Sustainable Earth – A curated list of all things sustainable - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bizz84/Sustainable-Earth <comment><USER2> Already too political. Greenpeace's focus on GMOs is bordering on absurd. Would recommend Cradle to Grave as a great book and primer on Sustainability.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback. Indeed I would like to keep politics out, however with these things it's more like a scale of greys than black and white.

I believe some of the articles I included are informative for the general public. I'm aware that opinion articles can be biased by the political views of the authors - the reason for including them is that they may be easier to digest and get the point across more easily than scientific publications.

As this is a crowdsourced effort I hope there can be a healthy discussion about what should go in here and what shouldn't.

Also, one of the reasons for creating this is to showcase new innovative products that may otherwise find it difficult to get traction / visibility.

<comment><USER3> I would strongly suggest _not_ putting weight into accusations of political bias. So long as the information presented has strong empirical support.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have removed Greenpeace and 350.org. I'll try to keep politics out of this as suggested.

<comment><USER3> That's precisely what you _shouldn 't_ be doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh boy it's going to be fun maintaining this project.

<comment><USER4> Don't even think about having fun, unless you have empirical evidence that it can be fun.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Offer HN: I'll critique your website and suggest ways to make it awesome - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone, I've been UX designer for 10+ years and have launched a service called Office Hours to provide advice for improving the design of websites for a reasonable flat-fee.  Wether you are looking to add some polish to your site or due for an overhaul, I'd be happy to give you some tips and point you in the right direction.
I'd like to build out my public facing portfolio, and this offer will allow me to do this.
To receive a free webpage review, simply choose the "Public" option when submitting your website and $50 (the cost of a single page review) will be deducted from the final price. I'll complete the free review in 10 days or less.  You can submit your webpage here: https://www.dustinkirk.com/officehours/
This offer will be good for 48 hours or until the queue is completely full.
Thank You, -d- Dustin Kirk <comment><USER2> Our marketing site is launching next week, any possibility to get a review for that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, go ahead and submit it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I dig this. I'll give it a go... where are you located anyway?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm located in San Diego, CA</comment></comment>


The Series A crunch is hitting now. Have we even noticed? - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/28/the-series-a-crunch-is-hitting-now-have-we-even-noticed/ <comment><USER2> I don't see any reason for the doom and gloom here. Series A funding isn't a lottery with a random 1 in 5 chance. The 80% of companies struggling to raise Series A are the ones without meaningful revenue or user traction. Why do they deserve to get funded?

A $1M seed round should be more than enough to get a SaaS business cash flow positive or get a consumer product to a meaningful user base. If you have failed to get there on a seed round, the answer isn't "give me more money", it's "the market is telling you to try something else".

$1M can be 2 years of runway. That's a long time to figure out what you need to do to get to product-market fit.

Most successful businesses don't have anywhere near that level of funding and are still able to make money on more constrained resources.

<comment><USER3> waking up to the reality that 80% of economic activity is unproductive sounds pretty doom and gloom to me.

you think the other 20% will just absorb that labour?

<comment><USER4> > 80% of economic activity is unproductive

The parent comment is talking about 80% of _companies struggling to raise series A_ , not 80% of the entire economy or even the entire startup ecosystem.

<comment><USER5> This is a good point:

global economy>us economy>tech economy>vc backed co's>series A needed co's>series A not avails to co's etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can I make a somewhat contrarian prediction. Feel free to trash it. I'd like to hear where I went haywire with my assumptions.

1- The real glut is an abundance of capital. With interest rates depressed & a stock market fairly valued, & that's not counting the immense wealth generated in other parts of the world by the commodity bubble. There are very few remaining outlets for productive capital. Say what you want about the valley now, it's still a great investment _destination/asset class_.

2- If the returns on the seed side start to dip. What would stop stop seed investors to graduate & become (smaller) VCs. After all, Investing is their trade, they're not going anywhere.Slowly, by capillarity, Seed investors will become series A, Series A will rise to being series B...& so forth. With the 500 investor limit being lifted. Maybe IPOs are going to be pushed even further down the cycle..until profitability is established & business models flushed out.

3- Crowd-funding is only getting started. It'lll get worse (kickstarter awareness growing, slowly but surely displacing game publishers for example.) & with the imminent enacting of the JOBS act, even more money will flood the Valley, just look at what AngelList, FundersClub, CircleUp are doing even before the law takes effect. All of this results in capital that's being displaced & that's going to look for new outlets.

4-Startup capital needs are collapsing. ( Exhibit A :Amazon announcement today.) Bootstrapping wil soon become a viable option (Just how much would you need to recreate Instagram today.)

What if we're witnessing a strategic & irreversible shift in favor of entrepreneurs & an expansion of innovation centers beyond northern California . Money after all is a commodity, it's a miracle that a particular geography & an investor class were able to quasi-monopolize the world's innovation for the last 15 years.

<comment><USER7> I believe pg summed it up nicely on this exert:

 _It's just getting easier to raise early rounds and harder to raise later rounds," says Y Combinator's Paul Graham over email, hewing to the latter view that this has merely become startup life in the Valley. "Investors will pay to see how an experiment turns out, but they are brutally unforgiving, if it doesn't turn out well… What used to be an obelisk is now becoming a pyramid."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a pretty dramatic article. I think I have read other articles on pandodaily where it feels like the author is told "to write a story on x _and how it is bad_ " and then they shoe horn words to make it so. (for example the VCs having smaller angel funds.)

Has anyone ever – in recent memory – declared that raising a Series A was anything other than challenging? Not only this, but people have been saying "it's going to get really bad in 6 months" for _years_ at this point.

And it kind of makes sense. If you're a $250M venture fund, why not throw $250K cheques around and see what sticks: but then if you're going to put a partner _on the board of a company_ you're going to judge this company very very closely.

I'd hope that if investors actually believe there are companies worthy of raising an A round and unable to due to a lack of funds, someone would start the appropriate positioned fund.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's true that raising a Series A is always difficult, but it's also true that there are far more seed dollars available than ever before. It seems to me like this has to cause some sort of shock to the ecosystem, even if the total volume of Series A dollars hasn't decreased.

<comment><USER9> Agreed here. I'm not really convinced that there's a series A crunch so much as there's a seed funding glut.

Anecdotally, it seems easier than ever to raise notes on a team, a dream, and a powerpoint deck. And the amounts being raised seem higher than ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What I find most interesting were Maples comments on only about 10 'good' companies a year. If I think about the early majority and late majority segments, this makes a lot of sense to me. Friends in those segments are just barely starting to use and understand Instagram, let alone, transportation start-up X. I wonder if we're at a point where good ideas don't work simply because the market is up against the we-can-only-learn-so-many-new-things-per- year wall. Of course that would be born out by a lack of series A's for those companies. Right idea, wrong time. Makes you kinda want people to open source their failures, so that in the future, you already have a place to start from on an 'old' idea.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if this is a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. Is this "crunch" happening to every startup, or is it more concentrated on a specific type of company?

It reminded me of the Fred Wilson post a few days ago (<http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/11/what-has-changed.html>), which makes me think it might be more of a problem for consumer startups than enterprise/B2B.

</comment><comment><USER5> _"The tech industry creates roughly 10 awesome companies per year," he says. "That's independent of how much money VCs have or how many companies funded. There are 10 awesome companies a year, and they will get funded. It's pretty simple." He says if a company is going to be successful you can see it in 18 to 36 months. If you don't, that company simply shouldn't get to take up any more of the Valley's rich resources — whether that's talent or people. Sorry._

\-- The Finite theory of invention. Or appeciation.

<comment><USER12> What'll be fun is when one or more of those roughly 10 awesome companies _don't need to get funded at all_ in the traditional sense, thanks to the JOBS act coming online soon.

My previous startup pursued a Series A last year (and failed), and I'm completely forgoing VC for my current startup. Instead, it'll be JOBS act and then straight into Second Market.

Ironically, we're raising almost twice as much money this time for a product my last venture _already included_ amongst a panoply of other tech developed over a 10+ year period.

Sometimes, it feels like the market is almost completely irrational in the small, and only seems to approach rationality over huge numbers of ventures.

All in all, I'm very happy with the JOBS act. Instead of making a bunch of already wealthy people on Sand Hill Road I just met even richer, I'll be able to spread that wealth around far, far more than I could have otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This smells like probably-awesome news. Less bullshit spending dollars that can go to not-bullshit... more talent to hire for companies better-prepared to make a serious go of it.

<comment><USER14> As always, we're facing a nonlinear system and it's unpredictable whether this will be good or bad.

Less money for bullshit is good if it means more money for substance, but it could also mean a decrease in engineer salaries, which means a future decline in power for those who are more fit to have it.

