You, the freelance programmer, would you pay someone else to write code for you? - <AUTHOR>

Hi there, i am Constantin, software engineer, with a day job and many projects part time (i am looking for the way of entrepreneurship), i'm wondering: would you pay a freelancer to write some parts of code for you, to speed up your project delivery time?
For example, you are working on a project, you're tight in time, and need external assistance. Would you willing to outsource parts of your code to somebody else? For example: the creation of a new payment gateway, a function that needs a complex RegEx you are not so familiar with, or any other independent part of your code that can be easily be done by someone else, to buy time.
Are you willing to do this? If yes, how often you think you'll do it if price is good? What about the code quality or any other concern that might stop you to take advantage of such a service?
Any opinion is greatly appreciated. Let's see how all of us think regarding the outsource of our work :) <comment><USER2> It depends on the complexity of the task that the other is going to do. If it is a straightforward but time consuming, than it will speed things up massively. However, if it has connections with a lot of your critical/tricky parts of your very own code, then you should provide enough background information about your code, or it will just slows the process down.

<comment><AUTHOR> You have right, but this triggers me to the other side of a programmer perspective. Thinking from a test driven development, and creating parts that are easy to mock and test, couldn't be the outsource-process mindset be a one more reason to better write code handling the dependency of the other parts of the system? This way, i think that some critical parts can be easily mocked up in the outsourced code, so the complexity gets easier to manage. What do you think?

<comment><USER2> Mocking the behavior of your code may be as hard as writing the actual code. I mean, you are right, you can feed an outsource code with fakey, but covering all test cases in the mocked up code needs a lot of work which drives us to the point I mentioned earlier: You have to teach them your code.

You are right, though, at some point that aiming to create parts that are easy to mock and test is a good practice. But here we have a question about one -a single freelancer- getting help by outsourcing at some point (which is probably close to the deadline) some functionality. I don't think there are plenty of freelancers out there who put modularity on top of their priority list when writing code. They care about the time deadline, functionality, robustness, error tolerance and at some point modularity shows up in the list. Many one-guy-cares-about-all projects are black box whose features other than functionality are not taken care of by the customer and the programmer.

<comment><AUTHOR> You have right. From what you are saying, i understand that in some ideal conditions, meeting THAT coder might help you a lot. Otherwise, it will just be a loss of time and money. Thank you for your thoughts!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't mind outsourcing some of my work but there are usually factors that stop me:

* Cost: Good experienced devs in a timezone I want to be awake for to talk with cost more than I can afford to pay (generalizing here)

* Management overhead: Good communication, writing good specs, etc such that a dev can complete the work in the way I want it done can be just as time consuming if not more so than doing it myself

* Establishing trust: Farming out work when in crunch mode to an unproven dev and hoping for the best doesn't sit well with me. I would want to establish a working relationship starting with code projects that are small and don't care if they come back crappy (which is almost none of my work at the moment)

* NDAs: Companies generally don't like you granting access to their codebase to people they did not vet/hire themselves

<comment><AUTHOR> You have pointed indeed real situations about outsourcing to a programmer. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In my experience effectively outsourcing of work requires clearly written, tight specifications with exacting testing criteria spelt out. In my experience the combined effort of writing accurate specs and then handling the communication with outsourced programmers is a bigger workload than just writing it myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand. So based on your experience, don't you think that writing down the specs and the expected return, combined with finding a smart programmer available to write code, could be a winning decision? I mean, there is nothing in this process that can be done to improve your efficiency and still be a win-win deal?

<comment><USER4> Finding "smart" programmers is very hard. As @lastofus points out communication and management effort eats into the potential gains.

If you are really serious about leverage then look at MBSE/MDD/MDE/DSL technologies. That is, tools that will take formal specifications and generate code. The old 80:20 rule applies here too, as much as 80% of the code can be generated automatically, the rest by either yourself or the very well paid sufficiently smart programmer(s).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your thoughts. In fact, I am more interested into the how can i make this process efficient in the real world, as a scallable service, without competing with the other freelancing sites that offers full projects development. I am more connected to a programmer to programmer service perspective (getCode.org)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been considering looking for a freelancer to help me on my current project. I'm working on a web2py project and am fairly quick at the backend development, but I am very new to js and am struggling with a lot of the front end stuff I want to do. Part of me wants to just hire that done, but the other part of me thinks I need to tough it out so I learn more.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand. Well than, hope he will do a right job for you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't do any freelance yet (looking to though). I am very backend focused - database design, SQL, Django, server administration. If I landed a freelance gig, I would definitely consider paying someone to make a prettier looking front end than I would (letting me focus on what i am good at). Obviously depends on the requirements.

</comment><comment><USER7> I (and many others) do this. There are a ton of sites to help us do, but I think the most popular are Odesk and Elance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Aren't oDesk and Elance more as a general complete project requests? I mean, you really find them perfect fit for outsourcing parts of your code? Is there any aspect of the process that you might want it different? Personally, I find them a bit to crowd for an immediate need of some coding parts for my project</comment></comment>


Proof of time travel, mind control, and Hell.  with "Holy Purpose" of course - <AUTHOR> https://www.docdroid.net/ZkbjdNU/antagonizingpainxe.pdf.html <comment><USER2> Not sure what to take away from that...</comment>


The 3 most important things I learned from Google (part 2) (from employee #13) - <AUTHOR> http://googler13.blogspot.com/2011/01/3-most-important-things-i-learned-from_26.html

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure if this is 'Operate as if in a vacuum' so much as 'Challenge assumptions', especially if you are entering a competitive market.

Challenge the format, the value, the technology, and the ability of users (both searchers and advertisers) to learn and adjust when the technology _delivers_ more value.

It was a ballsy move. Any number of 'hypothetical' scenarios could have seen it fail massively. Of course, we know that it didn't - and even if it may in your business, there's still good reason to challenge the assumptions you and everyone else are making.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Google completely disregarded the way the entire advertising industry worked and came up with its own solution as if it existed in a vacuum_

Kind of hard to combine this advice with "get out of the building". Read enough startup advice, and everything eventually becomes self contradictory. What's more valuable than advice is knowing when to use it.

<comment><USER4> every piece of advice has to be abstracted out of their context in order to be transmitted to others in a succinct way. So many of the adages you hear: "execution matters more than ideas", "get out of the building", "fail fast", etc. have been abstracted out of their concrete context for when they were conceived.

It's your job to take the abstract in their original context and see if it applies to you and your own context. Some people fail to do this, or they apply it in a completely wrong or different context, and just dismiss the advice too readily. And they make the mistake of never really learning the lesson.

And sometimes, the way you really learn it, to understand the context in which advice comes from, is to make the same mistake yourself. Too bad, really.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The key point IMO was his sentence "What what we knew and ultimately figured out was that we needed to economically incentivize advertisers to want to do a better job advertising to our users."

Which leads to his point "Sometimes to find the right answer you have to look at a problem and work out a solution which completely disregards current standard practices."

</comment><comment><USER5> > It meant that we weren't going to have graphical banners on our site.

The topic and timing of this is interesting. I wonder if author posted on this in response to gmail moving towards image ads?: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2151563>

</comment><comment><USER6> "Operate as if in a vacuum" is taking a big risk: if you revolutionise the industry you win _big_ , if not you die quietly. Most hugely successful people/companies will have taken huge risks early on. Does that mean that taking risk is a good idea?

I'm not saying that this is necessarily bad advice, but I think there is some selection bias here.

</comment><comment><USER7> The trouble is trying to create a new solution without thinking AT ALL about current practices. You, trying to be inventive, are then constricted by the thing they're trying not to be. The current model may have some good points, which could then be worked further through more design iterations, if you were able to see them. In our emotional competitiveness, it's got to be hard to single these out.

Also, I wonder if it would be useful to make sure that some people on the team are familiar only with the end goal and a rough outline of the problem, and not with current practice, ensuring that their brainstorming isn't tainted by the "we need to do something DIFFERENT" mindset.

</comment><comment><USER8> I suppose it reaffirms why Larry is the new CEO. He had business sense all along....

</comment><comment><USER9> It was cool to see them go about challenging the status quo. It is difficult starting something that goes against the established guard, but it provides hope for future startup founders wanting to revolutionize an industry.

<comment><USER10> Except that Google actually didn't pioneer search advertising...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Deleting HN comments - <AUTHOR> How's that one cannot delete old comments? Wouldn't it be more user friendly and privacy aware, allowing users to own their data? <comment><USER2> There are web crawlers that retrieve the data and store it, then making it available to everyone. Once it's here it's in the world, and removing it only from here is pretty much irrelevant.

As the web currently stands, if you put something on it you have already lost control, so framing the question as one of "owning your own data" is misleading.

I've up-voted the question because I believe it's important and should see a discussion of how future systems might be able to handle this, not because I agree with the implicit sentiment. Personally it would be fascinating to see a real world implementation of the "Oubliette" as given in Hannu Rajaniemi's novel "The Quantum Thief."

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree with most of your answer, eg most crawlers discard old data in favor of the latest snapshot, but thanks for taking the time to provide your PoV and inviting to a discussion. Even if some piece of data remains around, one should be in control of his/her contributions and be allowed to delete, that's far from irrelevant or misleading.

