Do Colorless Ideas Sleep Furiously? (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/proseDP/text/colorlessIdeas.html <comment><USER2> In 1985 some students at Stanford organized a competition:

> you were asked to compose not more than 100 words of prose, or 14 lines of > verse, in which a sentence described as grammatically acceptable but without > meaning did, in the event, become meaningful. The sentence, devised by Noam > Chomsky, was: colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

Four winning entries here: [http://archives.conlang.info/ga/farzhi/shiarweilwoen.html](http://archives.conlang.info/ga/farzhi/shiarweilwoen.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's funny the author wasted energy composing this after admitting he barely knows the origin of the sentence. Chomsky invokes it in "Syntactic Structures" to illustrate that the grammaticality of a given sentence doesn't fully explain the odds of it appearing in a large corpus. "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" is another low probability sentence, yet a native speaker couldn't perform these sorts of mental gymnastics to twist some meaning out of it.

<comment><USER4> Chomsky was arguing that probability is useless for defining and studying grammaticality.

I'm not so sure. GPT-2 says

log P("Colorless green thoughts sleep furiously.") = -53.64797019958496

log P("Furiously sleep thoughts green colorless.") = -65.46656107902527

The ungrammatical one is lower probability. But those are famous sentences, and probably present in the training data, so let's try

log P("Colorless blue ideas hibernate angrily.") = -60.12953460030258

log P("Angrily hibernate ideas blue colorless.") = -70.02637100033462

<comment><USER3> I think the more interesting result (and more relevant to Chomsky's point) would be to work in the other direction. If you instead produce a list of sentences with similar log probabilities you will see that it contains a mix of grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. This implies something more is needed to distinguish them.

<comment><USER4> > If you instead produce a list of sentences with similar log probabilities > you will see that it contains a mix of grammatical and ungrammatical > utterances.

Yes, Chomsky mentions this in a footnote. But as far as I know, it hasn't been tried with modern language models.

There's been some interesting work that tries to reproduce grammaticality judgments in terms of language model probability after controlling for length and lexical content. It turns out it works pretty well. For instance [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.14659.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.14659.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I wish there were a freely available copy online, I could link, but the passage is at the end of chapter 2 of Syntactic Structures. It's not a footnote, but rather the crux of his argument, I believe:

> "... a structural analysis cannot be understood as a schematic summary > developed by sharpening the blurred edges in the full statistical picture. > If we rank the sequences of a given length in order of statistical > approximation to English, we will find both grammatical and ungrammatical > sequences scattered throughout the list; there appears to be no particular > relation between order of approximation and grammaticalness. Despite the > undeniable interest and importance of semantic and statistical studies of > language, they appear to have no direct relevance to the problem of > determining or characterizing the set of grammatical utterances. I think > that we are forced to conclude that grammar is autonomous and independent of > meaning, and that probabilistic models give no particular insight into some > of the basic problems of syntactic structure."

I do think it's an important point for people to recognize. Scientific theories don't arise on their own out of large-scale statistical analyses. There is a lot of faith being put in deep learning methods these days, which are great for prediction, but not inference.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for pasting the whole thing. It's an interesting argument. The core empirical claim is

> If we rank the sequences of a given length in order of statistical > approximation to English, we will find both grammatical and ungrammatical > sequences scattered throughout the list; there appears to be no particular > relation between order of approximation and grammaticalness.

It's totally not clear that this would be true with modern language models, after you control for (1) the length of the sentence and (2) the words in the sentence (as mentioned in the thing I linked above).

<comment><USER3> I will have to take a look at that paper. I didn't catch your edit before replying. It would certainly be worthwhile to verify that claim (or not) using the paper's model if I find some time. In any case, I think the underlying point is that these language models serve a purpose, but will not uncover an underlying structure for you or derive something like the phrase structure grammar proposed in Syntactic Structures. I may be extrapolating a bit based on other times I've seen Chomsky discuss this, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author is working very hard to build an indifference to the self into what is an emotional and psychological meaning to that phrase. Logic and language rules only get you so far removed from desires and romantic realities. I get these attempts are innocent from an american cultural perspective, but paul is not the next colbert.

I never get tired of the internal contradictions people rely on to dismiss what is in front of their face. The start of this article declares that the phrase is meaningless and then ends with a fake revelation that the author has defined it's meaning. The author is so determined that the initial reaction is meaningless that we need to read three paragraphs about palming off nature to a language game.

Bring back Steve Jobs.

</comment><comment><USER6> With the rise of the Green Movement the sentence has actually taken on a semblance of meaning.

</comment><comment><USER7> > Do Colorless Ideas Sleep Furiously?

Racter would definitely say so.

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

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I see the title has been modified post hoc to include a year.. but it's wrong. It should actually be 1997...

<comment><USER8> Fixed. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Overtime makes us less productive - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MckqTuVJNaw <comment><AUTHOR> ... and more interesting thoughts from Mark Layton. A lot of this seems to be backed by research in Microsoft and there are other studies that found similar to be true.

If that's the case, why do we still see, especially startups, work their people beyond what is reasonable?</comment>


4 reasons to skip the Express view rendering engine to gain speed and modularity - <AUTHOR> http://strongloop.com/strongblog/bypassing-express-view-rendering-for-speed-and-modularity/

<comment><USER2> +1 on breaking out of a single "views" directory via a View Resolver. Coming from mobile dev app architecture I always found it awkward. Maybe this is more standard in web dev, but for iOS Android Mobile dev there is a much more module convention expectation on View/Controller organization</comment>


Why the Post Office Gives Amazon Special Delivery - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-post-office-gives-amazon-special-delivery-1499987531 <comment><USER2> It is not just the price..

Amazon is treated like royalty inside post offices. Some examples in tracking, delivery and accomodation.

\- This past prime day, a clerk had to come in at midnight to accept an extra 800 Prime packages from Amazon (normally delivered to PO at 4amish). Amazon barks, the PO acts!. Normally no clerk is required. This meant OT for other clerks as the rate of >$40/hr. there are 32,000 post offices. * BTW, prime this time was a bust... no real uptick in parcels.

\- Extra tracking. Regional management often calls the individual offices if any Amazon is not delivered, and wants to know an explanation. This never happens for any other company. Even dumb stuff like "dog interference" or "vacation holds".. Every Amazon has to be delivered each day. Can't miss one. It is all BS.

\- Extra effort. So, the package was mis thrown into another hamper, and the carrier has left for the office. Delier it tomorrow, right? Nope. not if it is Amazon. CAll someone back, give them OT, and deliver it today. NEVER happens for other packages, even USPS own Priority.

\- Amazon Prime is King Trump. So we get them early. they sit on a pallet. Each as a delivery window: 7-10am or 10am-1pm. Extra OT is always approved. We deviate from the route to make the deliveries. AND we have to take back the empties.

It is not just the price... The entire organization has made every supervisor and postmaster and above Amazon aware...

<comment><USER3> This sounds just like any vendor for Amazon, WalMart, IKEA, etc.

When you are locked in a cage with 1 angry 9000 pound gorilla and 9000 angry 1 pound rats, you don't focus on any one rat. You choose to either focus on the gorilla or the group of rats.

You should probably be thankful that Amazon is using the USPS. I've seen lots of Lyft drivers in my neighborhood making Amazon package last mile deliveries all week -- even on Sunday and in the evenings.

I can't imagine the USPS with pensions and their antiquated policies (especially with Congress preventing them from innovating and forcing them to fully fund their previously underfunded pension program) can match Lyft contractors who require no capital investment and no large contracts.

I think the USPS still sees the writing on the wall. Snail mail is increasingly becoming less relevant for paperwork. My USPS SNR is very low these days -- just a few bills that I can't turn electronic, yet. If not for Netflix, I wouldn't check my mail box but once a month.