<comment><USER13> Sure, that's definitely fair. It seems to me though that developer salaries haven't risen nearly as sharply as demand. Add to that the actual effects of the entre-boom with regard to the average developer's wealth and it starts to look like a lot more people are working a lot harder, for a lot less.

My gut is that maximizing the actual-value creation per-developer is something to strive for, and ought to be good for everyone involved.

<comment><USER15> Not sure how to measure developer demand, but as a "valley-insider" I regularly observe directly engineers being paid about 40% more today than they were in 2008. Also, I recently heard of a mobile developer getting a base salary of 900k, but that's hearsay so who knows..

In any case developer salaries have risen very sharply in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Something I've been curious about that wasn't entirely discussed, but briefly touched upon in the article: Convertible notes are normally assigned some value upon a more 'official' valuation being made by some VC firm. What happens, then, if the company generates enough cashflow to bootstrap their way to profitability and ends up not needing nor taking VC money?

How are the initial convertible notes valuated and equity assigned, in this case?

<comment><USER17> Since they are debt, they accrue interest and the note is due and payable in full at some point down the road (say 18 months). If the company successfully bootstraps, they need to be in a position to pay back the note + the accrued interest by the end of the 18 month period.

If the company can't pay back the note, they need to negotiate with the investors to either extend it or to convert it at some mutually agreed upon valuation

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Hands down the people who are most concerned about this trend are the angel investors."

Wrong. This is not an investor's problem. This is an entrepreneur's problem. The angels and VCs will shake this off as all of the combined seed dollars invested over the past couple of years are a relative fart in the wind compared to the greater startup investing arena, which doesn't become really capital-intensive until at least the Series A, and more often Series B stages.

It's the entrepreneurs who are (or at least should be) most concerned. Not the investors.

Edit: here's some cold, hard stats on the Seed VC phenomenon witnessed as of late: [https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/seed- investm...](https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/seed-investments- series-a). Seed investing continues to be a very real, growing trend, and yes - many startups will be left in the dust come Series A time.

<comment><USER19> Where's the problem? Anyone care to name high-growth successful seed companies that can't raise an A? Sounds like a great opportunity. I'd love to hear about that.

Oddly, nobody has named any specific great companies that can't raise an A. Wonder why that is.

<comment><USER20> This comes to mind -

<https://appharbor.com/page/appharbor-status-update>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Maybe we are reaching a point where we have more solutions than problems that can be solved with just with apps in general. Maybe this is why hardware is getting more attention.

</comment><comment><USER22> _"What used to be an obelisk is now becoming a pyramid."_

Off-topic, but what does this mean? (curious non-native speaker)

<comment><USER23> The shape of an obelisk has a narrow, constant width. The shape of a pyramid has a width that is wide at the bottom, and narrow at the top. The 'y axis' of the shape is how far along in the startup life cycle the company is. The width is how easy it is to get funding at that point in the cycle.

Here's how I interpret it:

It used to be that the ease of funding was relatively constant at all points on the life cycle. Now it's easier to get funding at an early stage, and harder to get funding at a later stage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Isn't this just a simple supply and demand issue? With the cost and barrier to starting a startup becoming so low and abundance of incubators and accelerators there are so many startups who are chasing the same Series A funding. So every VC is looking for the next DropBox or AirBnB to invest.

</comment><comment><USER25> The fact that companies aren't going to Series A is because they're raising more in Seed funding & the ones which are going to Series A are ones which investors are doubling down because, those Seed investments have worked & they don't want to waste their resources.

</comment><comment><USER26> "What used to be an obelisk is now becoming a pyramid."

\-- One of the best analogies I've heard in a long time

</comment><comment><USER27> Related article on _The Verge_ : [http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/27/3696704/funding- drought-m...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/27/3696704/funding-drought- means-fewer-frivolous-startups-but-less-creativity)

</comment><comment><USER28> It's not a big deal: startups are supposed to fail. Fortunately for most of the failed entrepreneurs, they'll be able to get a job at one of the countless startups that aren't failing :)

</comment><comment><USER29> to be honest I haven't seen this. the lessons are same as always: stay lean, stick to the customer, iterate to market fit. if you do all three of those things your seed investors are quite likely to back you again (if you chose wisely among seed investors!), giving you more time to find that market fit. there's always growth capital available for companies that have found market fit.

so, yes - there are many companies flaming out, but those companies would have flamed out anyway. for good companies with good teams, i'm seeing multiple "seed" rounds which sometimes add up to what would be considered a pretty healthy series a. any of those folks if they're worth their salt will back you again (at the same valuation if need be), as long as you fullfil all other expectations, giving you plenty of time to achieve product market fit, at which you bring in multiple VCs, bid up to high valuations, and lock in the gains for your team, angels + early seed investors.

with the increasing ubiquity of angellist and ramp up of crowd-funding activity, there will be tons of capital for some time to come. is it hard to raise follow-on financing? fuck yeah. who said it had to be easy? was it "easy" to get that first check?

the real story/"news" in all of this is that the combination of readily available risk capital with the dramatic increase in capital efficiency by companies means that many, many successful companies will be created, grown to profitability, and exited without any participation from a non-seed VC.</comment>


How many HNers have dabbled in arbitrage? - <AUTHOR> I'm kind of curious to know how many HNers have spent some time making money / learning arbitrage and other revenue generation schemes similar. Obviously hacking isn't always in the sense of creating something great for people to use.. <comment><USER3> Kinda a cross between arbitrage and outright windfall, but it is a fun story:

Does anyone remember Battletech? Due to a catastrophic error in a logistics system somewhere, a bookstore in Ogaki City once received a shipment of English Battletech CCG cards. Battletech is originally an off-brand knock-off of a Japanese series, the license was never very popular in Japan, this particular product had recently died due to lack of demand in the US, and geeky English products are not hot sellers in semi-rural Japanese agricultural/manufacturing communities. So the bookstore tried to liquidate their stock, and put the sign "100 yen" (then about $0.80) on the box. Battletech packs of cards retailed for about $3 each prior to going out of print. Score, right?

On investigation, the unopened box was not a box of $3 booster packs. It was a package of $10 starter packs. And they were first edition. And the store, not having been able to move even their Japanese CCG cards, was _not interested in opening the retail box_ so they were selling _all the packs in the box meant to be opened by the retailer_ for 100 yen.

I told the cashier that this was likely a pricing error. He either didn't understand what I was saying or just didn't care. So I bought a few boxes of boxes, for 100 yen apiece. Then I found a Yahoo mailing list for fans of the trading card game... and promptly send them an offer which was about one step less unlikely than that from my forgotten grandfather from Nigeria.

A few spirited rounds of negotiation later, I went to the Post Office, dropped approximately half the profits on shipping (I was irrationally worried about being perceived as being a scammer, so I went for the expensive option), and cleared about a student loan payment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great story! A little bit of common sense can go a long way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I spoke to some guy in (I think) about 2003-2004 who was selling SEO services by taking existing sites, having them built on top of Mambo CMS which he'd outsource using elance for $2000-3000 and sell them back over $60,000 - <USER2> used some form on his site like "how much money do you think you'd make if your site came up around 1-2 vs where it is now?" and he'd price accordingly. He had very little IT skills if any. Part of his secret he was reluctant to give up: submitting to DMOZ.

He lived in Queensland and has probably retired there too long ago. Shifty bastard.

</comment><comment><USER5> I paid my way through my first college degree with a site where I repackaged another company's services at a markup. People were willing to pay much more than they were asking if only the service were marketed differently, and this company was happy to have the business with me doing the advertising work. My markup was almost 40% and I was pulling in 20-30 customers a day from Google AdWords alone.

Growing my web apps to the same income level as that site was much harder and took much longer.

<comment><USER6> Did you change the company's name/logo as well?

Can you elaborate please?

<comment><USER5> I operated under my own name/logo, the customers did not know someone else was filling the orders, they only communicated with me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I actually haven't done any until recently. I just sold a musician FB likes at 100%+ cost I paid to get them. Might pay the bills..

</comment><comment><USER7> This is how I've been paying my bills while I'm working on my startup (it's much better than consulting/freelancing). It's not as easy as it sounds. It took me almost a year to figure out the whole process (it's more than just software development), but I now just need to maintain my site and process orders. It takes about 2 hours of work a day.

You also need some sort of cash flow (or credit cards) to do any sort of arbitrage and you have to learn to not worry about the unknowns.

As an example, if you are arbitraging services and your service provider does a bad job, you are responsible for cleaning up. This may mean returning the customer's money (and getting your money back). But, after doing it for awhile, you can find good people to work with and reduce your risks.

<comment><USER8> I know that there is probably a reason for not doing that, but could you elaborate on your business a little?

