Cryptocurrency miners are renting Boeing 747s to ship graphics cards - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcgamer.com/cryptocurrency-miners-are-renting-boeing-747s-to-ship-graphics-cards <comment><USER3> This just sounds grandiose but really, renting a 747-400F is not such a big deal. This [http://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series- air...](http://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-aircraft- operating-expenses/) article gives a figure of 24-27000 USD an hour. You need it how long? Ten hours? Twelve?

Using a random card Amazon gives us a box size of 13.4 x 9.5 x 3.1 about 400 cubic inches. Say [http://www.cargolux.com/our-expertise/cargo- equipment/aircra...](http://www.cargolux.com/our-expertise/cargo- equipment/aircraft/747-400f-specifications) we have 21 347 ft^3 that is some 36 887 616 cubic inches which means some 92 000 such boxes give or take.

There are inefficiencies etc so let's say it's 30 000 cards. Say at 300 USD each. That's a cool ten million bucks. The plane likely costs less than half a mil. It's not a biggie.

But do they really? [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zmemza/cryptocurr...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zmemza/cryptocurrency- mining-fueling-a-gpu-shortage) says "Enigma started with an installation of about 700 GPUs and now consists of several larger buildings," Schindler told me in an email. "Obviously at this size the operation draws attention from the hardware manufacturers directly and we have agreements with them." Compared to that I have some doubts they need to fly _thirty thousand_ cards in. Maybe they rented a pallet in a 747F...

<comment><USER4> A side business I run supplied them with components in 2016. Based on what I shipped them I'd say they deployed some where in the neighborhood of 18,000 graphics cards in 2016 and they were supposedly ramping up to go even bigger in 2017.

I don't have any insight into what they are currently up to because that scaling apparently involved hiring a eastern European engineer on the cheap to masquerade as a customer to try and obtain confidential hardware design details from me so he could rip off my product for them.

<comment><USER5> >I don't have any insight into what they are currently up to because that scaling apparently involved hiring a eastern European engineer on the cheap to masquerade as a customer to try and obtain confidential hardware design details from me so he could rip off my product for them.

Sounds like an interesting story here. How did you out him/her?

<comment><USER4> It was pretty transparent, almost comically so. My business makes adapter boards that let large mining operations reuse power supplies from old server equipment to power their mining operations. Each power supply has a different pin-out and way to turn it on and off many are proprietary and don't have publicly available data sheets. I figure out how they work and design an adapter board with the required logic to operate them safely as a general purpose 12 volt power supply.

The business operates on a model where the customer pays a minimal fee, $100, to purchase a prototype of a new design but I retained the rights to the designs and did all the design, development, and testing on my own dime and then amortize those costs over the life of the product.

So one day they come to me and say they want to start manufacturing at a factory they've made a deal with in China and ask me to give them the design files free of charge. I told them that I wasn't going to just give them the companies IP for free because a lot of work went into developing it etc... but that we could discuss what an appropriate price was if they really were dead set on doing their own manufacturing.

There was some back and forth but their position was that they didn't think there was anything special about the product and the most they were willing to pay for access to the design files and a license to manufacture it in unlimited quantities was $100 per design. I pointed out a number of things that we did the most important of which was making sure the design and materials could safely handle the high current loads the boards had to withstand, etc...

Shortly after I refused their $100 offer as insultingly low I get an email from some guy purporting to be from eastern Europe and saying he was interested in purchasing 500 units. Before he would go through with the purchase he needed to confirm some technical details of the board design because he was "concerned his environment was very hot and dirty". He then went on to ask a list of questions including things like what are the number and thickness of the copper layers in the PCB. These were the exact reasons I had discussed with the Genesis guys as to why our designs had value. At that point I was 99% sure of what was going on. So I responded that we didn't give out those specifics but that we could send him a prototype to test and he never responded.

To satisfy my own curiosity a little while later I used a personal email address to send the guy a message saying that a friend had given me his name and asking if he still did hardware design because I needed some design work done for crypto-currency related projects. A day later I got a response that removed any remaining doubt about what was going on.

<comment><USER5> Fun, thanks for sharing. The world of cutthroat SHA calculations. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These headlines are annoying and what I consider to be "fake news". -- EG They are blowing up some factoid or partial fact to make a false impression.

Here's the reality--

\-- Ethereum is going to PoS soon. Even if it doesn't fully switchover it will decline in profitability for miners quite a bit.

\-- Ethereum is down %50 in the past couple weeks. The GPU boom is over (for now) and supply should be loosening.

\-- There are just not that many coins out there that are GPU mineable to support really massive operations, like a full 747 of GPUs. BTC is $45B and ETH is $18B market cap. As far as GPU mineable coins looking at the top hundred on CoinMarketCap I see about $2-$3B market cap for them all combined. You aren't going to take the hash power of securing ETH at $18B and dump it into ETC and ZEC without thinking twice, and if you do you aren't going to be shipping 27,000 GPUS in at a time 2 months before you have to jump from your big pond into those tiny ponds.

\-- And if there were, the labor to bring that many machines up, even if you already have the physical and electrical capacity is weeks of work, unless you're employing a very large labor force which you are going to turn around and fire right after they've built your very cost intensive and valuable and hard to secure warehouse full of miners.

Reality is, the industry may be buying one 747 worth over the next several months but they are all getting them a few at at time and constrained by electrical and physical capacity and labor availability, and parts of everything else.

At even low scale these are non-trivial issues, when you start building 10 rigs at a time it is at least 10 times harder, 10 times more likely a part is out, etc etc.

<comment><USER7> You severly underestimate the number of GPUs mining other cryptos. For example ZEC has half a million GPUs right now (200 MSol/s).

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure what your point is. Do a similar calculation for the ETH difficulty and there are a lot more GPUs mining ETH....which are going to crowd into ZEC and ETC. IF you have 10,000 GPUS mining ETH and you have to move them in a few months, are you going to now be adding another 1,000 GPUS?

<comment><USER7> I was replying to " _There are just not that many coins out there that are GPU mineable to support really massive operations, like a full 747 of GPUs._ " And I pointed out that's not true because 1 airplane-load of GPUs represent only a tiny minority of the mining power of just 1 cryptocurrency like ZEC.

Also you seemed to assume this airplane-load of GPUs is meant for Ethereum, but Genesis Mining (the miner who rented a 747) already mine ZEC and other alts.

Finally, I would wager there are probably more (at least as many) GPUs mining all other coins combined than GPUs mining Ethereum (2 millions or so).

<comment><USER6> I'm assuming most GPUS are mining ethereum and that this will change. (not the airplane load, I don't think the airplane load even exists)

But you are right there's a huge number of GPUs out there. My main point is there is going to be a big shift to the others from ethereum when ethereum becomes less profitable...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The 747 is needed because it's filled fore-to-aft with cards? Or just because it sounds good in an article?

A ticketed courier could deliver a large number of cards just as quick, if not quicker.

<comment><USER9>
      Or just because it sounds good in an article?

Exactly. I bet if you took the cargo capacity (I'm guessing that with any packaging to speak of, volume would be the limiting factor rather than weight) of an air cargo configured 747, _months_ worth of Genesis' card consumption would easily fit in _one_ flight.

That one hyperbole quote generated at least a half-dozen different articles in this media genre, most of which have been posted multiple times on HN over the past 4 days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is great news. I can't wait until people realize that Ethereum is a largely useless network and GPUs rain down like manna from the heavens.

<comment><USER11> its useful for conducting unregulated securities offerings and launching dapps. i just haven't found any useful dapps yet. dapps are mostly used when you need censorship resistant functionality.

<comment><USER12> Most dapps I've seen are literally pyramid schemes or gambling.

<comment><USER13> [https://prism.exchange](https://prism.exchange)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a gold rush[1]. People that were early in BitCoin already cashed, now profit is made on exchanges and by hardware suppliers. It is even worse than Gold because you can't just hold when market crash.