<comment><USER3> When you say that "one should be in control of his/her contributions"... you realize that you are "publishing" these contributions, right?

I understand where you're coming from in wanting that control, but I would encourage anyone who feels that they should be in control of what they put on the internet to meditate on the word "publish."

You would laugh at Stephen King if he suddenly demanded that everyone return their copies of the Dark Tower, right? At one point he made the decision to "pull the trigger" so to speak, and publish that work. Like any trigger with lasting consequences, once you pull it, they are there.

<comment><USER4> Publishing something online doesn't revoke your copyright rights of that content, especially if you weren't asked to grant a non-exclusively license for posting it.

<comment><USER3> Sure, but let's remember that copyright enforcement requires work. Are you going to be the one who goes from car to car, peeling off illegal images of Calvin and Hobbes? Out of the kindness of your heart? How's that battle going to work out for you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some random, not organized thoughts on the issue:

On HN, you have two hours in which to edit your comment or even delete it if no one has replied to it. If you aren't sure you want it to remain on the permanent record, you can remove it at that time.

People who think they can erase what they said at will tend to behave poorly. People who think they can change handles with impunity and fool everyone tend to behave poorly. They think they can get away with it.

There are valuable things said in comments that people often want to look back up.

Having a record helps prevent he-said-she-said style of arguments. People tend to remember things differently from what actually happened. A written record can show who actually said what.

If you say it once and someone is stalking you, they will remember it or even keep a record of it. If there is no record of your remarks for you to reference, you may well forget that x, y and z is out there.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Wouldn't it be more user friendly and privacy aware, allowing users to own > their data?

Yes. It's a huge glaring oversight that a community so IT focused and that often complains about "Facebook" and privacy can't even see when it's happening.

But HN is not a utility like Facebook or Youtube, so you can argue, their site, their rules.

But the irony is what is annoying. The idea of dogfooding privacy and digital rights seems lost on HN.

PS Getting Shadowed banned will help stop getting yourself indexed at least.

PPS And the argument other sites might index HN anyway so it's ok to do is so flawed it's delusional.

PPPS The argument that the old info is of value is also "horder" style delusional. We need to stop this idea if absolutely everything is not kept (at the cost of privacy) it matters.

</comment><comment><USER7> Thank you for the pleasantries gentleman. You've all responded in way to avoid any risk of possibly wanting to delete your comments in the future. How very diplomatic.</comment>


Ideas on how to store energy - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/a-world-tour-of-some-of-the-biggest-energy-storage-schemes/ <comment><USER2> This is basically just a summary of the Wikipedia page:

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

... And really misses the important aspects, notably round trip efficiency, cost per kWh, and cost per KW capacity.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, Ars Technica used to have great science and technology coverage. For the past few years though, it has just been... sad. Articles either have gross, embarrassing inaccuracies, or are very shallow.

They do have decent coverage of the space and telecommunications industries though. So they aren't _completely_ hopeless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would add gravity storage [1].

"The fundamental principle is based on the hydraulic lifting of a large rock mass. [...] Water is pumped beneath a movable rock piston, thereby lifting the rock mass. [Later] the water which is under high pressure from the rock mass, is routed to a turbine [...] and generates electricity using a generator."

"[For certain pistons] the storage capacity increases with the fourth power of the radius, r^4. The construction costs however only increase with the square of the radius, r². [...] Strictly speaking, the price per kilowatt hour of storage capacity decreases with 1/r². This is the outstanding competitive advantage of this storage concept."

===

[1] [http://www.heindl-energy.com/gravity-storage/gravity- storage...](http://www.heindl-energy.com/gravity-storage/gravity-storage- overview.html)

<comment> semi-extrinsic Interesting concept, but lifting rock "only" gives you a ~3x advantage over lifting water, which can be lifted much higher.

<comment><USER4> I saw a talk of the inventor a couple of years back. The test site they where exploring they wanted to build a rock piston with a diameter of 250 and a height of 500-1000m (cannot remember exactly, but it was in this order). Since they can lift the piston to half its height that would be 250-500m altitude difference. Not sure what the limiting factor of the height of the piston is, so it might be even bigger.

For comparison the Three Gorges damn has an altitude difference of ~100m [1].

Also, it is much more compact then a traditional dam [2].

===

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Composition_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Composition_and_dimensions)

[2] For anybody wondering why ~3x: density of water 1 g/cm^3, density of rock ~ 3 g/cm^3

<comment><USER5> So...what is that in Megawatt-hours?

<comment><USER6> potential energy = HAM = __H __eight * __A __cceleration(due to gravity) * __M __ass.

Height = 250m

Acceleration(on earth) = 9.8 m/s/s

Mass = pi * r^2 * __h = pi * 125m * 125m * 500m * 3 g /cm^3 = 7.36e13

HAM = 250 * 9.8 * 7.36e13 = 1.8e17

<comment><USER4> Compared to the potential energy of lifted water mass in a dam, isn't the water also highly pressurized under that rock mass? Would that not need to be taken into account as well?

<comment> semi-extrinsic Water is very incompressible, so you don't really get anything in addition to the potential energy. If you decompress water from 300 bar (equivalent to 1 kilometer height of rock above it) to 1 bar (atmospheric pressure) it only expands by 1.5%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hadn't heard of / thought of the thermal storage idea (freezing ice at night - when it's more efficient both cost wise due to cheaper power, and thermodynamically due to lower outside temperature - and then using that to reduce the need for daytime cooling), and it's so obvious in retrospect that it seems like it should be everywhere. Given what a huge amount of electricity is used on air conditioning (~6% of all electricity generated in the US, apparently), this seems like it could be pretty big.

<comment><USER8> Thermal is also useful at the utility level, if you're trying to make concentrated solar work (though it can only really work _okay_ , ultimately). The usual medium is molten salt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The flywheels are interesting to me, especially for their use in vehicles. I wonder what the tests for catastrophic failure looked like though, especially since that Volvo engine spun theirs at 60,000rpm max. That is a _lot_ of energy in a small package.

<comment><USER10> Williams F1 did the most recent relevant work on flywheel energy storage for F1 KERS Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems.

They dropped it from the original F1 application in preference to the batteries that the other F1 teams were using. A few Porache 911 GT3 cars were modified to use the flywheel. These track only cars didn't have a passenger seat, instead the flywheel was there, spinning round at tens of thousands of revolutions per minute, just next to your 'privates'.

More recently Le Mans cars have had the flywheel although nowadays the business is owned by GKN. Williams sold the business after it was not found to be what they needed for F1. Lots of London busses have the flywheel, it has found its application in stopping busses and getting them back up to speed quickly.

How much power does the flywheel give out? The peak power is about 3/5 of a Nissan Leaf. It is designed to be used in series with the main engine or in parallel. In this way the vehicle can be designed to have a much smaller engine with the flywheel taking care of all acceleration. Multiple flywheels can be used.

The applications the flywheel is sold into are specialist where things get serviced properly. I don't think it will ever be in mainstream automotive because we are giving up on ICE cars and if you have got batteries on the car anyway then you might as well use them for the regen.

Now where I think Williams went wrong was in not making a flywheel that happened to be made from some lithium-ion batteries. So that metric tonne of batteries lugged around on a Tesla, imagine how much potential energy you could store if you flew that around at 36k RPM. You could spin the thing up before leaving the house and not have to use the battery for your first few miles.

I would like to see a purely mechanical version of flywheel, so just gears and a clutch to transfer energy to the flywheel when braking and accelerating away.

<comment><USER11> Reminds me on gyrobus

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

"A gyrobus is an electric bus that uses flywheel energy storage, not overhead wires like a trolleybus."

<comment><USER12> Reminds you? It is completely explicit!

> Lots of London busses have the flywheel, it has found its application in > stopping busses and getting them back up to speed quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> First we need excess energy to have a storage problem. Ignoring that, I think some market based mechanisms on the consumption side could gobble that capacity up.

If energy is a big enough input to some process like metallurgy, recycling, computation, etc in times of excess you could drop the price to the base mwh rate minus the cost of a theoretical amortized storage solution + transmission inefficiencies and give incentive to burn that capacity off.

Since we've already invented the economy, we can pass around excess money to use for on demand/scaling consumption instead of building big energy network storage and transportation and eating the cost.

In theory subsidizing scalable supplies with the fixed supplies.

<comment><USER14> We already need to deal with this problem every day as generation sources do not follow daily demand curve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really like this idea: [http://www.heindl-energy.com/media-and- newsletter/videos.htm...](http://www.heindl-energy.com/media-and- newsletter/videos.html)

A gravity storage in form of a piston carved from rock. It's lifted with water that's pumped underneath. The seal is a rolling "sleeve": [http://www.heindl- energy.com/gravity-storage/idea-function/s...](http://www.heindl- energy.com/gravity-storage/idea-function/sealing-the-rock-piston.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> I am a huge fan of the Donald Sadoway team at Ambri. [http://www.ambri.com/technology/](http://www.ambri.com/technology/) Liquid Metal Batteries

<comment><USER17> I'd really like Ambri to succeed. It's not clear if the use of low cost materials for the storage chemistry will produce low system costs. The inexpensive chemistry appears to have led to expensive problems with seals/separators. Similar materials problems have kept sodium-sulfur battery costs high, even though the active storage materials are cheap, abundant, and offer good energy density.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I always thought it was interesting that more of these systems didn't exploit phase changes and the cold side of the Carnot cycle. For example, instead of compressing air, you can liquify it, and then when you want to recover the energy you use it as a heat sink for a heat engine (for example, solar thermal) - in theory, this is just as efficient as adding energy to the 'hot' side of the cycle, and you can expand it out through an engine as well.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm curious if there could be any advantages/disadvantages to using a different, heavier liquid for pumped storage other than water. My physics knowledge is quite poor, but intuitively, wouldn't using something like mercury or iodine create more pressure going down, thus generating more energy by volume, thus requiring less volume, thus making it more practical to use a tower? Surely someone's looked into this.

