Skeuomorphism: The Opiate of the People - <AUTHOR> http://www.andymangold.com/skeuomorphism-the-opiate-of-the-people/ <comment><USER2> There's a difference between "looking like something I'm familiar with" and "working like something I'm familiar with". The problem with bad skeuomorphic design is when it _looks_ familiar but doesn't _act_ like the thing it's mimicking.

A good example of this was brought up by Josh Clark in his talk at Swipe Conference a few months back: the Address Book app on the iPad. The main interface is an open book, but you can't swipe through pages like you're actually reading an address book. In fact, if you swipe in the middle of the right page, you're going to swipe on a contact's field and then a delete button will pop up! Trying to swipe from page to page (like you would if this design mimicked the real object's affordances) could actually be a destructive action.

The design of Classics for iPhone and, later on, iBooks is skeuomorphic and resembles an open book, but you can (mostly) treat the app as if you would a book using similar actions. This is an example of skeuomorphic design that actually works. It looks _and works_ like the real world thing it's emulating.

Bad skeuomorphic design simply _looks_ familiar, but the user experience takes a wrong turn as soon as you start to use it like you would use the real thing. Bad skeuomorphic design can actually deeply harm the user experience because it builds up a false trust with users.

However, using real-world textures, patterns and materials like leather, tartan, glass and aluminum in your app interfaces just to spice it up a bit does not necessarily mean you're designing in a skeuomorphic manner if these items are used purely in an ornamental sense. An app like Find My Friends that looks like a baseball glove obviously isn't made to replicate a baseball glove's functionality, it simply uses some stitched leather textures from the real world. This doesn't mean it's a skeuomorphic interface but it does, in this case, mean it's ugly. The secret is to use realistic patterns and textures sparingly, not drop them from the sky all over the screen.

<comment><USER3> I always found iBooks' attempt at skeuomorphism really off-putting, at least on the iPad: the size of each page will change depending on whether you hold it portrait or landscape, and so the number of pages, and on which pages text can be found, will all change. I actually stopped using it shortly after downloading it for exactly this reason. It promises to behave like a book, but falls far short. No pages at all would have been preferable.

<comment><USER4> I want something between Kindle and iBooks. Kindle is too flat and lacks any personality. iBooks gives the personality, but the skeuomorphic behavior is off just enough to be disconcerting (like a robot that is almost, but not quite, human).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _But what hadn't occurred to me is that it doesn't matter if it actually does make it easier to use, all that matters is that it makes the average person think it's easier to use. In reality, a user must take time to learn any interface, whether clad in faux leather or not. The skeuomorphism in iOS plainly tricks people that might otherwise walk away, convinced that they can't learn something new, into putting in the time required to get acclimated to a new interface.

For every one designer pointing out flawed and unnecessary ornamentation in iOS, one hundred non-designers, normal people, are tricked into thinking they understand something new._

But this is violated as soon as that person walks up and tries it and the thing doesn't work the way they thought they knew it would.

Skeuomorphism _can_ help when used properly. If something looks like a button, I know by metaphor that pushing it will do something. What's really tragic about Apple's recent use of skeuomorphism is that it often doesn't make any metaphorical sense, and is also horribly ugly.

But I think we should move on. The people that need skeuomorphism as a crutch are dying out. The new generations are growing up with digital interfaces. We're artifically limiting what we can do by simulating physical things.

Here's my first attempt at thinking about what the implications of wholly embracing the digital medium are: [http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/9325300749/a-different- kind-o...](http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/9325300749/a-different-kind-of-gui)

<comment><USER6> _But this is violated as soon as that person walks up and tries it and the thing doesn't work the way they thought they knew it would._

Point is, that happens after they've paid for it.

<comment><USER7> I wonder how these points relate to the high satisfaction rate of iPhone users. Or maybe there's no relation at all?

<comment><USER8> Probably not much. Most of the skeuomorphism is actually relatively new.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How does the leather skin on "Find My Friends" trick people into assuming familiarity? It's an application without a physical analog, other than shouting your friends' names really loudly or wearing a weird hat or bright shirt.

I think someone with a high position in Apple's iOS app software department just really likes that leather look, and people are reading way too much into this. There are cases where the skeuomorphism is appropriate, such as the striped yellow notepad or the wooden bookshelf in iBooks, but Apple has clearly extended the use of these themes beyond where they make any kind of logical sense, making them simple arbitrary aesthetic choices.

<comment><USER10> Could it be a function of 'comfort in familiarity' in what's otherwise a jarringly personal app?

<comment><USER9> To me, it just looks weird, with interface elements such as buttons and text fields sculpted in leather. I cannot see how it would make me feel familiarity.

<comment><USER10> Maybe comfort is a better word for it.

It would be interesting to see an A/B test of the leather UI and a standard iOS UI — something that looks exactly like Google Maps with Latitude on top of it, for instance.

I'd be willing to bet that the leather UI is better received by users. The app is divulging a core aspect of privacy but it certainly manages to look friendly doing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The biggest problem is the use of metaphors that won't make sense in a couple of years. When we don't have printed magazines and newspapers we'll be stuck with the legacy of dated apps and metaphors.

Indulging in objectively bad design in the short term to appease technically inexperienced users isn't a solution, it's putting a band aid on the infected wound of inconsiderate UI designer.

For more on that line, I wrote about it a few days ago [http://designedbygold.com/2011/10/the-metaphors-breaking- the...](http://designedbygold.com/2011/10/the-metaphors-breaking-the-future/)

<comment><USER12> Are you talking about "Save to disk" icons that include pictures of floppy disks? =:)

<comment><USER11> Absolutely - great example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Useful related reading:

<http://www.alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofeyecandy>

Emotional Design by Don Norman - [http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Design- Everyday-Things-ebook...](http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Design-Everyday- Things-ebook/dp/B005GKIYD4)

(summary of above - <http://www.curledup.com/emotionl.htm> )

</comment><comment><USER13> I think it has it's place but I mainly use it as a way to inform the user's concept of an app or a portion of an app.

Example: At WePay we don't use skeuomorphism in the UI except for receipts and tickets, these are parts of the app that have a real world analog and we want to stress that these are the valuable results of a transaction that should be held on to.

In the end you have varying degrees of metaphor in UI design, this is just one of them...

</comment><comment><USER14> Related: <http://madebymany.com/blog/apples-aesthetic-dichotomy>. This writer brings up an excellent question: for whatever reason Apple seems to think having skeuomorphic interfaces is a good idea.... so why isn't this reflected in the hardware itself? Why is the macbook/ipad not designed to look like a notepad or briefcase?

<comment><USER15> This exactly. On the outside Apple's devices are sleek and futuristic and often boldly unconventional. For some reason they seem to lose their nerve when it comes to software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is blowing one element of design way out of proportion. I'm not a huge fan of brown leather, but to me, iCal is much easier to look at and functionally clear than Google Calendar, and part of this has to do with the use of texture.

When I open iCal (in the cloud or desktop), my focus rests naturally on the actual calendar because the texturing puts all the settings in the background. I like that the calendar itself is elegantly centered on the screen. I like that it has only settings I'm likely to use and that menus I use less the calendar selection column) are completely out of the way.

I don't have any problem using Google Calendar, but it's flatness annoys me. The calendar is lumped into the bottom of the screen, which is kind of an odd de-emphasis of the most used element of the app. The banner and many controls I don't use all the time have the same dark hue as the current week. Search is disproportionately (for my calendar usage, anyway) prioritized in terms of screen space. The whole left column (with the garish "create" button and a mini calendar) is basically useless.

Yeah, Apple needs to go easy on the leather (surely _something_ could be more consonant with that silk texture), but ultimately Google has a lot more to learn from iCal than vice versa. And I think iCal actually shows, albeit imperfectly, that texture does have its place.

</comment><comment><USER17> interesting read, but I would have appreciated a few more examples of skeuomorphism other than the leathery ical. frankly I ask myself whether it's possible to design a GUI without any skeuomorphisms at all. Wouldnt we be unable to use it? aren't we only able to interact with computers and with the world in general because we remember certain visual clues on what the expected behaviour is (eg. red & green traffic lights, light switches, door knobs...)?

<comment><USER18> It would be pretty much impossible. People are symbol processors, if they don't understand any of the symbols then they can't learn it. This is probably why car analogies are prevalent in the tech field, and higher dimensional spaces are difficult to understand.