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

<comment><USER6> People who bought at the absolute peak of the last market, where it was for only an hour or so, are now up %2700 on that purchase in 4 years.

You can hold and you can dollar cost average, and if you weren't buying with the intention of holding for 5 or more years you weren't really investing you were speculating and if you're speculating you should be hedged or have a strategy that can handle a dynamic market.

I know people who were early in bitcoin and they are still HODLing and using their BTC wealth to invest in other things like ETH and startups.

<comment><USER5> And we're still waiting for tulip bulbs to return to their peak value. Just because it continued up before doesn't mean it will continue up in the future.

<comment><USER6> The difference is that tulip bulbs were not a new technology with a compelling use case that keeps reaching wider and wider audiences.

<comment><USER5> In addition to mikechar's sibling comment, keep in mind that the blockchain technology can still be used for all kinds of stuff even if Bitcoin and Ethereum completely collapse to zero. They are just specific implementations and there is nothing particularly unique about them technologically compared to any given fork of the same code.

<comment><USER6> Your thinking is exactly where I was in about 2012. The network effects is why bitcoin has remained so valuable in the face of, say, litecoin which is arguably better technologically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm consistently surprised at how tepid AMD's embrace of mining has been. If I was them and noticed that my product was literally sold out everywhere because of mining, I would embrace it, open a mining division, and immediately get to work trying to create specialized hardware optimized for mining.

The fact that they seem to be pretending that this use case does not exist and stubbornly declare themselves to be exclusively a gaming company is baffling to me.

<comment><USER16> If their hardware is sold out because of mining, all they have to do to serve the mining segment is make more of that hardware. There is no urgent need to undercut themselves.

Brief research suggests that the entirety of Etherium mining is roughly equivalent to 1 quarter of AMDs GPU sales. It seems gaming is the much bigger chunk of demand (Nvidia sells 3x what AMD sells, so annual gaming sales are roughly 10x the total Etherium spend).

<comment><USER17> Wasn't there a time few years ago when AMD overestimated the demand and then had 4 times the production capacity idle? It's not exactly cheap to build too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> AMD announced the Vega 10 based GPUs today (on sale August 14).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14889357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14889357)

Apparently they are going to bundle most of them with games and hardware discounts initially, to discourage buy ups by the miners.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/11680/radeon-rx-vega- unveiled-...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/11680/radeon-rx-vega-unveiled-amd- announecs-499-rx-vega-64-399-rx-vega-56-launching-in-august/2)

The RX Vega 56 part has 50% higher SP compute per watt than the RX 580 and 570 (50 SP GFLOP/watt), and is only $399 MSRP.

<comment><USER6> EDIT: I see these bundles are definitely to limit demand on the early cards. I expect they will keep miners at bay until they start having volume on the single cards. That's fine.

Single Point calculations per watt or per second are not really the relevant measure for miners, it's all about memory bandwidth.

We will see how these stack up.

<comment><USER18> OK. Memory bandwidth for the Vega 56 part is 410GB/s, vs. 256 and 224 for the RX 580 and 570 respectively.

<comment><USER6> Right, those are good numbers for the price, comparable to the 1080 Ti, so this bodes well for using them for mining... however we will have to see if there are any gotchas (the access patterns for mining are different than for games, so for instance GDDR5X was less effective than GDDR5 despite being theoretically faster.)

<comment><USER18> Was that due to increased latency?

<comment><USER6> That would be my guess, that the bandwidth was very high but the latency was higher than the cheaper part, maybe not all the time, but in a way that affected this hashing algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The article title makes Genesis Mining sound like a bunch of amateurs, but they are a fairly large private company. Ordering express bulk freight for any company of this size doesn't sound so crazy.

</comment><comment><USER20> Imagine all these people wasting time, energy and power, the last of which is a crime against the environment and an affront to good sense at a time of global concern.

But when it comes to money, greed and self interest always triumph and there will be dozens stretching logic and apologism as far as it can go.

'Proof of work' has to the most hare-brained, wasteful, anti-environment scheme ever thought of. Responsible people should not just be wasting electricity in this manner.

<comment><USER21> Yet, here we are - wasting resources to post trivialities online. Their consumption is generating value, yet our comments are just yelling into the wind.

<comment><USER12> Proof of Work is inefficient by design. The transaction speed of the entire network is equivalent to that of an average node. Adding more hardware increases inefficiency.

A centralised service like HN on the other hand could be designed to scale linearly with the amount of hardware resources.

Edit: Now that I think about it I wouldn't be surprised if someone makes a cryptocurrency based around "digging holes" keynesian style. I've even found a name for it: captchacoin.

<comment><USER21> And our comments are creating no value. We're just ephemerally yelling into the wind. If the claim is about resource usage, the concern is about value. If nothing else, they are at least creating value - something we both aren't doing.

Hell, I don't even expect you to agree with me. I'm just posting to speak my point of view and amuse myself. This conversation is pretty much the most wasteful thing we are going to do today.

Real life is less utilitarian than many people wish. Even if our conversation is more efficient, it generates not one bit of value - at least financially. It does amuse me, but I'm not really sure that's very valuable.

<comment><USER22> >It does amuse me, but I'm not really sure that's very valuable.

That's valuable. It lowers the demand for jetskis and cocaine, at a fraction of the price. Also, there's not much point in life if being entertained isn't valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Any actual source for this? (Like a waybill, or customs documents. Not a press release.)

</comment><comment><USER24> It's a bit sad that cryptocurrencies tend to encourage concentration and centralisation. It's very hard for an individual to take part and earn if you "miss the time". And the negative side effects are large, like energy expense, or selling out of GPUs.

I think this is a general shortcoming of proof-of-work. I wonder if this could be fixed with a different scheme, e.g. reputation-based, or proof- of-(something socially desirable and not centralizable)?

<comment><USER25> You seem to assume that mining is the point of a cryptocurrency, and I don't think it is. Even Satoshi, when he was still around, predicted that mining would eventually be out of reach of the normal user.

But you can still "take part" by using it for what it actually is - <USER2> currency.

<comment><USER26> The big problem with cryptocurrencies is that they're really not currencies...

I don't know anyone who would want to use BC for anything other than speculation. Speculation that undermines the stability of the currency, which isn't conducive to use as currency.

There are proper cryptocurrencies that don't require mining but they don't seem to get nearly as much attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd be surprised if GPUs and CPUs were ever shipped by sea instead of air. 6-8 weeks at sea Vs 12 hrs flight is quite serious deprecation, even if you're not mining them.

<comment><USER28> In GAAP you don't have to do calendar time-based depreciation (assuming you're dealing with something that doesn't have a finite life, e.g. nuclear fuel rods). There's also usage based depreciation, so, for example, you only depreciate the cost of the GPU while the computer is powered-on or the cost of a truck based on how many miles it's gone.

<comment><USER29> I think the point was that due to upgrade cycles being what they are, a given model of graphics card will be less valuable in actual reality after a few months at sea; not just less valuable according to accounting.

<comment><USER27> Yes exactly, say you are on a 12month refresh cycle of your GPUs at Nvidia/AMD - 2 months is nearly 1/6th of that.

AMD or NVidia could 1up them by air shipping, which is very low cost considering the value per kg of the shipment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is this the real story behind nVidia's insane stock spike over the last year?

<comment><USER31> Miners use AMD cards because they have better integer performance, unless I'm mistaken.

<comment><USER32> I thought they use AMD cards because they consume less power

<comment><USER33> NVidia actually consumes less power in most games.

But AMD cards use less power with integer performance.

<comment><USER34> This is the reason, Nvidia is good for floating point. Which is why people use them for deep learning.

<comment><USER35> The main reason is library support. Still no widely supported (or ported) equivalent to Cuda/CuDNN for AMD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> i wonder if these massive mining operations have enough power to cheat the system: couldn't they quickly compute a series of valid blocks with the cheated transaction if they band together? the longer chain of blocks would win against a shorter one.

On the other hand they would have a self interest to preserve the system, if trust in cryptocurrencies collapses then the big miners would have a lot to loose.