If I were you, I would find ways to make Amazon's investments in your organization pay dividends to Land's End and the other USPS customers. Without some distinguishing features that beat email + FedEx/UPS/DHL + Lyft/Uber, the USPS will continue to atrophy. Make sure you and your fellow USPS workers encourage a virtuous circle and don't allow it to fall into a downward spiral.

<comment><USER2> Having been in the real world before cell phones displaced me, I know USPS can be blind to this. The congressional mandate seems to be strong; years and years the demise and privitization has been predicted.

A Trump action could make change occur, but Russia and his ego may never get it on the radar.

When I say there is absolutely 0 organizational memory/ability to think like a for profit organization, that would be an understatement. Or they are quite bad about comminicating such. To find ways to use the investments is logical. To inspire an organization to care about customer service is difficult.

I suggested that the latest budget include a line "deliveries will be made by a human" or some such language; to get it in now so it becomes legacy like 6 day delivery. But nobody even thinks about disruption. Kind of sad, actually.

If driverless cars really do become commonplace, the privitization of now- public roads, IMO, would come quickly. That may be the straw that breaks the Postal back.

As far as pensions, only the old timers have one. Most, like me, have the federal Thrift savings....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Select high-volume shippers are able to drop off presorted packages at the > local Postal Service depot for "last mile" delivery at cut-rate prices. With > high volumes and warehouses near the local depots, Amazon enjoys low rates > unavailable to its competitors.

Isn't this program available to any company that meets the requirements? Local shops and small-like shippers don't benefit because it's too hard, but Amazon's competition (Newegg, EBay, etc) presumably have access to the same programs.

<comment><USER5> I don't have a WSJ subscription, so I didn't RTFA, but IMO Amazon's biggest "special" service is Sunday delivery. This is not available to anyone else.

<comment><USER6> "As always, domestic Sunday package delivery is available in many major markets with Priority Mail Express® for an additional fee.1 But now we're working with a leading internet retailer in select markets to deliver your online orders on Sunday. "

[https://www.usps.com/priorityyou/welcome.htm?ns_campaign=sun...](https://www.usps.com/priorityyou/welcome.htm?ns_campaign=sundaydelivery)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've seem to have noticed more of my Amazon deliveries being carried by USPS.

Which I wouldn't have any issue with, but I've had the experience that USPS postal carriers are, well, less physically able to handle large packages. We order both Amazon Pantry and Subscribe & Save items, meaning we have 40lb boxes of dog food or cat litter coming in, sometimes several times per month.

I get a complaint almost every time from the postal carrier. I don't necessarily blame them, especially when Amazon puts 80lb of goods in one box. At the same time though, I end up feeling guilty just for ordering these types of items online.

<comment><USER8> USPS has weight limits, their carriers are trained to deliver anything within those weight limits.

If they can't deliver an item that meets their own USPS requirements then that's their own fault not yours.

<comment><USER9> > USPS has weight limits, their carriers are trained to deliver anything > within those weight limits

I know multiple people in different cities who have been told that their particular USPS mail carrier couldn't carry some reasonably-sized packages, so they wouldnt deliver them to the home.

This is not a case of "these packages are above the limits we allow for home delivery" \- it was very clearly a matter of the carrier for that particular route not wanting or being able to carry those packages.

<comment><USER8> The proper follow-through is to file a complaint with the postmaster general for your area, they take it fairly seriously. They carrier is literally refusing to do their job.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A cure for cancer: how to kill a killer - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/04/a-cure-for-cancer-how-to-kill-a-killer-revolutionary-immune-system-immunotherapy <comment><USER2> I work in oncology and with some of the people interviewed in the article. I want to emphasize just how exciting this stuff is and how wild it is to have patients who have a belly full of innumerable metastases, for whom 5-10 years ago we'd quote a few months' survival at best, and now on these new fancy drugs their tumors just _disappear_. It's incredible and up until now unimaginable for these late stage solid cancers. Similarly, to have people with leukemias who previously we use essentially 40 year old drugs, now we can fight and fight to keep alive long enough to get their T-cells harvested and re-engineered and re-infused and then (after nursing them through a cytokine storm) they emerge... with their cancer wiped out completely.

(The article blithely says "remissions measured not in extra weeks or months of life, but in lifetimes". It's a little over-reaching since we just don't have that much long term data yet; these therapies haven't been around for "lifetimes". As a result we often prefer the term "durable remission" to "cure".)

I also want to emphasize how _few_ patients have this outcome. It sucks. It sucks to have ads on bus stops and TVs that say, "Ask your doctor about Keytruda", but when they ask me, I know it has such a tiny chance of turning them into that laughing family playing in the grass. We test for and hope for the genetic markers that indicate certain immunotherapies are more likely to work spectacularly, but the vast majority of patients don't have those markers. Similarly, most patients with leukemias or lymphomas do not respond to CAR-Ts.

We still try these immunotherapies, though, because there's often evidence of some modest better outcomes, and also sometimes you get lucky. I think I mentioned this on HN in some other context, but one of the breakthrough discoveries around pembrolizumab was because of a "Hail Mary" in late stage colorectal cancer; all the patients progressed & died in the study except for one, and she held the key to the genetic derangement that made that subset of cancer particularly sensitive to checkpoint blockade -- leading to FDA approval for pembro for all cancers with that derangement. As this article mentions, there is now a massive number of trials studying these therapies in various subsets of patients, or in various combinations and permutations with traditional therapy, because short of "cure" there's still improved survival which can often be very meaningful.

It's exciting. It's inspiring. It's frustrating & heartbreaking.

<comment><USER3> In aother article pointed by the Guardian, I read :

>> Schmid said: "Immune therapy on top of standard chemotherapy prolonged survival by ten months

Since, I guess, patient are interested by "being cured", how should I interpret those ten additional months? Of course, I understand the statistic behind it, but I' d like to know if it translates to something meaningful for the life of the patient. For example, if I had a ten month increase in my life, considering that it could mean live 10 month more with pain, false hopes, etc., then I wouldn't feel that the situation has improved meaningfully (of course I don't have cancer and therefore I may miss some obvious benefits). OTOH, if that increase means that the chance of long time remission also increase, then, that's a whole different situation...

<comment><USER4> In my experience as a cancer survivor, it's all about "staying in the game". Medicine doesn't change as fast as software, but extra months means a chance to access new treatment options as they emerge.

<comment><USER5> I'm another cancer survivor. My understanding is that you don't take this treatment with the goal of surviving extra 10 month. You take in in the hope to be cured, because they say there is a chance, however slim. So the rational choice for me would be: take the treatment, and if in a couple of months it proves ineffective, take euthanasia (if it's legally possible, which is the case where I live - though probably there are still some unfortunate legal caveats), Just hanging around longer would serve no purpose except increasing the pain for my family. (That's my personal view only, not intended as a template for anybody else)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People seem to be disturbed by the indiscriminate nature of this cure. The immune system, unleashed, will target not only cancer cells but healthy ones as well. If this feels somehow aesthetically displeasing to you, ask yourself whether it feels more or less clumsy to shoot radiation in your tumor's general direction and literally poison yourself. Immunotherapy seems positively elegant in comparison.

<comment><USER7> Um, actually, radiation is _MUCH_ better than most of the chemical options unless you are one of the very fortunate few that has a particular receptor than can be targeted.

Radiation has gotten _extremely_ good at being far more targeted. The doctors actually model the absorption curves and let computers target the specific areas to make sure that the specific area gets the necessary dose while keeping the dose down in the surrounding tissue. If you can do radiation, it is by _far_ the best option nowadays. Sadly, you can't always use it--sometime surrounding tissue is too sensitive to radiation (intestines) and sometimes things are simply too large.

Chemotherapy, though, just really, really, sucks. Almost anything is better.

<comment><USER6> Yeah I hesitated at putting radiation therapy in there because I didn't know how targeted it was. Thanks for an informative response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Slightly off-topic but one thing that I've always been honestly curious about is that literally billions of dollars are donated to cancer research each year...but then the practical results of the research are sold to oncology patients at bankrupting sums.