It's extremely difficult to understand what Mayan tablets mean because we don't understand the symbols. This is why things like a rosetta stone are so important, because they give us clues as to what symbols mean.

Every symbol is evaluated in the context of the individual.

Designing an interface with no 'skeuomorphisms' would be extremely difficult, it's arguable that roman letters themselves are 'skeuomorphisms' of the requirements originally for stone tablets. An interface with no skeuomorphisms is like a person who no one can relate to. It's the difference between learning a new language and learning a new word in a language you already know.

"Good" designers have their own symbology so designers who are trained find other "haute" design easy to use. Since most people aren't "haute" designers it becomes difficult to relate to and use their designs.

There's a great article out there about a hotel that installed really well designed light switches that no one could use but everyone loved once they figured out how to use them. "Haute" design is like C4, it has huge activation potential to overcome but once you overcome it, it's explosively powerful. However, the activation potential is a hinderance to adoption.

<comment><USER19> "People are symbol processors"

No.

"Since most people aren't "haute" designers it becomes difficult to relate to and use their designs."

No.

It's easy to judge how realistic or beautiful a face is, but much harder to draw it. Similar concept with design.

I think you're making a fundamental assumption that design/drawing/visual disciplines are symbol-based, when they are not symbol-based.

I highly suggest reading "Drawing on the right side of the brain". I've studied art, and in every drawing class something along the lines of "No, symbols are bad, boo egyptian eyes, switch to the right side of the brain" was said at some point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If Safari had prominent wood grain I'd care, but the fact that this kind of design is isolated to a few of Apple's more obscure, lesser used apps makes this whole thing a non-issue.

I will say that I prefer iBook to the reading app I actually use (Kindle, since I'm in Amazon's ecosystem) - I find the subtle border and gradients on the edges (and a handsome color scheme) more pleasing to the eye than the flat "text on a plain background" that I see in the Kindle and Google Books apps. Done right, texture and shadow can subtly draw the eye to the most relevant section of a screen. To me, the flat interfaces that the anti-skeutomorph people seem to admire are unnatural and decidedly uneasy on the eyes.

</comment><comment><USER20> Apple's skeuomorphic design for iCal is bad. iCal has been made to look like a real calendar, but in reality it isn't used like a real one at all.

If iCal worked like a real calendar, skeuomorphism would have value, but in its current form, it's just an ugly skin. It doesn't actually show users how to use it.

Read about it here: [http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac- os-x-10-7.a...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac- os-x-10-7.ars/5)

<comment><USER21> You're confusing _affordance_ with skeumorphism.

Skeuomorphs are non-functional, by definition.

<comment><USER22> By who's definition? Some common skeuomorphs are shutter sounds on cameras without physical shutters and page turn animations in e-books. These are both skeuomorphs because they reference functionality in an earlier object, and they are largely ornamental. However, these are also functional. The shutter sound tells the user that the picture has been taken, and the page turn animation provides a visual transition between two pages. Both of these could be accomplished other ways (such as a chime and cut-through-white respectively), but that doesn't make them entirely non-functional.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is what happens when high design meets the real world. As much as it pains designers to realise, most people have _shitty taste_ and as such, there are times when compromises must be made to get them on board. As Reichenstein notes, for most consumer-targeted UIs, users won't even give your _serious design_ a chance if it lacks a bit of eye candy. You'll just have to find some kind of balance.

<comment><USER24> You make it sound like your particular taste is superior. But minimalism is not the end-it-all. It's one of many possible styles.

What does it even mean that "most people have shitty taste"? I guess it's easy to agree with that on an emotional level because taste is so varied. There is always bound to be a large number of people that you don't agree with in taste. That is completely subjective though, those people will probably find your taste shitty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is very entertaining and revealing. It helps me realize why I have been unable to get myself to use any of those apps with wood grain, leather, etc.

I'd argue that designers should stop overreacting to this though b/c few are innocent of using typefaces in a nostalgic way from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER26> I ended up clicking over to the (very interesting) wikipedia definition.

Does anyone know what the purpose of the Maple syrup handle is?

<comment><USER27> It doesn't have a purpose; that's the point. It's modelled after the handle on larger jugs, which permit the user to hold the jug-- but that makes sense on a gallon jug, and not on a half-pint jug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Shaquille O'Neal: the Michael Jordan of Basketball.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think it just gives people the confidence to play around with it. And that's what really matters. As longs as people are willing to play with it and aren't scared away, the design is pretty darn good.</comment>


Apollo Preliminary Drawings - <AUTHOR> https://apollopreliminarydrawings.com <comment><AUTHOR> These drawings were drawn between Jul and Aug of 1961. Several of the drawings have various revisions but I only have a single copy of each drawing and I assume they are the latest revisions. I hope you all enjoyed these.

I got these from my grandfather after he retired from Rockwell. These are one of a kind as far as he knew.</comment>


Facebook launches two-factor authentication - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/introducing-login-approvals/10150172618258920

<comment><USER2> I have the most secure kind of facebook account one could ever dream of... No facebook account.</comment>


Why are you still building consumer apps? Enterprise pays 4x more - <AUTHOR> http://www.developereconomics.com/still-building-consumer-apps-enterprise-pays-4x/ <comment><USER2> We're in the enterprise space. While I'm constantly amazed at how much we're able to charge for our product, I'm equally amazed at the reasons deals go sideways.

In the consumer space, you're working with averages over large quantities. The number of potential buyers is huge, so you need to build a product that, on- average, will result in more sales than non-sales when the customer reaches the point of making a decision. This decision point might happen tens of thousands of times -- sometimes millions -- a year for consumer products.

In the enterprise world, the number of sales opportunities are smaller by orders of magnitude. Every sale becomes a huge gamble, and as a result you tend to throw an immense amount of resources at every sale. This is also one of the primary reasons enterprise software ends up so bloated and unmanageable. On the front-end, the decision making process for purchasing enterprise software is driven by checklists and "due diligence" procedures that are horrible at accounting for software quality. You're more likely to win an enterprise contract by saying "sure, we'll add that feature" than you are carefully explaining how maintaining product focus results in a more usable product.

This makes enterprise software a high-stakes game. A sale results in windfall revenue, but a non-sale can severely strain cash-flows. At the end of the day, you're still trying to beat the averages, but you're working with a much smaller number of opportunities, so wins and losses move the needle in a big way. I think this is a significant incentive for small shops and independent devs to avoid the enterprise space. You need a larger bank roll to attack the enterprise market. We bootstrapped our company, and we hit several gut checks along the way. The days of writing large checks to my company are not quickly forgotten.

<comment><USER3> Exactly - at my last startup, revenue "lumpiness" was the worst part of the whole thing. In the early days, we'd have $0 in bookings one month, and then next month, a check for $800k would come in.

Building an enterprise sales funnel is also a challenge. It takes real discipline to be able to say "100 leads->25 opportunities->5 POCs->3 deals at an ASP of 450k". With consumer apps, the volume is so much greater that you can have conversations about A/B testing the homepage to drive a few extra percentage points - for enterprise apps, odds are not enough people will ever visit your website to be able to gather enough data to A/B test anything.

And deals will fall apart for the most random reasons - a regime change at a big bank. A bigger company releases a product that uses some of the same words as yours, so the customer decides to evaluate it. Your EU channel partner gets bribed to tank a deal by a competitor. Anything can happen.

True story: we lost a deal once because the customer did a POC, and then fired the engineers who evaluated our software. With the departure of the engineers who evaluated the software, management lost the use case doc and evaluation criteria that was used by the fired engineers, so they wrote a new use case doc without telling us, scored us based on the new doc (despite never having used our software), then had a competitor come in and execute their POC with the new engineers and new use case doc. Unsurprisingly, the competitor "won". The call with the customer was amazing:

Them: You lost because of X, Y, and Z reasons

Us: Those weren't use cases in the pilot, but even if they were, we can do those things

Them: Well...we didn't know that you could do them. But it doesn't matter. We picked the other guys.

Us: Where are the people who looked at our software?

Them: We had to let them go. Unfortunately they didn't have time to write a report before they left, so we based our evaluation of your software on your user manual.

This is one of the reasons why SaaS apps are so appealing on paper. They have:

\- Recurring revenue stream

\- Freemium models allow leads to self-select

\- Less sales friction (no need to send a sales engineer onsite, just spin them up a free 2-week trial)

But there's still a ton of money to be made in on-premise enterprise software, it's just a long, annoying, dangerous sales process.