<comment><USER7> I resell services. I found a couple of good providers after months of testing (and failing) and advertise on many sites like Craigslist. It pays the bills, but it's something I don't want to do forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have actually done this a few times in several different markets. For instance, I used to buy domains in the GoDaddy Auctions for $x and resell them for $xxx+ instantly to other webmasters/domainers. I actually ended up giving the method out for free including the core details and the services used to find the domains which would give the biggest ROI. The method still works today.</comment>


Homo Naledi 3D Scans - <AUTHOR> http://www.poweredbyosteons.org/2015/09/homo-naledi-3d-scans-available-on.html <comment> tefo-mohapi This is cool.</comment>


Synthetic sensors: General purpose sensing (PDF paper by Gierad Laput et al) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gierad.com/assets/supersensor/supersensor.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> ACM CHI 2017 presentation (with live demo) at [https://youtu.be/hpxUrvTltJI](https://youtu.be/hpxUrvTltJI)</comment>


Show HN: Leanweb – toolset for generating web components based web project - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/elgs/leanweb <comment><USER2> This looks very awesome!</comment>


Brighter inks, without pigment - <AUTHOR> http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2014/03/brighter-inks-without-pigment

<comment><AUTHOR> The work is being done by my labmates, so I can answer questions.

The killer application here is color e-ink displays, since these structures are purely reflective, they should let you make an apparently brighter display by sending back all of the light of a relevant color.

Also on Gizmodo: [http://gizmodo.com/scientists-discover-the-key-to-making- pai...](http://gizmodo.com/scientists-discover-the-key-to-making-paint-that- never-1546474602)</comment>


Food bloggers give restaurant owners indigestion - <AUTHOR> http://skunkpost.com/news.sp?newsId=2442 <comment><USER2>
        > brief description
        > Forget the pictures, enjoy the food!

I really like the trend of TL;DR version appearing at the top of "normal" posts. It really helps in searching / filtering articles. I'd like one-line informal abstracts to become a norm.</comment>


Ghost: The Future of Blogging (Node.js) - <AUTHOR> http://tryghost.org/ <comment><USER3> It looks rather good! But I do wonder if I'm the only person who was more than a little put out once I found it was the "hostage" model of open source - i.e. pay us enough money and we'll release this. Of course, there's nothing to say you can't do this, and I do applaud people finding ways to make OSS pay. But this way leaves a funny taste - it feels somehow counter to the spirit of the thing.

Possibly my ire was raised a bit further by the fact that I found that out in what seemed a slightly bait and switch-y way - "Try this!" _click_ "Maybe later if you pay us!" Hmmmm.

Those gripes aside, it looks pretty.

<comment><USER4> Stuff takes time to make, and time costs money unless you are independently wealthy or have a trust fund.

This looks gorgeous, but many of these features are non-trivial to implement.

<comment><USER5> It's fine to ask for money, but they could solicit money without declaring themselves open source yet, with a promise to do so in the future, or they could actually release the source now, and continue to solicit money. Instead they are claiming to already be open source but not actually opening anything. I think that's what got people a little put off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Err, about that..._

Could anyone tell me what's written at the bottom of the dialog box that pops up when you click the _"Ready? Try Ghost"_ button, please? My computer is a 10'' netbook, and the box is outside the visual range of my screen. Unfortunately, the scrollbar scrolls the grayed out background, not the box itself, so I have no chance of doing anything other than hitting the back button.

(To give them credit, what I _can_ read is: "We've built a prototype, and it's working really well! But there's a lot to do.")

Is there a page I can access directly to try Ghost out, without having to go through that box?

<comment><USER7> No, that page just points to the Kickstarter project. You have been tricked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Right now the leading open source new media publishing projects are driven by PHP communities. It's easy to see why, with a well-established and vibrant ecosystem, the PHP community is strong. But, it comes with its limitations, and recently other technologies have taken the lead on innovation._ [1]

Which limitations are that? I'm curious as to who their user is here. My grandmother or my friend who is a developer? For my grandmother, Wordpress suits perfectly. For my developer, Jekyll.

I feel like this is solving a non-problem here. The UI looks great, but then why not just stick it on top of the Wordpress admin?

[1] - <http://blog.tryghost.org/>

<comment><USER9> For delivering a _CMS_ , your server side is totally tech agnostic. The major innovations left are all client side.

If anything, people's major complaint with Wordpress is that it's a horrible tangle of spaghetti. What's the state-of-the-art for Node.js web frameworks?

There'd be a lot of irony in launching an aesthetically pleasing CMS admin panel overtop yet-another spaghetti engine that is hard to augment.

<comment><USER10> I've got high hopes for this. The currently popular web framework for Node.JS is Express (built on top of Connect), which has built on the success of stuff like Sinatra and Rails, and (dare I say) improved on them in some areas. Express/Connect uses the concept of middleware which helps to make defining functionality extremely modular and encapsulated, so hopefully together with the active JS community, plus the excellent package manager npm, should make it really easy (and not too spaghetti-like) to work with a Node.JS based platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am not sure I like this trend of people kickstarting things that they actually dont need money for.

For example, these guys are web developers and designers, what could possibly stop them from building it and putting on the web? Hardly the 25K pounds they are asking for.

I think the product is awesome, but I dont understand what you need the money for especially if they are boasting Open Source and not for profit.

<comment><USER12> Well if you give your product away under a liberal license like MIT, then you either need a lot of subscribers to your paid hosting plan or you have a problem.

Therefore, I like the trend of kickstarting open source project:

\- the initial phase where you have to work hard and yet don't have a lot to show gets funded

\- you are forced to think about it in terms of a product to attract backers

\- there's less incentive to pivot the hosted platform into a user-tracking and data mining outfit later.

<comment><USER11> Please don't be contrary and think your process through.

They do a kick starter today, what about tomorrow? not for profit doesn't mean they dont charge fees, I am sure they will charge. I am not belittling their efforts but they have all the required skills and enough financial ability (seems like they have held jobs previous to this) to pay for hosting till that can become a reality.

Your supporting arguments sound like, they were made up to back your purely contrary conclusion.

<comment><USER12> I don't get your point. They develop the software as open source. Free as in beer|speech. They develop a hosted version. This service is not free.

I see no contradiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Title changed again for this post? It should clearly say this is a link to promote their fundraising. There is no actual way to try this service.

</comment><comment><USER14> Seems like we have come full circle and now blogging is again the new "it" product. I would be interested to see this compete against Medium in the space (though they have different use cases). Would be interested to know why blogging has become a hot button product all over again.

in case you are forgetting all the awesome blogging related items that have cropped up in the last few months:

1\. <https://posthaven.com/> 2\. <https://medium.com/> 3\. <http://draftin.com/> 4\. <https://svbtle.com/>

That's just off the top of my head.

</comment><comment><USER15> TLDR;

This is a Kickstarter pitch, in which case I'm quoting myself:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5610715>

</comment><comment><USER16> Nice project, but I d think SQlite will not cut it. Not even in the short run.

Other than that, definitely an interesting project.

<comment><USER17> I would imagine that there will be some other DB options to come out pretty quickly once they release the source.

<comment><USER16> Doubtless. But never estimate the power of sane defaults.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why is Ghost the future of blogging, exactly? Nobody is going to take-on WordPress without a plugin architecture and a plan to host it.

<comment><USER19> Because it has a spiffy minimalist design and a dashboard. Everybody loves those (right now).

Sarcasm aside, it looks pretty nice but I don't see anything particularly revolutionary that I would move away from a more established platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Im a little confused by the choice to use Node.js, whats the purpose? The creator says that ghost is not a blogging platform for developers, but then builds a node.js blog?

<comment><USER10> Why not use Node.JS? It's technically feasible to use it, and it'll be fun to fill in the blanks in terms of coding new tools and utilities that are missing the community right now. If they make something good it'll remove a lot of the friction for web developers to write plugins for it too ... we get to use JavaScript and a first class modern package manager. For non-developers I reckon it'll be much easier to host and deploy their own Ghost apps ... using npm its practically the equivalent of a one click install, and super easy to get onto a Cloud host like Heroku too. Much easier I'd say than provisioning Apache, PHP, a database, then installing Wordpress.

Anyway, what's all this negativity towards somebody trying to do something with new tech? I thought we all like that sort of thing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Free. Open. Try it.

If you pay us. Oh...

Seems really nice though.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no payment. Funding is for development, the software is free.

<comment><USER21> I know. Nothing wrong with that approach, but being teased to try a demo and getting redirected to a fundraiser instead is a bit weird.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I love the markdown editor, especially the auto-scrolling feature.

The only problem is that it doesn't really scroll to the part you're editing - instead it assumes that if you've scrolled to 50% in the markdown code, the preview should also scroll to 50%. Add a couple of images and this assumption becomes false.

I know this is hard to do (involves hooking into the markdown parser) but it would truly be a killer feature.