<comment><USER20> I think that would work, but the challenge would be in finding a denser liquid than water in quantities that would make it useful - and cost effective.

<comment><USER21> And safe. Imagine the disaster if that mercury tower started leaking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there any prospect of making superconducting magnetic energy storage more cost effective? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage)

<comment><USER23> The main point of these systems is to store energy for months without much loss. Considering the cooling costs of the mechanism you mentioned, it only seems viable for more rapid usage situations ie. the middle ground between fast discharging batteries and slow discharging hydro gravity storage.

The beautiful thing about gravitational storage is that it is reversable. So the same pump that used energy to pump the water into a tank 20 stories up can also spin down as water pours through the turbines, acting as a hydroelectric generator as the water is released. Having a single reversable mechanism makes these systems pretty easy to maintain and the only places energy is lost is through friction during conversion and through leaks. They are pretty hard to beat.

The idea of deep ocean pods is similar in execution but instead of working solely against and with gravitys energy potential, the water pressure is used as well...its just more compact..but the orbs will need to be well built to withstand insane pressures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's missing the supercapacitor.

<comment><USER25> I think you mean Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES). Supercapacitors are a different thing.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_ene...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage)

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

<comment><USER26> Rather unlikely that parent confused the two. Supercaps are nice if you don't mind trading their ~<1/5 energy density (mass, volume) of batteries for their excellent cycle count. Clearly not grid scale since batteries barely are.

<comment><USER27> 1/5 takes quite a stretch, or comparing to especially low-density batteries. Maybe in a couple decades they'll be there, but my understanding is that high- end supercaps are currently 25x less energy dense than a lithium ion battery.

<comment><USER26> ~9Wh/kg for the best supercaps, compared to the old (and still standard) lead- acid maxing out around 42Wh/kg. Li-ion maxes out at amazing 265Wh/kg but they are always? small and scaled up by putting many in parallel... and if you damage one it's emergency fire preparedness time.

<comment><USER27> But if you have just about _any_ concern for density, you're not using lead- acid. Not when that's another 5x worse than other batteries.

I'm willing to bet that most lead-acid users would happily switch to cheaper supercaps if they existed.

<comment><USER26> Agreed. When supercap J/$ hits lead-acid levels the J/kg difference wont matter and most people using lead-acid will happily trade 1/4th the energy density for near infinite recharges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Aluminum has also been considered as an energy storage material, specifically one that is easily transported: [http://evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=765](http://evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=765)

</comment><comment><USER29> practical engineering youtube channels talked about swell pressure under buildings, I find this kind of "osmotic" work interesting. Extremely interesting.

</comment><comment><USER26> The [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe) is an interesting device for the compressed air category.

</comment><comment><USER30> What about storing it in fat cells? Bio chemistry storage. Is this possible/advantageous?

<comment><USER31> Not sure about fat cells, but IIRC there has been some work in using algae to generate hydrocarbons from the air. I can't really see "fat in fat cells" being better than alternatives that skip some steps, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> How about a system that loads springs as mechanical energy, do that have those?

</comment><comment><USER33> paging dani fong to weigh in on this....</comment>


Experience report: Making the bSelling add-on to Salesforce & promoting it on AppExchange - <AUTHOR> http://dailykibitz.blogspot.com/2009/03/first-web-based-product-released.html

<comment><AUTHOR> For our first web-based product we (Austhink software) decided to go straight for integration with the web-based Salesforce CRM, and put it up on Salesfore.com's AppExchange marketplace.

We've only just got it up there, but I thought that our experience may be of interest to those looking to play in the "Enterprise 2.0" (i.e. cloud-based, single-sign-on, Saas, mashed-together apps) space.

</comment><comment><USER2> bSelling is designed to appeal to salespeople by giving them a tool that is directly related to the art of selling, not to mention maximising sales and commissions, rather than the chore of data entry and reporting - which is what most CRMs generally excel at. After all, selling is about understanding customer needs and pitching a solution that meets these needs.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's been a fascinating experience developing our first app for salesforce.com AppExchange. Dan's post sums it up really well. Now to see how bSelling performs now that it's out there in the real world.</comment>


Posterous releases blog themes - <AUTHOR> http://blog.posterous.com/posterous-theming-its-here-its-live-and-its-t

<comment><USER2> Microblogs have a very interesting hype cycle: first they drop all the features that normal blogs have accumulated over the last ten years.

Then, one at a time, and to great fanfare, they add them back.

<comment><USER3> We've never claimed to be a microblog. This has been on the roadmap from the beginning. It's very simple: we listen to users and implement features to delight them and make the service more valuable for them.

<comment><USER2> I am definitely glad to see the feature added -- I just think the amount of attention it gets is a little excessive.

<comment><USER4> I've been waiting for it from day one. It literally changes my plans for my blog. My wife loved the backend but hated the front-end looks. It's a big deal to some of us.

<comment><USER5> _literally changes_

What would a nonliteral change be?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, umm, why isn't this a pay feature? I would have paid.

 _Added_ : In fact, I do pay monthly for squarespace which you've now got enough theme parity with (at least through the advanced editor) that a geek like me would pay happily.

<comment><USER6> You're the minority.

<comment><USER7> This would have been a great opportunity for Posterous to gather data to test their hypothesis. It's obvious that there are passionate people on both ends of the spectrum.

Would people actually -pay- for themes? Why not show some users a link to a "Premium Themes" option and see how far down the funnel they go? If the numbers work out, launch themes as a pay option. It's always easier to go from paid -> free than the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Finally. Seriously, I've been waiting literally months for this. So long I switched to tumblr in the end, sadly...

<comment><USER8> just noticed it supports _tumblr_ themes. how clever is that? A+

<comment><USER5> That's brilliant. It would make converting much easier. Now if only it had Tumblr's social features...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was wondering how dcurtis was doing it. This is great news. Just in time for me to start a blog.

<comment><USER10> Could you expand on that comment somewhat? Does <http://dustincurtis.com> make use of posterious somehow?

<comment><USER11> <http://blog.dustincurtis.com/> uses Posterous.

<comment><USER10> Ah, thank you. I would love to know how he approaches creating his other website and how he creates his graphics. I love is style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The huge response Posterous gets from their fans for every micro feature they release is because they already have a fan base. The more community or users you have who depend on your service, the more they want a feature. If you start off with an empty blog platform with every feature wordpress has, nobody really cares. OR, if you start off with one really distinguishing feature (Post by Email) and you instantly gain a huge user base who like that, they wait in anticipation for all the small features you can find elsewhere.

Posterous has an awesome foundation to build off of, and because of that they have a real advantage. They can get feedback from a lot of users, including requests for features. What to build? That is easily solved just by listening to what people have to say. They can validate features to build, and are justified in their time by the constant requests for these features.

As soon as they release a feature, they know it's going to be big since the community has been asking. And when it's there, the community feels that they were just given what they've been wanting. Nobody blames them for not having it in the first place, knowing this is a growing app, and are glad to be early adopters.

These guys (garry and sachin) are in a great position, and it's nearly impossible for them to NOT build a great product with all the feedback they are getting.

</comment><comment><USER11> _Javascript is not enabled on Posterous pages for security reasons. We'll be introducing ways you can add your own javascript widgets soon._

I wonder how good their protection is…

<comment><USER13> I can't find it at the moment, but there's a very cool javascript sandbox system at Google Code somewhere.

I believe it creates an iframe with a separate domain, writes the js into it, and communicates via message passing/anchor etc.

The net result is that you can execute unsafe js, in a sandbox on your page and expose an API to it.

<comment><USER14> <http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/>

It's not an iframe, it's a capability-based filter which provides more security than an iframe can. A lot of sites use it now that it's reasonably fast...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> While I understand _why_ they had to introduce theming, I'm worried about the simplicity that I have come to love in Posterous. I just hope Posterous blogs don't become the next MySpace pages.

<comment><USER16> Judging by the mostly sane tumblr pages, this won't be an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interestingly, it seems that if you remove the Posterous branding box from the theme template, it still gets added back in during page rendering.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wish they had JavaScript support in themes.

<comment><USER19> XSS support isn't a feature.

<comment><USER18> Both Tumblr and Blogger support JavaScript and they're doing just fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can now use my posterous blog as OpenID

</comment><comment><USER21> I'll stick with the minimalist default.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think they should give the chance to choose a name for the url instead of just using the email.