<comment><USER3> Self-replying to add: The other thing to think about with on-premise enterprise software is that while it's a huge pain to sell, it's incredibly sticky. If you build up a sufficient volume of customers, you can basically fund operations off of renewals, and invest all of your net new income in new R&D and development.

Many companies will renew support contracts for years, even if they're not heavily using your software anymore, because the risk associated with their being out of support and then running into a critical issue is greater than the $100k it's going to cost them to renew. But if you've got 100 customers paying $100k/year to renew support, that's $10m in basically guaranteed revenue, which means that _now_ you've got some breathing room to plan and grow sensibly. That's when the lumpiness goes away.

<comment><USER4> Having a predictable income from support contracts is also a buffer against seasonal sales cycles. The company I work for sells software to large enterprises that tend to go on buying sprees during the fourth quarter, when departments have to use up their yearly budgets or lose them. Many years we don't know if it will be a horrible year or a great year until we've hit the fourth quarter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems like there are a variety of challenges:

\- Selling costs are high.

\- Sales cycles can be long.

\- Harder to MVP and iterate.

\- Domain expertise required.

I think the last one is the biggest challenge. To be successful with any product you need to understand the customer. Usually that means, you _are_ the customer. With a consumer app, it's easier for you to be an example of the customer. With an enterprise app, you need to know that sort of enterprise -- its ostensible and implicit product needs, but also the decision-making processes and culture and so on.

As a result, you probably need to be an ex employee of that sort of company. Who became ex only after having been there long enough to understand the business and to make enough contacts at that company and its industry. And who became ex on sufficiently good parting terms.

So I would guess that's the "funnel" narrowing who can pull this off?

<comment><USER4> " _Harder to MVP and iterate._ "

Once you're established though, the difficulty of creating an MVP becomes an _advantage_ , because it makes it much harder for competitors to enter your space. If your product is an iPhone game, then a couple of college kids can compete with you. If your product is enterprise software, your competitors need to raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars just to have a chance to compete for your customers. The risk is that if your market segment becomes too large, it may attract competitors that are huge, well-funded companies like Microsoft or Oracle.

<comment><USER6> I agree it's an advantage once you're established. And even well-funded companies like Microsoft and Oracle are often so overly-bureaucratic that even with hundreds of millions in support their "me too" offering can (and often does) miss the mark.

They copy once an idea shows traction, but having not done the legwork themselves, they won't necessarily understand why the idea was successful in the first place. This is why you see huge companies like that wasting tons of resources trying to catch up or, if they're smart, simply acquiring the team with the winning idea.

<comment><USER4> But Microsoft can afford to spend years throwing resources at their product if they really want to get into that market. Release 1.0 may be crap and not a serious threat to you, but Release 4.0 might blow you out of the water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We recently made a switch from the consumer space to the b2b space.

There are two things about the change which are very refreshing.

First, we're talking with people who _want_ to pay us money and the amount doesn't even really matter. We're priced 10-100x over what we were charging consumers.

Second, the support overhead of supporting a crapton of free uses has dwindled and we're now able to provide significantly better support to paying business customers. We do phone support even.

All I've ever done in the past have been consumer startups. I don't think I'd ever do one again.

Edit: It's no silver bullet by any means. But it just feels much saner than the homerun derby which is the consumer Internet.

<comment><USER8> Are you referring to B2B, or Enterprise?

I've blown my proverbial load on Enterprise, and while I appreciate the money to be made, I've found that my psyche is more suited to 100 small wins than one win worth 100x the others. In short, enterprise isn't for me, at least, not if I'm involved in the sales process. The sheer arbitrary-ness of it was so mentally exhausting that it affected my productivity.

I can work on enterprise software, but if I'm in any way involved with the sales channel, it's a hardship.

For me, the happy middle ground is vanilla B2B, e.g., the same general demographic that 37Signals sells to. You still have customers that want to pay you money, but while cost is a factor, it isn't usually the driving factor -- there's likely little difference between $25 a month and $125 a month, assuming you're solving a problem that isn't cost-centric, and you're saved from the mental turmoil of enterprise whale-hunting.

<comment><USER7> B2B, really. We did have quite a few conversations with enterprise customers and the B2B conversations were so much better.

We haven't ruled out enterprise but I hope and imagine that our sweet spot is B2B.

As you said it has much of the benefits of consumers (little friction to get in the door) and enterprise (willing to pay).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, the word is out.

I have a friend, we'll call him Jon. Jon has been making apps for the past three years. He never learned to code, or design, or market, but he somehow managed to pickup xcode and started making fun apps for his nieces and nephews.

Eventually a day came when his sales skyrocketed, roughly $5,000 in a single day (a figure I made up, but he has stated before is realistic for him). Seemingly by chance. As Jon dug around a little he realized that a school -- who regularly provide iPads to students -- had bought his app in bulk.

Now, years later, he specializes in developing apps not for children or parents, but explicitly for schools. That's where the money is right now, he tells him.

You can make a lot of decent money selling quality apps or tools to consumers, but if you want to make boatloads you have to think in terms of those who would buy what you make via bulk purchases; from organizations large enough who need the thing you've made.

Isn't this how 37signals found their way?

<comment><USER10> > He never learned to code, or design, or market

sounds to me like he was never _taught_ how to code, design or market. he sure did learn it though.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the value adding clarification, genius.

<comment><USER12> That was uncalled for.

<comment><USER11> I disagree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From Joel Spolksky's "Camels and Rubber Duckies" (which is a great read in its own right):

>The joke of it is, big companies protect themselves so well against the risk of buying something expensive that they actually drive up the cost of the expensive stuff, from $1000 to $75000, which mostly goes towards the cost of jumping all the hurdles that they set up to insure that no purchase can possibly go wrong.

Personally, I'm just not interested in playing that game.

*Edit: Yet. Not interested in playing that game yet.

</comment><comment><USER14> Enterprise customers pay a lot once you get them paying, but selling to them is brutally hard.

<comment><USER15> Cold selling a large org is brutally hard. Usually what winds up happening is that internally in the org, there are people who follow what options are available in a particular space and are in a position to champion them. Companies need to find these people and then help these people make the convincing argument. If users internal to an org want to use product X, they will do much of the hard part of selling for you. You can find these people all over the place -- meetups, confs, blogs, etc.

<comment><USER16> That's true, but what you can't really do is target those people passively. You need hunter-gatherers to find them, corral them, and set up a collaborative sales process with them. Graham calls this "brutally hard", but what it really is is expensive: it requires direct sales teams, which in turn requires a founding/managing team that knows how to (a) hire and (b) manage direct sales teams.

 _Those_ tasks, tasks (a) and (b), are probably what's really brutally hard about enterprise sales. When an inexperienced founder/manager hires a direct sales team, the sales team sets to work on selling the founder/manager instead of the customer base.

An alternate path to getting a beachhead in an enterprise market is consulting. It's much easier to sell services to bigcos than products. Delivering services to someone gets you ~60% of the way to being able to sell products to them. The other 40% you can do on your own. That's worked for us (to greater/lesser extent depending on the specific offering we're talking about). But "consulting" is toxic to the species of startup we talk about on HN.

<comment><USER15> > You need hunter-gatherers to find them, corral them, and set up a > collaborative sales process with them.

I guess it depends on what the product is. I've initiated contact in a bunch of cases (mostly situations where the product is a public SaaS or already well-liked) and in others, evaluating a product stems from of a conversation at a meetup or conf.

IMO, the best thing anyone can do is make the product discoverable. If it has competitors, write blog posts and clear feature comparisons (they don't all have to be positive, either). If performance matters to whatever it is, write objective benchmarks and discuss performance aspects/tradeoffs. If it is something with an API, try to ensure there are a variety of platforms supported. This stuff is all good-to-have anyway, but many companies might not realize that people from large companies are browsing their sites and leaving unsatisfied.

I think developer-evangelist roles actually play a big part in this. Having someone set up real-world use cases and blog about them or post code somewhere can really help a customer out who just wants to try something but doesn't want to spend a lot of time doing it.

If the product is private, maybe have an easy way to generate an expiring VM image with some kind of demo setup so that you can quickly send it to leads. There's not a single person on earth that wants to do rounds of conference calls and in-person visits to just play with something.

> It's much easier to sell services to bigcos than products.