<comment><USER23> I posted this in the other thread, so I apologize if it's redundant. I agree, auto-scrolling the preview panel is important. In my personal blog, I didn't use Markdown, but rather just plain HTML (with some minor tweaks). What I did to synchronize the editor and preview was:

1\. Find the shortest path out of a currently-edited tag (look to see if the cursor is between a nearby set of < and > characters). In most cases, the cursor is not in a tag, so this is not needed.

2\. Insert an empty marker span.

3\. Find that span in the preview pane.

4\. Find the span's parent block, add a class to that block to highlight it, and then scroll to its location.

Seen here: [http://tiamat.tsotech.com/images/tiamat- authoring-2012-10.pn...](http://tiamat.tsotech.com/images/tiamat- authoring-2012-10.png) (the yellow paragraph at the bottom right)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hasn't Aaron Swartz's <http://www.jottit.com> solved this problem for years now?

Go ahead - type in some markdown, then edit the page. You'll be presented with a two-pane view. Your markdown is rendered dynamically. When you're done, just choose the access level for the page (public/private) and you're good to go.

<comment><USER25> Your SSL is messed up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm willing to bet they will finish it anyway. I'm sure a lot of us know that feel when you get something to prototype, holy crap it works stage. Something that you would use in the future with the bonus that many others may too. That feeling when you _have_ to finish the project at least to a point where it works properly.

They have that feel, but they also want some money for their troubles - <USER2> justify/legitimize it as worth their time.

It's a blogging platform after all. Their feature set could be done by one man in 2 to 5 weeks time with some experience and perseverance. I hate to belittle it below its merit, as I do think some features of Ghost make for something potentially useable. The project also could be nice because of the so-called committed team behind it maintaining it into the future, as Wordpres does.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd like to back this but, it looks great but there seems to be some conflicting info between their words and the kickstarter parameters. They say they want to deliver something, I'm guess it's alpha-ish code by summer, but the 120 pound pledge level says you get access 3 months before everyone else (meaning it would have to be right around the corner) but it's slated for a November 2013 estimated delivery?? Are they tying the Nov 2013 date to the release of the community site?

I'd just like some clarification of when I can get my grubby little hands on some code, especially if that date will change based on funding levels.

</comment><comment><USER28> Probably as good a time as any to mention this, but I've pushed up a work in progress Obtvse 2[0] to my github. With a user account system, live filtering, easy themes via pull requests, and quite a lot of improvements. It will be undergoing many changes over the next few weeks but is worth taking a peek:

[0] <https://github.com/natew/obtvse2>

Admin: <http://cl.ly/image/0o450t3C3c3G>

Edit with Live Preview: <http://cl.ly/image/0w052g1n1U40>

</comment><comment><USER29> My first reaction to "Free. Open." is where's the github link? I know you're funding the development with KickStarter, but free and open projects should still having the planning and initial development in the open. That way you can get feedback more easily, solicit contributors, as well as get early adopters.

If you want me to give you money, I'd like to see progress (and provide feedback) along the way, not just wait for the v1.0 release.

So in this case, it seems like you're using "Free and Open" as a label to get interest, but you're not really that keen on actually being open.

</comment><comment><USER30> It felt a bit "Try it, LOL JK!"

I understand why kickstarter exists, and I think it's a decent tool for some projects. That said, it's difficult for me to back something that's only screenshots and a brief "this is totally how it works" box on the main site. I want to be able to check out how the product works from the inside out. If I believe in it, I'll put money towards it. If I don't, I won't.

In this case, I can't demo it to a point where I'd say "this is a worthy product."

</comment><comment><USER31> honestly, i think something like jekyll (with prose.io) is the best blogging platform there is.

if there was a decent node.js based jekyll replacement, I would be using that.

<comment><USER32> prose.io impresses the hell out of me. Hopefully it evolves to the point where it can be hosted on your own server.

<comment><USER33> +1. Wish I could use it internally at work. Instead I had to code something custom..

As far as can tell it's just the authentication that binds to Github.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Interesting project, I don't really have anything to say beyond what the other comments here point out. Slightly off-topic, the /features.html page makes a really nice informative homepage. Their actual homepage is useless; it reminds me of the "Enter here" landing pages of the 90s. Is there some reason to structure the informational site this way that I'm missing?

</comment><comment><USER35> The irony of when I tried to add their blog to my feed reader (<http://www.rivered.io> by the way)...it said there was no feed...

Guess RSS doesn't belong in the future.

</comment><comment><USER36> What happened to the original plan to base Ghost on Wordpress? I love Node as much as the next guy, but surely basing it on Wordpress and therefore PHP would make it much accessible.

<comment><USER37> Basing this on WordPress is a bad idea. At a certain point to move in a different direction, you can't be shackled to an existing thing just because it's popular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> "I see the future of WordPress as a web operating system" - Please no no no. Having worked with Wordpress for the past few weeks, I sincerely hope I never have to again.

</comment><comment><USER39> pretty cool but I clicked the link because the title included node .. why is it included in the title ?

<comment><USER40> The app itself is developed with nodejs.

<comment><USER20> The original ghost platform was supposed to be developed in php <http://john.onolan.org/ghost/>

Im guessing thats why OP specified node.js in the title

<comment><USER41> AHHH, I knew I had seen this thing before!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> What about trilldy.com?

<comment><USER16> Unrelated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> DUPE ARTICLE! DUPE ARTICLE! OMG GUYS IT'S A DUPE!

I just migrated here from Slashdot; am I doing it right? :p

<comment><USER44> No. That's not appreciated.</comment></comment>


Pope launches YouTube channel - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/01/23/vatican.pope.youtube/

<comment><USER2> I'd like to see him do a video response to any of Pat Condell's videos...

<http://www.youtube.com/user/patcondell>

</comment><comment><USER3> that is too funny</comment>


Show HN: Hype Machine - 5+ years of Internet music history - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hypem.com/2013/01/time-machine-dive-into-5-years-of-music-history/

<comment><USER2> I posted about this on my Facebook wall yesterday. This is one of the coolest features on a music site that I've ever seen.

Can I ask, what inspired you to do this? I know there's been a bit of time- shifting with HypeMachine with quite some time, have you had the vision of being able to reference any week?

If you're looking for feature suggestions, I'd love to be able to trace an artists path through the hypemachine top 50. A simple line graph of an artists hits in the top 50 would be really cool.

Thanks for developing new ways for people like me to enjoy music.

<comment><AUTHOR> The memories that the older Popular pages bring up was a big motivation to build this. Like the month where MGMT was all over the popular chart: <http://hypem.com/popular/week:Apr-07-2008> (and the adjacent weeks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hypem is essentially an internet staple for me these days, you guys have done a really great job with it as far as I'm concerned.

<comment><USER4> I wrote a site to help you download the tracks if you're interested. <http://metahypem.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> sigh, i thought we're over this

<comment><USER5> I like the way you handled that. Just curious, but how often do you end up blacklisting scrapers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just wanted to throw out a huge congrats to Anthony and company for all the work you've done on the site. It's become my entire new music source over the past 4 years and I'm excited to see where it goes!

Job well done, I'm still waiting for an official Android app though :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been visting Hypem since 2007 and I've loved it the whole time. The nostaliga that this feature invokes is amazing. I'm also looking forward to the Hype Hotel @SxSW this year. I'll be living upstairs too. :D

<comment><AUTHOR> ha, upstairs from the venue?

<comment><USER7> For sure, you are having it at The Whitley, right? That is what the management told me last week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is hot! It is also how I have always organized my music, in iTunes and now in Spotify. At the beginning of each month I make a new playlist. Any songs discovered or listened to a lot for that month goes in that playlist. I get strongly anchored to the songs such that listening to a song from a year ago brings back memories. And I avoid listening _too_ much to songs from another month so I don't reset the anchor :)

<comment><USER9> Oooh... someone should make an applescript that links into last.fm to make this automatic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thanks hypem team for making my blog - ilictronix - such a rewarding time for me. Seeing tracks I posted climb their way to the top became some of the most memorable moments for me (I still mention this sometimes when I'm interviewing for internships!)

So big thanks, you guys are the reason I put so much work into the /new/ ilictronix, <http://ilictronix.heroku.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Why did you choose to build from scratch vs wordpress/squarespace/etc? This is neat

<comment><USER10> We originally ran on blogger (still do!) but it really didn't have what I wanted. College started, and I really couldn't prioritize "fixing up" the site on blogger, as it was just so convoluted.

Instead, I decided to take a stab building a custom solution in rails. Had a blast doing it, and I learned a ton. Still very much a work-in-progress, but I take great pride in building the very features I've wanted for such a long time. Now, I could tailor these solutions in PHP for wordpress or something, but it's not my expertise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've had this _exact_ idea burning in my head for a little while now. I was going to go ahead and start scraping the popular list myself to do it! Great job Anthony & co!

