This was on HN once before - when it was, I signed up, because I struggle with prioritizing things that I need to do in my personal life over my professional life. (Hair cut, clean car, dentist, what have you.) I figured I didn't have anything to lose, really.

Manasvini, who emails me regularly from the service, has been nothing but wonderful. Every email I've gotten has been encouraging and positive, and it honestly helps keep me accountable.

I really can't thank Manasvini enough for that. Never once has there been any scolding, nagging, or negativity - just gracious reminders and a good attitude.

(Manasvini, if you're reading this - thanks for putting up with me, and always being helpful getting me back on track, even when I manage to completely derail myself.)

<comment><USER4> Do you think you are acomplishing more because of this service?

I think they should start with a lower fee and charge x more every time the user fails to complete a task, on time. People need incentive to finish something. Not sure if someone emailing you is enough

<comment><USER5> Sounds like good motivation to do shit work just to get it done on time.

Inversely, offering rewards can be just as counterproductive.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/opinion/sunday/science- re...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/opinion/sunday/science-rewards- behavior.html)

If it helps you maintain intrinsic motivation then it may be of benefit. Maybe depending on the person a gentle reminder or a wakeup call works best, but the motivation shouldn't be focussed on getting a pat on the back or to avoid someone yelling at you.

<comment><USER6> > Sounds like good motivation to do shit work just to get it done on time.

You say this like it's obviously a bad idea. Why?

The more work you do, the better it will be, even if you're not trying for any particular quality level. Most people have much more of a problem with the amount of the work they do than with the quality.

I read of an experiment conducted on a college pottery class. Half of the class was told they would be graded on the quality of the pots they produced. The other half was told their grade would be determined by gathering all the pots they turned in, smashing them, and weighing the pile of shards. The heavier the pile, the better the grade.

The grade-by-weight group turned in higher-quality pots.

<comment><USER7> I remember hearing of this before - I think it tells us a huge amount about how best to achieve our goals, or to coach others in that regard.

For example: ask a team to build a software project with _excellent design and best practices_ and they may hit "analysis paralysis".

Ask them to build perhaps 5 distinct - but _cheap and disposable_ \- implementations and you might find they get a much better idea of how to do things "right" _very quickly_.

Note to self: remember this for future use!

<comment><USER5> > excellent design and best practices

Sounds like a sure fire way to spend all the time on premature optimisation.

Scott Guthrie at Microsoft used to talk about rapid prototyping, and to always throw away the prototype code and redo from scratch. Never keep the prototype, and especially don't just push it straight into production.

<comment><USER7> Exactly my point! That's an excellent technique in fact, tell a team upfront _this will not be allowed_ to evolve into production and, freed from unease about future plans, they'll explore and experiment much more openly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is so silly that this might actually be a good idea? I do want a good reminder and todo/red-flags don't do it for me. I can seriously see why speaking to a human and being accountable to someone can boost productivity. Consequences of not doing a task on time would be embarrassment and shame from someone you're paying. Or its just silly.

Customer defining the goals is akin to setting the difficulty on "easy" and beating the game. What would be good is if BaaS would interview the customer, set realistic but challenging goals for the customer based on the project needs and then push them. Similar to a gym coach.

<comment><USER9> Well, if you want them to have teeth there could be a contract where you either pay them X amount on success or Y if you fail to achieve a pre- negotiated goal. With Y > X of course.

To avoid setting bad incentives, i.e. that your boss still wants you to succeed, he personally should get a bonus out of the X even though the company earns less.

<comment><USER10> Paying money if you fail is counterproductive for actually getting things done. You're now allowed to fail, it just costs money. There's a case study I remember of a daycare that tried to get parents to show up on time by fining those who picked their kid up late; late pick-ups actually _increased_ afterwards.

<comment><USER11> Beeminder has written a lot about this. The daycare fine needed to be higher. Beeminder starts at a $5 fine and roughly triples with each consequent failure. Everyone is willing to fail until the consequence hits their limit, and then the behavior changes. I don't know about Stikk, but Beeminder has a premium feature that lets you skip the cheaper fines and go straight to the big ones so you can start changing your behavior sooner. I'm guessing the daycare's fine was timid and had no mechanism to ratchet up to each parent's pain point.

<comment><USER12> The problem with the daycare was that parents began seeing it as "I can leave my child later, it just costs more" and they were just paying an additional fee to keep their child longer at a service they were already paying for. The daycare ended up removing the fee and the late pick ups stayed.

<comment><USER11> Yes, that makes sense. The fine changes the consequence to something that can be rationally weighed. Too low and people willingly pay it, so it needs to be higher. Automatic fine increases allow the fine to be customized to each parent so all of them eventually stop being late.

It doesn't really matter if the parents see the fine as "a fine" or an unaffordable, automatically billed service if it's priced right.

<comment><USER13> I think this is a horribly bad idea. Daycare caretakers are the most loving and caring people I know. Putting them in a position where they have to argue with 3x richer people about hundreds of dollars is going to stress them out and needlessly strain the parent-caretaker relationship. I also can't imagine that's good for the child.

<comment><USER11> That may be. In this case, the daycare is just an example of how inflexible financial consequences could work better or worse depending on the implementation.

That said, if lateness is a problem, it's impeding on the workers' personal lives, which can't be good for anybody, so I don't mind exploring how those workers could be helped. I assume more upfrontness from the business office, and parent education, would go a long way, similar to other institutions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So I've recently been throwing around the idea that I might have some form of ADHD after really not wanting to accept it for a while. I also happen to have the least structured job of all time - work from home freelance web developer and writer.