I've found the exact opposite, but maybe it depends on what you're referring to exactly. Carving out budget dollars for "3 people @ X/hr" is much harder and more scrutinized than product. "Product" is a loose term, though. "1-yr license" or "1-yr maintenance contract" are products, not consulting, even though the company selling them might not view them that way.

When it comes to SaaS products, we typically want to buy an appliance (read: VM image) that just works, deals with some form of standard authentication/authorization tech (LDAP/AD, OAuth, SAML, OpenID), and x-yr support contracts. Per-seat licenses usually involve more effort. Purchasing professionals are looking to mitigate risk. They don't want to enter into a purchase that has an attractive up-front price, but open-ended potential rate hikes down the road.

<comment><USER16> It may be the case that developer offerings are easier to sell into bigcos than other services. For my part, I have (a) had no luck selling products into enterprises using passive sales techniques (blogging "developer evangelist"-type strategies being an example of passive sales), and (b) talked to a bunch of other people who report similar results.

Regarding consulting: yes, 3 full-time consultants as staff aug is hard to sell. But most consulting projects aren't like that. Our typical project is 2 people, 2 weeks; we scale down to 1 person/week easily. A 1 p/w project isn't hard to sell at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Because consumer apps bedazzle VCs who in turn bedazzle Wall Street which uses them to bedazzle institutional investors who need unrealistic growth projections to pay for unsustainable pension promises. The money being sloshed your way for obviousbullshit.io is a Hail Mary pass by a society facing a demographic tsunami.

</comment><comment><USER18> B2B is an interesting animal. I find I can only do enterprise sales. I frankly suck at consumer.

I love having a sales pitch being as simple as: my product saves you this much money and time or gets you this much profit.

It's a gigantic numbers game. Aside from that, get an internal project champion to gather all the necessary stakeholders necessary to make a sale. (Yes I just threw out a lot of buzzwords there, sue me) Those are usually how you speak to bigger customers though. If you want, internalize the lingo as something you'd think of it as( a guy on the inside who becomes my sales guy!) .

This may take a while, so budget your cash flow accordingly.

I've found if your product offering is compelling enough you 'll get calls returned.

Many people just try to throw a bunch of buzz words out there to random people working at a place and think that's sales.

Talk to the right people who would want to use your product and build up internal evangelists. The rest will play out in the form of meetings and other random exchanges.

Typical SaaS businesses also seem to think that you can just put up a pricing page and expect that to close a sale.

There will be contracts going back and forth, custom pricing negotiations, SLAs being signed, among other things.

I typically attribute the sales cycle being similar to freelancing. Just replace that with a product.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sure. Lots of money to be made. The reason I got out of enterprise though is that the feedback loop is flawed. Your users are rarely your decision makers, large capital investments and stickiness that comes with adopting an organization-wide solution means the best product is less likely to win than the best sales force. I want to build the best products, so I chose to go find a company who's business model was better aligned with that value.

<comment><USER20> Good point about the feedback loop. My experience in the educational software industry was that it was the worst of both worlds: the broken feedback loop, but slower because of yearly cycles, plus they don't want to pay as much as enterprises.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> In my experience SMBs are a much bigger cash cow than enterprises.

<comment><USER22> Likewise. Their demands are practical and they retain their humanity in dealings... probably even moreso than mass market consumers.

<comment><USER23> This is an area where I have tried and failed with my SmartPointment (online appointment scheduling). Are there any words of advice you can share in reaching out to SMB market?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How do you get enterprise clients? I'd love to have some tips or direction because all I can find reliably are small fries.

<comment><USER25> It's about who you know more than how good you are.

<comment><USER26> This. Certain disreputable companies in my sector are recruiting staff from competitors just for their contact list.

<comment><USER25> I'm sure this happens in all industries and sectors..

The takeaway I feel here is that if you are considering working at an enterprise-focused company (or especially startup), try to get a feeling for how well connected the leadership is, because that will make or break a lot of deals.

<comment><USER26> Not all industries and sectors although it's more common than not. I've done a bit in most industries.

The most successful companies I've worked for have no contacts and sell directly. The most politics-filled and most likely to fail enterprise products have always been sold via the "old boys networks".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not only because is very hard to a sale, you also become a kind-of-employee where your work for them, and have less freedom. And the requeriments change all the time. And the development can (and WILL) take years.

Plus, the corruption. Without "sales comissions" you can't even get the foot in. And you need to know people, and give them vines, go to a fancy restaurant, etc.

IF exist a enterprise somewhere that just do this: I need x, you can do it, let's do it, then I love to get in. I'm not afraid of "boring" CRUDs apps and that stuff.

But without the social connections and bribes,is a not start for me.

</comment><comment><USER28> When discussing B2B sales on HN, I often see black and white arguments. Either you're in the B2C space, or you sell your products for north of 50K.

This is IMHO a false dichotomy, there are lots and lots of opportunities between these extremes. I'm currently in a project at the intersection of software and shipping, it sells like hotcakes, we currently have a conversion rate (inbound prospects to signed clients) of more than 75%.

This is far from easy to pull off, and there are a few points I'd like to make based on my current situation (we're pulling a gross margin of $500 to $5000 by client):

* Selling pure software is hard. At the most basic level, we sell shipping rates and the accompanying software is the cherry on top (I'm saying this even tough I run the technical side of things). We're doing well because our target market understands the value proposition even better than we do, we manage to offer a free product and make money on it.

* Co-founders matter. I couldn't even have had the idea on my own, much less the resources (contacts, skills, ...) to launch the business. I'm very fortunate to have met co-founders that are beasts on the business and shipping & logistics sides of things, we form an awesome triptych, which is a very delicate balance to have.

* Everything takes much more time than you expect. You're at ease in the technical domain, this won't be much of a problem while developing your core product. But selling will take much of your time, it's is a time-consuming activity and you don't know anything about it. Plugging your product in your client's systems will take time, either because your client hasn't any in-house developer or they're less than half as skilled as you are.

If you're a solo hacker selling pure software in the B2B space, you are, I believe, in for a rough, rough ride.

</comment><comment><USER29> If you're just building products and your end goal is making money, then Enterprise is the way to go. While innovation comes from both spaces, I feel like the consumer market has a better more realistic feedback cycle. In enterprise, it's usually a small group of people making large decision deals which impact a large group.

Salesforce is a great example of a company that's widely successfully and their products are critical in enterprise, but I've never personally heard an Enterprise consumer say "Oh I love the Salesforce software." By contrast, I've heard people rave about apps like Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat even though none of them are profitable businesses.

For me, If I wanted to build a money making product, I would go enterprise, but I choose consumer because I want to make a great product--very rarely do I find great enterprise products.

<comment> UVB-76 > Salesforce is a great example of a company that's widely successfully and > their products are critical in enterprise, but I've never personally heard > an Enterprise consumer say "Oh I love the Salesforce software." By contrast, > I've heard people rave about apps like Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat > even though none of them are profitable businesses.

I think there is a certain inevitability to these things when you compare software that people are required to use as part of their job, and software they choose to use in their spare time.

It strikes me as a vicious cycle. People don't enjoy using enterprise software, so developers don't enjoy making it.

The incentives are all wrong, the purchasing decisions are made by the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, and it's near impossible to avoid locking yourself into a particular solution or provider. Welcome to enterprise software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Working in the consumer space is not just an easier sell from a sales prospect, it's also easier to persuade talented people to join your company. Great engineers and designers want to show off their work to friends and get bonus points for working on cool stuff.

Working on an enterprise application/system tends to be process heavy and requires lots of QA before shipping. It's driven not by the engineers or designers working on the product, but by requirements outside of their control.

If you're someone who just wants to work on hard problems, then enterprise is a no brainer. Though the common theme I hear amongst startup folk is that they want to be part of the decision making process too. They aren't interested in being handed a list of requirements and just asked to make it work.

</comment><comment><USER31> Because the selling costs to the enterprise are 16x!

<comment><USER9> Not always. Look at the app marketplace, for example. Businesses are in dire need of better quality apps for managing employees, HR, payroll, networking, etc. And to get your app into their hands is as simple as making a unique app.

<comment><USER32> > And to get your app into their hands is as simple as making a unique app.

