Making your first dollar from a SaaS project - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/@czue/what-actually-goes-into-making-your-first-dollar-from-a-saas-project-49d98f7d45 <comment><USER2> In 1998, before people had much of clue about what represents success and how big things can get given time, I built a software product and posted it to the net. Within a week or so there had been a handful of sales at $100 each.

That looked like failure to me at the time - "that's a trickle of money - extrapolating maybe $25,000 per year? Not enough to pay my bills. I need to get a job".

Today that sort of start looks like a whopping success.

I've been trying to replicate that start ever since.

The upside is that I did go and get a job, and through that job met the woman who I had kids with..... if that's that path to getting my fabulous kids then I don't regret it.

<comment><USER3> The internet is becoming a bigger and bigger playground. Even getting that first bit of attention is extremely meaningful now. There are so many different services and other attention-suckers out there at this point that everything really does matter.

What type of software product did you make back then that warranted $100 sales?

<comment><USER4> Back then, _every_ software product cost that much. Well OK maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but certainly anything that was B2B focused. 'Personal' sales would be $25 for something really simple, $50 for something established that people would use a lot.

Car expense tracker for Palm - $19.95. Today if you even want to charge $1.99, you'll be competing with several free (ad-supported) ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To share our experience (we sell SAAS in financial services): our first solution took us 6+ months of development (one person) to get our MVP launched and another year to get people to use it actively without active outbound selling (that is to say it was sold but we had to hold your hand the whole way through).

Some thoughts: internally we consider the "V" in MVP to encompass not just what is the minimum you need to do to solve a problem but the minimum to solve a problem (worth solving) at a level someone is willing to pay you for the solution. That often is more extensive than a traditional MVP which is why SAAS solutions require so much up front development. Consumers are not fond of subscribing to services and businesses don't like beta products.

A couple additional thoughts as we now actively sell 4 SAAS services:

\- to be successful in SAAS you need to build something people need. They say there are two types of businesses: painkillers and vitamins. If you're a vitamin you are 20x more likely to fail than a pain killer. The value prop is just too hard to communicate and people's attention spans are too limited \- the more you understand the user / workflow / domain the better. I realize this may sound obvious but I do my best to pay forward the mentorship I received and I am shocked at how often I come across people trying to solve other people's problems as an outsider.

\- with the exception of notable billion dollar startups we all love and read about daily, I believe the dream of "build it and they will come (register, put in their credit card and bam you're done) is just that, a dream. Yes organic growth is real but all my buddies who have successful SAAS companies spent a ton of time and effort selling them before that organic growth kicked off. This could be an east coast vs west coast thing as my network is hitting niche workflows but worth sharing regardless.

<comment><USER6> On vitamins vs painkillers: conversely, do you think if you are able to build a vitamin product that does make your worklife better/easier, wouldn't it be a harder barrier to entry for newcomers? i.e., greater entrenchment?

I'm currently doing customer development on such a product. I've burned my fingers previously building nice-to-have products and don't intend to repeat my mistake. With this one, I'm validating the market before I build anything.

There are ways people do this thing (inefficiently and poorly IMO) today. Their business isn't likely to suffer if they don't adopt my product but I'm hoping to prove a factor of efficiency improvement if they adopt it.

What would your advice to me be (aside from don't do it)?

<comment><USER5> First let's level set: the benefit of taking vitamins is that if you take them regularly, at some point in the future you will be better off than you are now (in other words there is no immediate perceived benefit - it requires an investment). Alternatively, a painkiller has immediate physiological benefits.

Assessing a service as a painkiller vs a vitamin is not totally black and white - generally I would say a service qualifies as a vitamin if there is no immediate perceived benefit to its use (ie it doesn't meaningfully save me time in aggregate, does not enable me to do something else that I can directly ascribe value to, doesn't reduce a painpoint I feel at this moment). A mental test I use is if someone goes from using my service for two months to immediately not using my service, how will their workflow change? If it doesn't change meaningfully, you are likely a vitamin. Note that I recognize that by this definition Facebook is a vitamin. Vitamins can make money.

So back to you. If your service does improve work/life or actually provide a "factor of efficiency improvement" over whatever their alternative is (e.g. Doing nothing) you may have a painkiller on your hands instead of a vitamin. The problem is you aren't the ultimate judge of what is a painkiller or a vitamin (you are operating on a hunch) until you go out there and try to sell it. The market will tell you.

So my advice is to spend as much time thinking about how you will package and sell this service as you are designing the service. Create a few marketing materials, hone the pitch and sit down face-to-face with as many people as makes sense and pitch them. In fact, I am 100% happy to genuinely consider purchasing this from you so you can try it on me. At the end of the day, the customer decides if you are adding value by voting with their time and dollars so developing a sales strategy early is important. You may discover you have a great service for a specific type of buyer profile but finding that buyer profile is too expensive. It happens.

I often remind myself of Ali-G's pitch to Donald Trump of a glove to prevent ice cream from getting on your hands (if you haven't seen it please watch - hilarious). Anyone who loves ice cream has this problem and the potential market of people who eat ice cream is huge. You could probably find someone willing to pay $1 for it but there is no way anyone can build a real business off this. Of course, you never know.

<comment><USER7> > Note that I recognize that by this definition Facebook is a vitamin.

Facebook started its life as an immediate painkiller. They solved several problems for the most hyper-active of social groups: college students. The facebook-equivalent products at colleges at the time were either non-existent at most schools or atrocious. Then to amplify the Facebook benefit, the connectivity between the primitive school products was basically non-existent (that is, to the extent they existed, there tended to be no wider connection school to school). Circa ~2004-2007, Once students acquired the benefits of having Facebook as a social booster, leaving it would have left them worse off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've crashed and burned on SaaS enough that I'm very into the landing page approach -- don't build the product, but convince people you have so that they can click the "buy now" button. That way you feel more confident that the market exists while you're actually building it. After all the projects I've failed at, nothing is harder for me to do than spend 200+ hours on something without having a clue whether it will reap benefits or not. Corey spent 100 hours trying to gather traction. He could have potentially skipped the 100 hours it took to build it and instead just tested the sales side.

There are people who can know where a market is and confidently blaze straight into it without any validation. I think I'm just not that genius or lucky.

<comment><USER9> Any recommendations for quick and effective landing page solutions? I assume something like MailChimp for email sign-ups?

<comment><USER10> I'm building something to do exactly this at [https://nichetester.com](https://nichetester.com) \- I should note that I used the method described in the OP to validate it and it worked really well :).

<comment><USER11> I absolutely love that the website that promises to build a testing decoy is a testing decoy. Perfect. (img idontknowwhatiexpected.gif)

<comment><USER12> Well, it worked - I just signed up!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Separate from finding someone who is willing to make a purchase, getting the technical bits in place in order to properly accept a purchase can be challenging, too. It's not just about being able to charge a credit card.

In our case we're an infrastructure service that charges customers based on their usage level. This required collecting the right metrics, consolidating them durably, making the metrics visual somewhere so customers understand how they are being charged, implementing notions of billing cycles, syncing with the payment provider (in our case Stripe), UI elements to indicate if the account is paid or not, ability to cancel paid service, etc.