So my question is when we donate to cancer research, are we donating to public research or are we handing our money to a for-profit corporation. What is the path from donation to six figure cancer treatments? I would be very interested in how that works.

<comment><USER9> > the practical results of the research are sold to oncology patients at > bankrupting sums.

In the US. [0]

[0] [https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/how- do-...](https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/how-do- healthcare-prices-and-use-in-the-u-s-compare-to-other-countries/#item-on- average-other-wealthy-countries-spend-half-as-much-per-person-on-healthcare- than-the-u-s)

<comment><USER10> The rest of the world can thank people in the US for spending rather large sums on certain treatments. In the UK the treatments are covered by the state at no cost to the patient, but it's only a limited set of available treatments which are considered cost effective. In the US there are plenty more options, if you can pay for it. People may decide to bankrupt themselves or sell their house for these treatments that could enable them to survive or not, but either way they are contributing to real world data that informs the rest of the world of the efficiency and cost effectiveness of a particular treatment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not directly connected to the article, but the 40% chance of getting diagnosed with cancer in my lifetime really sets of my anxiety...

<comment><USER12> If you live long enough you will eventually get some kind of cancer. This is inevitable as DNA damage accumulates. Chances are something else will kill you first, but detailed autopsies of older people frequently turn up small, slow- growing cancer tumors.

<comment><USER13> It's why at a certain age with Prostate cancer "watchful waiting" is often preferable to invasive procedures. In some cases it will be so slow growing you're likely to die of something else first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The article follows the standard convention of newspapers to hide any qualifiers in the last few paragraphs, in particular the second to last paragraph starts:

> Hype can be dangerous, just as false hope can be cruel.

I would therefore suggest reading the last two paragraphs carefully.

<comment><USER15> They aren't hidden, they are just at the end of the article. To me this seems like fairly honest reporting, as opposed to ommitting this info entirely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The immune system is so complex, we can't even solve food allergies. We're only scratching the surface, although I am hopeful for the future.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm worried about these treatments for people with autoimmune diseases. One, they might be on immunosuppressants, two, immune activation can then kill you through the autoimmune disease.

I have ulcerative colitis and am on immunosuppressants. So I'm more likely to get cancer and can't get that treatment.

<comment><USER2> At our hospital we routinely use many of these therapies even in patients with a variety of autoimmune conditions. In about a third of patients, they'll have an exacerbation of their underlying autoimmune condition, which fortunately only rarely necessitates cessation of the immunotherapy.

One of several studies we reference when we treat these patients: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=27687304](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=27687304)

What's interesting (and increasingly being studied) is the higher risk of developing an autoimmune condition _after_ treatment with some of these immunotherapies. The absolute risk doesn't seem to be huge, but it's an interesting window into how these conditions might develop in the first place.

<comment><USER17> That's good to hear. Would you stop, say Humira before treatment?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What the article unfortunately not explains: as far as I understand the medication suppresses ways the immune system can identify healthy/own cells of the body. If that is suppressed I'd expect more severe side effects, up to death, no less. Why isn't this the case? Imho it could work only if cancerous cells are more affected than healthy ones (like they are more affected by cytostatic drugs because they divide faster). Can anyone chime in with an explanation?

<comment><USER19> Some additional info here - [https://www.quora.com/How-does-PD-L1-checkpoint- inhibition-s...](https://www.quora.com/How-does-PD-L1-checkpoint-inhibition- selectively-target-cancer-cells-but-not-healthy-cells)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Pardon my naïveté. Has a honey-pot strategy been tried for Cancer? Like maybe we can't kill it but we can lure it to develop in a very localized place, like a cyst growing on the back of your hand or something, and then we remove the cyst.

<comment><USER21> Just as naive as you about this, but why would cancer developing in one place mean that it can't develop somewhere else?

<comment><USER22> Ok, following with the totally naive speculation. What if it were not a place, but a specific environmental factor or a specific trait? Cancers mutate quickly, and resources are limited, so cells that are more successful might starve those which lag behind, as it happens in animal populations. And once the cancer has "fallen into the trap" of specializing for _something_ , that something could be targeted, or the favouring environmental conditions removed.

<comment><USER23> This is the clonal evolution model of cancer, and is how many solid tumors are comprised and treated. The danger is that the selective advantage for the cancer cell is often by masking itself as a healthy cell to the immune system, which complicates treatments but this interaction can still be targeted (see PD-1).

<comment><USER22> Yes, the idle speculation about a "honeypot" method was of artificially encouraging the cancer to evolve in a certain direction, even boosting its growth, until it has reliably mutated in a way that makes it susceptible to some other intervention, like being starved or targeted by some particular marker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am honestly curious. What exactly is the root cause of cancer? The article talks about cancerous cells tricking the immune system, but this trickery is the result of something else. Immune system, in a healthy body, eliminates cancer cells continuosly. What enables some cancer cells in some humans to fool the immune system and multiply maliciously?

We can "manage" cancer without understanding the root cause. We cannot cure it.

<comment><USER25> AIUI, it isn't really a single disease with a specific cause. It's more like, our body is composed of trillions of individual cells. Each cell is theoretically an independent life form capable of doing its own thing. They normally each have a program, encoded in their DNA, that keeps them operating in service of the overall organism of our body - replicating only when needed, dying when not needed, doing things useful to the body while they're alive, etc. There's various environmental factors, radiation and chemicals and such, constantly attacking that DNA. The DNA has self-repair mechanisms, plus the body's defense mechanisms to kill badly behaving cells, so most mutations are either repaired, ignored, or immediately fatal to the cell, kind of like changing a random character in your program.

Over all of those trillions of cells and dozens of years, once in a while, a particular cell gets just the right batch of random mutations that make it possible to stay alive while breaking free of its programming and acting as its own organism, independent of the body's plan. It may then proceed to reproduce on its own, potentially disrupting the body's functions and/or consuming all of its resources if it grows quickly enough.

So each individual cancer case is a uniquely evolved life form. There's a few common threads that many tend to share, but no telling how many each particular case may have. Thus, the broad brush approaches tend to be the most successful - surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. More directed genetic approaches are tougher because of the uniqueness of each case.

Evolutionarily, it's a tricky balance. Too few mechanisms to keep all of your cells under control all the time, and your body dissolves into a mess of cancers too soon, like before you can reproduce. Too many mechanisms wastes resources, can potentially go haywire and damage your body themselves, like autoimmune diseases, or make it too hard for your body to evolve new and useful adaptations to the environment. We already have good enough controls that getting cancer before normal reproduction age is very rare. But now we're living a lot longer, much longer than our bodies are evolutionarily adapted to keep us alive for, so we see a lot more of these kinds of problems.

<comment><USER24> I agree with most of what you say.

If living beyond the age we were designed for is the cause, I wonder why the American Cancer Society says:

By 2030 the incidence rates among people ages 20 – 34 years will increase by 90% for colon cancer and by 124.2% for rectal cancer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My dad had liver cancer which was detected early. We went with liver transplant and 3 months later, cancer reoccurred in lymph nodes in his lungs. Now, he's on immunosuppressants (tacrolimus and everolimus) for organ rejection. Can immunotherapy still be tried on him?

</comment><comment><USER27> I've been working with a team* on an open-source analysis pipeline tool to assist researchers and oncologists in identifying specific neoantigens used in cancer immunotherapy. Given a patient's sequenced tumor/normal genome, it uses a set of prediction algorithms and the public Immune Epitope Database to produce candidate neoantigens for synthesizing the vaccines used in clinical interventions or research.

We just released a browser-based client to assist users not comfortable with constructing the long and complex command-line arguments used with most bioinformatics analysis pipelines. It also provides a REST API that makes it easier to integrate into existing research/clinical pipelines.