No, it isn't. It's about marketing to them, selling to the decision-maker, working through existing competition, wining and dining, proving your value with an on-site sales team, proving your integration...

and most of all, _proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that you will not fail or disappear in the next 5 years._

The problem with getting into Enterprise is not product-related. You can imagine all kinds of better products than what exists today. It's easy to build that better product that solves the same problems but prettier and with better UX. And make a great demo for it. Sure. I've done that.

The hard part is proving that your startup will be around in 5, 10, 15 years and won't leave them high and dry, proving that you will have a support team serving their every need, and ensuring you have the ability to implement and customize to the specific company's process and requirements (because every large company is so different and with such ingrained processes that it's not _them_ that will change, but _you._ Or else.)

It seems easy, but it isn't. This isn't even a problem of the "build it and they will come" fallacy—it's on an entirely different scale. And you'd have to be ready for all of that if you want to enter into enterprise.

<comment><USER9> To a degree, I completely agree with you.

But then, on the other hand, we see that making something unique does often propel the "build it and they will come" mentality. Because it works.

What marketing have you seen from Snapchat (not directly related to the enterprise discussion though)?

I'm reminded of the words of the great Steve Martin: "Be so good they can't ignore you."

It this always the case? Absolutely not, which is where I do agree with you. But when an executive walks into a quarterly meeting and asks: "I keep hearing about xyz app/tool, are we using that?" you've won a huge part of the battle. _Possibly_ with no marketing.

Make something unique, something a good majority of people will want to use and talk about, and your marketing/selling is half-way done for you.

<comment><USER32> Statistically speaking, that's not an average experience. It's an outlier. Don't count on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Because I'm not solely motivated by money.

</comment><comment><USER34> The market for consumer apps is several orders of magnitude larger however.

<comment><USER4> In terms of number of customers, yes. In terms of money, enterprise software is a much bigger market. Oracle's revenues alone were $37 billion in 2013.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Everyone is making good points about why enterprise is harder. Another one is barrier to entry. You need to have relationships in a given space in order to get in.

<comment><USER36> Relationships helps, but you can make good money even by cold-calling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The enterprise product we built cost us close to $1m in building it and around 300k per year for maintenance. [The engineering costs].

Each sale was supposed to bring in around $50k for a two yearly contract. A dedicated team of 25 people could barely make 20 sales per year. Bringing around $1m in revenue.

Remember the salaries of these 25 people ended up being the biggest cost component which made the entire business into a loss making proposition.

</comment><comment><USER38> Well - have you _worked_ on enterprise software? It's not fun.

</comment><comment><USER39> In the enterprise market you have to talk to 15 different people inside a company before you can make a sale. And often you have to go out of your way to convince them trying to cover every little insecurity they have and learn to live with the anxiety of failing because of actors outside your influence. You also have to dine them and wine them and laugh with their stupid jokes and generally try to be as pleasing and understanding as possible. The hell with that. In the consumer market things are a bit more straightforward. You focus your energies on the product and marketing and that's all there is.

</comment><comment><USER40> Your startup will never live long enough to survive the procurement process.

</comment><comment><USER41> to put it succinctly and in gamer terms: would you rather have a giant sword that does 16 points of damage with a 10% chance to hit? or a dagger that does 4 points of damage, but with an 80% chance to hit?

it's all about the dps, baby.

note: that metaphor obviously assumes "A little over 12% of the money-making developers" means that it's 8x easier to actually make money in the consumer space. not that 80% of consumer plays make money. not to mention it's way, way easier to build a company with 10 people than 45.

</comment><comment><USER42> Really? How do you target enterprises? It seems impossible to me to know which companies are actually willing to pay decently for apps. All the enterprises that I've encountered generally didn't like to pay more than ~10k euros for an effort of roughly two months of work, which isn't that much if you factor in the expenses (mostly wages).

It seems to me that the enterprise app development space is a low-margin business. At least over here in Germany. There seems to be quite a lot of competition in this space.

<comment><USER43> It depends on what kind of product you're selling. Certain budgets in enterprise are seemingly unlimited, generally when it comes to improving sales. If you're selling security products (outside of the compliance-driven market), you won't find much appetite for large margins. If you're selling CRM products (which are a dime a dozen), you won't find large margins.

You have to find out where a business is willing to invest no matter what the price. I know it exists, unfortunately each industry (and each subset of each industry) is going to have a different area where price is no concern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Because you can't be passionate about B2B apps. When we're reading about that to become an entrepreneur you can't be after the money, you have to do something you're passionate about, something you would die for.

All this, passion, solving a problem to die for, disappears by doing B2B and you're only going for the money again.

Of course there are exceptions, but that's the difference between B2B and B2C.

<comment><USER45> Find an aspect that you are passionate about. There are a lot of niches, whether it's specific types of companies, specific problems, or whatever. It's like saying "you can't make money with consumer apps." The space is far too large to permit such blanket generalizations.

<comment><USER44> I agree, you can't make blanket generalizations. However, there is just a stark difference that are few consumer apps that the founder ISN'T passionate about and there are few B2B apps that the founder IS passionate about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> To me, it just break even. It might be large sump value but the process of approval payment and user acceptance are way to long. There aren't much diffirent 30 buck subscription accounting software and 30 million erp software. The way much diff is building for enterprise system take lot of time doing discussion and reporting rather then make software itself.

</comment><comment><USER37> Enterprise might pay 4x more even for a product that is crappier by 10x than a consumer product but enterprise is also 100x smaller than consumer in sheer number of opportunities to make a sale.

Not to mention there are too many legalities around B2B sales some of which might threaten the very existence of your business.

</comment><comment><USER47> A lot of us are in it not just for the money. Sure enterprise companies can pay many times more, but who cares? Literally, who cares? You will never be "cool" by building the next oracle. And that's why most of us don't want to be the next oracle.

</comment><comment><USER48> It would be a rung up the ladder from "wordpress plugin builder and PHP monkey for hire"

</comment><comment><USER49> With enterprise, you end up supporting IE8 :(

<comment><USER50> Well we here in enterprise space are just starting to warm up to jQuery.</comment></comment>


Venture Capital in China - <AUTHOR> http://ventureblog.com/articles/2008/01/venture_capital_in_china.php

<comment><USER2> Having grown up overseas, I'm shocked at how unaware people in the States are at the differences overseas. A friend of mine is neck deep in providing hardware for two new Beijing and Bangalore branches of his company. It's a nightmare. I'm assuming an exec just said, "let's open up branches in China and India" without researching things fully and thinking through the implications.

My friend is having nightmares just getting computer equipment through customs. I can't imagine trying to invest millions in startups in a foreign country.

I'd think that investors would be better off investing stateside in companies that are focused internationally. There's not much to stop a startup in the US from developing it's site in Mandarin or Cantonese.

<comment><USER3> Why not just buy equipment locally? Or ship the stuff through Hong Kong?

In my very limited experience, almost all of the VC I've witnessed in China has involved imitative trend-chasing by small players hoping to cash out by getting foreign investment. Or government corruption (multi-million dollar investments in multi-thousand dollar projects).

Wholly-foreign entities in China have the freedom to perform well. The problem otherwise isn't the lack of entrepreneurs or even necessarily innovation:

[http://www.danwei.org/media_regulation/supply_to_end_for_pri...](http://www.danwei.org/media_regulation/supply_to_end_for_print_on_dem.php)</comment></comment>


Jusqu'ici tout va bien - <AUTHOR> https://pragalakis.gitlab.io/jusqu-ici-tout-va-bien/ <comment><USER2> Cool, how do you re-render the ASCII text quick enough for clear 60 fps tho? I assume that wasn't v-dom as well right?

<comment><AUTHOR> It basically works like this: when a certain Y coordinate is reached - the div element (with the wall part) is cloned.</comment></comment>


Why America is Broken - <AUTHOR>

This country needs to fail. The world needs a bold example to realize that no economy exempt from corrosion due to inner perversities. <comment><USER2> Well now, did I just drop in from an alternate universe? Sure America has lots of problems, some of which we are fixing, some not, and some are being ignored, but I dont feel like I am in the cesspool of the world. It sounds like you made a bunch of mistakes, getting an MBA was one, unless you want to work for large corporations. And there are certainly universities that are diploma mills. But most of us here on HN learned to shift gears and move on when we took a wrong direction.

Rampant discrimination? I'm a white guy so my vision isnt perfect, but I dont think so. My office has more Chinese and Vietnamese than whites. Maybe it's much different if you dont have a college degree, but you arent talking about that case. We do have an immigration problem, but I see signs of a political will to fix it, but expecting an automatic green card is unrealistic.