</comment><comment><USER12> Anthony you and your HypeM team continue to bring the magic of creativity, engineering and fun to us music heads. Bravo

<comment><USER13> Well said! I couldn't have said it better myself (and didn't).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> hypem's already been great to revisit my own listening and favoriting history from the last few years -- <http://hypem.com/smcnally/history> \-- it'll be interesting dialing up points in time to see what was blowing up when

<comment><AUTHOR> We only store about 1000 of your most recent plays, so you should also use Last.fm (and connect Hype Machine to it)!

<comment><USER14> My favorites date back to my earliest usage in 2008. Will these, too, be capped at 1000? Are there any time-based caps?

Thanks, again, for your work here.

<comment><AUTHOR> The favorites are not capped, only the plays are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I check out the Hype Machine daily, for about 3 years now - keep up the great work!

</comment><comment><USER16> I love the fact that the song pointed to in the blog post is sexual healing.

</comment><comment><USER17> this is awesome anthony! really brings me back... i can remember listening to certain weeks with my buddies. hopefully i'll see you at SX this year.</comment>


What Are the Differences Between Clojure, Scheme/Racket and Common Lisp? - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11223403/what-are-the-differences-between-clojure-scheme-racket-and-common-lisp <comment><USER2> For me the most important difference is Lisp-1 vs Lisp-2. I had tried my hand at Common Lisp a couple of times before trying Scheme. The latter immediately felt "cleaner" than CL.

My favourite implementation is Gambit Scheme and I have currently stumbled upon Gerbil (cons.io), a dialect built on top of Gambit. It's just fun to work with.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've found this page to be a nice comparison between Common Lisp, Racket, Clojure and Emacs Lisp: [http://hyperpolyglot.org/lisp](http://hyperpolyglot.org/lisp)

</comment><comment><USER4> > Wrong site. stackoverflow is best for real programming questions you have.

> I always get confused about which post should go where.

There should be a stack Overflow site, not a faq but site, to discuss which stack Overflow sites are appropriate for a particular post.

although all the interesting and useful questions posted to that site would be flagged as inappropriate for that site.

<comment><USER5> I am surprised by how many times the first hit of my google query is a stackoverflow answer which has been closed due to being "off topic", "not constructive" or whatever. I'm not sure how they benefit by being so active with their topic policing.

<comment><USER6> This. The fact that they've closed so many interesting questions as off-topic is the primary reason I'll likely never contribute anything to SO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My impresson is that the language differences are actually minor, but that differences between platforms and runtimes matter.

Clojure supports concurrency very well, and being hosted n the JVM, it is somewhat tailored to web applications. My impression is that it is far less ideal for CPU-bound parallelism which does a lot of computation on primitive types, since when there are more than a few primitive function parameters, they need to be passed as boxed values, which interacts badly with the JIT compiler. In practice, the advantages from support for parallel computation seem to be out-weighted by that. Of course, for concurrent web applications, this does usually not matter.

In contrast, Lisp implementations like SBCL or Chez compile to native code, and they can be as fast as C.

Racket and SBCL are far better for scripting because they have a fast start-up time.

Clojure and Racket have the best Library support which matches the "Batteries included" slogan of Python to some degree. Clojure can access and use all Libraries on the Java platform. In contrast, Racket, SBCL and many other Lisps can access libraries written in C quite easily using the foreign function interface, which is important for numeric and scientific programming. For the latter domain, using the JVM is somewhat a disadvantage.

Racket can also execute Python code (a subset, I think) and call into Python libraries. According to the documentation, it can also call into Python extension modules. If this is correct, the difference in the number of libraries available to Clojure should matter little.

SBCL has less libraries. So far, I was thinking of SBCL as being powerful but a bit bare-bones, similar to C++ when compared to Java. However, one of the comments on stackoverflow mentions that the library situation has changed significantly in the last years.

I am also wondering whether the library aspect might be less important that it seems. Traditional OOP languages put a lot of focus on code reuse in the form of binary code reuse - including libraries which provide objects which can do a lot of things. Java libraries are a prima example for this, and are famous for their heaviness. Lisps, in contrast, and Lisp culture, seem to put more focus on source-code reuse, because they put more emphasis on functional programming. This seems to make binary code reuse somewhat less important.

<comment><USER8> The libraries you use with SBCL are likely to be source rather than binary, unless you mean via FFI to (likely) C libraries.

Quicklisp[1] has made a _massive_ difference to how easy it is to download and manage sets of dependencies in a Lisp project. Try it out :)

[1] [https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/](https://www.quicklisp.org/beta/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was learning Clojure and OCaml last week (again) after doing a survey of a handful of functional languages. I still haven't seen a good way to spin up a really simple HTTP server like Sinatra or Express. Ones I did see either had a huge bug, were more verbose, or had no "getting started" documentation. The languages themselves are fun though.

<comment><USER10> And that's the problem. By picking these languages you're committing to building a lot of stuff yourself. Sure, I'd rather be writing anything other than JavaScript but you can't deny the Node ecosystem has solved a lot of problems.

<comment><USER11> It's not really a problem for Clojure since it is on the JVM, so you get all of those libraries for free. Java interop is very easy, especially due to macros.

I've never used Clojurescript. I'm not sure how easy that is with Node.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would have expected someone to point out that Scheme supports continuations and the other two do not. But nobody did.

<comment> white-flame I agree, but it should also describe what Scheme continuations are, compared to the delimited function object continuations that are used in practice elsewhere.

However, the notion is technically subsumed within the notion of a "simplified" language, as Scheme continuations are a low level operation quite often used to construct what other languages have out of the box.</comment></comment>


TinySrc: Scale images to fit mobile browsers - <AUTHOR> http://tinysrc.net/ <comment><USER2> Useful, and a neat trick to auto-size based on the browser being used (I assume by detecting the user agent).

However, why is it free?</comment>


Beg HN: Rethink your job posting strategy - <AUTHOR> http://wedtm.com/post/32676463296/beg-hn-rethink-your-job-posting-strategy

<comment><USER3> @wedtm co-founder of streak.com here, we apologize that the job posting came off as offensive - as you said in your post it was totally unintentional.

We would love some constructive discussion on where we went wrong and how we can improve. Re-reading the job post again (deleted but we have a copy) using your comments as a lens, I can see how the title may come off as abrasive. However, in our actual post - we use competitors as a way to contrast and illustrate what our beliefs are - not to belittle them.

We actually disagree with posting requirements for our positions, mainly because there aren't any fast and easy rules that would make someone a good fit vs. not a good fit. That's mostly determined by meeting and talking - <USER2> we can really do is try to attract people who are interested in our space and beliefs.

Your other point on posting the actual salary we are offering is a tough one. Its not tough because we don't want to be transparent, rather, we're such a young company that we don't have a set role, skill set or persona we are hiring for. Compensation is LARGELY dependent on the applicants personal situation (young with high risk tolerance implies more equity, less compensation vs someone older with family and mortgage). We're totally transparent with all of our applicants once they've contacted us.

We are totally open to your help on figuring out a better way to do job postings given the above constraints. We've been a part of the HN community for a while and definitely don't want to offend others here.

[edit] Happy to chat over email too: aleem at streak

<comment><USER4> Glad to see a response. I didn't catch the original job posting before it was taken down, but I have to wonder: why was it taken down in the first place?

Regardless, Streak seems like an interesting product.

<comment><USER5> Google caught it for you:

 _«Help takedown Salesforce - join the team at Streak.com (YC S11). Salesforce is a hugely profitable company but they make a low rate product. The vast majority of their users hate the product that they're forced to use. At Streak - we're building a product that people love to use. Even though we sell to "businesses", we aren't an enterprise company - we're a technology company maniacally focused on a great product.»_

Thumbs down.

<comment><USER3> Here's the full content: [https://plus.google.com/117773536965491876803/posts/X51N6Bsx...](https://plus.google.com/117773536965491876803/posts/X51N6Bsxhir)

<comment><USER5> I appreciate your move.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There have certainly been worse offenders in the annals of job posts on HN than Streak, but I see the point here (mostly).

However, job boards are classified ads, and oftentimes the controversial ones get the most eyeballs. Think about it from Streak's perspective: "okay, we're a young, relatively unknown company, and we're trying to hire the best engineers we can. Also, ideally, we want to screen for people who actually find our challenge interesting."

Through that lens it makes perfect sense that they call out an entrenched, better known enemy. It's controversial enough to be memorable--especially for people who aren't big fans of Salesforce (exactly the types they're looking for).

The problem is that those first few words is often all they have to get your attention. The forum's all wrong, and job posts in general are terrible places to tell people about your culture.

I'm just happy that folks have mostly weeded out the "rockstar" and "ninja" job posts. Those were god awful...

</comment><comment><USER7> I think no matter what the job postings look like, someone is always going to be offended, because they're advertisements, and the readership has no control over them.