<comment><USER6> This is a sybil attack and it would take wide collusion and would be difficult to pull off, and it would allow you to do what? Reverse some transactions that you had the keys for.

It's really expensive attack to get back the $5 you paid for Starbucks.

So you would want to do it with a multi-million dollar transaction.

However, the thing is, anyone you pay a multi-million dollar transaction to is going to let it clear for more than just one block... probably for many blocks...before handing you the goods.

Because everybody is aware of this risk.

Chains reorganize anyway, just naturally when sometimes two blocks are found within the propagation delay.

Trying to run ahead is very hard.

Wallets like Electrum show one confirmation in red, and several in yellow and only after the chain has gotten extremely expensive to unwind will it show them in green.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It would be fun to buy graphic cards in places where power costs are high and ship them to where power costs are low.

</comment><comment><USER38> If people are this serious, why don't they just set up their mining operation next door to the factory?

I imagine the factories are where they are in part because land and power is cheap?

<comment><USER39> Mining happens where power is cheapest; often near hydropower in agricultural china. Factories are usually in places with good shipping links.

<comment><USER40> Is electricity there really cheaper than places like Iceland? Aluminium smelters in Iceland tend to get contracts around $3c/kwh, other large clients should be able to get the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> i just cant wait to see when this whole crypto-concurrency gold rush inevitably collapses.

This is no different from the tulip mania of the 17th century. Yes tulips still have value today and cost something after all but not the absurd amount of money they once fetched.

</comment><comment><USER42> must be nice having the resources to buy that many gpus. do they make money mining these days?

seems like the average person barely breaks even after paying the home electric bill.

<comment><USER28> If you can get wholesale electric rates (I'm assuming if you're paying millions to buy and ship graphics cards you know what you're doing), then the power companies in California will pay you to burn electricity when the sun is at the highest [0].

[0]: [https://qz.com/953614/california-produced-so-much-power- from...](https://qz.com/953614/california-produced-so-much-power-from-solar- energy-this-spring-that-wholesale-electricity-prices-turned-negative/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> anyone else here sell their gpu? i couldn't resist...

<comment><USER44> Yeah, I managed to dump an old 7950 for well above its reasonable gamer- oriented price a few weeks ago but I'm glad I got my RX 480 before the craze.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Another source speakes more of ether. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14885294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14885294)

</comment><comment><USER46> One weird trick to mine crypto-currencies.</comment>


Results of "The Scientific 7-Minute Workout": Before and After - <AUTHOR> http://www.developingandstuff.com/2013/09/50-days-of-scientific-7-minute-workout.html <comment><USER2> All that is clear here that the Scientific 7 Minute Workout produces 1980's michael-j-fox hair.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fairly poor quality pictures with different lighting.

If you want to track changes track measurements, weight and body fat (even if it's with calipers, the absolute value is irrelevant the change is what is important).

</comment><comment> y-c-o-m-b While the suggested workout may be backed by science, there doesn't appear to be anything "scientific" about the method used here. Diet alone could have been the sole contributor for any difference in his body composition over the 30 days. Water retention based on his food choices is another factor. If he wanted to actually prove something with this, he should have tracked his measurements and diet.</comment>


Programmers: Before you turn 40, get a plan B (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://improvingsoftware.com/2009/05/19/programmers-before-you-turn-40-get-a-plan-b/ <comment><USER2> I'm a few years from 40 and have been a software developer since I graduated from college.

I hope I'm not a developer through my 40s. Why? Things don't seem to ever change for the better.

I've gone through death march projects, company politics turmoil, and business owners that seem to think Fooseball tables and a stocked fridge full of Red bull is equal compensation for spending unpaid extra hours on the latest product release.

Technology changes, but learning the latest framework du jour is not that difficult when you know the fundamentals.

I think some developers end up in management and others leave the industry entirely because they just don't want to deal with the bullshit anymore.

I've been consulting for the last 5 years and it has helped. I'm paid well and can work remotely from my own office or home.

I've also started my second side business that I hope will replace my consulting income. My first business lasted about 5 years before it became too difficult to maintain profitability.</comment>


Windows 10 Latest Update Is Wrecking PCs for Some Users - <AUTHOR> https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/04/06/windows-10-update-kb4541335-is-wrecking-pcs/ <comment><USER2> Yes, 4 year old custom HP 820z I updated 4 year old W10 on a separate boot drive, resulted in 4 seconds of windows icon then black screen with prompt.

It's my kids 3d modeller, renderer, she runs old non updated W7 due to frequent routine upgrade problems in the past.

Previous update of W10 upgrade on Samsung Laptop/tablet disabled WIFI.</comment>


Crowd funding acceptable for startup? - <AUTHOR> http://aleprok.eu/2011/10/18/crowd-funding-acceptable-for-startup/

<comment><USER2> I launched OpenPhoto on Kickstarter as a project with full intentions on building a company around it (I left my job to pursue it).

It's an open source project so that helps in terms of getting accepted into Kickstarter. Their terms state that projects are basically fixed in term and scope.

What I promised on Kickstarter was a photo management/sharing platform that allows you to use your Dropbox or S3 accounts for storage. I'm nearly finished with that.

The next phase is to offer a hosted version of the software (a la Wordpress) via a for profit company. The source is and will always remain open.

<http://theopenphotoproject.org>

<https://github.com/openphoto/frontend>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for letting me know of your success with Kickstarter. Good luck with OpenPhoto.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> When we were raising our angel round we asked our lawyers about this.

In the US, the general legal advice is that unless it's friends and family, it is not a good idea to raise money for equity from people who are not Accredited Investors. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor> \-- in short, millionaires).

IANAL, but the reason they gave is that non-Accredited Investors have more protections from the SEC and they can sue you if they decide that you didn't spend their money wisely.

There are also some complications that arise when you have too many investors on your cap table. I've heard of people getting around this by creating an LLP that invests in your company with set terms, rather than directly investing in your company. But I can't say for sure if this is good advice.

<comment><USER4> You could sell Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's...

<http://www.airbnb.com/obamaos>

If they don't invest, they don't have to be accredited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know this wasn't the question, but why do you need money?

You have "some ideas" for "some simple game projects"? That doesn't sound like a startup...that doesn't even sound like a project. Unless you have a very clear vision of exactly what it is you're wanting to do, you're going to have a hard time getting anyone to part with their money. If Tim Schafer has "some ideas", I'd give him money for sure....but unless you're proven, your ideas count for zip. It's the execution that counts.

A startup is a business searching for a business model that scales. A startup isn't a couple of guys with a few ideas that may or may not work.

If you have some awesome ideas, the best way to get money is to work on your idea until it is at a point where someone can see potential in it. It costs literally nothing to start working (providing you have the tools, which I'll assume you do). But it sounds like you're asking for people to put money in to...well...nothing.

Finally, if your idea of a project you and a few guys can work on, I'd suggest something a little less epic than "3D Sandbox mmorpg with really huge world designed and lot of monsters, characters and even own language for in game characters."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. This is what I waited for, the rant. You even read my next blog post.

One down. You should not be asking the question, "Why do we need the money?" I answered the question in the original blog post. For skills we lack and don't have 10 years to work on.

Two down. Why would I at this point start telling about my or his possibly epicly stupid ideas. Of course in the case if we actually do fund our first commercial project with crowd funding we will have to tell about the project and why the people should donate to us or invest in us.

I agree that ideas do not count for zip if the execution fails. Startup is a fresh business in phase of development and research for markets. Yes finding scaling business model is nice, but still the product is part of the startup too or you do not have anything to sell.

I know we could go the way of hacking code all night and day until we have something to show. Maybe uglier blocks than Minecraft has with barely no textures.

I was not asking you to give me money now. I was asking if we should go the way of crowd funding or find other ways to generate that cash by part-time working, etc.