If you're working in this area of research/treatment please check it out to see if pVACtools can be of use to you!

[http://pvactools.org](http://pvactools.org)

EDIT: Just received a writeup in GenomeWeb:

[https://www.genomeweb.com/informatics/wustl-software- offers-...](https://www.genomeweb.com/informatics/wustl-software-offers- automated-option-cancer-variant-review)

* as a user-interface designer/developer

<comment><USER28> This is cool. Who is the main target user for this? Biotech companies? Academic researchers?

<comment><USER27> Both. It's currently being used mainly by academic researchers, and biotech companies are evaluating it as well.

<comment><USER28> How does it perform compared to any in house software at biotech companies? Or are the main users companies that specialize in making cell therapies / peptide vaccines and you just help them figure out which vaccines to make?

Am just interested bc i have a few friends involved in neoantigen / shared tumor antigen cell therapy companies, and did some consulting work for a company that had tech for delivering nucleic acid therapies and was considering getting into oncology, but didnt have in-house sequencing or antigen identification expertise. Mostly intellectual interest at this point

<comment><USER29> The biggest difference between academic tools and those in industry is that they're sinking major funds into producing (expensive, hard to produce at scale) training data. That, in theory, should allow them to develop better algorithms for actually predicting which mutations in the tumor are going to be the best (immunogenic) targets. This tool, and several others like it, are modular enough to allow you to plug in whatever prediction algorithm you like, while still getting the benefit of all the other steps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The cure for cancer already exists. We've had it for ages. It's THC found in the cannabis plants. See research from, among others, Compultense University in Spain.[1] Many people suffering from various forms of cancer have been cured by using cannabis oil made from cannabis with high THC concentrations.

[1] [https://youtu.be/1miGzTwK28U](https://youtu.be/1miGzTwK28U)

</comment><comment><USER31> killing things is bad mkay. prevent instead of cure. solve the root cause.

" "The tidal wave of data is still teaching us fundamental concepts about the interaction of the human immune system and human cancer." "

So, if they still learning fundamentals. -> impact of actions based on inaccurate or incomplete knowledge, is unknown.

in programming this kind of practice would lead to bugs / undefined behaviour etc. - imagine what kind of shit that would mean for human health...

It'd be nice if they had cancer prevention studies instead of cancer cure studies. kthx

<comment><USER32> When dealing with a software bug you have to reproduce the issue before you can definitively "fix" it.

<comment><USER33> Not true. (It is often possible to understand the cause by just _looking at the damn code._ )

<comment> barry-cotter Humans, and every other life form have an undocumented, undesigned self executing specification that consists entirely of the most reticulated, self referential spaghetti code compatible with successful reproduction and it's not just riddled with Heisenbugs, they're core parts of the machinery of how everything works. We'll get there eventually but it's going to take an exceedingly long time.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bye #nodejs, hello #golang - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/felixge/status/275320642059001857 <comment><AUTHOR> Felix Geisendörfer is a core contributor to Node.js. Nice to see Go gaining support from someone so close to the Node project. I'd say that's a significant statement in Go's favor.</comment>


Build a do-it-yourself IMSI Catcher for about $20 - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gy7qm9/how-i-made-imsi-catcher-cheap-amazon-github <comment><USER2> Here are the limitations:

1.) It seems to listen to messages from the cell towers rather than listening directly to phones. This means you are likely to catch IMSIs from a very wide area (i.e., every phone that connects to the cell tower you're listening to), which means you don't get much information about "who was in the local vicinity". This probably also means you can't tell the phone's signal strength, as the received signal strength is that of the tower not the phone (unless the tower modulates its transmit power based on how poor the phone's signal is?).

2.) It can only listen to one frequency at a time. This means you need N RTL- SDRs if you want to listen to phones connecting to N cell towers. (But the RTL-SDR does have about 3MHz bandwidth, so in theory it should be possible to listen to multiple cell towers simultaneously).

3.) It can only see IMSIs when a phone first connects. I don't think the IMSI is sent when making a call or transferring data.

4.) It only works on GSM, i.e 2G. Hardly anyone uses that these days. (I don't know if a similar passive approach would work on 3G and 4G, it may be that only software is required in order to support more than 2G).

The benefits of this approach compared to other things I've seen are that it is totally passive, so even a savvy target is unlikely to be able to detect that his IMSI has been caught, and it is extremely cheap to carry out.

<comment><USER3> >> 4.) It only works on GSM, i.e 2G. Hardly anyone uses that these days. (I don't know if a similar passive approach would work on 3G and 4G, it may be that only software is required in order to support more than 2G).

Do you have some data that supports this claim? I haven't gone sniffing recently- but I believe T-mobile is still wed to 2G for the foreseeable future, and internationally, 2G is still in a lot of countries. I believe one northern european telco is going to decommission their UMTS network and support both LTE & GPRS.

<comment><USER4> AT&T discontinued GSM nationwide: [https://about.att.com/innovationblog/2g_sunset](https://about.att.com/innovationblog/2g_sunset)

T-Mobile is keeping it running until at least 2020: [https://www.t-mobile.com/news/att-2g-iot- lifeline](https://www.t-mobile.com/news/att-2g-iot-lifeline)

edit: Wikipedia has a pretty solid list: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G#Past_2G_networks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G#Past_2G_networks)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure modern networks allocate temporary anonymised IMSIs (TIMSI) to eschew just this kind of attack ...

EDIT yes [http://www.gsm-security.net/faq/timsi-temporary-imsi- gsm.sht...](http://www.gsm-security.net/faq/timsi-temporary-imsi-gsm.shtml)

<comment><USER6> Just slightly complicates it. All you need is for them to be in range of your catcher when they renegotiate a new TIMSI, which is done periodically. If your targeting a specific person that's as simple as deploying a catcher within range of their home and/or office and chances are good you will get most if not all TIMSI negotiations.

Like trying to stop MITM attacks on the internet by randomizing MAC addresses between sessions. IMSI are printed on a sticker stuck to the phone. How secret can it really be?

Even if TIMSI worked well, there are other techniques: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.05171.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.05171.pdf)

<comment><USER7> > IMSI are printed on a sticker stuck to the phone.

My phones have the IMEI number written on them, not the IMSI numbers. I'll have to take the SIM out to see if it has the IMSI written on it somewhere.

<comment><USER8> What's written on the SIM card is called ICCID. For some carriers, you can convert from IMSI to ICCID and vice versa, because they chose this convention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Odd that they say "Note that the IMSI-catcher would still need to have Ubuntu on the Pi, which it is not traditionally designed for" \- I mean, I see the README wants you to add a PPA for gr-gsm[1], but that shouldn't be a problem on stock Raspbian (or another Debian-based distro).

1: [https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI- catcher#setup](https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher#setup)

<comment><USER10> I don't think many people outside of the tech industry know that Ubuntu is a Debian-based operating system.

Edit: Changed Debian-based to Debian-derived

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tested now. It works just fine, with the proper antenna. RTL-SDR is a _receiver_ , with this toy you can only sniff some non-encrypted data exchange between the phones and the cell towers, for example IMSI numbers (as its name explains ). You can't do MITM attacks or intercept anything.

<comment><USER12> "Tested now. It works just fine, with the proper antenna."

Yes, but this is a GSM only implementation, using gr-gsm, correct ? They aren't doing anything like Tracking Area Update Request for LTE[1], correct ?

[1] [https://hackaday.com/2017/05/30/lte-imsi- catcher/](https://hackaday.com/2017/05/30/lte-imsi-catcher/)

<comment><USER13> Besides the software compatibility with protocols different from GSM (2G) there is serious hardware problem: RLT-SDR dongles can't operate above 1.4 GHz. This limit is for the better models (i.e. those with a better shielding ). In my experience the cheap models as the one mentioned in the article have problems above 1 GHz. I'm telling you because GSM support ~900 Mhz and ~1800 Mhz frequencies and, as I tested, only the traffic around 900Mhz is visible. So, even in the 2G domain, you can't see everything.