Thousands of Cuban PhDs driving cabs? I'll check with my Cuban brother-in-law to see if that is the case. Of course a Cuban PhD isnt worth squat nor are many of the others from around the world. And even if you are American, a PhD is no guarantee of a job, especially in a field no-one is willing to pay for.

If I dont sound very sympathetic, it's because I'm not. You blamed all of us for your very problems, without asking if you contributed to any of them. This is not a very good forum for blaming everyone else.

<comment><AUTHOR> I graduated from the Ivy league. From a top ten MBA program. Got 750 on my GMAT and three job offers from PE shops. Turns out they don't sponsor internationals. Had similar situations with my school several times. However, I can live with that.

What I can't tolerate is the country. I experienced a lot of discrimination, didn't see much opportunity and saw a lot of underpaid foreign labor in a couple of tech hubs. Namely friends that were working in big name tech firms (Fortune 100) and living very bad lives.

I just think American universities need to promote their services this in a more mature and realistic way.

I wanted to work for a big corporation after being an entrepreneur, but again. What I saw what another disaster. I'm just greatly disillusioned with America and lament to say that my third-world nation is better. Sorry, I'm going back.

I blame America simply because my educational experience in my home country was ten times better. I left my country chasing a lie it seems.

<comment><USER3> Was it a real MBA program or like a 1 year executive program?

<comment><AUTHOR> Dartmouth Tuck - Full time MBA - 2 years. 170K in debt, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This country needs to fail. The world needs a bold example to realize that no economy exempt from corrosion due to inner perversities.

I came to America with a lot of ideas,energy and passion. I came as a successful professional with experience and with great hopes of contributing. I chose to enroll in a graduate level program in order to validate my skills and join "the system".

But today I take that plane. The plane that takes you back to your home country as a failure. The plane that carries indebted, unemployed, suicidal and "broken-in-a-thousand-pieces" international MBA students.

My first mistake was believing in graduate education. A system that is completely broken and one that relies on lies to become self sustainable. After enrolling, I quickly found out how my school polished its recruitment figures, how they sugar-coat everything and how they make bad things look good. This was the first blow. Realizing that America lies to us international students in order to boosts figures and make their programs more appealing to national students. Pretty soon I discovered this practice was commonplace across every school.

I discovered that 25% of international students default their loans. But school officials don't tell you that. Discrimination is rampant, that the tell you, however nothing can prepare you for the forthcoming crude reality: you're being set up for failure.

You'll be treated like a slave, with no immigration options other than the current messed up status quo. You'll make no friends because "the whities" party on their own. And you'll need to wait at least a decade for that "green- card". Oh, wait, you owe us 200K dollars for an education that's substantially inferior to the one you received in your home country. I expected some of this, but not to this extent. The educational experience, "the contacts" and "the help" I received only amount to one thing: Grand Fiasco.

The extent of this exploitation has no limits. America doesn't validate foreign titles and, allows for thousands of Cuban PHDs that make a living driving cabs in Florida. You can't come to this country based on your skills, you need a patron: An employer or a university. Slavery anyone!

Indians have to wait in line for decades just to get a level of pay that will be comparable to what they where earning in the home countries. The Chinese must be content with middle-management jobs with no hopes of promotion because they're synonym to "grunt-workers". And Latinos, even engineers, most have to work as freelancers because their titles are not recognized by the government (even when the American universities they came to study in did recognized those titles).

But you know what, all this is fine with me. I can live with that level of filth. So far this only amounts to "Wall Street level" shit.

The fun part comes later, after graduation. That's when it really gets to you. When you go to a dinner party with your fellow classmates and get asked that nice question by the white guy that didn't get a job and almost didn't graduate. That golden moment when he asks you: "Did you get your papers?".

And then I came to me. The sadistic Americans need to pick on someone to justify their problems. It's because of the republicans, the blacks, Bin Laden or the Latino rice pickers! Its ALWAYS somebody else. And WE have to create a "jail-like" system in order to prevent our white Ivy-educated pricks from shacking the hands of "unholy" international students.

America is broken. Perversity starts in the college rankings and then perpetuates in the business world. Lies, fraud, heavy drug use, discrimination, promiscuity, exploitation and under-achievement, these are but a few traits of the broken educational system.

I never thought I would find myself in this situation. Seeking to disassociate from my university after graduation from an elite MBA program, jobless, discriminated and labeled as a failure by hundreds. Indeed, God Bless America. This country is in dire need of miracles.

</comment><comment><USER4> I hope you have a bright future back in the country where you grew up. Let us know in a while what you think of that place after you spent time in America and saw a different place. (In my experience of moving back and forth between both sides of the Pacific Rim, reverse culture shock is actually more challenging to your thinking than the culture shock of first going into a new country.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It sounds more like you're saying the higher education system in America is broken (which it is).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. But I can't understand why our very white classmates have to discriminate us.

<comment><USER6> I don't know if what you experienced was racism or not, I cannot make that call, but I can say this in my experience Americans by the majorities are not racist. What they are though is culturalist, if you do not make an effort to adapt to the American system you will stand out and you will be treated different because well you are different. It may be a bit xenophobic but generally it's roots are not in racism but rather a natural response to something that is different. This happened to all the different waves of European immigrants in our early history. There where times where Irish culture or German culture was looked down on and as it assimilated into the fabric of US culture it eventually faded into obscurity. The very same things is now taking place with South American culture, in places like Texas or Florida those cultures have been assimilated into the fabric of US culture. It may be that you come from a culture that is not well represented in the US and therefore you receive a natural reaction to something that is foreign to someone else. I am not trying to excuse the behavior, just wanted to highlight that racism is usually the result of hatred for ones fellow man the kind that reared it's ugly head in WW2 Germany, and I personally have seen very little true racism in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "What is wrong with America can be fixed with what is right about America." -Bill Clinton

The USA is not perfect I admit, corporations are corrupt, our education system is broken, legal immigrants are treated like crap and paid less than US citizens for the same job and our immigration system is broken except for the H1B Visa program that is often used as 'cheap labor' using 'temporary employees' from other nations.

To make matters worse politicians are in bed with banks and financial companies, as well as the RIAA/MPAA to pass laws on copyrights that take away freedoms, rights, and liberties to give these companies even more record profits and pay zero taxes.

These days you cannot even tell a Democrat from a Republican anymore in most cases, because both are corrupt, and both take lobbyist money from the same sources to pass the same unjust laws that violate the US Constitution.

But it isn't all bad, it can still be fixed, but we have to be willing to work to reform the system and get people involved and give control back to the citizens and legal immigrants, and take it away from banks, financial companies, lobbyists, the RIAA/MPAA, etc.

The Republicans have blamed legal and illegal immigrants which is why there is a lot of discrimination against foreigners, they have been made scapegoats. The Democrats have made it so jobs for legal and illegal immigrants will always be low, and that they be given lower position jobs at companies, and even deny them entry back into the USA to start a business even if they scored high in a university with a good degree and made the honor rolls. Unless of course they are willing to find a corporate sponsor for a H1B Visa for minimum wage or a little bit above it. The Immigration system needs a major reform and both parties have messed it up badly.

When you earn a college/university degree in the USA, you are no longer guaranteed a job or career. You can end up deep in student loan debt, because the cost of a higher education is always increasing.

When you work, the cost of health insurance has skyrocketed and your employer most likely picked the cheapest plan to save money. As a result most bankruptcies are due to medical debt by people who are working full time but do not have good enough coverage. Hospitals charge too much and it is a big racket. In the USA we pay more for health insurance premiums but get less than in most nations that pay a fraction of our costs, but get more than he are even promised to get for pennies on the dollar.

Everyone is good at blaming everyone else, that needs to stop. Someone needs to take responsibility and own the problems and start finding solutions for them. Non-profit startups can be founded to find the solutions to the problems the USA faces and fix the broken system and reform it.</comment>


Ask HN: How to do marketing promotion for a open source project? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a creator of a open source project, I found my idea is unique and useful. All teams I stayed love this project and use it in their projects. But I find it is very very hard to tell the community there it is, and even more harder to prove it is useful.
My project is guzz(http://code.google.com/p/guzz/), a orm framework designed for large scaled system.
I have tried to post a news in the theserverside.com, little attentions. My problem is I'm not a employee of google, facebook, twitter, or some place like that; so I can't tell the community it is born in a reliable company.
I really want to share my project? Or, someone proves me a wrong idea. No feedback is boring. So, what should I do? <comment><USER2> English is your second language, right? Your code.google page is full of language faults. For example "like shopping site" should be "like a shopping site", and "physic" servers should be "physical" servers. There are also a number of spelling mistakes. Your choice of words is also a little.. odd.