You kinda missed the point of the blog post where I mentioned about the 3D sandbox project. Over Design, being over my head, etc.. It's experience which I won't fall into that easily again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is exactly why we launched IgnitionDeck. We were thinking of raising money via traditional methods, but crowd funding, when it works, is so much more appealing. Of course, it's not as easy as it sounds, as consumers are just as picky, if not more so, than investors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. I'm kinda afraid of the picky people myself. Kinda even threw a joke suggestion to sparky that I'll whip up some malicious code and sell it in the black market to do the funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would really like to know the answer to this as well. Where's the line between a "project" and a "startup"?

<comment><USER8> The most meaningful distinction to make here is that a startup exchanges equity for investment capital, while a project simply accepts advance payment for some good or service it intends to produce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They could still use Kickstarter to help fund one of the startup's projects – they just can't offer equity in return.

One attempt to find a legal workaround for securities laws which make it hard to crowdfund startups is ProFounder:

<https://www.profounder.com/></comment>


Why Passive Voice Gets Writers in Trouble - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-passive-voice-gets-writers-in.html

<comment><USER2> Rule #17: any essay about the passive, unless written by a linguist, is almost surely wrong.</comment>


Show HN: Wagbee – an exploration in collecting and visualizing information - <AUTHOR> https://wagbee.com/w/3yR/sheet/528 <comment><AUTHOR> The link is to a "Wagbee Ideas" workspace in wagbee. There is no demo version, so using this discussion workspace as an example of shared spaces.</comment>


Perfectionism vs. Value - <AUTHOR> http://30sleeps.com/blog/2014/02/06/perfectionism-vs-value/

<comment><USER2> I see perfectionism as a behavior driven by two motivations: A) The desire to go from competent developer to an expert one. B) The desire to avoid the shame of failure.

In the case of A, I think its often good for the developer / bad for the product. By single-mindedly erasing imperfections, the developer learns the nuances needed to move from competence to expertise. I don't think the product is likely to benefit at the same rate, though.</comment>


Disqus Forks Into Two Products, Launches Revamped Real-Time Comment System - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/25/disqus-forks-into-two-products-launches-revamped-real-time-comment-system/ <comment><USER2> I just signed up for Disqus on Sunday using their old website for my blog comments. It was quite confusing, especially the sections that showed how to embed the comments on my own generic blog. I felt they were trying to do two different things using the same exact app (comments I've left on other sites and comments users have left on my site). As a result, I kept getting confused by features I did not much care for while setting up comments for my blog.

I just logged back in and am glad to see it is a significantly cleaner interface and that they have split the two products. Having made many sites that went from single page tools to full-blown apps, I can see how the interface slowly gets more and more crowded and confusing as we add more features. Every once in a while, developers/designers must take a step back, analyze what it is that we're trying to do, and make changes to not only simplify the product but also the message. Having just experienced the difference between what it was two days ago and what it is now, I can say that the Disqus team did a pretty good job.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone have experience in Disqus vs JS-Kit? I'm actually considering using one (or at least making it easy for customers to use) in a couple products.

<comment><USER4> Disqus is so nice. Best part is the reactions that you also get with twitter comments, facebook comments, etc. Since people dont' comment as much on blogs but still talk about the links on twitter it helps you pull that content right in. JS-Kit may be better now, I used it a while ago but Disqus is just very useful.</comment></comment>


Convert hexadecimal to binary in your head - <AUTHOR> http://lukerissacher.com/hexquiz <comment><USER2> I learned programming on a TI-99/4A which required you to enter graphics as bitmaps in hex. I've never lost the ability to "see" hex numbers as binary.

I don't know if there's still a use for such a skill, but if you care, I learned it as a set of 8 pairs: first, 0 and F are easy, right? 9 and 6 are 1001 and 0110, and a 9 looks like an upside-down 6 so hopefully you can remember that pair.

That leaves 12 digits, and they come in mirror-image pairs: 1/8, 2/4, 3/C, 5/A, 7/E, B/D. You know which hex digit is larger, and the larger binary is heavier on the left side, e.g. D is 1101 and B is 1011.

<comment><USER3> This is great! Here's a demo of the full set to illustrate your point more fully.

[http://play.golang.org/p/T1eJ4prBHM](http://play.golang.org/p/T1eJ4prBHM)

<comment><USER4> Missing 9 and 6.

mirror pairs

(1) 0001/1000 (8)

(2) 0010/0100 (4)

(3) 0011/1100 (C)

(5) 0101/1010 (A)

(7) 0111/1110 (E)

(B) 1011/1101 (D)

(0) 0000/1111 (F)

Program exited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Flippy Bit is another great way to practice this: [http://flippybitandtheattackofthehexadecimalsfrombase16.com/](http://flippybitandtheattackofthehexadecimalsfrombase16.com/)

<comment><USER6> Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> All this talk about mental-math base conversions reminded me of the "double- dabble" algorithm, which lets you quickly convert binary to decimal in your head.

> In the 1960s, the term double dabble was also used for a different mental > algorithm, used by programmers to convert a binary number to decimal. It is > performed by reading the binary number from left to right, doubling if the > next bit is zero, and doubling and adding one if the next bit is one.[4] In > the example above, 11110011, the thought process would be: "one, three, > seven, fifteen, thirty, sixty, one hundred twenty-one, two hundred forty- > three," the same result as that obtained above.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_dabble#Historical](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_dabble#Historical)

<comment><USER8> It's faster to just see 0xf3 and then compute 256 - 13.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool. Many languages allow 0b11110000 style notation, though. If that's available, it's much preferable to hex when the bit arrangement matters. One should not ever force the reader to do the mental work of this quiz if it can be helped.

</comment><comment><USER10> I giggled at `A/10` ... Thank you for that.

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://games.usvsth3m.com/binary/](http://games.usvsth3m.com/binary/)

UPDATE: seems like the game is broken now. It used to work and it was quite fun.

<comment><USER11> The archive.org version still works [1]. Thank you for the recommendation!

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20150101030559/http://games.usvs...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150101030559/http://games.usvsth3m.com/binary)

<comment><USER6> Ah, thanks for the pointer. Good to have Wayback machine around :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you're looking for an android app helping you master base conversions: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.akeel.baseg...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.akeel.basegame&hl=en)

Free version: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.akeel.baseg...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.akeel.basegamefree&hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER13> I do find it shocking that 'kids today' really do not appreciate knowing a little bit of 'hex' and how that relates to 1's and 0's. Numbers like 384, 768 and other common multiples should be understood as computationally significant. Same with numbers like 255, 16383 and so forth - people who work with code should mentally have an image of lots of '1's with these numbers, but they don't. One should not have to explain this stuff except to people, and, this article kind of sums that up, there are a lot of people out there that just were not brought up on the cusp of 8/16 bit computing!!!

For me this has been the case with images in particular. Why have some Photoshop operative spend all day cropping images to (say) 2000 pixels square when you could have Imagemagick just do all of them to 2048 pixels square in a lot less time than it takes to have a cup of tea?

Many, many micro-managers prefer the former option, thinking that the Photoshop operative will not have the ability to type '2048' on their Wacom tablet. Sure, those images are not going to be OpenGL rendered but they might be shown on a web page with OpenSeaDragon (what?) and those 8x8 pixel tiles in the JPEG will survive making the thumbnails better. What is not to like? Why go for the computing equivalent of 'imperial measurements'???

The odd thing about these scenarios is that these micro-manager types get hung up on things like image dimensions whereas programmers just let the computer do the work, to 'abstract out' those little details and let the code do it.

<comment><USER14> What are you even ranting about? Plenty of 'kids today' appreciate knowing a bit of hex. Are we talking about programmers, "micro-managers", or "Photoshop operatives"? Most programmers today are familiar with hex. But if you're expecting managers or Photoshop operatives to be able to convert hex to binary in their head, then I feel you have the wrong expectations.

<comment><USER15> The photoshop operatives are following me.... They want my lucky charms (hex digits!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This reminds me of a patience game I play. I count to 32 on one hand, with each finger representing a bit. If I'm doing it repeatedly, I'll count in my head in binary, octal, decimal, and hexadecimal. Works wonders when waiting for the subway or rocking a screaming baby.