<comment><USER14> Some SDR devices can go higher than 1800MHz, the HackRF One for example receives and transmits from 1 MHz to 6GHz and has been used to decode some GSM and LTE traffic.

[https://sdr-x.github.io/Whole-20MHz-config-LTE-signal-is- dec...](https://sdr-x.github.io/Whole-20MHz-config-LTE-signal-is-decoded-by- HACKRF-19.2Msps-with-ASN1-SIB-parsed/)

[https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/](https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/)

Way different price though still interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a "device to catch IMSIs", but the thing commonly called an IMSI catcher is much more than that - those are entire fake cells that MitM the traffic and can actually intercept calls. This device can't do that, making the title highly misleading.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm not super familiar with how cellular networks operate, but isn't there a way to authenticate the session with the tower so that the IMSI doesn't get transmitted to a snooping party? If we do it with laptops and wifi APs, can't we also do it with phones?

Finger print scanners and facial recognition are prevalent on phones these days, would that be a solution to circumvent this vulnerability?

<comment><USER17> * GSM (2g) does not have authentication at all.

* 3G has no integrity protection. Downgrade attacks from 3G->2G work. Also, it's the base station who decides if authentication and encryption is done. Fake base stations can still be used to track location, intercept calls and data.

* LTE/4G has mutual authentication and mandatory integrity protection. In theory you can't get IMEI if the message has no integrity but the protocols are not perfect.

LTE/4G can still be intercepted by using jammers, DoS attacks or exploiting weaknesses in the protocols and implementations to force a downgrade. Some messages in the protocols still go unencrypted and without authentication. It's for example possible to edit voice domain preference or send "LTE services not allowed" messages or edit the list of supported protocols to force downgrade.

Practical attacks against privacy and availability in 4G/LTE mobile communication systems [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.07563v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.07563v1.pdf)

<comment><USER3> GSM does not have _meaningful_ tower auth. It does have UE authentication.

<comment><USER18> To clarify: GSM is essentially first cellular protocol that does meaningful user authentication, on the other hand there is no way for user to explicitly authenticate the network. In usual operating mode the session is implicitly bidirectionally authenticated by the fact that both UE and network has to be able to derive same Kc, but nothing prevents the network from just ignoring the authentication response from UE and continuing in plaintext mode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Other than just being a fun project, is there anything that you could do with the data you collect?

<comment> Max-20 Can't you also track and read messages, mobile data and calls that are send and received from the mobile device?

An IMSI catcher is nothing but a 'fake' cell phone tower for a phone.

<comment><USER20> No, because those messages are encrypted.

Likely with a semi-busted protocol, depending on whether we're talking GSM/CDMA/LTE/etc, but a pain to attack, regardless.

<comment><USER21> They are sometimes encrypted but setting up a cell tower proxy (femtocell) let's you disable encryption to connected devices and then you can read any texts sent/received through your femtocell. Watch the defcon/blackhat presentations showing this. First one I remember watching was maybe 10 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sigh, yet another reason companies should stop doing "2FA" over text. Please support TOTP or U2F. I cringe Apple doesn't support either.

<comment><USER23> 1) This doesn't allow anyone to read anything, it only allows you to inspect phone identifiers which today are random anyhow.

2) Your security needs only to be as strong as your likely adversary OTP over SMS is fine for most use cases in any case this isn't an argument against it networks with piss poor controls over SS7 which could allow you to reroute calls and texts to another number or networks that allow you to access voicemail without password if you spoof the origin number are.

Yes SMS based 2FA isn't going to be reselient against a state actor but that shouldn't be the adversary you protect yourself against if it is you've already lost.

In nearly all other cases it's fine, attacks against it aren't scalable and extremely hard to pull off outside of purely academic exercises and the benefits from the added security are considerable when compared to the use of only passwords or pre-generated auth codes.

<comment><USER24> SMS-based 2FA is a joke not just because of SS7 attacks, but mostly because most (if not all) phones are set to display SMS messages on the lock screen.

So go grab somebody's phone and enjoy access to anything that uses SMS-based 2FA, because those messages are going to be shown even if you are unable to unlock the phone. Far from "academic exercices" or "state-level actors", I'd say.

<comment><USER15> Grabbing phones off people doesn't scale, and is reasonably hard to pull off since you need to first map from the online identity to the exact physical location, then actually physically get there yourself.

Much easier to just social engineer the provider into giving you a replacement SIM.

<comment><USER23> Grabbing phones of people also means it doesn't matter if they display messages or not if you have the SIM you don't need their device.

This isn't any different than stealing a ubikey of someone it's game over.

Also at least in the U.K. it's pretty hard to get a replacement SIM through social engineering you either need an ID in store or they send it to your billing address only with signed post.

In either case the previous SIM would be disabled on the spot which would likely mean that the owner would notice and block it before this can be leveraged for an attack and this is also less scalable than stealing phones since it's actually more involved in most cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Don't you also need to crack the encryption? Yes, it's pretty fast, but it does drive up the cost at least 10x. I'm not saying that's a lot, but it's no $20.

See [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dridHDUHJQ&list=PLRovDyowOn...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dridHDUHJQ&list=PLRovDyowOn5F_TFotx0n8A79ToZYD2lOv)

<comment><USER26> Not to sniff the IMSI/TMSI, just to decrypt the rest of the traffic. There's some parts of the signalling protocol that happens in the clear.

<comment><USER25> Are you sure? TMSI I agree is plaintext, but not IMSI, right?

TMSI is not as "temp" as the name implies, but that doesn't make it an _IMSI_ catcher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Doesn't this run afoul of the legal issue of monitoring the cell bands, or does that only apply to text/voice?

</comment><comment><USER28> This isn't actually an IMSI catcher - it is just passively looking at C0

<comment><USER29> What is C0?</comment></comment>


How to Acquire Your First 100 Customers - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/104qgagSsp2rQQEDORGbYC0uqt0neYHCPxu-aUl4CuSQ/edit <comment><USER2> Nicely formatted PDF version: [http://v.fastcdn.co/u/61275824/34126901-0-33906331-0-The- Fir...](http://v.fastcdn.co/u/61275824/34126901-0-33906331-0-The-First.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Or, better yet, thank the author himself by downloading it straight from his own website : [https://first100.yobenlee.com/](https://first100.yobenlee.com/)

<comment><USER4> Why do I need to give my name and email so I can be added to a mailing list before I can even see the content?

Obviously this isn't a problem because the submission has the content, as does the other commenter's direct link, but I just hate this sort of UX.

Let me see the value of your content (not a sales page) and if I really like it I'll subscribe to a mailing list _after_.

<comment><USER5> Why does the author have to write a book just to get your E-Mail? It's a transaction. Obviously as the consumer you would prefer having the upside without the downside. The same is true for the vendor.

We usually meet somewhere in the middle and call it a day.

<comment><USER6> GDPR would strongly disagree with you. Your personal information is not a currency and you should never be forced to part with in in exchange for goods and services. If you're worth dollars, you should be paying dollars.

<comment><USER7> You're not being forced at all.

<comment><USER6> According to GDPR you are. If your personal information is not required (from a technical standpoint) in order to use the service, you're not allowed to block access to the service if the user refuses to give you their personal information. That particular law is quite clear that requiring someone to give you their email address in exchange for digital goods that do not need your email address in order to function (like a PDF) is in violation.

GDPR may not apply depending on what jurisdiction this site falls under, but it sets the expectation for all digital goods anywhere in the world. If you're demanding someone's personal information as a _currency_ rather than as a _requirement_ , that is a scam.

If you want to make money, charge money. If you're not trying to make money, there's no need to require my email address in exchange for the product.

<comment><USER5> Interesting perspective!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My wife and I are bootstrapping a business, and we're nearly at 100 customers (92 right now). I would not say it's an easy road. We've been working on it full time for 1.5 years so far.