After having a structure my whole life in school which I did fairly well under, suddenly I found myself with literally no structure, deadlines that are always far in the future, and the ability to literally watch Youtube all day long without any _immediate_ penalty.

I love seeing things like this. I've had to build all sorts of structure into my life, but the hardest part is always getting myself to do it, because, you know, I could just _not do it._

<comment><USER15> I also have "some form of ADHD". Turns out stimulants work pretty well. I was terrified of them for most of my life, and it doesn't help that a lot of doctors are also scared of them, but they _work_ , and getting treated with them is one of the best decisions I've ever made.

<comment><USER16> Adderall works absurdly well for me, it's actually depressing to see how it can make being productive virtually effortless. For me it's the difference between an hour of real work per day and 15+ hours. I'm just afraid that taking it often will lead to some kind of brain damage decades down the line. Otherwise I would be taking it every day.

<comment><USER17> Reading this makes me wish Adderall was legal in my country.

<comment><USER18> There are other ADHD medications based on amphetamine. Be careful though, they can easily disrupt your sleep cycle and the psychological addiction to the productivity is real.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've previously dreamed of a community version of this, and I'm certain others have as well. There's a chance the concept might be flawed, but it's worth considering. Members would be encouraged to act as "productivity coach" for one or more other members, and in exchange could receive the same service. I like it because it could be cheap and/or free, and having members experience both sides of the equation could improve the overall experience. There are some challenges that might render this impossible, though:

\- Is there a target audience, ie. procrastinators capable of being productivity coaches? (I, for one, believe I fit the profile)

\- How can the coaching be incentivized? Points system, matchmaking?

\- Should it be monetized? If yes, how?

\- How much community moderation would be required, and how could it be implemented?

<comment><USER20> This does sound like a good idea. It is indeed easier at times to give advice to someone else than it is to yourself.

<comment><USER21> This. I find that the advice I easily dole out to other people is the same advice I struggle with following. It just seems so easy to do when you're telling someone else how to do it.

<comment><USER22> Totally. When I'm a "boss", I often give someone advice that I haven't done yet. Then after I say it, I actually (finally) go do the thing I said. It's like, I just needed to say it out loud to someone else in order to go do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Note that the acronym is Baas... which is Dutch for boss (and incidentally the source of the English word too) :)

<comment><USER24> I can feel it, there is an amazing startup name waiting to be discovered there. Huur een BaaS or something of that sort.

<comment><USER25> Baas as a Service. Truly FOSS-style acronym (one could say it's _Unix-like_ (not to be confused with Unox-like (Unox is the worst)).

<comment><USER26> I love RARA's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We're doing a similar thing with our app, Your Boss — except, it's peer-to- peer phone network and more of a community. I've found that if I need a boss, talking to someone who also needs a boss is super helpful! [https://thisisyourboss.com](https://thisisyourboss.com)

<comment><USER27> I'm impressed this might change my life for real.. do you connect to random or same people

<comment><USER22> Both. Right now it's random. It's great having a diversity of perspectives. But we're adding a feature where you can reconnect with bosses you've liked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If they turned this into an umbrella company service with equipment hire and lawyers and accountants on call, they'd really be onto something. I don't just hire bosses to shout at me, I expect them to also make sure the things I need for my job are there, that I'm legally covered and that the invoices are being chased.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, but then they would need to up the price 500x.

<comment><USER28> Or take a percentage and scale the perks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> em-bee i generally find that working in a team makes me more productive. pair- programming especially, makes it much easier to focus, and not be tempted to do something else every time i get stuck. (pair-programming also helps to avoid getting stuck in the first place)

but the key point is accountability to another person.

that person doesn't have to be a boss. it can be an intern. just the fact that i have someone watching me work, because they want to learn about my job, is helpful. and i want to show them how to do the work too.

several years ago, i joined an online incubator called n-reduce. each team, or individual that joined the service was grouped with a few others, and we reported weekly to each other what we were doing via private videos posted on youtube. the goal and effect was the same. i had to set my own goals, and work at my own pace, but i was accountable to someone.

or, you know how you make an extra effort to clean your home when you expect guests? -> accountability.

bossasaservice looks like it could be very helpful. however i would like to structure it a bit different:

more like scrum, with daily standups and maybe sprints. so that once in a while i list all my tasks and goals that i want to accomplish over the next period, and quick daily reports on how i am doing, with the service helping me note if i am on track or fall behind. they could join the sprint-planning giving suggestions on priorities. or, someone else could help with that.

a scrum-master for hire, so to speak.

greetings, eMBee.

</comment><comment><USER30> Anyone that has never been freelancing for a good amount of time will think this is a joke, but it's probably not.

Even if you love your job, you're working on your own personal projects, and you know how to manage yourself and get away from distractions, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to motivate yourself some days...

</comment><comment><USER31> Etymology note: the abbreviation B.A.A.S. corresponds to the Dutch word "baas", from which "boss" was loaned with the same meaning. Baas is, according to etymologist Nicoline van der Sijs, the most successful Dutch export word[0] (mostly via English). See [http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=341464](http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=341464) .

[0] Possibly excepting "apartheid".

<comment><USER32> I think "boss" is a little more common than "apartheid."

<comment><USER31> Depends on your metric. I don't have the numbers at hand, but apartheid may have been borrowed into more languages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Interesting idea... Kind of reminds me of (part of) the role artist managers have. Many (but certainly not all) artists find time management near impossible and need someone checking in constantly. Many (again definitely not all) also are technaphobes who do whatever they can do get away from digital tools. A human todo list might well appeal to them.