All in all it took us a good two months from when we wanted to charge people to when we could actually charge people. Of course every service will have different technical needs. Congrats on the first buck. :)

</comment><comment><USER14> As you get through the article, he mentions [https://toggl.com/](https://toggl.com/) as his time tracking tool. I'm not usually a fan of videos, but that intro is awesome.

<comment><USER15> Hilarious, especially the board meeting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Took a look at the site [https://www.placecard.me/](https://www.placecard.me/) and went through the flow of making a card and couldn't see a single place to pay for the template or order prints. Its possible I hit some kind of A/B test but i think the call to action might be buried too deep in the process.

<comment><AUTHOR> It should be the case that if you pay for a template you get a preview link where the PDF has a watermark on it, and the only way to remove that watermark is to pay.

I agree it's way too many steps and am trying to figure out how to make it easier and more seamless without delivering people something they don't actually want.

<comment><USER16> Maybe having the cards on the front page might help. You've invested a lot of screen realestate on explaining the product. You could probably make this [https://www.placecard.me/try/](https://www.placecard.me/try/) your homepage, have the instruction in the banner and have the product in front of the user right away.

<comment><USER17> I'll second this. I wasn't exactly sure what you were selling until I got to the "try" page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like the product. But I wouldn't invest in automation of all the stuff upfront. I would just process the upload/order manualy for a couple of first users just to validate an idea financially.

From my experience people fear more of success than failure therefore overdo the product to survive an imagined scale explosion. But there wouldn't be much outrage from users that once flooded you have just raised the prices or temporary suspended the service. I guess queue with bucks in front of the door would boost your motivation to finish up the process implementation in half of the time.

</comment><comment><USER19> I feel like not adding affiliate links is a missed opportunity. The guides section would be the perfect place to recommend a paper cutter, envelopes and paper and link to Amazon. The income probably won't be very big, but people who print their own place cards will probably need that stuff anyway, so it might add some revenue.

It might have been a conscious not to do it though, which is of course fine. But if it wasn't, I'd look into it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Very inspiring and well executed; I can certainly learn something from chasing problems that is so small that one can actually implement and promote a well- functioning product within reasonable time.

</comment><comment><USER21> You don't have any hosting costs listed, are you hosting the site for free? If so, where?

<comment><USER22> "You might be wondering where my server costs are, and I'll admit that I'm cheating a bit on that one. I host all of my projects on the same server—one that I've been paying for for more than five years—so I'm not including that in the budget for this project specifically. In reality I should probably include a portion of those costs here."

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't want to hear about the first dollar you made. I want to hear about how you went from $40,000 to $80,000 MRR. That's the key area. This post is just an ego stroke for a guy who made $1.00 ($.96 after fees).

<comment><USER8> You think making a dollar after 200+ hours stroked his ego?

<comment><USER23> Yes, I do think that. It was a promotional piece for his SaaS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm not sure why this is on the front page. I mean, $1 that you just made yesterday doesn't really indicate product/market fit, nor seem very noteworthy in general. If anything, it seems more like a midway point in the journey of what you might expect to get there. You might have to pivot several times after realizing traction is not stable or perhaps not scalable vis a vis marketing efforts, as has been my experience. Kudos to building something though.

Edit:

I get the point others are making about celebrating a milestone and your first sale being the stepping stone to the next, but I don't think it addresses mine:

Is $1 that you made _just yesterday_ really enough data to demonstrate to others what to expect? Is there really any conclusion that can be drawn from such a small experiment? Maybe it's just me, but I feel like there would be much more interesting insights to discuss after waiting more time or when more sales occurred.

Honestly this looks more like an SEO piece given the keyword rich external links in the article from a high PR domain and boost from HN. The author has mostly just submitted his own articles on HN to boot.

<comment><USER25> That "Zero to One" customer is a big deal. You can now ask that customer why did they buy it in the first place? Why did they take their credit card out of their purse/wallet, type their info in, and click buy? What would keep them as a customer, etc.

The next step is to get to 10 customers, then 100...

<comment><USER24> This is consumer product with a really low profit margin, which means he'll need a lot more than 100 customers paying $1 each to have a sustainable business. At $1, the product might as well be free. Imagine if this article was retitled "What actually goes into getting your first user." Would anyone care then?

Regardless, it would be much more interesting to hear why the customer took out their credit card and entered their payment information. Unfortunately, that's not what this article is about.

<comment><USER26> I think that alternative title would catch my attention a lot better, actually.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scientists using MRI scans to reveal physical makeup of thoughts and feelings - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/functional-magnetic-resonance-imaging-computer-analysis-read-thoughts-60-minutes-2019-11-24/ <comment><USER2> [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.366...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.366.2250&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

<comment><USER3> tldr; the dead salmon false positive fMRI criticism study. "Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Proper Multiple Comparisons Correction"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Using FMRIs for this isn't exactly new, but using this to study people while using apps has some pretty interesting implications. It can give insight to what MAU actually means to users' emotional state, and you could steer users to more fulfilling, positive interactions or addictive ones.

Or analyze people while watching political messaging. Scary/exciting.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely disgusting abuses of this technology / science. I hope this never comes to light

<comment><USER6> Added to the top: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_Kranzberg](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melvin_Kranzberg)

Kranzberg six laws of technology should ease your mind.

You don't need MRI's to manipulate people. Knowing basic psychology and allowing yourself some time to learn about them will allow the same effect. I understand you are saying mass produced, with data science applying these learning models to groups of people is easy enough.

You know why political campaigning on social media is effective? It's because they take a best fit approach. You find clustered of people, and identify the one most easily manipulated. It won't be long till they start to push the agenda fed through IV to their peers. Maybe 2/10 are dissenters and won't listen. Maybe another 2/10 are as stubborn as the opposite agenda and won't listen. So you are left with 6/10 people who are more likely to be convinced from someone they know rather than political advertisements. Especially if the IV being fed to best fit manipulator has disarm tactics for the opposites agenda, regardless of how true the disarm tactic is.

There was a time where you had to go to town hall, listen to the radio, and read the news paper. Even then, you were probably likely to find the same tactics maybe less pruned to actual manipulation and closer to the parties real ideologies.

Every technology has a cost benefit analysis. Do not let this stop progress. Stopping technological progress is the worst thing we can do because humans are evolving and growing and the technology is needed to keep up with the numbers.

Some of the argument may have fallen apart in the middle I'm more than willing to discuss further to clear up any anomalies...

<comment><USER7> Isn't it funny how most governments become less brutal as the technology and knowledge to influence and manipulate people becomes available to said governments. Not to sound too bleak, the flipside to this is that technology also enables people to coordinate and inform eachother of the actions of governments.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Egypt is a great case study. I'm not too privy on recent events but the protests that spun from Facebook proves exactly that. There was some change at least for a little while...

HK is another example of how technology has helped shed light which led to protests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> OK, gotta get my knitted mumetal hoodie. With a nickel/silver-plated silk liner.