A couple things I've realized while doing this:

1\. Business is a competition. Much like in sports, skills are only built up through practice. For an entrepreneur this means actually selling something. You will start at level 0. There is no substitution for actually doing the work.

2\. The bigger you grow, the easier it gets. A year ago we were running around like headless chickens not knowing what to focus on. Now that we've got a core group of customers, and it's much easier to decide where to go. We can start to plan a month or two months out now. Opportunities such as partnerships also present themselves as your business grows larger.

<comment><USER9> > The bigger you grow, the easier it gets

I guesstimate it's easier to grow until start hiring, and hit the point where you can no longer directly manage everyone who works at the company. And if you've never hired & managed people, being new to having employees is it's own kind of adventure!

<comment><USER10> My perception from going through growth again this past year is that the sooner you can get your organization organized the easier it gets. I can't recommend the eMyth books enough for most anyone starting a business. Systemizing things, particularly the things that are rudimentary, is the fastest way to get to a healthy business. I also ran around for months like a chicken with my head cut off. Once I hired some help (contractors mostly) to do some of the tiny tasks that were massive time sucks my life got easier and my business got healthier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a really interesting document. I literally _cringe_ reading it. At first I thought that I'd really like something like this document but with less random quotes, less facile language, less cheer leading, less fill in the blanks, etc. But then I thought... I wonder if I am reacting this way because this is exactly what I need to be reading. What if the way of thinking espoused by this document is precisely why I never start a business? Maybe it's the fact that I roll my eyes and completely disregard what people are saying when they start talking in this fashion that I haven't actually done anything.

Food for thought.

<comment><USER12> My encouragement for you to start a business is this, 'become unstoppable'. How you become unstoppable is finding your 'why' for doing it. I think this is the hardest part... and more important than finding 'a business opportunity' because I think you need the meaning of your 'why' to sustain you through the difficulties of new venture creation, especially as you iterate through to product market fit.

I think once you have your why, you'll find yourself naturally doing whatever it takes to execute, which sharpens your focus away from noise like what you're describing (i.e. other people's communication styles) and allows you to 'take what you need' from resources, such as this book, and ignore everything else.

<comment><USER13> Is... Is this some kind of parody / troll comment?

<comment><USER14> Not at all. It's based on one of Simon Sinek's most well known TED talks: [https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...](https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action)

<comment><USER12> Kind of... Simon Sinek distilled what I already knew to be true, and what I live as I work towards a company that "looks after people". The rest is from hard won wisdom AKA (temporary) failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks very interesting, but the doc is very busy right now. If you want to download a PDF copy of the doc for reading on the go, here's the link (let it load for a while): [https://docs.google.com/document/d/104qgagSsp2rQQEDORGbYC0uq...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/104qgagSsp2rQQEDORGbYC0uqt0neYHCPxu- aUl4CuSQ/export?format=pdf)

<comment><USER16> As someone further up in the thread posted: give the guy some love and download it from his website AND get it nicely formatted with a proper layout. Go here [https://first100.yobenlee.com](https://first100.yobenlee.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I will circle back and read this over the weekend but my advice is this:

Get to 10 customers, and then double down on anything that worked.

Some ideas for the first 10:

\- write an essay about something interesting that you can weave your business idea into, submit to tech blogs like hackernoon

\- join a maker group that can help you in an informal quid pro quo with social media shares and upvotes

\- launch on hacker news, product hunt and indie hackers. All have their rituals. Spend a little time, not too much, to get it right.

\- contact all the people you talked to before/during product development (bc you did talk to people, right?)

\- use an seo keyword research tool or just start searching for things and use the suggestions at the bottom of the google results. Write actual content on your website that is directed toward answering these questions. Seo compounds slowly so start early.

\- find places your customers are (questions on quora or stack overflow; Facebook groups; etc) and learn about them and interact without being spammy.

These are the techniques we used to take Cronitor to 10 customers and then hundreds more.

<comment><USER18> > find places your customers are

> we used to take Cronitor

You clearly have skin in the game due to following your own advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have an interesting question.

Say there is an already established business that has more than proven the idea is viable.

What does it take to... join the same market space? Can you offer the same features at the same price? Can you offer the same features at a lower price? Can you offer less features at a lower price?

Are there cases where there is only room for one player and no matter what you do, you will not be able to steal any sizable amount of market share from them?

<comment><USER20> Super simple. No matter the industry, you can beat the competition with AI + blockchain written in Rust.

<comment><USER21> And an amazing team: [https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*TZ- QFPLJjt470c3pc7...](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*TZ- QFPLJjt470c3pc7A3kQ.png)

<comment><USER22> Me myself and I, go team go

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Helped launch more than 500 mobile apps

I don't want to discredit the author... but that number seems way too high. 500 apps for a period of "more than 10 years" (which usually means prob is just 10 years or really close to it) implies that you would've had to release (on average) 4 apps per month non-stop during 10 years. How can you have time to do anything else?

I get you're not developing each app, but if you're helping them, then you must allocate some reasonable amount of time per app, otherwise your contribution would be close to zero (not relevant).

Was that a typo? I could believe 50, but 500?

<comment><USER24> My understanding was OP has been a consultant for startups, in the traditional sense of advising what works and what doesn't. Depending on how involved OP is and how high level they are working, that may only involve spending a few hours per week per client - I'd imagine even just joining a weekly retrospective and advising a team would be pretty valuable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is super timely — looking forward to take a look at this in the evening. Wish this was in an ebook format so I could stick it into my Kindle and read it that way though. You might want to check out Calibre, it's an app that automatically converts to more ebook-friendly formats. Might be worth a shot.

BTW - you might want to just host the PDF on your website behind an email wall and put it behind Cloudflare. I just spent 10 minutes trying to get the PDF, it's that busy on Google Docs.

Edit: I just tried to convert it, it works _okay_ , not super great, since the source is PDF. I'm sure you have the raw text document, you can flawlessly convert from that to EPUB/MOBI if you want.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will check out Calibre. Appreciate the feedback!

You can get the PDF downloadable link here: first100.yobenlee.com.

Will work on EPUB/MOBI formats!

<comment><USER26> Please do those formats. Many read on iBooks and pdf is hard to work with. I also tried calibre on the PDF, but that doesn't produce a good output. Thanks for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Already pinged my designer. If you want to opt-in on my page, I'll make sure we push these formats before the holidays! Thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER26> Awesome

<comment><AUTHOR> EPUB formats have been pushed live on my page!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Very insightful. While reading the article, I realised that having freedom is my core motivation. And that (a bit of extra) freedom is the biggest thing my company can give people. We enable people who are diagnosed with cancer to be in charge. To not feel defeated, to make decisions and set their path. Will use this to update our messaging. Thanks for the article!

</comment><comment><USER28> "Roadmapping: a pre-development product workshop that helps founders validate their app idea against the marketplace. [...] With more than 500 Roadmapping sessions under our belt, we can say definitively that it works: 18% of our alumni raise more than $250,000 in pre-product seed capital"

How on earth is raising money a synonym of successful product market fit?

<comment><USER29> Yeah, once I read that I couldn't stand to read on, it was like, oh, this is just BS then, that's not a signal of success or market fit, it's a sign of convincing investors there is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I do like your agency brand (Rootstrap) but as you may have found, its one of those words that has unexpected meanings in other cultures :)

</comment><comment><USER31> I took a startup course in the MBA program at one of HBS/GSB/Wharton/Kellogg that was taught by a (in my estimation) great VC. Arguably the most insightful class I've ever taken. I'll give two sets of insights: anecdotes and principles.

(A1) The founders of a successful custom apparel startup didn't get even close to 100 customers until after they had tried two different distribution channels. First, they opened a store and that didn't work. Second, they tried to sell on-line and that didn't work. Finally, with implosion imminent, they tried a hybrid model where you get measured in the store, but every purchase is made on-line and then delivered. It worked.