I think there could be a niche version or this service for that industry - <USER2> if the "bosses" in this service were vetted in a way an artist could know they understand the industry. I could see some mid-high level artists paying for this (esp if social/marketing were slapped on top). Might need to be localised somewhat though...

As a complete aside if anyone running the business is reading this I found the centered text for everything inc body copy pretty hard to read. Solid website overall though.

</comment><comment><USER34> If you are interest in a more premium offering, I work with a "Fairy God Mother" who offers project management, accountability, productivity coaching, etc.

She's good, but much more than $25/mo.

[http://thetalentsquad.com/consulting/](http://thetalentsquad.com/consulting/)

<comment><USER35> > VIP status > Private sessions: Weekly x 55-minute one-on-one sessions. > > Skin in the Game: $997 month.

Oh wow. This must be one of those service that make sense only if you life in a "high salary/high cost of life" area. I could buy a few good quality used cars a year at that pricing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This would make a good basis for a Black Mirror episode. Ask the question, "How far will they go to hold you to task if you don't complete your goals, or what happens if you lie?"

Name the episode "Safeword."

<comment><USER37> They do use the phrase "deadly serious" a curious number of times...

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Another word for what this service is offering would be "coach," in which case it sounds a lot less ridiculous. Plenty of people hire personal trainers, why not a productivity trainer?

<comment><USER39> Yeah when you say "life coach", people get what it is, but it's boring. But there's a certain weirdness to the term "boss as a service" that make it seem interesting and people want to find out what it is, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> As a side-note: Baas means "Boss" in Dutch. Which happens to be the abbreviated "Boss as a service" :)

It's quite a funny idea, I wonder if that'd be sustainable though!

</comment><comment><USER41> _# Is this a real thing?_

 _Existential question: are we really real if we don 't exist on the blockchain?_

Immediately bought a subscription.

<comment><USER42> The rest of the page until that point had been making me smile more and more. That line took me over the edge to full-fledged laughter for ten or more seconds, and a few hours later it's still making me chuckle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Hmm, I know some bosses who really enjoyed making people "accountable" but didn't seem to enjoy knowing what they were doing, articulating a realistic vision, or making coherent decisions. Why do poor bosses only seem to like that part of the job?

</comment><comment><USER44> This could be an alternative to personal trainers, if all you need is the motivation and you already know how to bench press or whatever (or happy to follow youtube for that).

<comment><USER45> I'm a personal trainer and I'm building data analysis tools that I believe will allow me to effectively scale an online training service using common fitness apps of your choosing.

If I can look at your Apple Health export and Strong/Fitbod/Fitnotes weightlifting data there is a tremendous amount of things I can tell you about how to optimize your training and lifestyle to get you closer to your goals.

Is this something you'd be interested in?

<comment><USER46> I am not the person you're originally replying to but I am interested in hearing more about your efforts. How can I contact you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I remember an article which was saying that a lot of startups are just solving problems for the 'millenials' that their moms used to solve. Laundry, making food, making appointments, cleaning, etc. Now there is a startup that will sign your grade sheet and tell you to do homework.

</comment><comment><USER48> You mean like how I envy my seniors, who managed to get a "Personal Assistant" or PA, who basically does this? because in the end, if you hire them, you can't get the same kind of tractive force them hiring you has.

On the other hand, you can get them to do things in calendar, project and time management, which you really should be able to do, but for whatever reason cannot. Yes, even project management. A lot of P.M. is timeline enforcement. amazing what a 2IC can do in these situations.

My seniors who have PA, basically rely on them to coordinate the awesome. The PA has no functional authority, except the silent kind a camerlengo has...

<comment><USER49> I thought PAs just helped you forget about menial, boring tasks like setting meetings, making initial calls, etc. so that you can continue working on the real problem. I didn't know they got to bust your balls if you slacked off.

<comment><USER48> You have to pay em a lot more, but for the right pa and the right boss..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> In this vein, has anyone had organizational success hiring a high level PA? Not talking about the cheap offshore PA's from upwork, but a native English speaker with training and a higher rate.

I find I have more projects than I can track. A good PA/project manager might help with that, but it's hard to know in advance or how to hire one.

I run an online business, and have contractors for specific tasks, but I'm really the only one with a bird's eye view. And frankly, project management is my weak point.

<comment><USER34> I work with a woman who is a "fairy god mother" who does Project management, light ideation and strategy, accountability and some PR consulting.

<comment><USER50> How is it?

<comment><USER34> I did a test run for a couples months and enjoyed it. Will start back up in new year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Not a Stephen King fan, but I really enjoyed reading "Quitters, Inc." years ago. I certainly hope this service doesn't branch out in that direction :-)

</comment><comment><USER52> Brilliant. You can even fire your boss, how cool is that?

</comment><comment><USER53> I guess it's not unlike how people who hire personal trainers to push them to work out. Some people just need a little encouragement.

</comment><comment><USER37> Is there something similar but for positive reinforcement? Negative reinforcement (tough love) tends to make me want to crawl into my bed, cry and give up. (I know I should fix this, get tougher skin or whatever, but assume I've tried already. Just like this site works _with_ chronic procrastination, rather than telling you to "just fix it".)

<comment><USER54> The top comment doesn't make it sound like negative reinforcement. Might depend on the human they assign you though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Holy shit, I never realized how badly I need this.

</comment><comment><USER56> I have to say I have had thoughts about something similar. It came to me because I worked for a number of managers who weren't very technical yet got paid more then me to basically just make sure I turned up to work and competed projects. I started to think surely their job can/will be automated. Maybe this is just the first step or 0.1 beta

</comment><comment><USER57> Very interesting. I'm not sure if I will sign up, but I can see "me when I was a student" signing up for this.