<comment><USER23> You can do that: firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER22> Thanks. I wanted to create a blog with name "1-world" but I got an email saying that

"We were unable to post your email:

create a blog to site: 1-world.posterous.com because this site does not exist."

<comment><USER22> I see that they let you choose the custom url after you create the blog.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bullshit jobs: why they exist and why you might have one - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/2018/5/8/17308744/bullshit-jobs-book-david-graeber-occupy-wall-street-karl-marx <comment><USER2> There was an interesting discussion of an article about the same phenomenon a few days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389)

</comment><comment><USER3> If there are so-called bullshit jobs then how come there are still jobless people all over the world.</comment>


U.S.'s $13 Trillion Debt Poised to Overtake GDP - <AUTHOR> http://preview.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-04/u-s-s-13-trillion-debt-poised-to-overtake-weigh-down-gdp-chart-of-day.html

<comment><USER2> It's interesting that many people seem to have accepted that endlessly taking on more debt is a good idea. Debt has to paid off and you can't just take it on endlessly. I wonder what the future looks like if the United States continues to take on more and more debt. Right now we can't really pay it off ever so we're stuck servicing it forever. Seems like we're giving our children a much worse world than the one we were born in. When I was born the debt was pretty manageable and over the course of my lifetime it exploded to something that's basically never going to be paid off.

<comment><USER3> _Debt has to paid off and you can't just take it on endlessly._

That is simply not true. Governments are different than you and me. James Galbraith:

[http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra- klein/2010/05/galbrait...](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra- klein/2010/05/galbraith_the_danger_posed_by.html)

"Government does not need money to spend just as a bowling alley does not run out of points."

"Since the 1790s, how often has the federal government not run a deficit? Six short periods, all leading to recession. Why? Because the government needs to run a deficit, it's the only way to inject financial resources into the economy. If you're not running a deficit, it's draining the pockets of the private sector. I was at a meeting in Cambridge last month where the managing director of the IMF said he was against deficits but in favor of saving, but they're exactly the same thing! A government deficit means more money in private pockets."

"The way people suggest they can cut spending without cutting activity is completely fallacious. This is appalling in Europe right now. The Greeks are being asked to cut 10 percent from spending in a few years. And the assumption is that this won't affect GDP. But of course it will! It will cut at least 10 percent! And so they won't have the tax collections to fund the new lower level of spending. Spain was forced to make the same announcement yesterday. So the Eurozone is going down the tubes."

"On the other hand, look at Japan. They've had enormous deficits ever since the crash in 1988. What's been the interest rate on government bonds ever since? It's zero! They've had no problem funding themselves. The best asset to own in Japan is cash, because the price level is falling. It gets you 4 percent return. The idea that funding difficulties are driven by deficits is an argument backed by a very powerful metaphor, but not much in the way of fact, theory or current experience."

<comment><USER3> I'll reply to myself because I've just explained this sentence to myself:

 _Because the government needs to run a deficit, it's the only way to inject financial resources into the economy._

The central fact of economics is: The economy grows. The number of people on earth is still growing. The productivity of individual workers is still growing. We are capable of making more stuff in every year than we did in the previous year.

Now, suppose the supply of money were finite. But the amount of stuff being made keeps getting larger. So, every year, the price of everything goes down, because there's an ever-larger supply of pizza and beer but a constant amount of money.

But this creates a serious problem for the economy. Because now we've got deflation. And that produces a really big incentive to save. Too big an incentive. Everything will be cheaper tomorrow, so every individual benefits by burying money in the backyard and spending as little as possible.

But as people bury more and more money, the economy shrinks, because there is less and less money to spend, and everyone is trying to hang on as long as possible without spending anything. You end up with lots of people sitting, unemployed, with tools idle, and resources idle, and money buried in the backyard, staring at each other and waiting for someone to make the first move. Because, thanks to deflation, the first person who spends anything is a relative loser. And now your economy has deadlocked.

And that's why the government always runs a deficit, and why the inflation target is always higher than zero. The government prints money to make sure that the supply of money stays good. This produces some amount of inflation, of course, but the growth benefits of liquidity outweigh the inconvenience of having to do something more interesting with your money than bury it.

(Why don't more people understand this? Partly it's because the growth of the economy is a historically new phenomenon, dating back only about 150 years. Before that, as far as we can tell, human economic production per capita barely grew throughout millennia of history:

[http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History- Princet...](http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History- Princeton/dp/0691121354)

The other cause for misunderstanding is that if you, say, define "gold" or "silver" as equivalent to money, and your society's economic productivity grows, but society's ability to dig up gold or silver grows _exactly as fast_ as overall productivity at all times, the currency magically manages itself. Because of this, for a hundred years and more of the Industrial Revolution the world managed to struggle along with a gold-based money system. But, of course, the gold standard was abandoned when people finally figured out that this process is very haphazard -- indeed, it cannot be controlled. You can't discover gold overnight, but sometimes you need more money in the economy overnight. Like now, for example.)

<comment><USER4> These are great points you're making. And I think the way you are making them is very intuitive. It is impossible to default on a currency you control. You just print some more space-credits. I think you sum up why you _should always be_ printing space-credits nicely.

Reminds me a bit of what Paul Krugman has been saying over on his NYTimes blog: <http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/>

> Why don't more people understand this? Partly it's because the growth of the > economy is a historically new phenomenon, dating back only about 150 years.

I personally think the reason people don't understand this is because they think that a government should be run the way a family should: save and don't live off credit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is worth to point out that one is a stock (debt) and one is a flow (GDP), and the right way of comparing them would be by taking the net present value of the flow, or comparing the cost of servicing the debt per year to GDP (so debt servicing cost climb to x percent of gdp).

<comment><USER6> According to this NYT article (<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/business/23rates.html>), debt service was $202B in 2009. It is projected to go to $700B in 2019.

To put that in perspective, $500B more than covers what we spend on education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course, this assumes that our interest rates stay the same. I don't see how this is possible as our debt/GDP rises. I fear we are seriously choking ourselves.

<comment><USER7> I don't think we are choking ourselves. Loaning money to the US government means the government can use all its resources to pay you back. We have not tapped any of those resources yet; taxes in the US are pretty low compared to the rest of the developed world.

Also keep in mind that the government can loan money at a higher interest rate than it can borrow it at. (I am not sure how much income this generates, though.)

<comment><USER8> Higher taxes might actually lead to lower tax revenues or a tax revolt. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

<comment><USER9> We're not so far down the Laffer curve that raising taxes would lower revenues, and it's unlikely we will be anytime soon.

<comment><USER10> Moreover, the Laffer curve is mostly an absurdity.

Martin Gardner's improved depiction: [http://books.google.com/books?id=oXEaTdstD7gC&pg=PA133&#...</a>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A dumb question - isn't the GDP a per-year figure whereas the debt a total figure? ... so doesn't it simply mean that if all GDP goes to paying off the debt, it will necessarily take more than 1 year. That pay off period is increasing and about to cross the 1 year threshold, but I'm not getting the "debt cycle" concept .. in other words what is the difference between 1year- delta and 1year+delta?

</comment><comment><USER12> Like anything else in America we're going to need a crisis for anyone to even consider doing something to resolve the problem. It seems to me that a drastic cut in military spending, raising the retirement age to 70, raising taxes on _everyone_ , closing tax loopholes, and an across the board cut of 5%-10% should be a good start to get this resolved in the next 20 years.

<comment><USER3> _raising the retirement age to 70_

That's idiotic. The official US unemployment rate is nearly 10%. The U6 unemployment rate, which is probably closer to what one actually means when one asks "how many people are looking for work" is twice that high. One in every four Americans who wants a job does not have one and we're going to raise the retirement age? What earthly good will that do?

<comment><USER13> I'm guessing he means "raise the age when folks begin collecting social security benefits"

<comment><USER3> Same difference. When you take away money that older people are living on, you force them to look for work. Which, in this economy, will tend to make them unemployed.

I suppose great-grandma can always move in with her grandkids. Of course, the grandkids are also 25% likely to be unemployed.

Naturally, there is a subset of people for whom Social Security is a needless luxury because they are living off of private investments. The proper way to target these people for additional funds is to nudge up the marginal tax rate on those private investments. This is difficult to accomplish, of course, because people with lots of money can afford to buy votes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the difference today is that everyone is using fiat currency, and the markets for commodities potentially useful as a medium of exchange (gold, oil, etc) are too volatile.

We've already been living with slow inflationary growth, despite the nonsense spewed by the government. In 1985, a single wage-earner could support a middle-class family. In 2005, two parents need to work, mostly to pay a mortgage and pay a few minimum wage earning daycare workers.

</comment><comment><USER15> Drill baby drill!!!!!!</comment>


Buy a bracelet – plant a tree Arbo bracelet - <AUTHOR> https://indwww.indiegogo.com/projects/buy-a-bracelet-plant-a-tree-arbo-bracelet#/ <comment><AUTHOR> For every bracelet purchased, one tree will be planted in your name!</comment>


How This Poster in a Women's Restroom at a Bar Cleverly Combats Sexual Assault - <AUTHOR> http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/how-poster-womens-restroom-bar-cleverly-combats-sexual-assault-174370 <comment><USER2> No, these posters only combat bad dates (but only for woman).