(A2) Co-founder of one of the publicly-traded food delivery companies told us how he started out. Was hungry, realized he couldn't order online, so he sits down and codes an initial web page (as well as an API). Asks a friend of a friend that runs a restaurant to let him list the restaurant on his new site. Guy gives him $140 for one month.

Figures he'll just knock-on doors to add restaurants, but managers kick him out with no meeting. Realizes if he walks in the back door (alley) and pretends to have a meeting with a manager he might get somewhere. So, he walks through the kitchens of 100's of restaurants and they ask him who he is there to see, tells them he has a meeting with the manager. 50% of the time he gets kicked-out, the rest of the time he gets restaurants to agree to being listed.

(A3) My VC professor's fourth business was a bridal gown website he purchased with his co-founder. They didn't use paid SEO. Rather, they came up with creative hacks to drive traffic to the site. One of the better ones:

Pay writers in India to compose short articles about stuff happening in the bridal space. The writers read the first articles to be published that morning (UK time) in the BBC, etc., then write up the same stuff, and publish it on their bridal gown page right as (US time) the same stories were hitting presses at the NYT, etc.

Using such hacks, they got their site to number two on google search results without paid SEO.

\-----

(P1) "Half of the difficulty is going from zero customers to one customer. Everything after that is the other half."

(P2) Every startup is a science experiment. Come up with a hypothesis, test it, and see what worked and what didn't. Rinse, repeat.

Following a structured, hypothesis-driven process is key. Literally, write in a journal what your hypothesis/assumption is, how you are going to test it, and what you hope to learn from the test. Next week, write-out what your hypothesis is, what you need to do this week to make further progress on validating/invalidating it, what progress you made the week before in validating/invalidating it, and what your plan for the following week is. Continue writing out these four things every single week to stay organized.

(P3) If you feel extremely strapped for cash, view this as a blessing in disguise. There is some creative hack that will allow you to validate/invalidate your hypothesis or set of assumptions - you just haven't found it yet. Running solid, structured experiments (i.e. process) is most important. Love process.

\-----

Unless you have blown way past 100 customers, the sciency/experimental aspect of a startup doesn't change. And even inside unicorns, management is (hopefully) still ultimately just running a never ending series of experiments.

<comment><USER32> Those are excellent insights, thank you.

Do you have any pointers to get started on this for someone whose last practice of scientific method was a middle-school science fair project? (Asking for a friend)

I picked up the book "Uncontrolled" by Jim Manzi, which is ostensibly about this subject. Would love to hear any recommendations you picked up from learning about this material and applying it.

<comment><USER31> I just created a gmail account you can contact me at ( firstname.lastname@example.com ). I'll give you the syllabus, assorted materials, and a bulleted list of take-aways that I've written up for others in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> most detailed guide drop I've seen in a while on here, thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate it! I'll be pushing some bonus material next week. Here's how to get on the list yobenlee.com -> Read My Book

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is nicely put together - thank you.

My entire business is actually in helping people get customers and at least half of our clients are those seeking P/M fit who partner with us to get early demos of their product (or even pre-demo conversations) scheduled. I have a sketchbook full of cool SAAS ideas that I'm not savvy enough to build. But I'm good at getting customers so _viola_ that's my business.

I would offer these tips if you are trying to start a business - any business - and need a nudge to get your first few customers.

1\. You don't need to be different. The world is HUGE. Most of your potential customers have never heard of your competitors. In fact, they may well be saying "I wish this-thing-that-solves-a-need existed" without knowing that 20 versions of that thing exist. We tech folks drastically overestimate the amount of time and energy people put into finding ways to solve problems they have. Most folks just live with the misery.

2\. Your competition sucks. If you pick up the phone and start the process of selling than you already way ahead of most of your competitors. Why? Because most of them act like they sell but they really just sit and agonize over one more line of code or one more feature instead of getting out there in front of customers. Use this to your advantage! Your product is already good enough, so stop developing it and go find users.

3\. Your network is a goldmine. We had a potential customer approach us to help set 20 demos a month for their SAAS product. So far they had scheduled zero demos even though all 3 founders had over 1000 LinkedIn connections. Instead of taking them on as a client I consulted with them for a couple of hours on how to reach out to people they already knew. (Side note: If you won't put your product/service in front of EVERYONE you know who is a potential customer than you are lacking confidence. This can be solved, but selling to people you know is MUCH easier than selling to strangers. Offer something you believe in and the conversations come easy).

4\. People hate cold callers, spammers, and unsolicited messages. So make warm calls (after an introduction) and send relevant emails (how it is you know they have this problem and how you can help). Do not be fearful of reaching out! People ARE interested in real things that solve real problems and they will pay real money for that.

5\. Charge more. Charging a low price doesn't motivate buying any more than a high price discourages it. Don't price your SAAS at $2 a month because you are afraid no one will pay $5. Don't price it at $10 because you are afraid no one will pay $50. Especially in B2B when purchasers aren't often spending their own money. Problems in the business world are worth more than $5, $10 or even hundreds of dollars to solve.

Good luck to all of you. Finding new customers can and should be fun, not a source of stress. And seeing the first official sale or first dollar in the bank is a high that never gets old.

C

</comment><comment><USER34> This is fantastic!

</comment><comment><USER35> Great guide, very well detailed! Just what I needed, thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Presentation is not good. Endless headings followed by double space followed by short paragraph or bullet points.

Hard to read, annoying to scan. I can see a lot of generic fluff. There may be pearls in there, but I didn't spot any on quick glance.

<comment><USER37> > There may be pearls in there, but I didn't spot any on quick glance.

I've read 1/4 but carefully and already found several pearls. Mind you, some people will already know 80% of knowledge in this book, but it's not the same 80% for anyone. I won't tell you what is usable because this book is very general and different parts are usable to different people.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Firefox Extension Like Hacker News Sidebar? - <AUTHOR> Hacker News Sidebar is a chrome extension that tells me when I'm reading a page that has been submitted to Hacker News. It produces a button that pops out the thread, and I love it. I'm switching to Firefox, and it doesn't seem to exist there. Can anyone recommend a similar extension? <comment><USER2> Haven't tried it out personally, but some Chrome extensions work in Firefox due to the WebExtensions API.

Maybe look into that? Keywords: chrome extensions in firefox</comment>


The future of AutoCAD - <AUTHOR> http://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interface/2018/03/the-future-of-autocad.html <comment><USER2> AutoCAD "Web" is Chrome-only:

"Unsupported Browser. The AutoCAD web app is currently only supported by an up-to-date version of 64-bit Google Chrome on Windows or Mac."

[https://web.autocad.com/](https://web.autocad.com/)

<comment><USER3> Chrome is the new IE

<comment><USER4> If IE received monthly updates and had one of the fastest JavaScript engines around, it would still be the dominant browser.

<comment><USER5> IE/edge does recieve monthly updates every patch tuesday for the last several years

<comment><USER6> Yes, monthly updates every patch Tuesday, but sadly no fixes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Something similar existed years ago with ME10 running on HPUX. Many similar things existed. Workflows centrally hosted, on site, with terminals or workstation clients. Literally many engineers could work on a single drawing or design and individually created or updated. And of course the updates would synchronise between clients.

Nix hosted, colloborative workflows. What is old is new again.

Personal Computer software like Solidworks or Maya might seem "cool" or cheaper; I once made money as a contractor recreating what companies lost from older solutions and refused to pay for from platforms like Catia. These frustrating paradigms are not excuslive to CAD or DCC.

So many designers and architects I know still use pen and paper more than software, I am not sure if the tooling advancements in PC hosted software has outweighed what was lost in centralised, transaction backed, collaborative workflows.