<comment><USER9> I haven't seen mumetal mentioned in the wild since I got sucked into the Steorn train wreck back circa 2006. Learned a lot about magnetism, that's for sure.</comment></comment>


Microsoft explains the lack of Registry backups in Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> https://www.ghacks.net/2019/06/29/microsoft-explains-the-lack-of-registry-backups-in-windows-10/ <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317669](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20317669), which was posted earlier. (It doesn't look like it from the timestamps, but that's explained at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774614](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774614))</comment>


Disney+ Has 26.5M Subscribers - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/2020/2/4/21123014/disney-plus-26-5-million-subscribers <comment><USER2> Why they expect to lose billions in the first few years then? What is so expensive?</comment>


Why do we rape, kill and sleep around? Don't blame the caveman - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/id/202789 <comment><USER2> I'm glad that some of the more extreme conclusions of evolutionary psychology are being challenged, though not for political reasons. Their conclusions never really bothered me, because I never thought that an evolutionary incentive for immoral behavior gave a "free pass" in any way whatsoever.

What I dislike about evolutionary psychology is that it often tries to use the word "scientific" for explanations that are really "just so." I suppose it's an improvement that the explanation made to fit "just so" fits with a vaguely scientific worldview rather than consulting the bones, tea leaves, tarot, or astrological charts. But a just so explanation that fits with science _is not!_ scientific reasoning, and that's where the evo-pysch folks got themselves in trouble.

I think evo-pysch is a great idea, but it needs to be scientific. And you know, some of it probably is - though those studies probably haven't produced the same sensationalistic headlines, and as a result aren't defining the field. "Just so" isn't scientific, but evo-psych certainly could be.

<comment><USER3> I think the word 'scientific' is one of the most abused or confused words around. Should it only be used for areas where relative certainty can be established or should it also encompass logical and evidence-based speculation on things that cannot currently be tested well? It doesn't matter what the 'true' definition of the word is when the majority of people use it differently.

From one direction calling evo-psych 'scientific' can fool others into believing there is more evidence than there really is. From the other side a well-reasoned argument with incomplete evidence like 'smoking causes cancer (in the 60s)' can be made to look like astrology by using the word 'unscientific'.

Perhaps a new words need to be invented so that people can talk about these things more clearly.

<comment><USER4> >>I think the word 'scientific' is one of the most abused or confused words around.

Agreed, it is misused. But note that some of the research in any field will be of bad quality (the book on rape was probably one) -- and some will be good. You will have probabilities in all active research areas (see e.g. diet advice...).

Note that ideologically motivated people argue that researchers in all evolutionary biology are in a conspiracy or complete idiots.

Many of the critics of evolutionary psychology are obviously also ideologically motivated, but sure... they _could_ be closer to the target than the creationists.

(Marxists and religious people have problems with lots of behavior being built in; don't ask me about the specifics. Don't tell me either, I don't really care).

Here is quite a fun answer to some of that criticism: <http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/CEP_Gould.html>

(And note, most researchers in two fields -- intelligence and evolutionary psychology -- would have to be in a conspiracy for Gould to be honest... :-)

<comment><USER5> _Note that ideologically motivated people argue that researchers in all evolutionary biology are in a conspiracy or complete idiots._

Note that alternative medicine, evolutionary psychologists, and creationists/intelligent designers will argue that the "establishment" scientists are in a conspiracy or complete idiots.

<comment><USER4> Evolutionary psychologists _are_ the establishment. :-)

If you want to contradict, do you have some references from non-idealists that aren't discredited (like Buller)?

By the way, the author of the article was "downvoted" on Pharyngula, last time she wrote about evolution...

[http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/01/sharon_begley_how...](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/01/sharon_begley_how_could_you.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some points in the article could be queried... (but I'm not trying to suggest this invalidates the whole thing)

 _the notion that being a brave warrior helps a man get the girls and leave many offspring has been toppled. Until missionaries moved in in 1958, the Waorani tribe of the Ecuadoran Amazon had the highest rates of homicide known to science_

Why then are they being treated as representative? One would expect adaptations to be suited to normal conditions, not extreme outliers.

 _If the male mind were adapted to prefer the most fertile women, then AARP- eligible men should marry 23-year-olds, which [...] they do not, instead preferring women well past their peak fertility._

It's unclear what "prefer" means; but the context suggests it means "who did they actually marry" rather than "who would their ideal woman be". Clearly, we can't all get what we want.

I really wish it was more common for articles like this to provide a list of the scientific papers they're relying on, so readers could conveniently investigate deeper (for some definition of "conveniently").

</comment><comment><USER7> "Depend on? The very phrase is anathema to the dogma of a universal human nature."

It's unfortunate to find such a simple misunderstanding in the middle of the article; as Robert Wright explains in "The Moral Animal", it is not necessarily behavior that is coded, but adaptability. To shuffle this entire domain off to behavioral ecology ignores the fact that adaptability doesn't have to be an overt product of higher functions. An evolutionarily coded genotype that is dependent on environment for phenotype still falls under the purview of ev psych.

</comment><comment><USER8> A lot of interesting and informative points. For instance, I never knew that the "universal preference" for a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio was debunked.

</comment><comment><USER9> At some level, rape is absolutely a product of evolution, unless you don't believe in evolution. The desire for a male to have sex with a female is so strong that it approaches a need. Acknowledging this doesn't condone rape, but it does allow us to not be morons.

<comment><USER10> Isn't all human behavior is a product of evolution by definition? Humans like to explore because it can improve their mating chances due to prestige, wealth, less competitation (those unsuccessful thin the pack) hence people went to the moon.

I'm not trying to be a troll, but how can we have behavior that wasn't caused by evolution?

<comment><USER9> Sure, any behavior is going to be a product of evolution and environment. Of course, sex is actually the mechanism of evolution, so it's doubtful that pretending behaviors associated with it are not strongly related to it will yield sensible results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 1) I'm not seeing any discussion of group survival. At an individual level, a lot of human behavior can look counterproductive, but makes sense at the group sense. If a genetic line evolves to support other members of the same (or similar) line, then that line as a whole has a better chance of lasting.

2) If anyone's interested in longer discussions of these (and they are interesting):

\- _The_Red_Queen_ (why we sleep around) [http://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen- Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/00...](http://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution- Human-Nature/dp/0060556579/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248738373&sr=8-1)

\- _The_Dark_Side_Of_Man_ (why we rape, kill) [http://www.amazon.com/Dark- Side-Man-Michael-Ghiglieri/dp/073...](http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Man- Michael-Ghiglieri/dp/0738203157/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1248738408&sr=8-1)

Note that the 2nd tries to make political/policy conclusions which IMHO don't hold up. However, the scientific work in the text is pretty enjoyable.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't think we have much in the way of "behavioural modules" that are instinctively programmed for specific inputs and outputs, in the way a sensible engineer would design it. I doubt that many animals do. It's more likely that we have modules that react to a certain range of inputs, in certain ways, and their combination forms reactions that evolutionary pressure select against. It's neither modular nor hierarchical.

In other words: mess, not modules.

It's clear that animals have instincts, and it would be surprising if we didn't have any. Clearly, we do: for hunger, for sex, for defending territory, for pecking order (dominance hierarchies) but also for language, conscience, law, commerce, cooperation, tool-making and wanting to believe in something greater. These things arise in groups of us without instruction.