<comment><USER58> Indeed, and I can see my parents paying for it

<comment><USER59> Why can't your parents boss you around for free? :)

<comment><USER60> By outsourcing this, they can focus on the more enjoyable parts of parenting :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I think I'm gonna give it a spin, it doesn't sound bad at all.

Coincidentally the abbreviation BAAS is also Boss in Dutch!

</comment><comment><USER62> Doing a similar things using email tasks with followupthen.com.

I am just emailing me tasks one by one as they come, and I am receiving following up emails every morning until they are marked as completed. It's working well for me. It's an excellent service and it's free.

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm actually considering doing this as part of a side business,but more personal. I'm pretty good at managing people, but why work for a company? I'd rather help people push themselves to achieve their goals, while giving a bit of advice on how to accomplish something

</comment><comment><USER64> Hey I use this! It's a solid service and Manasvini is great to work with. I'm a big fan.

</comment><comment><USER65> I'm working on [https://kanrails.com](https://kanrails.com). Eventually I hope to achieve a similar thing, except that Kanrails (the bot) will be the one nagging you incessantly.

Anyways, brilliant idea.

</comment><comment><USER66> This is definitely an interesting development - but in the spirit of trying to work out 'what can go wrong' with new technologies and services (something that the tech industry hasn't been doing a great job at), one idea I'd throw out there is that while _good_ managers help and support their reports, _bad_ managers may effectively end up controlling or telling their reports what to do, and having undue leverage over them.

It's hard to say whether that will happen in many cases here, but this does have the potential to set up lots of direct relationships with unusual power dynamics over time.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is awesome. I was literally just trying to figure out how to solve this problem without paying a fortune. I wanted a personal trainer like you get for the gym to keep me accountable in other areas of life.

<comment><USER22> Working on this. What sort of life stuff would you want a personal trainer for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> When people talk about the robots taking over, sometihng like this is what i m afraid of. An AI personal assistant will soon become my boss, or rather, my master. I just hope it's not evil.

<comment><USER68> This is the plot of Marshall Brain's Manna.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_\(novel\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> It's like personal trainers. You made an obligation to someone else to show up at 7am at the gym 3 times a week, and that alone is enough to make you go to the gym consistently.

<comment><USER70> Good analogy!

btw. I asked the question a year ago whether this whole "boss as a service" was viable and I think it is one of those things that you can't really imagine until you tried it out. I am glad there is now the opportunity to do so ;)

s. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13498466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13498466)

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> It sounds like we're at or past the "peak job", now that there are services telling us what we kind of need to work on... bc we really don't have to work on any of that BS.

</comment><comment><USER72> Having an intelligent person give you a impartial voice is often valuable as well, we get caught up our own bubbles. 'That person' is hard to find though.

</comment><comment><USER73> This is truly novel and fascinating. Great work. As an aside to the brilliant thinkers out there who aren't especially interested in or concerned with design, as a general rule it's not good or necessary to center-align paragraphs of text. I always see this on really cool projects like this and I know it's somewhat trivial but part of me hurts on the inside and I just needed to let it out.

</comment><comment><USER74> I would consider hiring one if he would tell me exactly what to do to reach my goals, not just stimulate me to. He needs to be really competent.

</comment><comment><USER75> LoL, PainInTheAss-as-Service.

</comment><comment><USER76> Do they accept experience and exposure as payment?

</comment><comment><USER77> Very nice concept! We use something similar for daily follow-ups, it's a bot that integrates with Slack and pings us on a daily basis to check what we did yesterday, what we are up to today and if we are having any problems. Pretty simple yet powerful: [https://dailybot.co/](https://dailybot.co/)

</comment><comment><USER78> Perhaps it would work better if you paid them your salary, and you'd only get it back after you've completed your tasks.

</comment><comment><USER79> The big thing that is missing in this service is a community of like minded people. The service itself could be completely automated since the person is still just generic.

To get stuff done you need both community and organization. Organization can be automated but community can not. If the community is fundamentally different than you, it will not work.

</comment><comment><USER80> Interesting to see all the traction this is getting, I think that it certainly addresses a need! I stumbled upon this a few months ago when I saw this website which was made by the same folks: [https://whydoiprocrastinate.com/](https://whydoiprocrastinate.com/)

</comment><comment><USER81> Who are the bosses? How do they get chosen? Browsed around and read some comments but didn't see it.

</comment><comment><USER82> I want mine to start every sentence with "I'm going to need you to go ahead and um...."

</comment><comment><USER83> Fun fact: Boss as a service = BaaS, which is the same as the Afrikaans translation of Boss :)

<comment><USER84> howzit bru

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> You need to be able to choose boss type. Perhaps according to Theories X, Y, and Z. ? :P

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

</comment><comment><USER86> Assuming this is a real company and not a joke, consider taking the money you would spend with them and paying people to do work for you, like cleaning, cooking, bill paying, investing, testing, marketing, etc. Be your own boss!

<comment><USER6> OK, I've considered it. I immediately concluded that $25 / month will not pay for even one of the many functions you just listed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> This is a great idea. But boss has a negative connotation. Figure out the right name, minimize costs and figure out how to penalize or reward the user so it's effective and it's a winning business.

Good Job!

</comment><comment><USER88> I already have a personal boss, like many other married guys. _ducks_

Joking aside, wouldn't you just get a friend/family member/spouse to do this with you if you really wanted some accountability?