</comment><comment><USER8> SketchUp has been running in the brower for the better part of a year (or at least their free version does): [https://help.sketchup.com/en/article/3000315](https://help.sketchup.com/en/article/3000315)

I wasn't able to find any technical information about whether SketchUp takes the same approach of compiling their desktop code to Emscripten.

<comment><USER9> SketchUp is very cool, but it does not have a constraint solver. If you want to know what that means, try SolveSpace for an easy-to-use CAD program that has one. When you reach its limits switch to FreeCAD which is far more feature complete but harder to learn and use (IMHO).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why can't they just wrap it into Electron or Meteor and go full circle desktop-web-desktop, all in C++, just eating a few more gigabytes for V8? It's so super enjoyable to see Chrome header, buttons etc. on top of any desktop app, really!

Something in our industry went horribly wrong, investments going to self- serving "innovations" instead of needed areas.

This is probably an attempt to turn a full-blown desktop app into a SaaS- bound, remotely-delivered app without much concern for users. I guess we will have to get used to it; next is likely going to be Photoshop & co.

</comment><comment><USER11> The future of AutoCAD is certainly not web, but BIM. Their biggest problem is that BIM standards are national, so have to be provided by third party devs. Which does not allow coming up with proper general solutions for the more technical challenges of working with large BIM projects. Web is only a toy, like the first internet connected AutoCAD versions 2000.

</comment><comment><USER12> I hate webapps. What will happen to scripting, application automation? Just have a look, how dumbed down most webapps are when compared to their desktop parts or similare programs as desktop version.

<comment><USER13> I hate desktop applications. They take a long time to install, they have local file storage that requires me to spend time backing the data up, they eat up disk space on my computer system, they aren't accessible to me if I need to use another computer system, they need to be manually patched and updated, and if I am dependent on them they could restrict my choice of operating system on my desktop.

Web apps aren't perfect either but they have a lot of value to offer users.

<comment><USER14> The cloud is someone's else computer.

I like to have _my stuff_ on _my computer_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This probably doesn't count as full-blown CAD, but there exists a cool and mature desktop 3D modelling application written in _ERLANG_! How can you resist at least trying that? It's called Wings3D:

[http://www.wings3d.com/wp- content/uploads//SS01.png](http://www.wings3d.com/wp- content/uploads//SS01.png)

[http://www.wings3d.com/wp- content/uploads//Amx141prscr.jpg](http://www.wings3d.com/wp- content/uploads//Amx141prscr.jpg)

[http://www.wings3d.com/?page_id=84](http://www.wings3d.com/?page_id=84)

<comment><USER16> 3D programs target different domains.

Wings is mainly for creating renderable meshes.

A CAD software's main usage is in modeling physical structures.

<comment><USER17> another major point of distinction is free form sculpture vs engineering parts. the tools made for either of these domains is largely useless in the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You would think, if you wrote a hosted CAD program that ran on large compute instances in AWS, you'd really lock the market down. No more buying expensive CAD workstations, way less graphics drivers, just fire it up. Need more power? Just pay more each month/day/hour. Plus you could host all your giant CAD files in the cloud, no more buying storage and easier to share across remote teams.

<comment><USER16> The hardware is cheap nowadays compared to the software. Any sub-1k dollar/euro PC will handle most things one would use Autocad for. It's the software that is expensive.

<comment><USER18> Not if you're doing 3D. ISV certified laptop with GPU and enough RAM is going to be $2,000

<comment><USER19> The price you quote is the cost of yearly subscription for just a single program (per station). An architect or engineer will use ~5 such programs on a daily basis for various modeling/analysis tasks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The owner of this website (through-the-interface.typepad.com) has banned your IP address

Whelp, I guess I didn't care that much.

<comment><USER21> Gdpr-shield?

<comment><USER20> My traffic is coming from a Digital Ocean NYC, in the US

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> SolidWorks, you're next!

<comment><USER22> That already kind of happened. A couple former SolidWorks CEOs started OnShape which is a CAD webapp. It's not as mature as SolidWorks which has been around for 20+ years of course, but it's a very capable CAD application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> AutoCAD is vast, recursive, and bloated. I really hope someone comes out with a lightweight version that does less, better.

<comment><USER24> The road to Sausalito is littered with the corpses of AutoCAD challengers.

Generic CADD was pretty good. Bought and shut down.

I also remember Visual CAD (which I don't think is the same Visual CAD a quick google search is turning up). I forget who bought them.

There's a zillion others I no longer remember.

Unbelievably, as bad as AutoCAD is/was, Bentley Systems' MicroStation was a hellspawn of turrible.

I've never really understood how AutoCAD and Office maintained their dominance. Conventional wisdom is control the file format. There were so many efforts to open up DWG/DXF. But I don't know that interop ever mattered.

I think it's just been inertia. Nothing since Generic CADD has been enough better to warrant the switchover costs.

<comment><USER16> "MicroStation was a hellspawn"

I think you mean _is_ a hellspawn. I think they still have a solid foothold in some sectors.

<comment><USER25> Sadly I have to work in one of the sectors. It is very common for geometric design of roadways. I think it is a result of State Departments of Transportation buying into the system and never wanting to change.

<comment><USER26> The only way to change that- is to actually pretend alternatives are not used- meaning they have to mimick the output exactly- even the flaws. Then after 5 years or so- the department anounces- oh- and by the way, we completely replaced xyz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Maybe some day you'll be able to set FACETRES above 10, or export your NURBS to something other than ACIS.

<comment><USER16> "export your NURBS to something other"

NURBS does not define a single mathematical entity, like a Bezier curve for example does. You can't convert NURBS trivially from one kernel to another. If the implementation is not _exactly_ the same, the transform is unlikely to be mathematically exactly equivalent.

<comment><USER27> I confess, I left that partially as bait, because I know it's hard (I'm currently trying). It's infuriating to have so much ACIS geometry that is so far away from being available on the well documented kernels without licensing it from Spatial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Now they are ready to port the WebAssembly to run in Electron.</comment>


Do Experiences Or Material Goods Make Us Happier? (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090223221532.htm

<comment><USER2> "every action has an equal and opposite reaction"

I don't see anything earth-shattering with this report and it makes absolute sense, but for some reason the "every action has an equal and opposite reaction" kept coming to mind and seemed to hold absolute truth with their findings.

Specifically, they find that it is true that if purchases turn out well, then the purchase of experience has the greatest happiness benefit and material goods the lesser.

Conversely, they find the opposite is equally true when it comes to purchases that don't turn out well: "Purchases that decrease happiness are less damaging when they are material purchases than when they are experiential purchases," or people will be least happy when a purchase doesn't turn out well if it is an experience vs a material good.

Maybe I wasn't clear at first which warranted the down vote on the comment.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The actual study: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/26169481/Happiness-for-Sale-Do- Exp...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/26169481/Happiness-for-Sale-Do-Experiential- Purchases-Make-Consumers-Happier-than-Material-Purchases)</comment>


An Unstoppable Combination - <AUTHOR> http://nathanbarry.com/unstoppable-combination/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for submitting this. I'd love to hear what resources everyone has used to learn design, development, and marketing.</comment>


Bill Nye sues Disney claiming it withheld $28M in profits from his show - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-nye-sues-disney-lawsuit-2017-8?utm_source=hearst&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=allverticals <comment><USER2> I hope he doesn't win

<comment><USER3> Nye is pretty skeezy, but I can't bring myself to hope Disney gets to hang onto the money either.</comment></comment>


VW's first mass-market EV suffers delay thanks to software struggles - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/11/21288572/volkswagen-id3-ev-delay-software-vw-herbert-diess <comment><USER2> Deliveries of the ID.3 will start in the next month or so. The ID.4 is coming soon as well:

[https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/stories/following- thr...](https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/stories/following-three-comes- four-series-production-of-the-id4-begins-in-zwickau-6298)

Volkswagen will be pumping out electric cars year after year from now on, which is as you'd expect. They're a car company. They're good at making cars.</comment>