Guess what, men also go on bad dates and wish they could just go away from them, but they are either too polite to just leave or they accept they come out as idiots and just end it. They don't have your 3rd choice of getting "Angela" to pretend for you to get you out of the situation without accountability or social decency.

<comment><USER3> if only someone would think of the men!

<comment><USER4> Well said. Men are _never_ on bad dates or in awkward social situations they'd like to get out of gracefully. Why, the very idea is just absurd.

<comment><USER3> You're right, it is such a problem that someone just hasn't mused up a solution for it yet.

I'm glad this is getting the attention this issue deserves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So now "Bad/awkward dates" = "sexual assault".

</comment><comment><USER6> Good job totally fucking up their discreet little process for helping women out of awkward situations by posting the fucking code word on the fucking internet.

Y'all are A number one assholes to the max.

</comment><comment><USER7> An overwhelming amount of sexual offences are committed by men so it makes sense to have this in the bathroom for potential victims. Sadly it's true that some women will use this to get rid of bad dates.</comment>


When is it stealing? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WhenIsItStealing.aspx <comment><USER3> Never. It's never stealing. It may be infringing, douchey, objectively wrong, illegal, despicable, plagiarism but, unless it deprives you of your copy, it's not stealing.

While I understand the rhetorical usefulness of calling copyright infringement stealing, it's simply not accurate and nitpickers will be right. Again, they may also be annoying, myopic, or outright stupid, but they will be correct.

However, the article is much better than the title would imply so if you were just irked by the headline, don't skip it.

<comment><USER4> In an economy where attention is the currency, someone takes your work and uses it to gather attention to themselves -- attention that would otherwise have been yours.

How is that not stealing?

<comment><USER5> This argument is the same as the one MPAA makes about lost revenue due to piracy, which in general is bullshit, because there is no guarantee that those people pirating stuff would have ever paid for it if pirating wasn't possible.

So the answer is easy - you can't talk about stealing "attention", when the "attention" you're talking about never existed in the first place.

<comment><USER6> And you can't sue someone for lost wages when those wages have yet to be earned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Stealing exists at a culturally-defined threshold. One must be brought up (or assimilated) with an understanding of what is 'property' and what is not. Then, one has to also understand what is 'ownership'. Most of us learn this stuff implicitly, from the people around us, but in a globally connected world, this is much more difficult.

I know this first-hand because I grew up in poor Appalachia, in the US. There, property and ownership and rights were much differently understood than in metropolitan Virginia where I live now. Even though we were under the jurisdiction of local, state, and national laws regarding such things, we followed the norms of the people around us. But, as I became assimilated into the urban 'middle-class', I had to re-learn these things.

I think this is why file sharing in the US became so popular in the 90s/2000s. Kids (and adults) who were otherwise raised with an understanding of US 'property rights' were nonetheless stealing media. The media that was being shared just didn't have a cultural foundation as property, to them.

Anyway, there are a lot of people on the internet that don't necessarily have the same understanding of property and rights and ownership than us. Some people just don't know that what they're doing is bad and/or illegal.

<comment><USER8> >I know this first-hand because I grew up in poor Appalachia, in the US. There, property and ownership and rights were much differently understood than in metropolitan Virginia where I live now

This sounds fascinating, could you elaborate on some of these differences? Both from a real property (land) and object property (trinkets, devices, food, etc) perspective?

<comment><USER7> It was more of a shared, collective kind of property model. People generally knew which things that people had and who currently had it. Generally, one would 'borrow' a thing indefinitely, until someone else 'borrowed' it. It wasn't uncommon for someone to 'borrow' a car, for example. You would just take it, if you needed it.

It worked well, in that small culture of people. But, it certainly presented a lot of challenges for me as I left that area. It took me a long time to learn that that wasn't accepted behavior for middle-class urban people.

For example, in college, people would come to my dorm, and I'd give them my stuff, not expecting that I'd get it back. Tensions would flare up when I'd 'borrow' other kids' stuff and then lend their stuff out to others. It took me awhile to understand that that was frowned upon. I also had to learn that I couldn't just take stuff. I was used to going to other people's houses and just eating their food, taking video games, music, etc. - Yeah, the middle- class urbanites didn't like that very much.

Even now, I have strange understandings of property. I'm very likely to just give my stuff away, to even people that I don't know very well. Most people who witness this think it is very, very odd.

<comment><USER9> It's quite common in rural areas. I grew up in west TN, and the exact same sort of situation exists there. I've lived in Alaska for a bit, and it's ubiquitous there. (e.g. you _never_ lock a cabin, as someone might need to get in)

A good example is chainsaws. Where I'm from, you heat with wood. Therefore, having a functioning chainsaw is a necessity. New chainsaws (or good ones, anyway) are fairly expensive, so you invariably have several ancient ones around that you're coaxing into functional shape. When you don't have anything working, you just go to a neighbor and borrow one. If someone asks for one, you loan them one that's working, even if it's the one you borrowed from your neighbor. The point being, you owe someone "a functioning chainsaw", not "that particular saw". It's effectively a communal pool of tools.

To this day my parents usually don't pay when they buy groceries. They just write their name on the back of the receipt and pay the accumulated bill whenever they get around to it. Just a few years ago, nowhere took credit cards, so the stores all extended credit that way. People need to eat, and often don't have cash until the end/start of the month. Similarly, it's changed now, but growing up, the gas station left its pumps on at night. If you needed gas after the station was closed, you just pumped it and dropped in the next day to pay the bill.

At any rate, you're very aware that you're a part of a community, even if your nearest neighbor is several miles away. People are fiercely independent and individualistic, but resources are treated somewhat communally.

Of course, a lot of that is changing, but it's more true the more you move towards the "fringes" of society, in my experience.

I knew folks who kept someone posted on the ridge to shoot at any car they didn't recognize (the sheriff literally called first when they had to respond to something or serve a warrant). At lot of methheads and a lot of folks on the run, but you'd never think twice about loaning them your truck or saw.

<comment><USER10> That sounds really nice, actually.

So, where does it fall over?

<comment><USER9> It falls over as soon as people stop trusting each other.

As soon as you get to the point where you don't know everyone, folks get less trusting. People function very well in "village-sized" groups, in my experience, and there's a big change in behavior as soon as you get to the point where you don't "know" everyone. (Behavior doesn't necessarily change in a bad way, but there is a big change.)

Or that's my $0.02, at any rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When you use the word "stealing" to describe anything other than shoplifting or burglary it instantly starts endless conflicts with each party with it's own definition of what is stealing based on their own definition of what is property and so on.

I would like to describe the situation as cheating in the game without trying to going down into the rabbit hole that the digital goods opened(or expanded, since before the digital era we already had goods that are valuable other than it's material and building value. Books, Paintings, Designs, Blueprints and more).

So, you are producing something with intention to gain money or maybe just reputation but often you already use other peoples work to do that - <USER2> is made out out of thin air.

Then somebody is building some other product with some intention like making money, gaining reputation or something else and his product is using your product and maybe many other people's products. Let's say a website with AI that awesomely curates the content of other people.

In this situation everybody produced a valuable product but the other guys product's success is on your expense.

Ideally you would have an arrangement where everybody wins. I will give an example from the movies and music industries:

a)When you have the arraignment it's iTunes store. b)When you don't have one, it's the Prate Bay.

or Defense industries:

a) When you have a contract it's joint venture and you exchange some information to build some product. b) When you don't have one and you spy on each other to create similar product its espionage.

or personal relationships:

a) When a couple are also seeing other people with the consent of the other one, it's open relationship b) If there is no consent, it's called cheating.

It's not about stealing, it's about managing the resources in coordination with other parties so that everybody wins. Otherwise often one party wins in expense of the other, many time everybody loses in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER12> > _What are your thoughts, Dear Reader?_

Honestly? Like you wrote, everything's going to be copied anyway, better don't let it cause frustration. It's just information, something we've never controlled successfully before the digital age and haven't given up trying to control on the web _yet_.

If we didn't try to (pointlessly really) fight over attention from search engines and revenue from annoying ads where we ought to put our content, it wouldn't be such a big issue and the world would probably a better place if people published stuff because they thought it would matter to do so, not for ad revenue.

<comment><USER13> _the world would probably a better place if people published stuff because they thought it would matter to do so, not for ad revenue_

1: How much of the content you read every day is created by people who are paid to do it? (many links on HN go to articles by paid reporters on news sites, or are commentary on such articles by amateur bloggers)

2: How much of the content you rely on every day that _isn 't_ paid-for content costs an absolute fortune to maintain and would disappear if there wasn't a corporate backer and/or financial incentive? (like Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow)

My internet would quickly become a very small and geocities-like place.

<comment><USER12> I have no idea how much of the content I read is paid for (and how). A large part of it is certainly summaries written by people who aren't paid to do so (copied, digested and filtered for me).