<comment><USER17> Have you ever considered this might be compulsive behavior?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Storylane - People sharing things that matter - <AUTHOR> http://www.storylane.com/

<comment><USER2> Fantastic!

What the hell does it do? I'm not signing up without knowing a single thing about this service.

<comment><USER3> Here's a sample user page <http://www.storylane.com/gauss>

<comment><USER4> Weird that most of the users who i browsed through, seem to not be actual users and are just syndicated from existing blogs. (with the owners permission ?!)

Screenshot: [https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/9zSroi6QLrBk8JpuJXo6Qk...](https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/9zSroi6QLrBk8JpuJXo6QkKTigM4rYdvDJAdY5Evkfo)

same as this user: <http://www.storylane.com/scottbedford>

a pity...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Amazing design. But if I'm totally honest, it just looks like a blogging platform. I can't tell what's unique about it.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1) Make that ol' fashioned signup link just a little more obvious... 2) Could the two welcome emails be combined (can't the activation link come as part of the second if the subject line makes it clear)? 3) I couldn't help but laugh when "What are your best memories of graduate school? Worst memories?" came up as a prompt under "Life". There's something amusing about this question being posed so innocently after "Did you have a pet?".

Anyway I think the site is actually pretty fun, and I'm glad I signed up despite not being able to tell what it was just from the homepage (might want to change that). I was just about to go to bed and jot down a few things I wanted to write about the coming morning but after poking around I may just spend some more time poking around with some of the topics here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear that you liked it! And I hear you on combining the welcome emails

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Recommendation to the founders: Change the flow:

1\. Story writing. As a guest, let me write my story right away. Give a few story ideas.

2\. Sign up. Make it optional. Tell me I can share my story anonymously but if I want to keep it forever, allow me to sign up then.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice design and concept. I could see myself using this, no doubt.

That said, I have some suggestions:

\- Let me remove stories I don't like. Bonus points if:

\-- I can drag them out to remove them (it was my first instinct, and I think it'd work well)

\-- The system learns from that, after some time.

\- Please, let the "bar" stay fixed. It's only distracting when I'm reading a story or enjoying a photo.

\- Let me read more of a story in-place, by expanding the "card" (downward?).

Good work, and I'll be looking forward to what you build from here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

\- Like the idea od removing what you don't like

\- I hear on fixing the bar.

Again, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> With no info at all it feels like a dare.

<comment><AUTHOR> Storylane is an effort to create a library of human experiences. technically it works like a publishing platform built socially from the ground up.

<comment><USER9> I like the sound of "A library of human experiences" - it grabs me more than "People sharing things that matter".

Perhaps there is an example or demo you could make public, to give less adventurous visitors (like me) an idea of what it does? (edit: like the /gauss link I just noticed - now I like it)

I'm all for stealth but IMO this is _too_ stealth.

<comment><USER8> Since upvotes aren't shown, I just want to say that I prefer "A library of human experiences" too. The current subtitle makes it sounds more like a social network for friends and families than a open community.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for joining in. I love that explanation too :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Please, this is how you execute this idea......<http://cowbird.com>. I did not sign up because i have no idea what the product does and the alternate to Facebook login blends into the background and is hard to notice.

</comment><comment><USER11> Some of those stories are pretty intense Ex: Nick Slater (Palantir's designer in Palo Alto) <http://www.storylane.com/nickslater>

</comment><comment><USER12> It would be nice to see an OpenID login.

<comment><USER13> It would have been nice to have seen OpenID succeed into no-brainer non-geek use. As it is, it's like an artisan pencil that's really useful and no one's heard of, made of renewable bamboo pulp and non-toxic "lead" that can be erased with the non-point end which is merely an extension of the bamboo, shredded at the factory into a small brush. (Hey, did I just invent something?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Your logo is similar to: <http://codegram.com/>

<comment><USER15> And also 8Tracks [1] if you say that a infinitive sign is similar to another infinitive sign.

*[<http://8tracks.com/>]

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This sound like g+ - ppl sharing things that matter to me.

</comment><comment><USER17> On your fb tag line you have padding that ruins your y's.

</comment><comment><USER18> whoa, this site is looking good! love the use of subtlepatterns and conservative use of gradients on the buttons. who designed this?

<comment><USER19> this talented person is to blame for the design: <http://dribbble.com/mhrescak>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> looks like a clone of <http://www.remenis.com/>

<comment><USER21> Simple WHOIS shows that storylane.com is online since 2003 (although this service probably wasn't there, but I am a user of storylane since about march 2012) and remenis.com was created on 18-Jun-12, so you've got that clone the other way around.

<comment><USER20> I know the founder of remenis.com he explained to me the idea in Dec 2011. But good luck to everyone, I was never super impressed with the idea in the first place. Whats the difference between this and blogging socially on wordpress.com or blogger or tumblr?

<comment><USER21> >> I know the founder of remenis.com he explained to me the idea in Dec 2011

That's good for him, but you can hardly clone something, that's an idea in someone's had, right? Thus it seems that - shocker - there was no cloning involved.

>> Whats the difference between this and blogging socially on wordpress.com or blogger or tumblr?

I bet that the authors can explain this better than I can (if they haven't yet in this post on HN)

<comment><AUTHOR> Zorbo provides a good answer: Focus. Both in what the Tool does and also what it is used for; to wit, we created Storylane to build a library of human experiences and opinions. We created Storylane to focus on what matters. This is partly achieved by the tool itself and how it works, partly by the community and how is being collectively crafted. The key operative word here is actually "being" as in we have been doing this for a couple of weeks and the focus that I am describing is pretty much in the making

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How do you compete with subreddit?</comment>


Show HN: How I Bling -- A millionaire simulation game - <AUTHOR>

Hi all, we built this prototype web app at the recent Startup Weekend in NYC and I would love to get your feedback. It's a simulation on what you can buy and do when you win the lottery (or sell your startup, etc.). I personally have had great fun as a user and learned loads about my - at first impulsive/intuitive - spending behaviour which gradually changed into more thoughtful spending/buying.
Anyways, check out
http://howibling.com
and let me know what you think! <comment><AUTHOR> And beyond this comment thread, if you had the time to fill out a quick survey over at [http://howibling.wufoo.com/forms/how-i-bling-beta-tester- eva...](http://howibling.wufoo.com/forms/how-i-bling-beta-tester-evaluation- form/) would be great. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER2> Love it. How does it "move" though -- so far all I've done is buy stuff? (Investments 'n such).

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now, it's about the experience of spending. Having fun with it, be seduced and/or rational about it. It's open-ended in that regard. After a while, under 'My Stuff', you find a more general breakdown of your spending which may or may not give you insight into your own behavior and desires.</comment></comment>


Good CEOs aren't busy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/keep-learning-keep-growing/good-ceos-aren-t-busy-a4c0e657284a <comment><USER2> Sometimes I read these things and wonder... Does anyone _really_ think that the CEOs job is doing the grunt work.

Like I get that everyone does stuff at a startup, but are you really a 'CEO' if the business isnt even big enough for someone to be dedicated to building out the business yet.

I dont even know if i have a point, but i dont really think anyone is going to read this and go 'of course! all this time i shouldve been a CEO instead of not being a CEO'

<comment><USER3> I used to work for a CEO who refused to hire a designer or UX/usability expert. She meticulously "designed" the screens of our web application herself using PowerPoint.

The end result was, predictably, fucking terrible. I still can't decide whether to laugh, cringe, or break something when I think about those screens.

I don't work there anymore, but she continued to do this after the company had 15 employees and substantial revenue (I left as soon as I could).

So yes, some CEOs are totally unable to delegate or see past their own arrogance, and they continue to do grunt work when they shouldn't. Some of them (like my old employer) are even successful despite making that mistake.

<comment><USER4> I would love to bungle my way to pay 15 employees wages and substantial revenue.