If you're offended by the job post, that's more of an indicator that you're not a good culture fit, rather than _wrong_. Sure, there are some things (like not listing requirements) which are generally considered a bad thing, but it's not a terrible shame to just ignore advertisements you don't like.

</comment><comment><USER8> The premise of the job posting, "Salesforce is a hugely profitable company..." is also completely false.

Salesforce had negative earnings for fiscal year 2012, losing millions of dollars. The projections for 2013 call for much larger losses. It is unclear when, if ever, Salesforce will be profitable again. The company has recently been hiding their huge losses by trumpeting bogus financial numbers using non- standard (non-GAAP) accounting practices.

</comment><comment><USER9> In many cases I'd agree. But this one has a little bit of historical context. This is how Salesforce marketed themselves. Benioff's book "Behind the cloud" talks about doing exactly this to disrupt the status quo.

</comment><comment><USER10> >If your requirements are "The best hacker on the planet, must have at least 83 PhD's from Harvard", you've just alienated a majority of the workforce.

The above sentence appears twice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, good catch. Fixed.</comment></comment>


Houston, Dallas and New York City: America's Great 3-Way Housing Supply Race - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2017/03/20/houston-dallas-new-york-city-americas-great-3-way-housing-supply-race/ <comment><AUTHOR> _" Houston and Dallas are the most notable examples of where such scarcity has not occurred--in fact, it's almost been the opposite. Between 2010 and 2015, these two metros had the most net population growth, at 736,531 and 676,582, respectively. They are also perennially among the leaders in corporate and business relocation, job growth, and wage growth. But they have the 2nd and 3rd cheapest median home prices of the 11 metros, at $176,000 and $202,000, respectively"_</comment>


Ask HN: $640 Million... why do so many people insist on buying lottery tickets? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> For one dollar a lottery player purchases entertainment and maybe even a bit of optimism for a little bit of time.

I have always found the "math tax" line silly. I've never understood why "math tax" people assume that the only utility that a lottery ticket provides is the expected value of the payout. Is a ten dollar ticket to a spy movie a waste of money since there is little likelihood that watching it is going to get me a job with some OGA?

<comment><USER3> > For one dollar a lottery player purchases entertainment and maybe even a bit > of optimism for a little bit of time.

      And above all there is gambling, the cheapest of all
      luxuries. Even people on the verge of starvation can
      buy a few days' hope ('Something to live for', as they
      call it) by having a penny on a sweepstake.

\-- George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, chapter 5

<comment><USER4> Except that quote is only really relevant when the gambling is done on a repetitive basis. For many, this was the first and possibly/probably, the only time they decide to play the lottery.

This lottery only garnered so much attention because of the high jackpot, however even that was an anomaly. For most people who pay the lottery repeatedly, yes, it is a 'tax'; however many people who are more than capable of figuring the odds, still decided to play this jackpot - if only for the chance of winning.

Apologies for bad grammar, on a 48 hour day and my 2 cups of coffee isn't jump-starting my brain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The urge to play the lottery is a very normal cognitive bias. I know it has a negative expected return, but I do feel drawn to play it when the prize gets very large. The actual reason I didn't participate is that my aversion to waiting in line is even stronger than my urge to buy a ticket.

Dan Kahneman's book "Thinking Fast and Slow" is good reading for anyone who thinks that only stupid people feel the urge to play the lottery. It's more subtle than that, and worth understanding because these biases affect all of us in many important decisions.

Note that the lottery has about the same expected return as insurance (around 50% I think), and I've always bought insurance for risks I don't want to cover personally. Is overpaying to cover downside risks "smart" but overpaying for big upsides "stupid"? I don't have an opinion either way. If I consider the question, I can't tell if my own opinion would be more informed by my knowledge of psychology and statistics, or by my attitudes about prudence and waste.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think very analytically the majority of the time, even when I'm not programming. When I saw this lottery in the headlines and in friends' Facebook posts, the first thing I did was break out a calculator and figure all the relevant statistics of interest to me, not because I thought it might be worth it, but just to see exactly, numerically, _how_ ridiculous the mass-attention to this lottery was. I suspect a lot of the HN community think like this.

Most people absolutely do not think this way. The thinking of the average person is more social, more concerned with ritual, more qualitative, and less quantitative. Their friends are talking about it, the number is big, people are going in on ticket pools together, they fantasize, and some of the affect of that fantasizing transfers to their goal-seeking behavior. Not fully appreciating that they _can_ refer to solid math on this, they adapt their attitude and expectations to the cues of those around them.

<comment><USER2> What is wrong with fantasizing? It seems that to HN is full of dreamers and people who ignore statistics and likely outcomes. How many small businesses fail? How many people quit their steady job in order to go join a startup?

<comment><USER7> I think the difference is, right or wrong, that when people ignore statistics and pursue startups, they have the feeling that they can affect the outcome.

A lottery is just a random number generator. A startup is blood, sweat and tears...and if I sweat _just a little more_ we can beat the odds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something's got to be a bit out of whack when governments sanction and even sponsor lotteries where the odds of even getting your investment back are worse than 1:4, and governments make it illegal for masses of people to invest equivalent amounts in startup companies, all in order to protect the people from the possible downside of losing their investment.

Reminds me of a bumper sticker: "Don't steal. The government hates competition."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "I guess I think of lotteries as a tax on the mathematically challenged." -Roger Jones

I haven't followed much of his other work, but this rings true.

</comment><comment><USER9> A lot of people scoff at the lottery because of the odds, yet few would go without earthquake or fire insurance and many have money in the stock market.

Here's a hint: there's more to the mathematics than odds.

It's about expected return, barrier to entry, and the consequences of not doing something. Odds are only a small part of the equation.

</comment><comment><USER10> We bought $40 of tickets. We did it because we lacked the vision to buy AAPL when it had a $5B market cap.

It is really a form of entertainment and escapism. Someone could do an interesting photo series of people at booths (when there is a big jackpot, not the regular regulars).

Day dreaming and lottery entering, both useless/damaging in excess - maybe ok in moderation.

</comment><comment><USER11> As an outsider (a Canadian) I thought the most compelling thing about this jackpot (MegaMillions $656 Million) was that it escalated from the announced $540 Million BETWEEN draws. Surely there is not a better indicator the of state of the American economy than this.

</comment><comment><USER12> As the value of a winning ticket goes up, the expected value of any given ticket approaches the price of a single ticket. Of course this isn't really true, but even a small miscalculation, multiplied by half a billion, could easily make it look like a good deal.

</comment><comment><USER13> What is the expected value of a MegaMillions ticket in this drawing?

<comment><USER14> Highly negative. Lottery tickets are always highly negative, and it is a commonplace observation that the expected value is much more negative for lottery drawings with unusually high jackpots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "The lottery is a tax on hope" - David Mitchell</comment>


How do you get initial traction as a B2B-startup? - <AUTHOR> http://kukuruku.co/hub/social-media/how-do-you-get-initial-traction-as-a-b2b-startup <comment><USER2> We operate in the B2B market and the key takeaways I would say are:

Our leads come from: 1, 50% Previous users of our software that move to a new company and then call us up looking for a better system at their new workplace 2, 40% Google Adwords 3, 10% Networking/cold calling 4, 1% Conferences

Of those three the likely prospect of them actually spending:

1, 80% chance because they already know and have already done the selling within the organisation 2, 50% They are actively looking and are open to taking risks 3, 10% This requires a lot of time and energy with very little chance of success 4, <1% In all my time only one customer has ever come out of a conference/expo

1 and 2 basically require very little time, if you have a sales team they'll be doing 3 and 4 because that's all that is left. Networking and conferences provides a side benefit of research, you get to see what the market is doing and where it is going.