> _My internet would quickly become a very small and geocities-like place._

It's funny that you named FB, Twitter and SO as important sources of content you "rely on every day". Who actually writes the content and who gets paid for it? Do you really think it's impossible to get the same amount and quality of content from the same people without some (sometimes evil) corporate entity provding servers and bandwidth? (think P2P)

<comment><USER13> _Do you really think it 's impossible to get the same amount and quality of content from the same people without some (sometimes evil) corporate entity provding servers and bandwidth? (think P2P)_

Sounds like begging the question and reacting to a point I wasn't making, so let me answer a question you're not asking by asking a question you may not answer: Are there _any_ such communities _today_? Your question seems to imply that you believe such communities are possible. Technologically I have no doubt that that's true. Hey, many BBSs were created, run, staffed, maintained by volunteers back in the day. Large swathes of the original web were created by universities without profit.

However, technology isn't the whole story. In order for things to shift where it's _likely_ "to get the same amount and quality of content from the same people" (this point assumes a site with the breadth and universality of Facebook), the world would have to change to such an extent that those people _couldn 't_ (or for whatever reason _wouldn 't_) use Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow. That world simply does not exist today.

To beg the question again, do you think my mother (who counts as one of the same people whose content I'm interested in, and by extent my analogy includes _anyone 's_ mother) would happily use bittorrent-based systems tomorrow to replace her use of Facebook today?

<comment><USER12> > _Are there any such communities today?_

Yes, there's Wikipedia and there are IRC channels (and to some extent still, Usenet).

> _[...]the world would have to change to such an extent that those people > couldn 't (or for whatever reason wouldn't) use Facebook, Twitter, Stack > Overflow. That world simply does not exist today._

Why would the world have to change? Did it have to change for FB to exist and siphon users off of myspace? We just need the product / the infrastructure / the volunteer work to get some stuff done. It hasn't been done yet, but it's not an otherworldly idea.

> _do you think my mother [...] would happily use bittorrent-based systems > tomorrow_

Which part of it would make her unhappy? Would she miss the corporate entity behind it? The decentralization? Or do you assume that FB's (highly complex by the way) UI is something that cannot be replicated in a sufficiently recognizable manner?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is exactly why I came up with the idea of the Pirate License. [http://retromocha.com/pirate-license.html](http://retromocha.com/pirate- license.html)

Not everything makes sense to put out as Creative Commons. Sometimes you want to actually sell something like software or an ebook, but you don't think it makes sense to go after people torrenting your stuff and giving it away for free.

My philosophy is there can still be an exchange of value. So, with the Pirate License, you make a version of your product explicitly licensed under the Pirate License which calls those who steal your product pirates, and asks them to pass it along to other pirates or potential customers.

I think it makes the expectations for piracy much more clear and should lead to better outcomes.

</comment><comment><USER15> For multiple reasons including those stated by mrtksn, "stealing" is an unsuitable term - it invites an ideological digression on copyright, property rights, law and justice.

However, the situation hanselman describes is certainly copyright infringement, and in my opinion he ought to look at the possibility of legal action. It might not be worthwhile, but might be satisfying and set a precedent for control of ripoff sites (modulo jurisdiction and other practical issues).

On the principles involved, IMHO copyright infringement can be justified and even admirable and virtuous in some contexts - but commercial exploitation of others' works, without the creators' permisssion, is not among them. In a just world Hanselman would get the all the profit the infringer realized plus the full cost of suing.

What's most egregious here is the relationship of economic power and enforcement of rights. Big, evil copyright-hoarding companies, that do not create anything but exploit the creations of others, are able to enforce their legal rights to an extreme and excessive degree, including interference with civil communications, taxes on blank media, false takedown orders and other abuses - while individuals subjected to exactly analogous, or even worse violations have no recourse. It's a two-tier system that deserves little respect.

'Scuze me for ranting.

</comment><comment><USER16> It is never stealing, but unlicensed use or license violation!

Steeling would be taking away copyright ownership from author.

</comment><comment><USER17> The whole problem comes down to definition of property. What is it, really?

People don't consider content to be proprietary. We treat a blog post in the same way we treat speech. Users ain't gonna pay for that. Period. Some of them may, but no the majority.

<comment><USER18> Exactly. When i hear a discussion in public, i won't ask for permission if i want to use or reproduce part of it elsewhere. I would give them attribution (i don't like to pretend that i came up with some idea when it isn't true) but that's all.

The attitude of content creators is quite schizophrenic. On one hand, they want to spread their work as far as possible, on the other hand, they want to limit access to it. The source of this stance is of course their business model often based on copyright law which links the financial reward of the author with the artificialy created copying limitations. Replace this with some other model where content creators reward is not depended on the number of copies sold or on number of page hits, but rather on some more rational measure like the amount of time and effort put into the creation itself, on the popularity/reputation of the creator and quality of his previous works. Then, this 'copying is stealing and stealing is bad' attitude disappears because i believe that no sane author would realy object against spreading of his works.

<comment><USER19> Your argument loses a lot of weight when you consider that since we're talking about stuff on the Internet, most of the examples in OP could just, y'know, _link to it_. But that wouldn't let them get ad revenue for someone else's work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > When is it stealing?

Never.

A good read about IP:

[http://mises.org/document/3582/Against-Intellectual- Property](http://mises.org/document/3582/Against-Intellectual-Property)

</comment><comment><USER21> It's stealing when a company takes your hard-earned cash (not "copies", but "takes") and doesn't deliver a product you actually enjoy using.

</comment><comment><USER22> Call me non typically British but it's pretty obvious why they didn't ask. Even if 100% of people they asked were fine with it (Scott seems to imply he is) probably less than 10% would bother to respond, that then knackers their startup instantly. "Better to do something now and apologise later than ask for permission and not get it" as I think a saying goes.

Better attribution would have been good, and possibly reaching out to original creators asking them to opt out if they'd rather not be involved. Offering something in return (the embedded player for relevant articles) could have helped grease the wheels. Ultimately, if they get bug they may not need massive support from content creators like Scott but they do need not to be on the wrong side of them.

<comment><USER23> That's why creative commons licenses are useful. If the content they want to use is under CC, they don't need to ask because the terms are perfectly clear.

There's also fair use, but IANAL and I think that they should definitely ask (because of the "all right reserved" part).

<comment><USER19> Copying entire works (even a blog post counts) is not fair use.

<comment><USER24> There have been several cases where courts ruled that copying an entire work was fair use. Substantiality is only one of the considerations. For example, in Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, the court ruled that even though they had copied the entire work, it was OK because that's how much they needed to copy for their intended (otherwise legitimate, commercial, and transformative) use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I clicked through hoping this would be about physical objects... I've always wondered, if I leave a bike unchained and someone takes it, it's considered stealing, right? But what about littering a box of cigarettes on the floor, and someone taking the last one in it, did that person just steal your cigarette?

Totally off-topic, so I apologize, but I've always wanted to read into this topic a bit more...

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm conservative about words. I object to using "literally" to mean "not literally." When I do, I'm invariably taken to task: "words change!" "language evolves!" "it means what people use it to mean!" "dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive!" "get with it, you curmudgeon!". But the use of "theft" or "stealing" here seems perfectly natural to me, even after reading the legalistic objections to it. And, certainly, people use these words to describe copyright violation, all the time. So why, in this case, does everyone suddenly join the usage police? In not once place on this long page of comments do I see the usual descriptivist lament. Where are my old friends who should be popping up to explain that "stealing" means copyright violation because people use it that way?

</comment><comment><USER27> This came up quite recently with the twitter account that posted historical pictures without attribution. Arguably they're showing people wonderful photographs that they would otherwise not see, however they were basically lifting archive photos and publishing them without giving any nod to the photographers or the institutes that provided them.

[http://petapixel.com/2014/01/24/make-money-twitter-ignore- co...](http://petapixel.com/2014/01/24/make-money-twitter-ignore-copyright- creative-credit/)

The attitude in most of these cases is innocent unless you can prove you own it and complain enough.

Extreme example - is Google stealing from you because it aggregates your content, stores it, makes it easily searchable and then serves adverts to make money from it?

</comment><comment><USER28> How does Umano make its money? Do they charge for the app or play ads? Sell data?

I've always felt it questionable ethical territory to take somebody else's work, slap ads on it, and pocket the money. "Aggregators" have been doing that forever, though.

</comment><comment><USER29> _When is it stealing?_

As soon as you have to ask, "When is it stealing?", it's stealing, simple as that.

As much as people would like to believe otherwise, all the rest is hand waving, semantics, and window dressing.

<comment><USER30> You can assert that, but plenty of people have an over-entitlement and will claim stealing for anything. Not saying that the author is being over- entitled, but just asking if it's stealing shouldn't somehow elevate things.

For one, this completely destroys fair use, even for parody. Just claim something was stolen. It'd kill any innovation driven by competitor enhancements: stealing.

Heck, some people felt that Kindle's text-to-speech was stealing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Full disclosure. I'm one of the Umano cofounders, I figured it's time to jump in here.

There are many things mentioned in comments that I'm not going to try to cover, but I will cover the basics. I'd be happy to answer any direct questions.

The vision behind Umano is simple. We want to provide our users with a new way of consuming content. Many times it's the content they wouldn't otherwise read. How many times have you come across an interesting article that bubbled up in your twitter stream, you added it to your Pocket, and you forgot about it forever and ever. Reading is a heavy task. Reading takes time and your full attention. You can't read while you are cooking breakfast, getting dressed, standing in a crammed Muni bus, or riding on your bike to work. Listening is passive. Listening is easy. Listening allows you consume longer pieces of content with less effort, while doing something else. Umano is here to offer great content in a different medium.