But I think two kinds of layers separate us from most other animals, which the article refers to as our flexibility and adaptability. There is conscious adaptability, where you refrain from punching the other fellow on the nose, because of your ethics or fear of consequences or whatever - the reason doesn't matter, the point is that you can modify your response.

And there's the much more important _unconscious_ adaptability (which I think coincides with the physical outer layer in the brain - the cerebral cortex). Conceptually, this acts like an abstraction layer, so that you can treat a tool as an extension of your body; litigation as if it were a physical threat; or users of a computer program as if they formed a tribe. Your interpretation of input is what gives the input meaning - e.g. misunderstandings will affect your reaction. I think this layer can pretty much convert anything into anything; though some instincts, like hunger, can apply pressure towards overriding it (but not control - consider hunger strikers).

I don't claim any special insight here, just restating common sense.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised this article is getting as positive feedback as it is. The author is clearly guilty of a pretty significant straw-man argument, presenting evolutionary biology in very simplified, extreme terms, casting it as essentially hardline biological determinism.

The author is clearly uncomfortable with the suggestion that violent and socially unacceptable actions may be very normal parts of human behavior (given the right environmental conditions) and seems very eager to validate any suggestion that we are "blank slates."

The idea that there is no such thing as human nature is patently ridiculous. Is there no such thing as dog, or elephant, or orangutan nature? If we accept that at least one important aspect of what a human being is is an evolutionarily-developed biological organism, than how can this also not apply to us? At the same time, the idea that we are hopelessly determined to express our instincts and innate drives in any one particular way is also surely not valid.

Are evo-psych researchers suggesting that the existence of genetic tendencies makes their (extreme) expression (via rape, murder, infanticide, etc.) acceptable? Clearly not, though that is what the author of the article is unavoidably hinting at with lines like "[l]et's not speculate on the motives that (mostly male) evolutionary psychologists might have in asserting that their wives are programmed to not really care if they sleep around..."

Her tone throughout the piece communicates the opinion that evol-psych proponents are just looking for excuses for bad behavior, something which I really don't think is true. Understanding why bad behaviors are so common is not the same things as justifying them and, actually, seems like a more useful step towards making society better than arguing that they're just the result of "bad" individuals or something.

Evolutionary biology is effective and meaningful when it is used to explain and account for the particular expression of some genetic tendency (in the form of an observed behavior.) It doesn't make sense to argue that abuse of stepchildren, for instance, is an acceptable or inevitable thing in contemporary society for several reasons, including the fact that this particular expression of instinct is one we have deemed undesirable for moral/ethical reasons. The underlying idea, that we are genetically predisposed to care for our own offspring ahead of the offspring of others, though, seems a useful observation. Overall, theories like evo-psych are ways of understanding why things occur as they do, not a means of prescribing how they should or must be.

That being said, political ideologies like mainstream feminism and much of contemporary liberalism intentionally strive to deny the existence of human nature or instinct because it doesn't fit into their worldviews, more so than because it really appears not to be present, I suspect. They start with an abstract idea of how things "should" be and work backwards from there, rather than trying to understand why we are the way we are and then working forward from that. There seems to me a significant weakness and danger in drawing a blind spot upon our underlying motivations and darker, biological imperatives.

<comment><USER14> The article does point out scientifically based refutations of some simplistic eve-psych explanations rape, abuse of stepchildren and so on. Doesn't your point about the motives of feminism and liberalism use political name-calling to counter the scientific arguments?

I agree that evo-psych in general is an interesting field - and certainly all human behavior is somehow rooted in evolution. So of course rape also have some kind direct or indirect evolutionary explanation, just as love, music, wine-tasting, pole-sitting and so on. But the explanation is probably a lot more complex than "rape helps spread genes".

Pop-evo-psych have gotten great exposition in the popular media lately, so it is quite refreshing to see a debunking.

<comment><USER15> "refutations of some simplistic eve-psych explanations"

That's one of the classics, though. For the same reason creationists think they have refuted evolution theory if they find some bone in some hidden corner of the world that some random biologist had a wrong hunch about.

Some of the claims of "evo-psych" often seemed simplistic to me (like the hip- waist ratio), but then these were often the ones spread by journalists in popular newspapers, not by scientists. I wouldn't assume that they were as universally accepted among scientists.

For a long time "strange" variations of sexual preference have been known, for example the mutilations some people seem to prefer (small feet in chinese women, elongated necks in some tribes where they put rings around their neck during growth and so on). I can't imagine any serious scientist would not know about them.

Many of the "refutations" seem a bit weak, too. For example the rape gene: let's accept that for the average member of society rape makes no "economical" sense. But is the typical rapist an average member of society? If rape is your only chance at spreading your genes, the economics might be different. From the article it did not sound as if that was taken into account in the "refuation".

Another thing I am 100% sure: evo-psych did not predict that women would prefer to be monogamous. So refuting that is just a strawman.

The final straw for the article is when they describe how evo-psych can now only fight back by getting personal and unscientific. Followed up by a personal and unscientific quote by the anti-evo-psych guy.

<comment><USER16> I agree, I used to bash evolutionary psychology myself, but then I realized: We know how "accurately" the media portray research in physics, mathematics, biology and chemistry; how do we figure that the way they represent evolutionary psychology is any better? Instead of arguing against strawmen like the article does, why not first listen to what evolutionary psychologists actually have to say?

I don't know how representative Steven Pinker is for the field of evo-psych in general, but I found that he explains his reasoning very clearly and understandably.

Steven Pinker debunks the idea of a blank slate: [http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_chalks_it_up_to_the_b...](http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_chalks_it_up_to_the_blank_slate.html)

Richard Dawkins interviews Steven Pinker (really long, but I found it had some interesting insights about evolution and psychology): [http://richarddawkins.net/article,3941,Steven-Pinker--- The-G...](http://richarddawkins.net/article,3941,Steven-Pinker---The-Genius- of-Charles-Darwin-The-Uncut-Interviews,Steven-Pinker-Richard-Dawkins)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I quibble with one small part of this article:

 _[Evolutionary psychology] has had the field to itself, especially in the media, for almost two decades. In large part that was because early critics, led by the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, attacked it with arguments that went over the heads of everyone but about 19 experts in evolutionary theory._

Philip Kitcher's _Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature_ (MIT Press, 1987) is a thorough devastating takedown of sociobiology, especially what Kitcher calls "pop sociobiology". Except for bits of the first and last chapters, it is entirely based on empirical arguments rather than "OMG the political implications of this are awful"; and you don't need a biology degree to understand it.

All the arguments I have seen for the controversial claims in popularized evolutionary psychology (e.g., "this behavior exists and therefore it must be adaptive") were answered by Kitcher twenty years ago. (I don't follow the field, so if there are people doing good work in evo-psych that is too boring for the mainstream press, well, good for them.)

(Kitcher also wrote _Abusing Science_ , a takedown of "creation science", back when it was called "creation science" rather than "intelligent design".)