</comment><comment><USER89> If they could extend this to someone who would actively manage you, instead of just be a human to-do list with procrastination checks, this might be worth something. The idea at its core is great.

</comment><comment><USER90> This is cool. When I've had a big project up against a deadline, I've thought of like hiring someone from TaskRabbit or Craigslist to simply watch me and make sure I'm being productive, on-track.

</comment><comment><USER91> Ive had this idea years ago.. so glad to see someone finally launched it. Accountability is HUGE for Single Founders and Consultants.

V2 should have Expert Bosses for specific Verticals ( premium plans! )

</comment><comment><USER92> I really like this idea, but I'm not sure I'd pay $25/month for it unless I'm really sure I like it. Maybe make the first month cost $5 or $10?

<comment><USER34> Shit, I've been considering paying someone $1k a month to basically talk to me 1 hour a week and keep a running todo list for me.

<comment><USER45> I'll do it for 500 :) executive coach / trainer as a service! And for 1 hour each month we wouldn't be wasting each other's time either

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> "Just get married" - my wife when I told her about this

<comment><USER71> Lol - although you'd end up working on stuff you never knew even existed or had any use for until you got married.

</comment></comment><comment> a-dub This is pretty brilliant. Now if only they added a paycheck-as-a-service feature for those who are figuring out what's next as well! :)

</comment><comment><USER94> They could charge more the less you get done. As you become more productive the price goes down.

</comment><comment><USER95> WoW this could be quite exploitative. I think the people who really need this service would avoid reading your emails, this service may not be really helpful surely it will make money by exploiting the weakness of people with low disciplne or distracted mind due to various reasons or things happening in their lives.

</comment><comment><USER96> Yeah but if I'm hiring you that kinda makes me the boss, no?

</comment><comment><USER97> This is a boss idea.

</comment><comment><USER98> There is a task manager in Outlook too!?

Maybe I should use MS Office.

</comment><comment><USER99> LOL, this sounds like from the Silicon Valley TV show. Please everybody tell your parents you're using such a service and see how they'll break down in laughter ;)

</comment><comment><USER100> Sure, but you will need another boss service to make sure you're not giving up on this boss service after only a week of annoying micro-management stuff :)

</comment><comment><USER101> This just looks like a crutch to me. If you need someone hovering over your shoulder to hold you accountable to complete work, you're either suffering from depression, or not behaving like a responsible adult.

Someone who is able to complete work without paying someone to tell them to be productive will always find much more success in what they're doing than anyone who finds a service like this valuable.

This is for the same type of person that believes in setting New Years resolutions.

Not bad for a business though, regardless of what I think of people who use it. Very low expenses, good profitability.

<comment><USER102> People talk like crutches are a bad thing. They're legitimate medical devices! You wouldn't try to walk off a broken leg, and a wheelchair or some crutches will help you get around while the leg is healing, while keeping you active and fit enough that you do actually hopefully heal.

Some people break their get-it-done-femur instead. Why not embrace some crutches if they're effective?

> This is for the same type of person that believes in setting New Years > resolutions.

More like the kind of person who knows damn well they're not going to _keep_ those new years resolutions, is sick and tired of it, and wants to try something that might (or might not) be more effective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> Considering making a discord group or something. You're responsible for one other person and someone else is responsible for you.

What do you say ?

</comment><comment><USER104> Garbage in garbage out.

</comment><comment><USER105> I had to look up at the calendar to check the date - thought it was April 1st.

</comment><comment><USER106> I don't need a boss as a service, I have a wife who handles all our finances...</comment>


Call9 (YC S15) Delivers On-Demand Doctors in Emergency Situations - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/20/call9-delivers-on-demand-doctors-in-emergency-situations/ <comment><USER3> A few comments (which aren't necessarily a complaint about your product) from a firefighter/paramedic:

1\. Nursing home staff should be able to recognize typical and atypical signs of cardiac arrest ('should' being a key part of this).

2\. My county's 911 service (serving 300,000 people) has the following response times: 6.0min for BLS (Basic Life Support) services, 6.1min for ALS (Advanced Life Support). 15 minute response times would be... a whole new world.

3\. Impending cardiac arrest, I'd be curious as to what the 'difference made' would be. Administering ASA (aspirin)? Not emergently significant. Nitro? Typically self-administered, and again, I'd question the quality of a nursing facility that didn't feel comfortable administering such drugs based on vitals and symptoms alone, without needing the assistance of an ED physician (granted, several in our area as a policy/liability concern will immediately phone 911 as their 'treatment plan' for these situations - but similarly, these same facilities would be on the low end of the bell curve for utilizing a service like Call9).

4\. Similarly, a nursing facility that wasn't vigorous in training and utilization of CPR/AED (because that's the number one hope for an arrest patient, high quality chest compressions - in the absence of tele-EKG for administering cardiac drugs for certain arrhythmias and dysrhythmia - again, if your 911 arrival time is 15+ minutes, perhaps...)

I can definitely see a use case for anything that moves from "proactive" (nor necessarily in a positive, often actually a negative sense) ED / 911 visit called by a skilled nursing facility. Indeed any increase in the use of a community outreach / service for high risk patients is a good thing.

I did read that you are indeed going to supply EKG and US to clients, and this helps - but I'd be curious about the value of some interventions. A presentation of impending cardiac arrest should be a first call to 911 (I realize your example presented with constipation and stomach pain). And in the context of having to talk a nurse through an EKG, what interventions do you really expect them to be able to reliably perform (start an IO/IV)? I am intrigued though, to see how this could grow, but it seems to me that your target might want to be 'urgent care' as much as emergency medicine.