<comment><USER3> The CEO is an excellent saleswoman and networker, and she had millions of her own to invest. Anyone can bungle their way to success with enough money to form a safety net for them. She wasn't bungling anything but the product development, though -- sales and morale were excellent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While great CEOs of large companies do edit much more than they write, I see early stage CEOs that think they can start editing right away, because they're the CEO.

For the first couple years (at least), it takes heroic effort to get something to work and then to build a growth machine around that thing that works, and a founder/CEO needs to do a lot of "writing" to make that happen.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good CEOs aren't busy, they're writing Medium posts

</comment><comment><USER7> Well ideally you'd want to delegate basically everything in your life that feels like work and takes energy.</comment>


Patent Trolls Attack OpenMoko Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.csamuel.org/2008/11/14/patent-trolls-attack-openmoko-project <comment><USER2> Sisvel isn't a patent troll; it's controlled by Philips. Patent trolls are companies that don't do anything but enforce patents.

By all means hate Philips, but use the right terms. =)</comment>


Common Language Mistakes That Undermine Good Writing - <AUTHOR> https://mcconnellsoftware.github.io/language-tips/ <comment><USER2> This is the third writing critique this week that is _itself_ riddled with grammar, usage, and punctuation errors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy to hear about them...?</comment></comment>


Why we dropped our free plan - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/bfab146c47c8

<comment><USER3> I think the real parts in these stories are -

1\. Have free plan to pick up 10x more users (and gain more traction, exposure, feedback, etc).

2\. When the time is right, remove free plan to convert some of those users.

The rest is just b.s. to justify a perfectly good strategy to those free users and the rest of the market. Which is b.s. in itself (...thinking you have to justify it with b.s.).

But it was so well done here that you kind of have to admire it.

Gaining H.N. exposure for a day, and getting picked up on some other sites is also not too bad.

<comment><USER4> I like to think of it as a modified version of the thing where businesses start out doing shady stuff and then suddenly go legit and everything is just okay. Think Napster, for example. They built their audience and popularity and business on facilitating the sharing of other people's copyright and then they go legitimate. They would never have been able to build their business being legitimate from the start, though. And once you go legitimate, everyone forgets that you essentially built your "Ford dealership" by stealing the Ford's from the other Ford dealerships in your town, until you could make enough money off their products to go legitimate and open up your own honest Ford dealership.

Granted, this isn't that extreme, but it reminds me of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really good points, Nikos.

At Huddle we faced this issue a few years ago and ended up dropping our free package. Especially for businesses, there's often just no point in trying to support free users. In the long run, everybody has done better for it.

There is one type of user you might not have considered yet, though: Charities.

We started the Huddle Foundation [0], which provides free accounts to Non- Profits, for up to 25 users. They get all the standard features that Huddle provides (in other words, everything except advanced customisation which is really just visual stuff). We do it through a company called TechSoup.

I recommend you look into something like this, because most charities really don't need to be spending money on stuff like this. It's better and more useful for them if they stick with one platform instead of hopping from one to the other to the other as free trials run out. You'd probably be a hero in many charity recruiters' eyes :)

[0]: [http://www.huddle.com/foundation/](http://www.huddle.com/foundation/) [1]: [http://www.techsoup.org/](http://www.techsoup.org/)

<comment><USER6> Elimination of free users and giving free accounts to non-profits, remind me of Google Apps.

OP's and your cases are a case for Google's elimination of 'free' users on Google Apps etc, isn't it?

<comment><USER5> Possibly, I suppose. I naturally can't speak for Google but I wouldn't be surprised if they did it for the same reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Free plans tend to be cancerous. Users who subscribe to free plans are usually 90% of your support requests. The customers who actually see value in what you do tend to not only be the best to work with, but also tend to foster mutual win relationships. As has been stated, it's also a good filter for getting users you're solving a real pain for.

Edit: Since what I said appears to be a bit controversial, maybe I need to clarify a bit. Free plans are great for getting users initially and to test a product, but there are serious tradeoffs to consider if you're looking to get revenue. Not every business is built on top of the idea of accumulating users ---> raise VC ----> exit.

For most people who want to build a business with even just modest revenues and stay bootstrapped, paying users really are your best bet, since it proves value in what you're doing. People only have finite resources, so it might as well be spent on people who value your services enough to pay for them.

</comment><comment><USER8> _Don't look for evangelists among the people who think your product isn't worth $19_

This quote from the post serves as a great TL;DR

</comment><comment><USER9> Some excellent points in this! My current startup will not have a free tier at all for this reason, but it will have an open source core (despite being built from the ground up aside from some MIT licensed libraries) -- I think this is a great compromise. Techies that have more free time than cash (I fit into this niche a few years back) can often be your greatest evangelists, and the friction of running your own server for it keeps a lot of the low-value customers out.

Thoughts about that strategy?

<comment><USER5> This strategy isn't just for techies with more free time than cash. It's also for the techies who work for companies where security is a _really big_ issue. Companies who, for one reason or another, simply cannot store some of their data offsite or delegate that responsibility to third parties.

We have our own GitHub server (read: actual deployment of GitHub, on our local network, because we just like GitHub), which requires a license to use. The benefit is that we are in control of keeping our own stuff private. This is important for some of our customers. And of course we don't fall apart because GitHub is having an issue.

There's real potential for "the Cloud" as a concept to lose a bit of trust in the wake of the PRISM revelations so having letting people deploy your software to their own "Private Cloud" could be very welcome.

NB: We do also have our own public GitHub account too for our open-source stuff, with some private repos for when we need to work with third-parties.

<comment><USER9> Ah yeah, that's the other reason, but we'll be doing that for a price with proper support for the companies that need it. It's a financial service, so this will be a big part of our business I believe. The open core is a happy byproduct of it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think your prices are too low. $19/month for a job? Recruiters make e.g. $20,000 for a placement. Who are you selling to? I am just so skeptical of $19/month, can it really be providing value?

<comment><USER11> Recruiters charge for their ability to bring you top quality candidates (they help you attract and select people). We sell software to manage the recruiting process. It's not one or the other.

Think for example accounting software and tax advisory services. You'd get both and the second would be far more expensive than the first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12>
      It forces an honest decision. Will I really get value out of this product,
       enough to justify paying for it? If someone is not getting $19 worth of value out of Workable,
      then we're not solving a real problem they have.

This is one of my favorite reasons to charge for a product. It's a service to the people who decide to not use your product because it helps them reduce their app clutter. Some people will sign up for things because they are free.

</comment><comment><USER13> Good points, but the reason behind having a free tier is not to offer a good experience for free, but to eliminate the initial friction of using a payment mechanism so that a user can actually try a product before committing to it.

<comment><USER12> A workaround is to offer a refund if the user is not satisfied. I wonder how many sign ups would be lost to people who purely just do not want to enter payment info (vs users who don't want to commit).

<comment><USER14> Not having a free plan does not mean you cannot have a free trial which does not require entering payment info!

<comment><USER15> actually they have a free trial, but I think they should edit the main page according to it: there's a "create a free account" call to action button in the main page, but actually it will lead you to a 15 days trial (as stated in the Pricing page). Maybe they can use a more clear statement also in the home page, instead of "no credit card required" use "no credit card required - <USER2> days free trial".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 1\. Get free users

2\. Cut free service, converting some users

3\. Make a condescending blog post and fire it at HN for publicity.

<comment><USER17> This sounds good. Let me try this in my upcoming startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't have a free plan, but I offer a very generous reward for referring new customers. Some people may in fact never pay me or they may pay me but receive more money back from me.

* Everyone starts with 5 free transactions and test transactions do not count.

* If they were referred to me, they get an additional 5 transactions for free.

* After they use up those 10 total initial transactions and pay for credits, the original referrer gets 5 transactions for free, once, and 20% of what the person they referred paid me. This referral arrangement continues for a long time.