</comment><comment><USER18> I think it's good that the tenets of evo psych are being challenged (they are indeed based on shaky evidence) but these naysayers do little to propose an alternative. The evo psych folks are at least offering some theories, which is still vastly superior than just saying "we'll never know."

<comment><USER19> They're saying "We don't know" which is worlds apart from saying "We'll never know" and running around spouting bullshit to the the lay audience is vastly worse than saying "We don't know."

<comment><USER18> That's what science is: Coming up with bullshit (or "theories" as scientists call them) and then finding evidence for and against.

As for scientists "spouting off", I think you sound pretty paternalistic saying that lay audiences need to be protected from scientific theories, no matter if they are unproven.

As for whether the article argues "we'll never know", the gist of the article is that there is no way of answering these questions without having a time machine- That suggests they preclude the possibility of answering these questions. Then it knocks scientists who at least attempt to come up with theories, given the limited data, which is exactly what scientists _should_ try to do.

(That being said, evo psych folks clearly have been sloppy in popular expositions just how shaky the foundations of the discipline actually are.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thank you very much for posting this!

After years of reading articles that thoughtlessly parroted the lastet evo psych "research", I started to think that good science journalism was dead.

Apparently some journalists can still think critcally!

</comment><comment><USER21> "Cashdan puts it this way: which body type men prefer 'should depend on the degree to which they want their mates to be strong, tough, economically successful and politically competitive.'

"Depend on? The very phrase is anathema to the dogma of a universal human nature. But it is the essence of an emerging, competing field. Called behavioral ecology, it starts from the premise that social and environmental forces select for various behaviors that optimize people's fitness in a given environment. Different environment, different behaviors--and different human 'natures.'"

The article reports a really interesting integration of evolutionary pressures on human thinking and social constraints on human behavior. Well worth a read.

<comment><USER4> The article really _do_ say that evolutionary biologists (here evol psychologists) don't think evolution can build a function into the brain that modifies behavior after environment...

Which should either be a straw man argument or that the journalist has garbled some serious argument.

Edit: In the last evolution article from the author, she fell over her own feet... explains a bit.

[http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/01/sharon_begley_how...](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/01/sharon_begley_how_could_you.php)

<comment><USER21> _The article really do say that evolutionary biologists (here evol psychologists) don't think evolution can build a function into the brain that modifies behavior after environment._

I'd like to respectfully request that you restate that sentence with clearer grammar.

For what is mainstream in evolutionary psychology, one reasonable source is

<http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html>

<comment><USER4> Is this understandable: The article _really_ claims that evol psychology says that the environment shouldn't influence behavior!

(English isn't my native language and the only thing I can write clearly, without a few rewrites, is code.)

It is a nice link, a long while since I read it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Toy helicopter lops top of man's head off - <AUTHOR> http://nypost.com/2013/09/05/man-decapitated-by-remote-controlled-toy-helicopter/

<comment><USER2> Discussion from earlier today for WSJ version of the story (which has more information than the Post): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6336803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6336803)

</comment><comment><USER3> not to confuse with heli "drones" which have small props and spin slowly ( you can often put your hand in them without a scratch). the helis as pictured arent toys at all, imo. every pilot of these know they can also cut an arm through the bone.

<comment><USER4> Not true. Carbon fiber props on even a 'toy' drone will cut deep like a knife. The solution to this madness is to attach effective prop guards, at least on multicopters.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I fly these things. A short time ago I got cut on the arm by a blade strike on spinup as a result of a cheap plastic servo gear which had missing teeth which I discovered after taking the servo apart.</comment>


Interactive visualization of commute times for all US cities - <AUTHOR> http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/san-francisco-ca <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Sha from Trulia here. I worked on some of the frontend aspects of this visualization and would be happy to answer any questions. We're pulling in OSM road data and published GTFS files for public transit routing. I just linked to SF but you can also search for other cities:

<http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/new-york-ny>

<http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/miami-fl>

<http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/austin-tx>

<comment><USER2> Is this the absolute worst-case commute times? It never takes me that long to commute into/out of miami, or baltimore, or fort lauderdale. More like half the time.

DC actually seemed like it went the opposite way as it usually takes an hour and a half to get from VA through the beltway into DC while the map showed only an hour for as far out as Dale City. A half hour (or more) from Petworth into Downtown during rush hour is fair, since DC has probably the slowest crappiest drivers in the nation.

Updated theory: these commute times might not be based on actual driver data, it's probably a very rough estimation based on distance, travel time, speed limit, and population. It needs to be weighted based on the curve of traffic based on time and the way locals drive. Boca commuting will probably be slower than Miami commuting on average, unless you're on the highway in which case you're totally screwed in Miami. Not to mention anywhere there's an on-ramp with lots of flow you're going to make a choke point, so times would increase a lot, unless you started after that exit.

tl;dr Traffic is hard.

<comment><USER3> Agreed on DC - the places that I plugged in from northern va. (22102, 22213, 22046, etc.) all seemed to be showing the best-case times. Some places that it says are a 5-10 commute are more like 30-45 minutes at rush hour.

Also, not related to the commute times, but the crime rates look strange. At least, it's showing Arlington, VA as almost completely red (very high crime). Maybe the data is right, but that would be surprising for one of the richer, more yuppified areas of the US.

<comment><USER2> This map is so inaccurate. I'm looking at Congress and the White House and it doesn't show any crimes committed at all!

<comment><USER4> looks about right for NYC (I'm only posting this so people can know they can reliably use it)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it's a very awesome idea, and I'm impressed with the visuals. However it seems that several people on here are claiming wildly inaccurate commute times, and I myself have noticed this as well. I think part of the problem is that it is hard to get a full understanding of what rush hour traffic is like, and that the actual volumes of traffic and slowdown differ depending on locality and road. Sever places, including my home town, have way overblown estimates, such as 40min commute on a road that never takes more than 15. and that's a two way, two lane road. However City driving can be much much different, and even dependent on end of day vs. morning. For example, my DC commute was 40min in the morning (it is reverse rush hour) but my commute home was always a hour and 15, on the same road, reverse commute both times.

edit: and if I could make any other suggestion, I would be to allow me to continue to zoom out. The zoom sticks at a certain point, and it is not zoomed out far enough for me.

<comment><USER6> Hi, Talin from Trulia here.

As many commentors have pointed out, our time-accuracy is not exactly 100% yet. :)

This is our first iteration on this concept, so we are using some heuristics to try to get times roughly close, and accurate relative to each other. We're also validating the user experience, value as a product, etc.

I'm still investigating a good set for nationwide traffic data, which will help give us a much more accurate picture of real-world commute times. Traffic varies so very much city to city :)

<comment><USER7> Where I live (Santa Cruz, CA) it doesn't know about a local highway that is virtually stationary every afternoon/evening.