Of course, where 911 response truly is that slow (and I know that it can be in several parts of the country), then anything that helps the patient's prognosis cannot be a bad thing.

<comment><USER4> Look their own sales pitch in the article is the death knell for this startup.

Protocol with 911:

* Person has suspected heart attack symptoms.

* 911 is called, short triage on the phone.

* Ambulance is dispatched.

Protocol with this new startup:

* Person has suspected heart attack symptoms.

* Skype with doctor, short triage on Skype.

* Doctor quickly trains nurse (conveniently available on site) to take EKG (presumably while patient is grasping his chest).

* Nurse takes first EKG in her life.

* Doctor reads EKG, and calls 911.

Who in their right mind would call a gatekeeper instead of 911 in an emergency?

<comment><USER5> Hi, this is Jessica from Call9. Just wanted to address a few points here:

1) When you call 911, you talk to a gatekeeper. That gatekeeper is a phone dispatcher, not a doctor. Talking to a doctor is not a delay in care--it's the reason people call 911 in the first place.

2) Since Call9 works with facilities such as nursing homes and has access to patient information, using Call9 actually saves time in the dispatch process.

3) As described in the article, it's not always that clear to the person calling 911 has "suspected heart attack symptoms". In the given example, he presented with abdominal pain. That is why having the doctor be the first point of contact is so important.

<comment><USER6> Your doctor is a gatekeeper to 911, so you have an additional gatekeeper. I think you will find that anyone in the general public experiencing an emergency is going to call 911, not your service.

Your service might be useful in non-emergencies. It's basically like a family doctor visit on Skype. There are a number of companies offering this, but it's not clear how this helps with outcomes. (For example, [http://nyti.ms/1fyWXeK](http://nyti.ms/1fyWXeK))

For healthcare facilities, like nursing homes, you are basically providing a doctor on call via telemedicine. That is already heavily used. Many hospitals employ radiologists, neurologists, etc who can view diagnostic images and data remotely and provide consultation to the medical staff on site.

What I think is dishonest (and could cost lives) is advertising your service to the general public as an alternative to 911, and especially claiming that it is faster than 911.

<comment><USER7> These are interesting points. I think that it's important to clarify a major differentiating factor between Call9 and other telemedicine providers: not only do we have an ER doctor directly interfacing with the patient immediately, but we also have on-site healthcare staff who are prepared to perform diagnostic tests and immediate medical interventions under a doctor's direction. This is different than a consult where a doctor can only virtually advise, but cannot intervene; it is also different that calling a doctor for a specialty consult or a second opinion.

It is true that putting a doctor first in the process adds another step before calling 911. But it is a meaningful interaction that improves the quality and efficiency of the medical care (both by having an ER doctor assess the patient, and by having information ready so that the 911 call can go faster). It's not about cutting out steps, but reorganizing the system to optimize care and save lives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool! I think this could help with sudden cardiac arrest, where the heart stops pumping blood effectively and death happens within minutes--faster than an ambulance can arrive. [http://my.clevelandclinic.org/services/heart/disorders/arrhy...](http://my.clevelandclinic.org/services/heart/disorders/arrhythmia/sudden- cardiac-death)

The survival rate of sudden cardiac arrest is 8%, and it kills about 350,000-400,000 people in just the US. It's our #1 killer.

The difference between a life saved and a life lost is whether non-medical bystanders can intervene and perform CPR or use an AED within the first couple of minutes.

<comment><USER9> SCD (sudden cardiac arrest) is a great example of when having a highly trained healthcare professional at the scene early can save lives. It's been well shown that there's a 'bystander effect' when it comes to CPR, which can keep the brain oxygenated in SCD and keep people alive before the ambulance arrives. The bystander effect, is that CPR is often not done when it needs to be (even by those who have been trained in CPR) because they are fearful of doing something wrong. With a doc there immediately, we can encourage bystanders to do CPR immediately and again save lives not otherwise being saved.

<comment><USER3> SCD is sudden cardiac death, not arrest - death as the result of 'loss of heart function'.

<comment><USER9> Sorry - let me explain myself. The term SCD is often used as analogous to SCA (sudden cardiac arrest). In this context, SCA is a more proper term - <USER2> catch. The only difference between the two is that the SCA didn't get treated in time and so the patient expired.

<comment><USER3> I figured something along those lines, with "SCD (sudden cardiac arrest)" in your original comment. Always happy to clarify and get clarification!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks fascinating.

i) do you have plans to gather data? Correct research would be tricky, but have you considered collaborations with researchers / statisticians? It'd be fascinating to see some robust numbers after a year

ii) in England a considerable amount of 999 calls are either alcohol or mental health related. You've limited the "custer base" to schools and care homes and etc, but how will you handle such calls? For example: you get a call for someone who has engaged in severe (requiring surgery and hospital admission) self harm but who has no suicidal intent. Do you have procedures for that kind of call?

Thanks for patiently answering questions! HN is sometimes somewhat hostile. :-/

<comment><USER9> i) A group from University of Arizona is actually doing a prospective study on our patients. The have IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval to collect data and will see our impact on the patients as we move forward. After we proved concept, we were confident enough in our product to let them in and see what we're doing. I stay out of their way, so I don't have details on how the study is structured, what data they're collecting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "In a few years, people are going to be using Call9 instead of calling 911," says Tenev.

I doubt it. I would never put my life in the hands of an insurance like app which may or may not work; say where data is not available. You can call 911 over all cell network even if yours is not available/no sim/unregistered phone.