* I integrate the product into every customer's website for free to eliminate the friction of them not knowing how to do it. It's much easier to do a quick remote login than to educate customers how to do it.

* You can sign up to use my product by SMS. No credit cards required.

* I don't prevent a customer from using the product when they have zero credits. They simply don't get the product until they pay. However, I never change the end user experience.

* I don't charge a monthly fee and I don't charge for maintaining a mobile landing page, for which competitors charge.

For many customers, that initial 10 free transactions is all they will ever need. My technology quietly sits on their website and credits them for their passive referrals for clicks on my widget.

Due to the nature of my product, charging a monthly fee does not make much sense. The usage spikes and is difficult to predict. It made more sense to charge per transaction.

I am not sure I agree with the statement that you will not find evangelists among your free users. I don't pay for Apigee, Appery, Salesforce or BizSpark. I pay a modest amount to Twilio. I will talk your ear off about how great these and many other companies are.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't get it: [http://workable.com/](http://workable.com/) & [http://workable.com/signup](http://workable.com/signup)

Have you not deployed it or just reverted?

<comment><USER11> We still have a free trial for 15 days, as we always did. But no free plan.

<comment><USER19> Then please say so anywhere on the first page OR the signup page. There's no "trial" or "expiring" mentioned anywhere I can see...

<comment><USER11> You're right that the button in the main page is outdated and perhaps gives the wrong idea.. but if you go to [http://workable.com/pricing](http://workable.com/pricing) it clearly says "try it free for 15 days" and has a big box underneath explaining how the free trial works :)

<comment><USER20> So - don't you want to fix it?

Saying the limitation is mentioned somewhere on the page is a little lame.

<comment><USER11> Of course we will, just saying that it was not intentional. In most places it is mentioned (there is a signup button on the pricing page and at the bottom of each page which says 15-day trial) but we didn't notice that in some other places the button text can be misinterpreted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Excellent points and I agree with pretty much everything being said. One niggling question however is how to introduce people to the product? typically this involves a limited trial. The limited-trial version ends up having the same issues as the freemium one.

You still have to support non-paying trial users, you still need to think about features which go on paid vs. trial plans. Then the only difference becomes the _volume_ of users? Or do you think people have fundamentally different expectations from a trial than from a freemium product?

</comment><comment><USER22> I keep seeing this article or variations on it over and over. The question I have is, "Why did they _ever_ have a free version?" Why does DropBox have a free tier? GMail? Why do Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE give away thousands of QA person-hours and more thousands of server hours on community Linux distros? Why are the complicated pieces of software that are browsers mostly free?

<comment><USER23> It is cheaper to make copies of software than almost anything else. This means that building network or a large customer base is very cheap, almost free. What prevents you from building a large customer base is not costs, but lack of demand and artificial barriers like charging a price. If you can make money by selling access to a large customer base, then it makes sense to go that route and remove every barrier to mass adoption.

Google does not have to work hard to sell its products. People are happy to use its search functions for free. And advertisers are happy to pay to access searchers. If Google charged for search, then it would have to work hard to sell paid search in the face of free alternatives. It would lose users and thus have less to sell to its advertisers. It's just easier from a marketing and business perspective to keep search free, or even pay people to search, and then charge for access to searchers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I remember Patio11 (Patrick McKenzie) made similar claim on this: charge the customer, and in fact, don't afraid to charge more. If my memory is right he talked about this in a conference, but too bad I don't have the link handy. If any of you can share, it will be great.

<comment><USER25> I've made directionally similar statements on more occasions than I can remember, so I'd have difficulty giving you a particular link unless you had a more specific claim or anecdote that I was referencing.

<comment><USER24> I found it, good read indeed.

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/24/marketing-for-people- who...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/24/marketing-for-people-who-would- rather-be-building-stuff/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There can be advantages to have a limited free plan. I offer limited free plans for 2 main reasons:

* users can make sure they like the service before paying for it. This avoids costly refunds

* users can integrate our API and doing tests without having to pay for it. It makes for a better experience, as they don't feel they are paying for missing documentation or limited libraries.

If you make the free plan useful as a trial, this can be a win-win. With my service, I see people using the free plan as a trial only: after a few days they pay for it, or they stop using the service.

I also use my free users for posting Tweets and other social sharing.

</comment><comment><USER27> The thing about free plan is that most of the users are freebie seekers and have no intention of getting an upgrade. And talking about B2B, if companies can't afford $19/m, then they shouldn't be in business.

</comment><comment><USER28> Another factor that you should address is competition. If your market offers a free product you cannot afford to have a pay only product. Examples include free products like radio streaming, email, or even online taxes.

<comment> chestnut-tree _" If your market offers a free product you cannot afford to have a pay only product"_

Is this really the case? If you provide a pay-only product over a competitor who offers it for free, surely you have to sell the benefits of your paid product over the free one? You have to convince users that paying for your product gives them a better service or experience than the free alternative.

To take the example of email, there are many paid-for email services (e.g. fastmail) despite the fact that the market is dominated by free players such as Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google.

An alternative to the free service is the free trial. It won't attract the free users, but it might encourage paying customers who want to try-before- they-buy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Read Lean Analytics, there is a good example of a company offering the exact same service, look at what they did.</comment>


Giant shipload of soybeans drifts off China, victim of trade war with US - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/08/giant-shipload-of-soybeans-drifts-off-china-victim-of-trade-war-with-us <comment><USER2> The ship has already docked & been unloaded:

[http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1114855.shtml](http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1114855.shtml)

(It is already Saturday in China.)

<comment><USER3> It isn't clear if they chose to take the hit of the tariff or if they got some deal or something...

<comment><USER4> Probably took the hit because they are moving something else on... its really interesting how sometimes the arrival time or next few journeys can change how profitable a ship is for a charterer.

<comment><USER3> Yeah with 400k in extra costs ... 6 mil is a big hit but I'm not sure they were going to avoid that total if they went elsewhere or such.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Surely it is anchored, and drifting about its anchor. Not aimlessly burning fuel sailing in circles. Minor point to the story I guess, but it would be an immense waste of fuel to be underway for no good reason.

<comment><USER6> well its an interesting question.... if 'waste' is the limiting of movement of goods or services, then every single tarrif and trade barrier is theoretically a cause of 'waste', since at some point every single product that is under trade barrier winds up in a similar situation to this ship, does it not? even if it at a small scale.

so if someone makes 25 Talos Power9 computers and the market would support 25 of them, but there is a tarriff that discourages one from being sold, then you have 1 machine sitting there, essentially on a proverbial virtual boat. Maybe its not burning fuel, but its taking up space somewhere, costing rent and overhead. Not much but a little. Now multiply that tiny amount times a billion other products ...

just a thought experiment...

<comment><USER7> You've just discovered something economists have known for decades: free trade is generally good

<comment><USER8> The logistical inefficiencies of dealing with tariffs are arguably a minor component when evaluating free trade, since they account for a small fraction of the total value of goods.

<comment><USER9> 25% tariffs involved here are not small; larger than most normal profit margins.

<comment><USER10> > 25% tariffs involved here are not small; larger than most normal profit > margins.

Profit margins are set by competition. The customer might pay $5 except that your competitors are charging $1 so you can't even charge $1.10 or the customer buys from a competitor. If everybody's costs increase by 25% then everybody can increase their prices by 25%, because you can't profit at $1 anymore but neither can your competitors. Unless your competitors aren't subject to the tariff, which is kind of the point.

Meanwhile the revenue the tariff generates offsets some tax that now doesn't need to be collected somewhere else and would have caused a similar inefficiency or cost increase in some other place.

Tariffs suck because taxes suck and tariffs are taxes. But for a given amount of revenue generated, it's better to tax somebody else's economy than yours.

<comment><USER11> _Meanwhile the revenue the tariff generates offsets some tax that now doesn 't need to be collected somewhere else and would have caused a similar inefficiency or cost increase in some other place._

Different forms of taxation can have different economic consequences.