I'm not trying to be negative, just honest. I can also speak a second language (dutch), and despite the fact that I'm at a high level when compared to my peers, I'd not dare to open a code.google.com site in dutch. So well done for doing it. It is to be commended.

Other than that, it's not clear from the first page exactly what your product does. You should be able to explain the most important features in a couple of sentences.

Why should I use Guzz instead of reliable technology like Hibernate, Entity Framework, Active Record or the like?

From your site it looks like the framework is targeted against massive relational tables, and allows a certain level of scaling by automatically splitting these tables across database instances. Is that right? Why is that better than the competition?

What language/frameworks does it target? Java? Ruby? C++? Cobol?

Who uses it? What kind of traffic volumes do they see? What kind of workloads?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Show HN: High School Schedule Manager I Made for My 12th Grade Project - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/schedutron/S-Koo-L <comment><USER2> More on what this is:

> > [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/schedutron/S-Koo-L/master/...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/schedutron/S-Koo-L/master/Documentation%20Stuff/Data%20Files%20and%20Other%20Stuff.docx)

I would suggest getting the README updated with that intro and definition of a few terms (proxy, etc.) and losing 90% of the screenshots.

Neat idea, and nice addition to the pronunciations of SQL :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that suggestion; I'd almost forgot about that Word file! When I made this project I wasn't familiar with Git, the importance of having neat README's and heck even linting code.

I'll update the README with that file, add few explanations and instead of having those screenshots I'll try to have a gif that encapsulates a session.</comment></comment>


40% of the American middle class face poverty in retirement, study concludes - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/12/40percent-of-american-middle-class-face-poverty-in-retirement-study-says.html <comment><USER2> Articles written like this make me incredibly angry. Stop reading headlines and audit your news.

1\. The entire basis of this "news" is a study which is cited exactly _nowhere_ in the article. There is a passing reference to a "new study" by the "Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis." They don't even give a partial author list, let alone a title!

2\. This is the study in question.[1] I had to dig this up on my own by piecing together specific claims with the name of the research organization and searching for them. The study appears to be closer to policy advocation than new research.

3\. The author is a business management consultant who cites _himself and his company_ for data contributing to the article, with no alternative supporting source ("Managing Defined Benefit Plans"). If there's a bias here it doesn't seem to be explicitly called out.

I can't comment on the core findings of the study, but I find its presentation and reporting in this article to be disingenuous and poorly supported. I'm deeply skeptical of the headline's claim given the incredibly politicized nature of the topic, the utter lack of critical analysis and the (intentional or merely incompetent) obfuscation of source material.

If you're going to start a discussion about economic policy or financial trends, please find and submit the original study. This article is just noise - it's barely capable of engaging with its source material. Why is a CNBC article on HN instead of the primary source?

___________

1\. [https://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/images/docs/research/...](https://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/images/docs/research/retirement_security/Downward_Mobility_in_Retirement_P_N.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for pointing that out! But leaving warped science, politics and hidden advertising aside - given that there exists a certain amount of this kind of poverty - are things likely to improve in the future, or will they get worse?

<comment><USER4> C'mon, if things were getting better you'd see a lot more conflict in the world. People have accepted they're being fucked and they're looking forward to the pitchfork phase--but it's not here yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Warning: anecdote incoming!

I'm not sure being under the federal poverty line (or 2x cutoff as this article used) means the same thing at retirement age.

My mother, for example, has a monthly post-tax income of $1,400 or just under $17,000 per year. She must be poor right?

However, she owns her home outright. So her total reoccurring monthly expenses are around $1,200. That includes property tax, condo fees, health insurance premium, food and gas for the car. She has a very comfortable life. She would certainly not call herself poor.

She can basically live off her pension without touching the equity in her home or the savings she has (unless it's for something important like travel).

A lot of people in retirement are no longer relying on income, instead they are taking money out of savings as well. Not sure if this paper accounted for that.

<comment><USER6> now picture tomorrow her condo floods and the car gets t-boned.

Whats that do to her budget?

<comment><USER7> That's what insurance is for.

<comment><USER6> You didn't mention it in your budget; presumably therefore, she has none.

You did mention health insurance, however.

<comment><USER5> Most condos won't let you go without renter's insurance, so it wasn't mentioned directly but should have been assumed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is "at risk"? A married couple is going to be getting over $4000/mo in Social Security, mostly tax free. Outside of a few metros, it's hard to see how that leaves one impoverished. The Baby Boomers are the whiniest generation ever.

<comment><USER9> "The study also concluded that if workers age 50 to 60 decide to retire at age 62, 8.5 million of them are projected to fall below twice the Federal Poverty Level, with retirement incomes below $23,340 for singles and $31,260 for couples. Further, 2.6 million of those 8.5 million downwardly mobile workers and their spouses will have incomes below the poverty level — $11,670 for an individual and $15,730 for a two-person household."

You say $4000/mo for a couple = $48,000/yr – article says $15,730/yr for the worst off and $31,260/yr for the next worse off. Do you have a source for your figure?

<comment><USER10> This [0] article provides a table of numbers. There are several ways to approach $4000 for a couple, but I feel like those numbers only apply to the top 10% incomes in America. Hardly a good average.

0: [https://www.fool.com/retirement/2018/08/21/heres-how-much- so...](https://www.fool.com/retirement/2018/08/21/heres-how-much-social- security-benefits-are-by-age.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wait, this is sensationalized. Within the article the quote is "Roughly 40 percent of Americans who are considered middle class (based on their income levels) will fall into poverty or near poverty by the time they reach age 65..." And their definition of near poverty is twice the poverty level? If I can live comfortably on less than 75% of that in LA, I don't see how that could be considered poverty. The 2.6 million, which I assume implies 12% of middle class is what slip below the FPL.

</comment><comment><USER12> The savings rate in the US has fallen continuously since 1906 when Insurers were prevented from cheating Tontine Pensioners out of their savings. Instead of selling Tontine Pensions honestly going forward, they switched to selling life annuities which were far more profitable for the Insurers. The solution is to bring back the savings products customers want to buy (Tontines Trusts) but without the rent-seeking financial institutions.

<comment><USER13> Disclosure: I work for an insurance company that sells annuities. This is solely my own opinion, and I have no incentive to get you to buy an annuity.

With that out of the way, a few comments on this:

* Tontines were exorbitantly profitable for life insurers before they were outlawed - much more so than any modern products I'm aware of.

* Profitability is somewhat independent of product structure in that either a tontine or an annuity can be priced to achieve a given level of profitability.

* The structure of a tontine means that payments start off much lower than a life annuity and grow substantially (exponential growth with a growth rate that itself increases exponentially) over time. Most retirees would probably prefer a higher initial payment and lower growth rate, since the amount of income they need in retirement generally doesn't increase that much over time.

* While annuities are reasonably profitable for insurers, profitability metrics are lower than you might expect. The vast majority of what I'll loosely call "profit" goes to agents and "financial advisors" in the form of commissions, not to the insurance companies themselves. While they're uncommon due to low demand, there are annuities that can be purchased directly from insurers (i.e., without paying a commission), and the rates are probably similar to what you'd get through a trust because the expenses scale well.

* If you're totally opposed to any profit being captured by financial institutions' shareholders, mutual insurance companies are owned directly by their policyholders and return profits to them in the form of dividends. The only potential advantage to a trust over a mutual insurance company is that the former might be able to back policies with riskier investments (and I'm not at all certain that that's the case).

* While the personal savings rate in the US has declined since 1960, I'm not sure that that's still true when going all the way back to the turn of the 20th century. Can you provide a source for that claim?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Prices for everything will need to come down and people will learn not to consume for its own sake. Return to normalcy</comment>


How to Make Easy & Flexible Star Ratings - Airbnb-Nerds http://nerds.airbnb.com/quick-tip-making-star-ratings-with-one-image

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great discussion of the mechanics of rendering star ratings in a browser. I'd love to see a companion theory post on how to intelligently compute and rank such ratings. The arithmetic mean is notoriously sensitive to outliers, and the consequences are sometimes severe: I know a resort in Thailand that used to be ranked #1 on TripAdvisor on its island (Koh Phangan), only to fall to #17 after a 1-star review. (The tragedy is that, if you read the review, it's clearly positive—the reviewer evidently thought that 1-star was best. D'oh!) In addition, any sensible ranking should take into account statistical significance, so that (say) a 4.6 ranking consisting of 45 reviews (possibly) gets ranked above a 5-star ranking consisting of one review. How does Airbnb handle these cases, or does it just punt by calculating and sorting the arithmetic mean?