I hope Call9 understands the emergency side of the business esp around PSAP? Otherwise it won't scale and will be liable should their technology fail to save a life.

A problem with mobile phones is location. Unlike a home phone which is tied to your physical home address, how will the emergency personnel know where you are if you pass out before telling them the address? Cell tower location find can be up to 100m away from you. Satellite requires 3+ direct satellite triangulation.

Then there is the routing issue. So the app connects to a Physician in a hospital? But hospitals don't own Ambulances. Ambulance companies are private in the USA. So a hospital will in turn contact the Ambulance company. Additional piping that can be avoided with a better model. Say; if Call9 connected directly with an Ambulance company that is running a Home Visit Program (HVP) ie. Paramedicine, then use the EMT to triage the situation using industry Protocols/ICD. Then, Call9 would be starting to solve Hospital Readmission Penalties/Rates. That's a big fish worth $$$ per patient and thus a great disruptive business model.

Now of course this is all easier said than done since the red tape to get this going is the major hurdle. The technology part is easy. I've been down this rabbit hole ;-)

</comment><comment><USER4> It looks like this product introduces an extra delay before an ambulance is called - terrible idea. When you have a heart attack, you want an ambulance, not an Uber driver (UberFIRST-AID) or a Skype call with a doctor (this startup).

<comment><USER9> We get an ambulance to the scene faster than 911, which is a great benefit of using Call9 - I completely agree that it would be a terrible disservice to cause a delay in emergency response. Because we have a direct line to an ambulance service dispatcher, we don't first need to go through a central call-center like other 911 emergencies. Therefore, we save time by a) not having to explain if its a medical vs. police/fire emergency, b) not explaining our location - they know it already, c) having the doctor tell them if advanced life support is needed vs basic life support.

<comment><USER3> This doesn't necessarily seem like it's a guarantee - firstly, from my experiences working private ambulance, most are built and staffed to operate at or near capacity, as idle ambulances don't make money.

Depending on the location, when you dispatch ALS/BLS ambulances this way, whose medical license are the EMTs and paramedics working under? Does the county medical protocol director like/want this?

In cases of cardiac arrest, you're going to typically want more than an EMT and a medic on an ambulance. CPR is, as you know, a man-power intensive activity.

The three things you mention are not really problems in a 'modern' PSAP. "911, what are you reporting?" "Confirmed cardiac arrest". Even without that, in most areas around here criteria-based dispatch is used to determine ALS/BLS with an erring towards ALS if there's any question.

In my county (Washington state), the protocol states (and is met with 94% reliability that from call reception for EMS, dispatchers should have toned the appropriate unit(s) with 60 seconds of call reception, and those units should be en route within 2 minutes of that (even for in quarters response).

<comment><USER8> FWIW, Washington state is exceptionally good at treating cardiac arrest. See table 4 here: [http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=182614](http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=182614)

SCA survival rate of 16% in Seattle, vs. 3% in Alabama or 5.5% in Toronto.

Still a long ways to go, even for the best regions.

<comment><USER3> Very true. As objectively as possible, I realize we're at the 'leading edge', and there are a lot of improvements, both here and elsewhere, to be made.

But then again, I'm sure Call9 would rather be compared to 'how we fare versus the best EMS systems in the country, not the worst'. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hi Tim, congrats on the launch from back here in Boston! I had a couple of questions on what I'll call 'sensitivity' and 'specificity' in your early work:

Sensitivity: What's the OR, relative delta, or NNT in calls for changing prehospital acuity or intervention to a higher than initially suspected level?

Specificity: How often does the early contact result in a less intense, on- site, or diverted response?

So many questions! Would love to hear what you're finding.

(edit: copy)

<comment><USER6> So much misleading medical marketing in the article and this thread, by the time this thread is done, he's going to have his medical license pulled. :)

<comment><USER12> Well, like usual on HN I don't read the actual linked content and probably won't here as well. For my own peace of mind, I'll recuse myself from reading the website and it's likely necessary launch rhetoric. You're right that HN suffers from less than rigorous medical analysis more often than I would usually like, but there are usually at least a few penetrating questions on the medical threads I read.

However, I have met Tim before and can attest to his interpersonal candor on problems with EMS, and the reputation for rigor of his medical training. In short, I think he's a smart, hard working guy who is legitimately committed to solving a real problem.

Given my own experience (as an EMT, working in the ED as an admin and medical student, and as a federal emergency response officer in a previous life), I do think solutions along the lines of higher fidelity information on scene will be useful for patients and providers.

There will need to be piles and piles of evidence before we can conclude that products like this will provide the outcomes we want in our health system. In the meantime, I'll try to appreciate the obstacles I know this team has overcome to get as far as they have.

<comment><USER9> I still don't know who this is writing this, but I thank you for the sentiments!

We've done our best to research the stats and present a thoughtful representation of the current state of EMS. We have many official and unofficial EMS advisors who have spent tireless hours to make sure this is true. I assure you, nothing on our site or in our advertising is meant to be misleading - the 911 system is antiquated and could benefit from an overhaul. Like many large systems, there are a lot of good, smart people involved, but change is difficult. We hope to work from the outside in, and save lives/improve outcomes in the process.

Research and academic integrity is important to me and my Call9 colleagues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "The team has a group of 130 doctors standing by"

I think that this is not a startup, but a psychology experiment that needs to find out just how gullible we are.