Have you considered partnering with someone like Waze to get anonymised actual trips, which will be far more accurate than pure traffic data (or they could be merged).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Most people are missing some of the most amazing stuff here. First, how the slider works without refreshing the tiles. They have tiled the travel costs [http://tiles.trulia.com/commute/time_map/data/driving/37.774...](http://tiles.trulia.com/commute/time_map/data/driving/37.7749295/-122.41941550000001/13/1309/3166.json?v=1&degree_buffer=0.002&callback=trulia.maps) and are drawing these changes without having to refresh the map. That's cool. Secondly, they have used Openstreetmap for calculating travel time. I cannot imagine OSM having a street segment cost that is too accurate, so it was probably derived from pure geometry (think about it... traversing .25miles in downtown SF has a much higher cost than .25 miles on the 5 freeway). If instead, you used a Navteq or Teleatlas dataset for this, I bet the isochrone polygons would come out much more accurate. My hats off to the Trulia team, this is good stuff.

<comment><USER9> The physicist in me won't think it's cool until there's some monte carlo simulations of commute times with some additional random walk information for alternate routes and stop light entropy, then a log-likelihood fit to find the best fit commute time.

Just kidding, it's alright, it's kind of off for the SF/PA commute though, by nearly a factor of two for many places in SF, unless you're doing absolute worst case scenario every day of the week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is the most worthless chart I've ever seen. When would this be useful? It's roughly the same everywhere.

Before I am downvoted into oblivion... honestly can someone explain to me when they would ever reference this chart? Give me one good example.

<comment><USER5> If it was accurate, it would be very helpful if, say, I got a new job, or was looking to relocate areas for a job, I could pick out neighborhoods I'd want to live in based off of commute times to my new workplace. And if I knew where I thought I wanted to live, I could see if it would be too far to work.

or if I was on travel, and had a meeting at a client site at point a. but a hotel near my companies office at point b, I could see the travel times, and maybe even go for a hotel closer to point a (or hotels near point a are too expensive, how far would cheaper hotels be for my commute) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hey Sha -- I can't speak for the rest of your cities, but Tampa, FL is VERY wrong. I drug the end point to downtown St. Petersburg and the times given appear to be almost double what it truly takes to commute, over a certain threshold. Under 20 minutes seems to be accurate, but it starts trending towards 30, 40, 60 minutes too quickly.

I'll tell you what, though -- great UX and visualization. Very plain to read and utilize the slider functionality. I suggest modifying the legend to be more explicit about what the color bands mean -- perhaps labeling each color, for instance.

<comment><USER12> Looks nice, great UI, but I think the Minneapolis / St. Paul numbers are a tad bit off. It doesn't seem to show the big changes in time as you cross choke points (394 -> 94 for example).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Mapnificent (<http://www.mapnificent.net/>) does something like this and even has an API.

I started writing a Chrome extension using the API that you could apply to any existing Google Maps v3 map (such as AirBnB), but I've abandoned it since 1) I was disappointed that quite a few sites with Google maps are still using older versions (such as Padmapper) and 2) I lack time. I believe the Chrome extension portion is working, but it needs a UI overlayed on the map for specifying locations of interest.

If anyone is interested in working on this, send me a message and I'll post what I have to github.

</comment><comment><USER14> WalkScore has similar functionality (click on "My Commutes"):

<http://www.walkscore.com/apartments/CA/San_Francisco>

The numbers there are somewhat different.

You can also enter more than one commute location. So you can find all places that are within 20 minutes of your office AND 30 minutes of your girlfriend's house.

The other tabs have some pretty cool filters, such as proximity to public transit, grocery stores, etc.

They also have heatmaps showing how "walkable" a particular neighborhood is, i.e. how much you can get your daily errands done without needing a car:

<http://www.walkscore.com/CA/San_Francisco>

</comment><comment><USER15> Can't get to it on my android phone. Get a prompt to download the app, then an Oops 404 page not found.

</comment><comment><USER16> Question: Is the pointer the start location or the end location of the commute? It wasn't immediately obvious to me and in many areas it makes a huge difference. It seems like it's just pulling worst case "in traffic" drive times right now.

Also is it possible to adjust the time of day that one commutes? (since many may work shifts off rush hour and encounter little/no traffic or strange/intermittent transit schedules)

<comment><USER6> On the large scale, you get pretty much the same map whether you're calculating 'to' the marker or 'from' the marker. The only exception is if you plan on commuting in the opposite direction of rush hour traffic, both ways.

i.e., if you think about commuting to work in the morning, the heatmap will show you the times it takes to drive from any given location to the marker. If you're thinking about driving home in the evening, you can think of the time from the marker to any given location.

on the macro scale, most streets aren't one-way, and commute times tend to be symmetric.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Transit times were pretty spot on for New York, nice job guys!

</comment><comment><USER18> Some of the data is wrong, e.g. it takes me 30 mins to go to my office and Trulia is saying it's 60 minutes (miami).

But, the UI is great, I just wish they had better data, seems like it's just calculated with distance / avg mph, traffic in this problem has a lot to do to get an accurate calculation.

</comment><comment><USER19> It might be worth doing "rush hour" and "non-rush hour". It takes me 48 minutes door to door from downtown Oakland to Mountain View, going 80 on I-880 and 70-75 on 84 and 101 (i.e. flow of traffic, and at the speed where you won't get a speeding ticket even for going past a cop, especially if you slow down slightly on seeing one..).

It takes 1.5-2h during rush hour on the same route if anything goes wrong (50-75% of the time there is at least one accident or construction).

Both numbers are meaningful, but distinct.

Transit is the same way, in the other direction -- during peak commute hours, trains are frequent and/or synced. During off-hours, you can be waiting 30-59 minutes for a connection, 1-2 times.

</comment><comment><USER20> I work in Minneapolis and my commute is about 30-40% (15-20 min) less than what this site says. Neat idea, but certainly needs improvement for broad real-world use.

<comment><USER12> It doesn't seem to pick up the jumps in time of stuff like 394->94 though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Imagine stating the location of your work and the cost of your time in $/hour (whatever you assign to it), and the size of housing unit you want. The, you would see a map colored based on the delta between the cost of your commute (via either personal vehicle or public transit) and the cost of housing in various areas. I bet that, for most urban dwellers, there would be a few surprising points on the map.

</comment><comment><USER22> Great concept, but I think there are a lot of data errors here. (In Seattle, a drive I take about 5 minutes to make was listed as taking an hour!)

<comment><USER23> Yeah, I'm seeing consistent ~3x times in my location outside Seattle (a rural, no traffic sort of place). Within Seattle, well, Downtown to Magnolia doesn't take an hour.

It really looks algorithmic based on street size, assuming some specific congestion level. I'm not seeing any indication of some of the known congestion points that I used to have to deal with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thinking out loud: In an attempt to vastly improve the data, could a mobile app be written that can "detect" if you are driving (exact location, speed, alignment/frequency to your past paths, etc), in such a way that the data could be automatically collected and crowdsourced?

Fire up the app, let it run in background, and it logs everything passively and adds it to global data set. Feasible?

<comment><USER25> Forgive me if I've heard wrong or if this is just wishful thinking, but doesn't Google do this with Navigation? I believe there's an option to view a traffic layer and from what I've seen in my commutes, it's fairly accurate for gauging traffic density. It should also be capable of calculate travel time based upon crowdsourced traffic information from Android users.