 _it 's better to tax somebody else's economy than yours_

Thinking of tariffs as "taxing somebody else's economy" betrays a misunderstanding of the concept of _incidence_ (as in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence)), since you're raising prices for _your own_ imports.

<comment><USER10> > Different forms of taxation can have different economic consequences.

Yes, of course. Car tax has different economic consequences than [real] property tax. But a tariff on cars looks a lot more like a tax on cars than it does a tariff on real property.

Actually "tariff on real property" (meaning [high] property tax owed only by foreign nationals and corporations with foreign ownership) might be one of the best possible methods of generating government revenue.

> Thinking of tariffs as "taxing somebody else's economy" betrays a > misunderstanding of the concept of _incidence_ (as in > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence)), > since you're raising prices for _your own_ imports.

It's not misunderstanding it, it's understanding it perfectly well. It's not that exactly 0% of the burden falls on the domestic economy, it's that it disproportionately falls outside of it.

When you have a tariff, there are two ways for a foreign supplier to lose.

The first is that there is a competitive domestic market for the same product. In that case the price won't change much if at all (minimal impact on consumers), the production will just shift to domestic suppliers who hire domestic workers. Then the tariff doesn't generate much if any direct government revenue, but it shifts a bunch of domestic citizens from collecting unemployment to earning taxable income, which is great in a different way.

The second is any case where the producer has to eat a tax in general, e.g. because there are substitute goods preventing the producer from raising prices, so they can't pass the burden on to the customer.

The domestic market only pays if domestic producers can't make [more of] that product _and_ consumers are still willing to pay the higher price for it. But even then, it's not _worse_ than generating government revenue from a purely domestic tax, it's just not any better in that unusual case.

And in practice it will typically be some combination -- domestic producers will appear charging slightly higher prices (but more than making up for it by creating domestic jobs), and then the foreign producers have to compete with them (and other substitutes) so they have to eat most of the tariff but not all of it. So the burden falls disproportionately on someone else's economy, as opposed to domestic taxes that fall primarily on your economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's the best argument against Trump's trade war? It's one of his few policies that I've not heard a good argument against. It seems like it's only fair that major countries have (roughly) equal trade. And fair that small countries should be permitted to have imbalanced trade in their favor, though I'm not sure that's his policy.

If that means things like iPhone manufacturing needs to be moved to the US, causing the price to double, then it's on Apple & Co to build more automated processes and/or raise prices. If car and firearms companies can do it, why not everyone else?

<comment><USER13> Setting aside the debatable morality of nationalism, protectionism just doesn't work well in the long term. A good place to start: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism)

> There is a consensus among economists that protectionism has a negative > effect on economic growth and economic welfare, while free trade, > deregulation, and the reduction of trade barriers has a positive effect on > economic growth. In fact protectionism has been implicated by some scholars > as the cause of some economic crises, in particular the Great Depression.

<comment><USER14> There was a "consensus among economists" that US economy would tank under Trump, and that it can't grow at anything over 3%, and that "those jobs are not coming back". To quote Paul Krugman, the perennial darling of progressive intelligentsia: "No, you could make me total dictator to do everything I think would work and it still wouldn't get you up more than a few tenths." There's a reason why economics is not considered a real science: economists have a hard time explaining the past, let alone predicting the future. Their "consensus" is not usually worth the paper it's printed on.

<comment><USER15> > There was a "consensus among economists" that US economy would tank under > Trump,

No, there wasn't. At most, there was concensus that certain policies he proposed would have adverse impact, but not all of those policies were implemented, and policies rarely have their full impact within a 1-2 year period.

> and that it can't grow at anything over 3%,

No, there wasn't.

> and that "those jobs are not coming back"

To the extent that there has ever even a widespread belief among economists, much less a consensus on that, it was (and is) on the long-term trend in certain sectors, not about the absence of positive short-term fluctuations.

> Paul Krugman, the perennial darling of progressive intelligentsia

Krugman isn't a progressive or particularly a favorite of progressives. The darlings of the progressive intelligentsia don't generally have gigs in the corporate media.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> World needs US dollars since it's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrocurrency) due to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Shock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Shock) and till [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma) is resolved.

And CHINDIA can get US dollars by exporting their Services/Products to America;</comment>


2 Months Out, 74% of Latest Y Combinator Class Funded or Profitable - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2010/05/21/2-months-out-74-of-latest-y-combinator-class-funded-or-profitable/

<comment><USER2> Hmm, this 74% stat is directly conflating funding and profit; it's a conflation that doesn't seem to make sense to me, as I really only care about the profit side of the equation. If you suppose that profit increases monotonically, this title hints at tremendous success - but I don't make that assumption. I'd be more interested to know the medium-to-long-term success - say, profitability at 12 months, or 24.

<comment><USER3> The similarity between the two is clear when you're running an early stage startup: being either funded or profitable means you are not imminently going to run out of money. And since that is usually the main thing you're worried about in a startup 6 months old, that is an important similarity.

<comment><USER2> Aha - I think I follow. I thought the 74% was an attempt to inform us about the startups. In a sense, it's not - it's telling us more about YC and its ability to pick and/or guide startups such that they don't quickly crash and burn. Thank you; that makes more sense, now.

<comment><USER4> It means that 74% of the graduating class is alive and healthy, at least for a while. Don't try to read more than that into it.

<comment><USER2> No, that simply brings me back to wanting to see longer-term outcomes. However, so far, so good!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What percentage are actually profitable?

Don't get me wrong the 74% is impressive, but I'd expect a large percentage of YC projects to get additional funding. They've already cleared a bunch of hurdles and have a strong team backing them.

<comment><USER3> 7 out of 27, so 26%. Bear in mind that at this stage most that are profitable are only barely so.

<comment><USER6> does "profitable" mean "paying the $20/mo to slicehost" as some people around here seem to think? or, paying the founders a ramen wage?

Edit: nm, I see the answer below.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Makes for a great headline but it's actually not difficult to achieve when you have no employees, no office space and your product is a webapp (hosting costs are a few hundred dollars per month at most).

<comment><USER3> The biggest cost tends to be the founders' living expenses. If they're young, that can be low. But it is not a trivial matter to reach this threshold after 6 months. Viaweb didn't.</comment></comment>


Usability issues with adding search engines to Web browsers - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/02/usability-issues-with-adding-search-engines-to-web-browsers.html

<comment><USER2> > is add any search engine that comes up in meta tags automatically

Won't it possibly lead to adding phishing entries (silently waiting for cases users won't notice the right one and add the wrong one) in future?

</comment><comment><USER3> Great writeup with screenshots highlighting the different issues IE, Safari Chrome, Opera, and Firefox have.

Near the end Gabe says "I compiled feedback on these issue in hope that this part of the browser user experience gets fixed in all these great pieces of software." Yeah really. Let's hope the browser vendors listen!</comment>


Ask HN: DuckDuckGo is challenging Google. What can challenge Facebook? - <AUTHOR>

Recently, DuckDuckGo is blowing up: http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html
It is really challenging the monopoly of the giants like Google & Bing by not tracking you.
What can challenge social networks like Facebook & Twitter? <comment><USER2> Being a Google+ user, I'm not really familiar with it, but how about Quora?

And mainstream users don't really see the problem with giants or tracking, they see how Google's search results page is getting more and more complicated with features they don't need. The original reason to use Google instead of, for example, Yahoo!, was twofold: the website looked very clean and the results were good. Now DDG's results are nearly matching Google, and they provide a much better interface plus a few features (mostly for developers, like MDN integration). What happens? People switch.

If Facebook works good for users, I guess they'll stick.

<comment><USER3> I'd say that would be a major purpose re-definition for Quora, as it's not _primarily_ a social network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Facebook is overwhelming used to share photos, and the photo sharing apps are the ones challenging it (instagram, tumblr,etc.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Whatever happened to Diaspora? Did that fizzle out?

<comment><USER6> They're still on invite-only. I remember them having some problems, but I think it's also taking a long time because their idea is so damned ambitious...</comment></comment>