The other major thing is buying cycles, plan on a 18 month to 2 year cycle, if the contact you have within the organisation moves on then that is generally a good thing as it opens more opportunities.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I switch my career to software engineering? - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
I'm trying to switch careers from systems integration (SI) consulting to software engineering, but I have a lot of questions and would greatly value any advice I can get from current software engineers.
Here's my situation:
I graduated from college (undergrad) fairly recently from a top 10 undergraduate business program (which also happens to rank in the top 10 for engineering). At college, I majored in business, but also minored in computer science through the school of engineering. This major-minor combination meant that my coursework involved core business classes with many business electives, as well as core computer science classes with an upper-level CS elective. I performed a lot better in the CS classes because I found the material much more interesting and challenging, and I often scored well above the curve on CS exams - even in the "weeder" classes. Looking back, I should have switched my major to CS.
As a result of my undergraduate education, I have a pretty solid foundation in computer science - OOP, algorithms, data structures, memory management etc...
During college, I also ran a web development business and earned a reasonable amount of money to cover my basic living expenses, so I'm very familiar web application development. This business also involved working part-time at a web technology firm creating Flash web applications (back in 2007), and working with advertising agencies to implement concepts from designers.
Since college, I have worked for about 1.5 years at a large SI consulting firm.  I chose to work at this firm because I thought SI consulting would be a good compromise between business and computer science. But I was wrong - my passion lies in coding and solving difficult technical problems. Many of my co-workers at this firm majored in some sort of engineering, but they work here because they didn't want an engineering job. I'm the opposite - I want an engineering job.
In consulting, it's typical for consultants to go out to dinner or to the bar after work. Instead of doing this, I come back to my hotel room (as soon as I can get out of work after an 11-hour day - 6:30ish) and build Ruby on Rails / AJAX web applications. I read HN religiously and enjoy learning about new technologies and languages, whereas the consultants I work with seem allergic to code.
I don't suck at consulting, either - I was rated among the top 10% of consultants at my level within the firm, but that doesn't stop me from disliking it.
I've tried to "stick it out" in my current job, but I don't see a future for myself at this firm. I don't aspire to become a manager or executive, and I don't enjoy my work.
Nevertheless, I understand CS very well and I've researched CS interview questions.  I'm confident I can pass a software engineering interview using pseudocode (I could probably manage in a coding language, but I don't code in my current day job, so there would be lots of syntax errors).
Furthermore, since I work on software implementation projects, I have a good understanding of the software development lifecycle (requirements traceability, testing, functional designs, etc...).
Here are my questions:
1.) How do I go about approaching companies to obtain a software engineering job? Is a CS minor going to put me at a significant disadvantage compared to the CS majors, given my experience?
2.) I apologize if this sounds arrogant or naieve (given my situation), but I want to avoid becoming a "code-mokey" and work somewhere with opportunities for advancement. How do I avoid "dead-end" coding jobs? (or do they even exist?) Please set me straight if I'm completely off-base here.
Thanks for reading, and thank you in advance for your advice. <comment><USER2> It sounds like to me you are doing everything right. I think studying interview questions is really good. Some possible interview question might be;

1)Describe an algorythm? Then describe it within it's implementation.

2)Write a function with two parameters that returns a string in a reverse fashion.

3) Write a SQL queries? Use inner, outer, and all other joins when needed depending on interview requirement of the question.

3)Describe dependency injection?

I think for the most part interview question's can either can go one way or another. They will either slam you with conceptual CS stuff or actually have you write code. I would look at as many question's as possible. Then I would literally ingrain the basics of coding(In order to implement anything they ask you in the interview on the spot). Things like loops, structures, stacks, recursion, and everything else. Learn them and understand how to implement them at their most basic level.

Let them know that you are addicted to programming and learning new technologies.

Also get involved in as much open source projects you can handle.

Focus on the fact that you understand business process and how that relates to software dev.

Mock up some demo stuff or have a site that contains your portfolio. (Have demo of something cool for each language you know.) Take you laptop to the interview and show them your work and explain the abstraction and logic.

Focus on any projects you have done in the interview even if you did not get paid for them.

Find a solid mentor that has been in the industry for 10 plus years.. learn everything from them.

Put them as a reference.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the reply. I appreciate your advice.</comment></comment>


Progressive Reduction - <AUTHOR> http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/42361566927/progressive-reduction

<comment><USER2> This is really interesting, but I'd like to see some level 1/level 3 comparisons for the app as a whole. What is being gained by the user progressing? A more minimal, less cluttered interface? You would think the beginner is the one that needs that interface, not the expert. In addition, how do you bridge the gap from "icon on a button" to "using keyboard shortcuts", which is where your expert users are really going to be spending their time.

That being said, I think the adaptive interface concept is really intriguing, and if executed right could be really useful

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess the Hacker News mods really don't like LayerVault these days. This was removed from the frontpage.

<comment><USER2> What's the deal with this? Is there some feud or something? This seemed like perfectly valid HN front page material

<comment><USER3> Not to my knowledge. I did (stupidly) tweet the link to the post from my Twitter account though. Probably tricked the spam and vote-ring detection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great technique, but I am concerned that instead of augmenting good, flexible responsive design, it will replace it. It has the negative side effect of creating a lot of ambiguity (what does the checkbox mean without the label, discovery is a lot harder now).

Just be careful with it, I suppose. It is not the solution to all your resolution troubles. :-)</comment>


Impossible to compete with free software - <AUTHOR> http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.737375 <comment><USER2> One place where it's very easy to compete OSS is in the enterprise. For an enterprise, the license cost of software is only part of the total cost, which includes:

* Piloting, operationalizing, and deploying the code.

* Staffing maintenance and support.

* Training.

* Tracking and deploying new revisions of the code.

In fact, I think a lot of people have had the same experience I have, which is that it can be easier to sell software to an enterprise than to give it away.

The flip side of this is that for business/enterprise software, there is very little risk in just making your code open source and then selling a commercial version. Prospects will download and play with your code. They'll pre-qualify themselves, calling you only when they're receptive to the software's value prop. The people who will operationalize the free version probably weren't good prospects to begin with.

<comment><USER3> _One place where it's very easy to compete OSS is in the enterprise._

Another place is B2C. All of the following sell B2C software:

\- User experience that doesn't hurt. (Have you ever put a non-technical user through getting software from sourceforge?)

\- Marketing. (It isn't evil. Most of your customers know how to describe their pain to Google but they don't know how to conceive of the solution, and they probably don't know the computer can help them. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explain how the link between unhappy present and happy future is use of the appropriate software -- YOUR software.)

\- Speaking the users language (hint: "GPL", "XML", and "multimedia engine" are three words that my B2C page does not share in common with my OSS competitor.)

\- Design. ($25 of stock icons doubled my sales back in the day. Most OSS projects do not have anyone who would care enough to secure the equivalent.)

\- Answering emails such as "I can't email the hard drive to the download" with respect and patience rather than that special brand of community the question would get on most OSS mailing lists.

\- A web site that _sells_ the product/download/etc. Rather few B2C OSS sites are written by someone who sounds like they actually WANT you to hit that download button. They're like sculptors adding navels to statutes: they know it has to have one but the task is boring and detracts from the interesting parts of the project, so it is completed in as perfunctory a manner as possible. You'll never hear an OSS developer saying "This is the 47th iteration of our Download Now button. Its 350% more effective at getting the click than v1.0"

<comment><USER4>
        Design. ($25 of stock icons doubled my sales back
        in the day. Most OSS projects do not have anyone
        who would care enough to secure the equivalent.)

I'd love to hear more about this (before and after pictures, etc). What are those stock icons? Did you have no icons before?

<comment><USER3> The experience was originally written up here:

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/08/26/the-visual-impact- stock-...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/08/26/the-visual-impact-stock-icons- make/)

But its so long ago that both the before and after photos were overwritten in the the intervening years. I had icons, though, in roughly the same positions as they are currently. You can see the old version here -- not the best photo but it suffices:

[http://www.topdownloads.net/section_images/software/11552149...](http://www.topdownloads.net/section_images/software/1155214957.jpg)

They were from Sun's Java visual identity set, which was attractively priced when I started working on a Java project with a $60 budget. You can see them here:

<http://java.sun.com/developer/techDocs/hi/repository/>

The ones I was using were the open, save, print, and new document buttons. If you notice, they do not look like the sort of thing you would expect an elementary schoolteacher to have in her classroom. I knew the sort of look I wanted: big, bright, bold -- like a Fischer Price toy. Then one day, while browsing the Internet, I saw an icon set that gave exactly that for about the price of one copy of my software. So I snagged it, on the theory that if it resulted in one marginal sale it was worth it.

I've used those buttons continuously since August 2006, so you can see them on the front page of my website (<http://www.bingocardcreator.com>). Note that they're big, bold, and colorful. That increased my visitor to download conversion rate and download to purchase conversion rate, instantly. Take a gander at the difference between the 08/06 and 09/06 bars here:

<http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month>

As you can see, it was worth rather substantially more than 1 marginal sale.

(Wow, thats a blast from the past, reminiscing about when the difference between $300 and $500 was a _huge_ improvement to me...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would actually say it's not that hard to compete with free software. Here are a few reasons:

\- Open source is free (as in beer). This means that there's no support, no training and noone to blame if things go wrong. As anyone who has worked at a semi-large business will attest that is bad from a corporate buying perspective.

\- The UI design of open-source software is often terrible. Open-source values code, not pretty design. I've never heard of an open-source solution that has gone through formal usability tests. Often customers don't care about pretty code, they care about a pretty UI.

\- There's noone to turn to with feature requests, etc. And no, for most companies submitting a request to sourceforge or just coding it up yourself is not an option.

\- There's no marketing for open-source software. Marketing sells producs, otherwise companies wouldn't spend trillions a year on it.