<comment><USER2> Use the algorithm given here:

[http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average- rating....](http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html)

<comment><USER3> Also the response article at [http://masanjin.net/blog/how-to-rank-products- based-on-user-...](http://masanjin.net/blog/how-to-rank-products-based-on- user-input.html) is interesting.

<comment><USER4> Thank you guys, I'm just working on an app that requires calculating scores on user input, and these articles are pure gold! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's interesting that the year 2000 way to do stars would be to have a full, empty, and half star GIF, and just to display however many stars you need by doing a loop.

So, when this article says "The goal is to avoid having a sprite that looks like this" where the sprite has all the values of stars in a line... why did people switch to doing it that way in the first place? Like the article says, it's a pain to maintain, has lots of pixels, and is not resizable.

<comment><USER6> Well, if you do it that way you can change the whole rating by just changing the class name, after you set up all the background-position rules for all the different rating classes. I guess that's why?

<comment><USER7> With a loop you only need to pass in the rating. Get the modulus and then the floor. Render as many full stars as the floor, a half star if modulus was more than zero, then render an empty star as far as the number of full stars + half stars rendered was less than the number of stars that should be displayed (e.g. 5.)

That's way less work than all that CSS.

<comment><USER8> This method leaves all styling in your HTML/server-side code, which is a pita.

<comment><USER4> In an app I'm making, each group of items can have a different rating size, as defined by the group's admin. So the sprite with a fixed number of stars wouldn't work.

Essentially, I see a number of stars as just a different sort of a "progress- bar"-like graphic, so it's not necessary to set individual stars in the HTML. Just set it as a horizontally-repeating background, with predefined "steps" od the overlay, and the only number you need to pass from the server is the step level. This can even show a partial star if you want.

P.S. I haven't read the OP article prior to writing this comment; that's essentially what they're advising there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I liked how you guys present some of the stuff you create. However, I'm not a huge fan of star rating. I know it's in use everywhere but I feel that it's such a flawed rating system that we need to think twice before using star ratings.

I think that Facebook's like is a good concept that can replace stars rating (a like is a like, no negative feedbacks, and you know that you either like something or you didn't).

Star ratings is too complex, I mean, something I rate 4 star is very different than somebody else's 4 star rating.

Maybe this isn't the place to discuss this but I wanted to let the word out ;)

<comment><USER10> This is touched on in some of the other posts, so I won't belabor the point, but the issue with only positive feedback is that there isn't a way to identify items that are popular but also controversial.

For example, an Airbnb venue with 5,000 likes would be considered 'better' than one with 500. But add in negative feedback, and consider if the same venue with 5,000 likes also had 4,500 dislikes, while the venue with 500 likes only had 50 dislikes.

Negative feedback helps us discern between if something is 'better' or simply 'popular' -- the latter can be gamed with marketing, while the former is much harder.

<comment><USER11> That is a great point. At $work, we're about to revamp how we do ratings. The idea was to only consider positive feedback, but maybe we should figure out how to include negative feedback too. But that brings up the question of how to avoid the spammers, scammers and idiots that inevitably popup?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing I would suggest to all you coders out there... PLEASE place a demo within the post in which you are writing the tutorial.

For example big demo button on CodDrops: [http://tympanus.net/codrops/2011/10/12/flexible-slide-to- top...](http://tympanus.net/codrops/2011/10/12/flexible-slide-to-top- accordion/)

</comment><comment><USER13> The HTML5 meter element lends itself to star ratings perfectly. Using divs with classes seems a bit old-school for today, although the blog post does say how they don't want to use JS for this.

I wrote a Raphael powered polyfill for this <http://dylanfm.github.com/jquery.ratemate/>. Although it requires Raphael (and JS), at least it's a bit more semantic and has a non-JS fallback in browsers that have native support for the meter element. The plugin also provides a way for controlling star ratings on input type number or range elements. However, this really isn't worth using if you're not including Raphael already (fairly large library). I'm thinking about making a canvas alternative.

</comment><comment><USER14> On a side note, if you have 6 different ratings on one page plus an overall rating, should they all be stars and all in the same color?

</comment><comment><USER15> This is the code that should go to the server side for calculating star ratings:

 _Star Ratings_

I've been awfully busy programming lately. My Django-based side project is coming along well and I hope to have it ready for use in a few weeks. Please don't ask more about it, that's really all I can say for now. Anyways, I came across an interesting little math problem today and was hoping some skilled programmers out there could come up with a more elegant solution than mine.

 _Problem: Star Ratings_

People can rate cheeseburgers on my website with a star rating of 0-5 stars (whole stars only), 5 being mighty tasty and 0 being disgusting. I would like to show the average of everyone's ratings of a particular cheeseburger to the nearest half star. I have already calculated the average rating as a float (star_sum) and the total number of people that rated the particular cheeseburger (num_raters). The result should be stored as a float in a variable named "stars."

 _My Solution (in Python):_

      # round to one decimal place and
      # separate into whole and fractional parts
      parts = str(round(star_sum/num_raters, 1)).split('.')
      whole = int(parts[0])
      frac = int(parts[1])

      if frac < 3:
        ___frac = 0
      elif frac > 7:
        ___frac = 0
        ___whole += 1
      else:
        ___frac = 5

      # recombine for a star rating rounded to the half
      stars = float(str(whole)+'.'+str(frac))

Mmmm… In-N-Out Burgers… Please leave a comment if you've got a better solution.

<comment><USER16> Please don't do that. Here's a one liner:

        round( 2.0 * star_sum / num_raters) / 2.0

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pretty nice. It's missing the actual content though (the rating), so it's completely inaccessible to search engines, scrapers, screen readers and the like.

</comment><comment><USER17> I would do it another way. I'd have an on state and off state graphic as a sprite. There'd be two divisions, one laid on top of each other. The bottom layer would be the off state tiled horizontally statically at the width that is the number stars your ratings setup uses by the width of you on-off state graphic. The layer on top would be the on state with a width determined by an online style - CSS accepts percentage as a unit which can be worked out trivially. I find this is far more flexible that setting static widths in the CSS. You only haVe to set one width: the number of stars. Other things can be worked out programmatically and cached if needed.

</comment><comment><USER18> "Its very easy but I won't put one of those on this page."

</comment><comment><USER19> This was a great, easy to read and understand tutorial.

</comment><comment><USER20> A bit disappointed that the ratings don't degrade gracefully to a form with a dropdown menu or radio buttons.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why are the gists in a non-fixed width font?

</comment><comment><USER22> Great use of SASS. I approve!</comment>


Ask HN: What, do you think, Operating Systems will look like in 10 years? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Pretty much the same. We plateaued with new features some time ago. OSes 10 years ago were almost the same as now. We got more indexing / relying on content rather than paths. We moved more apps to the browser. But fundamentally, you can't do anything on W10 that wasn't possible on XP.

There implementation will change - more "as a service" on both OS and app level. Disk will be more of a cache layer. (Than it already is)

<comment><AUTHOR> "Disk will be more of a cache layer." Do you mean storage will be primarily in the cloud?

<comment><USER2> Yes. This is already pushed heavily on mobile (Google photos ask you to upload everything so you can delete local copies and save space). It's pretty much the case for games (steam and other launchers will happily download games - larger ones already allow you to play while the rest is still being installed). Multiple platforms started offering streaming where you don't even have to install most of the game.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some of the best blogs you follow? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for more content to read in the various fields including tech, startups, life, philosophy etc.
Currently I follow Sam Altman's, Mark Manson's and Tim Urban's (waitbutwhy) among the few that I really like to read. Would be awesome if I can get my hands on more avenues of learning!
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Julia Evan's blog is excellent - [https://jvns.ca/](https://jvns.ca/)

It's network-focussed but covers plenty of other topics. The information is presented well, in quite easy-to-digest chunks, with loads of illustrations for the more abstract points</comment>