We started Umano with no licensing deals from any publishers (big or small). Sure, having licensing deals would be amazing, but "Even if 100% of people they asked were fine with it (Scott seems to imply he is) probably less than 10% would bother to respond, that then knackers their startup instantly." as @robinwarren said above. Now that we are bigger and more mature, we have deals with many large publishers. However, at this point it wouldn't be scalable for us to ask for permission from all bloggers that write amazing content that our community would like to be voiced. If the content producer doesn't want their content on the platform, we will happily take it down. As we grow and start to make money, our mission is to do revenue shares with content owners. Until then, the benefit that we bring to many bloggers is distribution. Popular articles often generate a significant number of listeners. Finally, one interesting point about Scott's article that was narrated - it was actually requested by one of our users through a new "Submit Any Link" feature that we recently launched as an experiment on Android.

Now to attribution. We never claim that the content we voice is original Umano content, and we always provide attribution. We link to the original article, and always include the name of the publisher and the author in the narration. Scott mentioned that we do it poorly on mobile web and will fix that shortly.

<comment><USER32> It's this part that concerns me primarily.

"However, at this point it wouldn't be scalable for us to ask for permission"

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> With this line of thinking you'd never get things like YouTube or Uber. Switching to opt-in would basically imply shutting down so that's not really an option. I suppose they could default to computer-generated reads and wait for content owners to request a human-read version. We're likely in a gray area here but it's hard to get too objectionable (except for the part where Umano claims some future ownership).

</comment><comment><USER34> I think the problem is time, not the law. I read this article a while ago, and it really opened my eyes as to how much, despite massive effort by the copyright lobby, society is changing away from the idea that copying is theft:

[http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/the- generational-d...](http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/the-generational- divide-in-copyright-morality/)

</comment><comment><USER35> my Facebook stream has lately been filled with people copying and pasting 27bslash6 posts to their buzz feed clones.

i don't know, is them keeping the real names, such as david thorne in them without reference to the original fair use?

in academia this would be considered plagiarism i recon(but i may be wrong), while quoting the source wouldn't.

at the same time someone below said by the definition of the word it's not stealing because they don't take it away from you. but in a legal sense that statement might be incorrect since if they're getting more buzz they could be stealing the attribution. just like edison never really stole a light bulb, but he very well stole the fame of the light bulb.

</comment><comment><USER36> s/stealing/copying/

<comment><USER37> Because we need to hear this more often:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU7axyrHWDQ)

Copying is not theft!</comment></comment>


"Julian Assange's internet link has been intentionally severed" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/787889195507417088 <comment><USER2> We've moved most comments to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12725427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12725427).

</comment><comment><USER3> I was reading this post when it was still number 11 on the front page, went for lunch and came back, and now it is number 67 on page 3 ...

Does anybody know why this happened? During this last hour the post went from 91 to 140 points so it's not like it wasn't popular.

<comment><USER4> This story is now 7 hours old with 164 points, but on page 5.

I count 6 stories on the front page that are older than this with less points, e.g:

      9. Virus stole poison genes from black widow spider (bbc.com)
         155 points by kawera 10 hours ago | hide | 25 comments

Is HN censoring?

<comment><USER5> It's political, so it's probably being flagged and demoted for that reason.

It's probably triggering the flamewar detector, and getting demoted for that reason.

There's probably no need for active censorship by the mods to explain the observed results.

<comment><USER6> Of course the existing moderation policy constitutes a background of censorship, so your claims should be evaluated within that contest.

<comment><USER5> In the sense that all systems of deciding what to publish and how are censorship, sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [deleted]

<comment><USER8> That's from four years ago.</comment></comment>


IPv6 Performance Revisited - <AUTHOR> https://blog.apnic.net/2016/08/22/ipv6-performance-revisited/ <comment><USER2> Few charts to look at:

20% ipv6 adoption worldwide: [https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html)

and per country data (Greece at 33%): [https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per- country-ipv6-adoption&tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption)

<comment><USER3> Belgium at 52%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some day my ISP may support IPv6 natively, but today is not that day. I think I'm approaching the 10 year anniversary of my HE tunnel broker account, and that's just sad.

<comment><USER5> IPv6 is one of the things that Comcast actually does right. I can't believe how slow some of the other ISPs are at adopting it.

<comment><USER4> Shoving IPv6 into the DOCSIS3 spec was really forward looking for the industry.

Meanwhile Verizon's only visible contribution to getting IPv6 on FiOS has been to delete their IPv6 on FiOS FAQ.

It's a crying shame that a service born in 2005 (10 years after RFC 1883 was finalized!) apparently has no transition plan for IPv6. Even if it wasn't enabled at launch, the network should have been designed for v6 support from the start.

<comment><USER6> Kind of reminds me of Python 3 migration, no one was willing to do it until running 2.7 became bigger and bigger hassle.

And even then people rarely looked ahead and try to make their code forward compatible.

At least it looks like Py3 was finally accepted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You hove no idea how much I would love to adopt IPv6 in my home network, but I can't find an affordable switch that handles IPv6 routing (or, if it does, can do it in hardware). This is really going to be a big bottleneck for adoption in home and small business markets, even if CableOne supported IPv6 I couldn't deploy it in my aunts shop without a rather large investment - meanwhile a dumb EdgeRouter X and managed TP-Link switch get the job done exceptionally well with IPv4.

<comment><USER8> Mikrotik's home products are pretty inexpensive and all support IPv6. I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for (L2 switch, L3 switch, or L2 switch + router). L2 switches obviously are IPv4/6-agnostic, and L3 switches are typically overkill for a home network, so I'm assuming L2 switch + router. Mikrotik has a gigabit switch with a decently performing (IPv6-capable) router in the same package for $60 [1]. I've been running my whole home network (gigabit LAN + WiFi, 50 Mbps IPv6 WAN via HE) on one of these [2] which go for $130.

From your other comment it seems you are actually looking for an L3 switch setup. You can get wire-speed routing with Mikrotik's CCR series, but those start at $425 [3]. Not sure what your budget is.

[1] [https://mikrotik.com/product/RB750Gr3](https://mikrotik.com/product/RB750Gr3)

[2] [https://mikrotik.com/product/RB962UiGS-5HacT2HnT](https://mikrotik.com/product/RB962UiGS-5HacT2HnT)

[3] [https://mikrotik.com/product/CCR1009-7G-1C-PC](https://mikrotik.com/product/CCR1009-7G-1C-PC)

<comment><USER7> > L3 switches are typically overkill for a home network

My home network consists of a little more than a handful of computers that need internet access, I've also got a couple dozen VM's, FreeNAS (with direct 10Gbe links to the virtualization host), and a IP phone system. It's not some enterprise network, but I still hammer the crap out of my network and take full advantage of the light L3 features available in my TP-Link switch.

I've got 12 out of 24 ports currently in use on my switch, and I'm looking to add more when I finally manage to buy a place - worst case I can split the clients off to a separate switch and use some 10Gbe uplinks, but right now that accounts for a grand total of 1 port going to my wireless access point.

$500 is in my price range, but finding something with enough ports gets expensive really quick - and it gets even worse if I need to get 2 switches (one for my lab, one for client access) plus a 10Gbe-capable router to handle traffic between them :/

<comment><USER8> Well I would not call that a "typical" home network ;)

MT's 10 Gbe-capable routers range from $500 [1] or $750 [2] for a single 10 Gbe (with 8 or 12 1 Gbe ports) to $1100 for two 10 Gbes [3]. Depending how much work you can actually push into a dumb switch I can see how costs add up.

[1] [https://mikrotik.com/product/CCR1009-7G-1C-1SplusPC](https://mikrotik.com/product/CCR1009-7G-1C-1SplusPC)

[2] [https://mikrotik.com/product/CCR1016-12S-1Splus](https://mikrotik.com/product/CCR1016-12S-1Splus)

[3] [https://mikrotik.com/product/CCR1036-8G-2Splus](https://mikrotik.com/product/CCR1036-8G-2Splus)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We definitely need some kind of legislation, banning IPv4 after some point of time. Say 2020. Or Maybe 2025.

<comment><USER10> We definitely need to keep legislation the hell away from network protocols.

<comment><USER11> Not necessarily. We could require by law that all ISPs provide an "industry standard" network protocol defined by a group of major internet companies.

This is how the EU defined the phone charger standard (and the industry board of phone manufacturers recently decided to switch the legal requirement from microUSB to USB-C)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: If you could hand-pick an Advisory Board for your startup... - <AUTHOR>

...who would be on it?<p>Specifically people who will help you on the product, NOT business, side of the startup: who've built great tech / proved to be exciting marketeers / done something new with social apps/community / will be awesome help in building something people want. <comment><USER2> This is a purely fantasy question, right? In that case, off the top of my head: Peter Norvig, Fabrice Bellard, Bill Joy, Alan Kay, Chris Lattner (LLVM). These are just people who are my hacking idols and have a long history of actually getting extremely impressive stuff done.</comment>


Provision up to 10,000 IOPS for Amazon RDS Database Instances - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/09/new-high-performance-provisioned-iops-amazon-rds.html

<comment><USER2> This should solve lots of scalability headaches for many companies! My gut feeling is that the DB is the most common bottleneck for many web-services and I/O is the most common bottleneck for the DB.</comment>


Goal: %100 Free Time - <AUTHOR> http://tortillasinbed.com/post/26229642463/free-time-is-my-goal

<comment><USER2> The author wants:

 _time that isn't owned by someone or something else beyond my control_

Depending on how you look at it, no time is ever beyond your control (except arguably something like incarceration).