<comment><USER26> They do yeah. On Android there's even a widget that you set with your destination and it'll tell you the journey time. Would be great to see their live traffic data used for this journey time metric across the world. I'm moving interstate here in Australia, would certainly help narrow down choosing suburbs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I saw something very similar last year. But I don't a clue neither on the website nor the product name. The only thing I remember is that it was a German guy (I guess!). Could you (Trulia) please let us know what/who motivated this work?

</comment><comment><USER28> It says my commute time is 48 minutes to my work (in Denver). In reality, it is 25 min, at rush hour, 90% of the time.

Worst case is a surprise bad blizzard, it can take 2 hours if that happens (about once every four years)

</comment><comment><USER29> This data looks really good. It even seems like express subway services are taken into account, which is rare for this kind of thing.

It would be nice to see biking times in addition to car/public transit, however.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've read it as "Interactive visualization of commute times for all US citizens." the scary thing is that in another ten year this may well be reality, given the path we're on.

</comment><comment><USER31> You have support for driving and public transit but not for bikes? Seems like you could get some rough estimates by using elevation variance as a multiplier for driving time.

</comment><comment><USER32> Looking at this reminds me how glad I am of the fact I get to telecommute... and the fact I only put 2900 miles on my truck last year. Very nice visuals though!

</comment><comment><USER33> Really nice. Commute is very inaccurate for the Indianapolis area, however. One marked as 1 hour took me 25-30 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER34> According to this I love an hour from work. Wrong by about 30 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is very optimistic to the actual commute times in Atlanta. They are off by a factor of 2 or 3. Not sure as to the cause but the vector mapping in Atlanta is terrible, so is most likely routing problems or the like.

</comment><comment><USER36> This doesn't seem very accurate, at least for St. Louis, MO

</comment><comment><USER37> It greatly overestimates driving times for Charleston, SC

</comment><comment><USER38> Looks to me like you divide by 1.5 to get the right time.

</comment><comment><USER39> Very cool site!</comment>


Ask HN: What music do you listen to at work? - <AUTHOR>

Startup life, especially during the early days, can be lonely at times. Your emotions go like the roller coasters with every hit and miss. You are constantly chained at the desk, your parents don't understand what you do. Your girlfriend dumps you for not being able to spend more quality time with her and your friends think you are crazy. I found the only remedy is to listen to music that reminds me the good and poignant times in life. My productivity can literally jump 5x to 10x.<p>What music do you guys listen to at work? <comment><USER2> During times that require high concentration (like programming), I listen to drum and bass. I find its repetitive nature combined with high energy resembles something like auditory caffeine without the crash afterwards.

Music with words or highly technical music (like jazz or prog) distracts me too much because of my musical background - I want to listen to every intonation, play the notes over in my head, try to figure out the scales, etc. But technical music is perfect during tasks that require only motor skills, like soldering or writing documents (rock, metal, sometimes jazz)

<comment><USER3> May I recommend here a specific album that goes along your lines in terms of repetitive nature and intense rhythm pattern, of high quality and definetely works caffeine-like for me?

It is Toi Doi, Creative Commons licensed and is available for download at <http://www.ektoplazm.com/2011/toi-doi-mother-pitch>

<comment><USER2> Thanks. It's a little dance-y, but pretty good (can't argue with that price either :)

I will throw one back at you: Fantastic Plastic Machine. Pretty interesting mixing -- I would describe it as a Japanese version of Fatboy Slim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find that a lot of Krautrock, especially the more psycadelic and/or electronic flavour is perfect for programming. Try Can, Cluster, Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk and German Oak.

Also, less chaotic Free Improvisation and Free Jazz works very well for me as long as Ive heard the work before. Try NVP([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeRkH7amPl8&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeRkH7amPl8&feature=related)) and Ornette Colemans Town Hall, 1962

</comment><comment><USER5> Lately I've been listening to a lot of Turntable.fm's "Coding Soundtrack" station: <http://turntable.fm/coding_soundtrack3>

Otherwise, I enjoy things like Trent Reznor/NIN's instrumental stuff (like The Social Network soundtrack), TRON soundtrack by Daft Punk, or anything by Ratatat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Daft Punk is great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Instrumental music, like Pelican, God Is An Astronaut, Japanese Telecom and some Classical music for coding.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for pointing out Japanese Telecom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> When I'm coding I listen to movie soundtracks. When I'm doing emails its usually vintage punk music. When I'm in a really really bad mood its really really fast punk.

The Lost soundtracks are really good for coding actually.

</comment><comment><USER8> Some days I like it more than others, but turntable.fm coding_soundtrack rooms are usually pretty good (<http://turntable.fm/coding_soundtrack3>)

<comment><AUTHOR> Too bad it's not currently available outside of the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Preferably uptempo stuff from among Springsteen, U2, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Allmans, Beatles, Beach Boys, Little Steven, Bebop Deluxe and Jeff Beck with the occasional Girl Talk and ELP.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would be different from the rest. I play rock when I am passing time, but when it comes to hardcore coding, my background music is Metalcore.

It gives me a kick and my work speeds up :P</comment>


Social Recruiting: Localbacon Relaunches As Jibe, Raises $875K Seed Round - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/22/jibe-localbacon-relaunch/ <comment><USER2> The core idea of localbacon seemed really good, in essence creating a market for job applications so that both job seekers and employers would treat the application as if it were worth something (as opposed to most job sites where the applications are largely worthless). Now they took that idea and added social networking, for some reason. The localbacon idea was good on it's own, and the social networking-based job website idea is perhaps good on it's own, but what is the synergy between the two mechanisms? If you're going to help applicants gets recommendations from their friends who already work at a company, why do you need the pay-to-apply mechanism? If someone is paying to apply who cares if they know anyone at the company? Both of these are good methods of screening applicants, so why have both?

It seems to me that this company would be better off focusing on one idea or the other and doing it well.

<comment><USER2> Looking at the article more carefully, it actually seems to me that these two ideas aren't just not synergistic, but are actually antagonistic. It says you can either buy job application credits, or earn them by farting around with your profile and sending messages. As an employer, I think I'd much rather hear from someone who bought some credits to apply than from someone who got their credits by spending a lot of time on facebook. The social networking angle makes the pay to apply angle less valuable, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is something I really, really want to succeed. A simple tweak to the job market (seekers pay a nominal fee, reviewers must provide feedback) plus a slick fast UI.

Although hopefully I won't need to search for jobs after my startup launches and takes off :)

<comment><USER4> I don't know if the site can accomplish it's stated objective: "The idea was to get the most qualified applicants who were really serious about the job."

I suspect most really qualified applicants don't have too much trouble navigating the job market (and probably choose to do so the old fashioned way of personal networking rather than using job boards).

That being said, I can see a market for students desperate to hear back from an employer. The most frustrating part of job boards from an applicant's point of view is only hearing back from <5% of the companies you apply to.</comment></comment>


The real reason behind the fast version incrementing of Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=rev&revision=65749

<comment><USER2> > bumping the version so we look hot, fresh, and new to our new friends

You will look old when hit version 10.</comment>


After the Deadline: Acquired - <AUTHOR> http://blog.afterthedeadline.com/2009/09/08/after-the-deadline-acquired/ <comment><USER2> Congratulations! It takes cast-iron balls the size of cantaloupes to make a product that competes against companies with six orders of magnitude more funding... and succeed.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's great that the author found a way to continue working on something he loves but there's a tremendously broad spectrum that 'acquired' could technically fall under - from 'sold one license and got a job' to 'my investors bought another beach house and my grandchildren can afford to be fulltime cocaine addicts'. We don't really know where this particular deal falls.