<comment><USER9> Hahaha. I like this comment. We have 130 physicians who will do part time calls - we also have full time docs. But the benefit of the part time model is that Emergency Medicine docs have never had a model to make extra income for clinical work in which they can only work a couple hours at a time. As an EM doc, when I go to work now, I have to stay there until I'm done usually 10-12 hours later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hey HN! XiaoSong here (cofounder/CTO at Call9). Would love to answer any questions people might have about the product.

<comment><USER15> Are there any liability aspects if a nurse or other practitioner _doesn 't_ call 911, in favour of calling you? Or does your product also alert ambulance services, while simultaneously providing advice?

<comment><USER14> If the patient needs an ambulance, the Call9 doctor can easily order one. One advantage of this system is that the doctor can prep the EMTs on what they need to know as they're en route to the emergency. The TC article elaborates on this a bit.

<comment><USER15> Cool. That sounds sensible. Good luck! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is really interesting. I know it's not a replacement for it, but 911 seems so inefficient and outdated to me today. I'm excited to see how this company progresses. Small improvements here can really save lives.

<comment><USER4> It's not going to seem so outdated when you or one of your loved ones has a heart attack, and the ambulance is rushing him to the hospital where an interventional cardiologist is going to unblock his/her heart arteries in an operating room.

<comment><USER16> Well, one of the reasons why the medical response aspects of 911 feel so outdated and inefficient to me is because the system has to treat all calls as if they are life threatening heart attacks, when most often they are not.

<comment><USER4> Right, so this startup introduces an additional delay / filter before 911 is called. I would not want that for my loved ones in an emergency.

<comment><USER9> Surely your right to not use our product. But, we've already saved lives, decreased transport times, identified conditions in patients that otherwise would have been ignored (because we have doctors doing the assessment, not bystanders/nurses/EMS). The way the system works is that there are many triage steps before a patient ever sees a doctor - we've flipped that model and put the physician (who is ultimately the one making the medical decision) as the first step rather than the last. To us (and our patients), it just makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why not just call an ambulance?

<comment><USER14> Most people don't realize this but there are a lot of inefficiencies with the current 911 system that jeopardize the safety of patients. It takes on average over an hour to see an MD from the time you call 911. In that time, a lot of triage and diagnostics, and even treatment can happen. We cut down that time drastically.

Additionally, a very large portion of 911 calls come from patients who should not be going to the emergency room. Going to the emergency room is always exposing yourself to risk (such as hospital infections), not to mention unnecessary stress and pain. For the elderly, or very young patients, or very ill patients, this undue (and often unnecessary) stress can have very detrimental effects on the patient. Call9 can prevent that portion of calls from going to the hospital.

So with call9, we either A: provide safer, better service on top of traditional 911, or B: we skip the emergency room altogether.

<comment><USER3> This confuses me. These aren't necessarily benefits to your service.

If the patient needs an ER visit, you are getting one, however it is initiated.

Community-outreach / in-call? Absolutely. I love that aspect of your service.

Your "A" and "B" benefits seem to be the same, not an either-or. The safer route in A comes from skipping the emergency room in B where applicable and appropriate.

I do like that you cut the waiting time to see an MD, regardless of the situation. Diagnosis is an important first step. But I'm curious about the 'medical kit' provided. Because diagnosis is limited to cases that don't require (for example) lab services, and for non-emergent cases, great. Prescribe the appropriate medication or treatment regime. For anything else, the outcome is likely to be the same - not much is changing in that "golden hour" (with all caveats thereto) in terms of definitive care.

I realize I may be coming across as cynical or skeptical in many of my comments, but I really do wish you success and would be very happy to talk with you further. I'm just raising some of the thoughts and questions that come to my mind as a first responder and, as I'm sure anyone will agree, anything that alleviates pressure on the 911 system is "A Good Thing(TM)".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Good idea for patients, terrible awful business model.

<comment><USER9> How so? Would love to address this question and your concerns. What is your perception of how our business model works?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why not dispatch the ambulance as soon as the call is received, and call it back a few seconds later if the doctor determines it's not an emergency?

</comment><comment><USER20> Are they insured?

<comment><USER9> We insure ourselves and our physicians.

<comment><USER20> Was that difficult, being an emergency service?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> DO NOT visit call9.com

If you were curious, like me, why Call9 didn't use call9.com, don't visit that domain to find out. It will redirect you to a malware website.

IMHO, Call9 should attempt to acquire the call9.com domain (or sue for it), since it clearly serves no decent purpose.

<comment><USER9> use callnine.com !!! we're surely working on this

<comment><USER21> Ah, good deal. One more thing:

The "Request Access" button doesn't function properly on Firefox, due to the use of... an <input type="text" ...> there (not sure what the purpose of this is, but surely you could get by with just a <strong> or something.

<comment><USER9> thanks for this. we'll work on it right away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > "In a few years, people are going to be using Call9 instead of calling 911"

'Murica, your shit is beyond repair.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is dangerous for one reason and one reason alone: It conflates the message of "Medical emegency, call 911". We've had that drilled into our heads and drill it into our children's heads.

Now, you want people to question that in a time of emergency? "Crap! Mom is having a heart attack! Should I call 911 or use Call9? It's supposed to be better! Shit, where is my smartphone, all I have is this landline. Crap, my smartphone is upstairs, I'll just use my tablet. Wait, I don't have Skype installed on my tablet. Dammit, I'll just call 911".</comment>


Show HN: Websites for Trello - <AUTHOR> http://websitesfortrello.com/

<comment><USER2> This looks very impressive. Any details on how it was done?

<comment><AUTHOR> Trello sends webhooks when anything is created or updated in a Board, Websites for Trello listens and keeps his own model of each Board structure and data to serve it on demand in the form of webpages.</comment></comment>