If you don't want to work one day, you don't have to work. What's that, you have a full-time job? You still don't have to work.

I think the real issue is that, if you have a full-time job, not working if you don't want to can have undesirable consequences. But I think these consequences are often overstated, or rather avoided to a degree that is not in line with their actual effects.

 _I also choose to keep my commitments and responsibilities low._

I'm not sure what to think about this either. Part of me says, good on you if you can manage it. But then, there is a difference between an external commitment and an internal commitment. You can have "commitments" as an employee or employer or boyfriend or husband, but unless you let these commitments decide your actions, you aren't really committed. I don't know if that makes sense.

Who has more time under his own control: the man who chooses to go to work to develop software every day because he finds it to be an efficient use of his time to acquire money, or the man who struggles to make a living wage off passive income because he's attached to a misdirected notion of "free time"?

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to feel the same way, and now I feel that sentiment is pretty naive.

In our culture in the US responsibility is typically associated with adulthood. The more of it you have the more "grown up" you are. And you've probably heard phrases like: _A boy becomes a man when a man is needed._

And there is a good reason for that. I've come to find that responsibility is essential for self-actualization as well as maturity. There is no success in relationships, in business, or in life without responsibility. By definition if you have no responsibilities, if nobody relies on you, then you don't matter. If you disappeared nothing would change and nobody would notice.

Also responsibility is found to be very psychologically rewarding. This part of the reason why people love having children and doing volunteer work. Being selfless is intrinsically fulfilling.

\--

Now I share in the sentiment that there isn't much value in being responsible for stupid crap like paying bills or creating TPS reports. But being able to choose your responsibilities (a noble goal) is not the same as avoiding responsibilities (immature and selfish).

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I realize I might have appeared 'immature' in my aversion to responsibility, but my natural fear of it comes from experience. Mainly from witnessing my dad be driven into the ground by responsibility by his business, his family and obligations. The same has happened to friends who have saddled themselves with so much, and so young. Kids, cars, houses, etc. None of these people are happy, and that is where my fear stems from.

To clarify, I am mainly looking to avoid responsibilities that can be easily avoided. I do still have responsibilities though. I work, have a steady relationship, a pet, friends and family, etc. so, so far I am doing well in avoiding unneeded responsibility, but still enjoy the small amount that I do have but am not looking to add any at this time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think a lot of people have the idea that it would be great to be 'so rich' to have 100% free time. I haven't met many people who could handle that though. People need structure, pressure, responsibility. It's easy to misread this blog post as written by someone who is very young and naive. I don't think that was the idea, it just reads like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand that it does seem naive and misguided, especially since I often found myself bored when younger and free of responsibility. I'm realizing that I was trying to tackle too many points with this post, and none were delivered well. I wanted to emphasize the importance of reducing your responsibilities so that you still have free time. I also wanted to make note of the negative perception of having free time. Like its a symptom of failure or lack of success.

Thanks for the comment and reading.

<comment><USER4> > I also wanted to make note of the negative perception of having free time

Yes I agree with you there. I'm not sure if it's something mostly American because only my American friends have that; if you say you took time off they look at you like you are slacker. Even asking what you did in the weekend; if you say 'nothing' it is met with quite a lot of negativity.

<comment><AUTHOR> > if you say 'nothing' it is met with quite a lot of negativity

Exactly. Because, in reality when you say 'nothing', you really didn't do 'nothing'. But if you didn't do anything substantial or productive then it's almost shameful to say what you really did.

Also, to your initial comment, my thinking behind the post had nothing to do with money with regard to being 'so rich' I wouldn't need to work. Enough money to maintain the small amount of responsibilities I have taken on, and to enjoy myself is all that is needed. Nothing more.

<comment><USER4> Yes, that's what I meant with my previous comment :) I don't think you meant it quite that naive; it just reads like that!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Best practices for CI\CD in robotics enviroments - <AUTHOR> Hi,
Any recommendation for applying a CI\CD pipeline for robotics development? (drones in particular..)
Specially I'm interesting on assuring safety and exploring multiple real-world scenarios...
Thanks. <comment><AUTHOR> anyone?</comment>


Ask HN: SaaS Pricing Model? Plans or charge per user - <AUTHOR>

I am trying to figure out the pricing model to my new SaaS app. It is a B2B app similar to Yammer and Basecamp.
Yammer charges $5 per user, while Basecamp has plans (similar to X users for $Y). The Basecamp model would allow me to make "more" money off of the smaller customers, while the Yammer model would allow me to make more money off the the larger customers.
I was wondering what you think about these pricing models and which one you think is best to maximize profit(not user count, etc)? <comment><USER4> Sean - I always ask the following two questions first: "who told you they would pay money for this?" - which is a good place to start to figure out the types of companies interested in your offering. And then "why would they pay money for this?" - which helps flesh out the value perception of your offering for those types of companies.

The thing is, if you can't accurately answer those questions, you should go back and try to. That might mean seeking out potential customers and talking to them. There is a whole movement around this - Customer Development - <USER2> is all about product development that is aligned with customer needs. Turns out it applies to pricing, too.

You might find that you will have different types of companies with different value perceptions. This is where Market Segmentation will come into play and you could - as some of the other comments said - end up with pricing plans for different segments that are themselves quite different. Nothing wrong with that. However, as a small startup that might be taking on too much, which means you'll have to make that very difficult decision of whether or not to focus on a single market segment and dominate. Not easy - but nothing worthwhile is, right?

The problem with talking to potential customers is that you can't just ask them what they'd pay! You have to figure out what problem they have, how they want to fix that problem, how you can help them fix it, what value they see in having the problem fixed, how they'll buy (to the point of others here), etc. All of that goes into determining a price for _your_ offering. Remember, Pricing is Marketing.

So what Yammer charges, or how 37Signals priced Basecamp is not relevant here until you fully understand who your customer is, what their value perception of your offering will be, and how & when they'll buy. Using those companies as a reference point is really only useful to see what others are doing out there, but what they are doing may - or may not - work for you.

That said, I Googled you (awkward, I know) to see if I could find what you're working on....ScoopBase is what I found. Based on your tag line "Your team has questions, give them answers" it would seem that there might be a need for some "super users" to answer questions / edit responses and perhaps unlimited "view-only" users. Perhaps you would price based on how many "super users" there are, or maybe based on the other features of your offering. Perhaps some companies – large or small – would rather pay based on certain features and the number of users should be irrelevant. Or not. Those are questions you need to get answered from your potential users. Pricing - no matter what - <USER3> down to the willingness to pay of the customer. The metrics you use to build your pricing must be valuable enough to the customer for them to pay.

Good luck to you on your new venture!

</comment><comment><USER5> What do you think the bulk of your customers will be, small or big companies? Small business tend to like static prices (plans) because it is easy to budget. It also makes it easy to offer 3/6/12 month subscriptions which can help lock in customers.

If you price per user, but not everyone at a company needs the product, they will tend to restrict the use of the product to minimize the expense to them. With plans, you still have this, but to a lesser degree I believe.

</comment><comment><USER6> Depends. Precisely you need a histogram of customer/company. So you will know how many companies have <5 customers, how many 5-10 etc. Using this info you can build a quick model to decide how you want to go.

There are other factors though like how fast the companies are to adopt new software. The big ones are slow.

</comment><comment><USER7> It will give you maximum profit if you charge both a base price for each month and certain amount for each user.

</comment><comment><USER8> You could do both - e.g. 5 users for $x, 10 for $y, $z/user thereafter</comment>


A Few Synthesizing Superoptimizer Results - <AUTHOR> http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1252

<comment><USER2> I feel like super optimizing llvm code isn't the best idea.

I feel like the way other superoptimizers get good results is by taking advantage of really strange interactions of some of the less commonly understood opcodes. LLVM doesn't have those funky opportunities.

<comment><USER3> It's not either/or, adding superoptimiser-derived optimisations at the IR level doesn't mean you can't also add different ones at the backend.

<comment><USER2> My intuition is that stacking general super optimizers will be at best equally or less effective than just running a machine specific one for twice as long.

<comment><USER4> The advantage of performing superoptimization on IR level is that you have explicit data dependencies (due to SSA form). Thus you don't have unrelated instructions in between. Figure 1 of the cited Optgen paper [http://pp.info.uni- karlsruhe.de/uploads/publikationen/buchwa...](http://pp.info.uni- karlsruhe.de/uploads/publikationen/buchwald15cc.pdf) shows an example that can be optimized with IR-based superoptimization but not with a machine-specific one.

In summary, no approache subsumes the other one. Thus, it is worthwhile to have them both.</comment></comment></comment></comment>