<comment><USER4> It falls under his definition, which is good enough a story for me.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps I am some ogre of a curmudgeon but 'falls under the author's definition which we have no way of vaguely qualitatively evaluating' is not good enough for me. What if his definition was 'I was acquired by my mom who let me move back into her basement'? I'm not suggesting that it is or that there's anything wrong with an early exit that pays your debts and legal bills (or more or much more). But we know essentially bupkis about this - it's a good story because... it has an inspiring ring about it? Having a hard time throwing my critical faculties to the wind just because it undoubtedly does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congrats raffi! (<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=raffi>) This is totally awesome news.

</comment><comment><USER6> I was surprised to follow this link and see a familiar face. I recognize Raphael Mudge from when I competed in the Northeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (<http://neccdc09.nssa.rit.edu/>) where he was a member of the red team. I didn't have much time to get to know him personally, but I do remember him being a nice guy. Congrats, Raphael!

<comment><USER7> That would be me. Thank you very much :) My last day in the (active duty) Air Force was spent at NECCDC 08 and it was great to work with you guys for the 09 competition. Hopefully Daryl invites me back for 10.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congratulations!

I loved the idea about the NY Times quiz. (I got it wrong). It's a little thing, but it may have been just the hook to catch the right fish.

I try to learn something from everything here. This was a great lesson that I hope to put to use myself someday.

</comment><comment><USER9> I assume the sale price is not public?

</comment><comment><USER10> Welcome to the family, Raffi. :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Finally, a story in which YC misjudged... :)

Congrats...

<comment><USER12> Misjudged? Not necessarily.

While getting acquired is cool for the founders, getting acquired so early is usually not in YC's interest and I doubt they'd have too much regret over (what is likely) a super-small acquisition.

<comment><USER13> YC may also suffer from an embarrassment of riches, where they have more good startups than they have resources to fund.

<comment><USER4> Not sure that is in any way a failure or suffering. I think its a great success. Look at MIT's move to give away its courseware online. They don't think it will hurt them in the foreseeable future. Is MIT losing out by not solving the problem of expanding the number of paying students they can take in? They don't think so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hear, Here! The internet is thankful for all the future Wordpress-powered blogs whose writers will be spared the embarrassment of confusing its and it's, their and there, and complementary and complimentary. Congrats!

<comment><USER15> > Hear, Here!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear>

<comment><USER14> Sigh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here it is 379 days ago on HN first. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=286162>

Congratulations.

</comment><comment><USER17> Awesome, I am incredibly happy for this! It was a pleasure working with you on both FeedbackArmy and this in terms of design, it is a rare treat to have such a polite and understandable client. I've also seen you online at the most awkward times of night slaving away, so I know this is certainly well deserved. Best of luck my friend!

</comment><comment><USER18> This is great news. If you can teach the great unwashed blogging masses the difference between "there", "their" and "they're" you'll be doing the English language a great service too! ;-)

</comment><comment><USER19> Congrats! Does this mean we'll get to see the source?

edit: Any details on the financials?

<comment><USER7> Hi Yan, Yes, we're planning to open source the backend. I will also try to post snippets of AtD functionality into blog posts as this will be easier to digest. As a researcher I think the ideas probably have more value than the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Huge congratulations to Raphael. I had the chance to see a preview of his presentation, and I was impressed right away. The market is obviously hugely competitive (who really wants to take on MS, google, etc?), and those were the biggest questions I had at the time.

But this is a perfect combination of tech and opportunity. Again, well done Raphael!

</comment><comment><USER21> Ironically the grammar error he cites might not be an error, depending on whether Mr Franken said that IRL or in print. If it were in print, such as on a website or email, then it was not incorrect for the New York Times (which was why I missed it, because I skip the quotes when looking for errors) to have simply transcribed Franken's error. (In that case they could put the old (sic) there, but I view that as a total dick move. Leave that pretentious stuff for The New Yorker.) If they were transcribing his spoken word, then it was erroneous.

I view that as ironic because the article talks about contextual grammar checking, and there's no way a machine (or in this case even a human) could know the proper context that determines whether or not the article's author made a mistake.

<comment><USER3> The NYT article makes it quite clear it's an interview. It's just a simple error of spelling (not grammar, the sentence is grammatically correct) in the original article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Congratulations man! Way to not let rejection knock you down one bit!

</comment><comment><USER23> WOOOOT ! Congrats dude ! I'm kinda sad I didn't join you. You rock

</comment><comment><USER24> I thought I'd try it, using the link provided in the article (<http://www.polishmywriting.com/nyt.html>) I copied some text from my blog into it. In the sentence fragment:

...took pictures of famous czech and slovak authors...

It noticed that Slovak should be capitalized, but not Czech.

So until it can pass my 30 second test, much as I am pleased for the authors, I'd not use the product, under any ownership.

</comment><comment><USER25> A question for the AtD folks: Do you have any concerns about being acquired by a company which builds such a famously insecure product?

Speaking as someone who cares a lot about security, I'd be concerned about the reputation for poor security "rubbing off" on me.

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure why my question here is being voted down; the fact that wordpress is famously insecure is hardly controversial.

Can some downvoters please explain?

<comment><USER26> It sounds like you are whining about Wordpress, rather than just commenting on the article.

Microsoft Research did a lot of work on Haskell. Does the multitude of Windows viruses make you not want to use Haskell? Probably not. It just doesn't matter.

<comment><USER27> _It sounds like you are whining about Wordpress_

I fail to see how the original question qualifies as 'whining about Wordpress'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "[...] as part of an application to Y-Combinator, Spring 09. Later, I was greeted with a rejection letter. But that was ok! I knew I didn't need permission to start a business. So on I went."

I think we all can take a good lesson from this example of determination.

Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER29> If they have a better spell checker, why tie it to a particular editor/web site?

<comment><USER7> It's a software as a service so it isn't tied to a particular editor/web site.

I chose to support TinyMCE as the first editor because of its excellent plugin API and use in popular applications. I chose WordPress as a first application because of its excellent plugin API and infrastructure for distributing plugins to users. The fact I think it's pretty slick helped too.

<comment><USER30>
      It's a software as a service

So, when you say you're going to open-source it, does that include the backend?

<comment><USER7> Yes, the front-end stuff is already available under an open source license. Something about AtD that amazes me is there isn't a lot of code. The data and the rules do most of the work. (although there is a lot of stuff to manage the training and testing processes)

<comment><USER30> Thanks for the info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Did you make more than you would have consulting over the same time period?

<comment><USER16> I don't think he could have consulted on anything that would be used by hundreds of thousands of content producers (bloggers) around the globe. I could be wrong. But I doubt it.</comment></comment>