\- You have no guarantee that your open-source software will be updated in the future. It might just be abandoned. And again, for most companies just doing it yourself is not an option.

In summary, using open-source software requires you to know what you are doing, being able to overcome installing and maintenance hurdles without support and living with the knowledge that the software might not be updated. And you'll have to actively go out looking for it, because noone will try to sell it to you.

Most business-types, who are the ones with money to spend, don't even know that there is such a thing as open-source software, and if they did many of them wouldn't use it for the reasons stated above.

<comment><USER6> _I've never heard of an open-source solution that has gone through formal usability tests._

WordPress has.

[http://wordpress.org/development/2008/10/usability- testing-r...](http://wordpress.org/development/2008/10/usability-testing- report-25-and-crazyhorse/)

<comment><USER7> GNOME too, at least back in the day

<http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject>

KDE too, apparently: <http://usability.kde.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are some good comments there.

I think that Free Software, in all forms, has helped raise the bar for paid software. I remember paying for some really simple and crappy stuff (commercial software) back in the 80's and early 90's. A lot of it was stuff that has a comparable free counterpart today.

I do not believe that any legitimate valuable software product has lost a significant piece of their marketshare to free software. The free options HAVE required that the paid software have a true value though.

<comment><USER9> > _I remember paying for some really simple and crappy stuff (commercial > software) back in the 80's and early 90's._

My company is still paying for really crappy software instead of using free alternatives. They just slap the label 'Enterprise' on something crappy, and sadly companies just eat it up. Granted, there aren't really a lot of free alternatives to most enterprise software... most likely because ERP middleware is not fun to do in your spare time.

<comment><USER10> I can't find the exact quote to properly cite it, but somebody once said something like, "Stick five of the best open source programmers in a room for a week, give them a really hard problem, and you'll get three mail readers and two text-mode web browsers."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We do both. Our company builds 90+% Open Source software, and a small chunk of proprietary code that sits on top.

Our Open Source products have millions of users.

Our proprietary software has thousands of users (well, actually one thousand and some hundreds...I don't think we've crossed the 2000 licenses sold mark, yet, but it's getting really close).

So, in one sense (raw numbers), we can't compete with Open Source. Even with our own software. But, when I look at the percentage of paying customers we have that we wouldn't have without the Open Source products, the math begins to look less depressing. Maybe we just have a really high marketing budget made up of lots of development hours spread over the past 11 years...and over time we'll convert more and more of those Open Source users into paying customers.

That said, it's definitely possible to convince people to pay for software. Just make it better, easier, better supported, and more predictable over time (make upgrades that work, for example; almost nobody gets upgrades right, including most Open Source software...so if you do, people will remember it and won't be nearly as tempted to try a new product every time a major upgrade or new system is needed).

Also, it matters who you target. We have some Open Source users who want our commercial products to be even cheaper, insisting that we would sell _huge_ numbers if it just cost half as much. But, I know the reality is that the difference between free and $69 is almost as big as the difference between free and $138, in terms of how many people will make the leap. So, targeting the low end of the market for a product that has Open Source competition is insane. Target the high end, luxury end, or enterprise end. Power users, Apple users, professionals who make a lot of money by using your software, etc. We actually decide what goes into our Open Source vs. our proprietary product based on whether it helps someone make money. That's pretty much our only determining factor: Does it make money for the customer? If yes, it's proprietary software. If no, and there are lots of cool non-commercial uses for the feature, then it goes into the GPL version. That won't work for everyone...but it works for us, since our market is one that has a pretty clear divide in who uses the software and for what.

</comment><comment><USER12> I hate the word "free", it always makes people think of free beer.

You _can_ charge $$$ for Free Software and "open source" software.

One day I'm going to get pissed off enough to start selling the GIMP for $100 or something, just to prove this point. Maybe no one will buy it, but you _can_ do it. And hey, maybe it'll encourage people to "pirate" it and increase the number of users?

<comment><USER13> Using the GIMP example...if you put together a manual for Photoshop users on how to use GIMP, you could probably charge $100 for the manual and the software and see some sales. Photoshop is costly, but if your staff is used to Photoshop, the leap to GIMP can be difficult and filled with searches for information.

A concrete example: a friend is a project manager at a local design shop. He is a designer by trade, so he knows his way around the Adobe suite. But, his employer doesn't have the budget for another Photoshop license, but I'm guessing they would shell out $100 for GIMP and a "GIMP for Photoshop Dummies" book.

<comment><USER14> To followup on that idea: pick a particular segment of the graphic arts industry and find what Photoshop features they use that GIMP is good enough at. Then write the manual _targeted to them_ that explains how to use just those features. Also if you change the GIMP UI (god, I hate that thing!) so it's optimized for those tasks, I'm sure you could sell it for at least 1/2 what Photoshop costs.

<comment><USER15> Yes, maybe you could sell one or two or maybe a hundred copies but hardly any more.

The more successful your fork, the more likely it's going to be packaged and distributed by the one of the top distributions for FREE. The higher your sales price, the more likely people will buy just one copy and share additional copies among themselves.

Now consider the costs: Changing the UI of GIMP seems to be no easy task, otherwise someone would have done it, already. People are complaing about the interface for the last ten years or so.

In other words: Yes, you may be able to make revenue by adding features to the GIMP, but you're unlikely to make a profit!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm oriented around the "enterprise". The mainstream free software I work with tends to be powerful but difficult to learn to use effectively.

As far as I can tell it's reasonably difficult to find people who are able to work through simple network connectivity problems without paying a lot of money.

Here's a two minute business model for someone who aspires to start a mISV:

1\. Learn how to methodically diagnose connectivity problems between points on tcp/ip networks.

2\. Identify a niche with money that relies on connectivity.

3\. Write some software for people in the space (or find some free stuff that does it that other people don't have time to learn how to learn)

4\. Become known as a person who uses such software to solve problems.

5\. Profit!

</comment><comment><USER17> I think its important _not_ to think of free software as mutually exclusive with paid software.

It's been proven that you can create a profitable business by creating open- source/free software and building a business on top of that. Same goes for SaaS apps that have free plans.

Take a look at the article on Zimbra that was just posted. 40 million paid email boxes. Yet, there is an open-source version of Zimbra's software suite. Similar things going on for places like RedHat, MySQL, Google Apps, SugarCRM, etc.

You can create an open-source app and reap the benefits of it ... and still make money by:

\- selling premium versions

\- selling support

\- selling hosting with per-seat licensing

\- selling add-ons and custom development services

<comment><USER3> _You can create an open-source app and reap the benefits of it ... and still make money by:_

\- using the OSS to power, sell, etc a closed source application

Anybody can come download my shopping cart any time they want. It still earned me a few hundred dollars this week.

See also Rails (open source framework powers immensely profitable closed source applications), etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Free software is a common bogeyman on the Business of Software forum. It's a handy scapegoat for when your new µISV experiences disappointing sales.

You'll note that the guy who asked the question was trying to find an excuse not to _start_ a business, and how quickly cooler (and more experienced) heads prevail.

</comment><comment><USER19> [http://www.valt.helsinki.fi/staff/herkia/kava/Seminnarit/MI_...](http://www.valt.helsinki.fi/staff/herkia/kava/Seminnarit/MI_mustonen.pdf)

That paper has a (simplified) model for the economics of free and proprietary software in the same marketplace. It basically shows that the best programmers have incentives to work on free software. It also shows that the price that the proprietary software maker places on the product directly affects the number of programmers working on the free alternative. Very cool paper that I reviewed for an economics course.

</comment><comment><USER20> The market is changing from: create something and try to sell it, to: get paid to create something. This has always been the case for programmers that work for a product company. They agree to a price(their salary) before implementing the software. Of course, this is nothing new, consulting practices have always operated this way. The ony way open source hurts devs is that open source encourages reuse. Devs are paid over and over again to create the same thing. This is a much more efficient(in terms of effort) way to do things. Companies will always need new features and custom integrations. Obviously this does hurt "product comapnies", but do we really care? If we don't need something anymore, let's throw it away. It's wasteful not to.

</comment><comment><USER21> But for any software used by a business it seems pretty simple. You simply need to match the free software in features (or get pretty close) and compete on support.

The key question is "What if something goes wrong?"

Because a business owner can't really use open source stuff unless they (a) know enough to edit the source competently or (b) can afford to hire someone who does. Assuming there's a large market of founders who can't edit source code themselves and don't want to pay $100+ an hour to have someone else do it you end up with a pretty wide open market.

Corporate America will always be risk adverse which means the deck will always be stacked against free stuff. The trick to competing is just stoking the fires of that fear and then making your software look like the remedy to all of them.

<comment><USER2> I think that might depend on the value proposition of your product.

For the kinds of products that need the whole dance of vendor selection, budgeting, pilots, and rollouts, then yes: feature parity, or even a small feature deficit, is easy to overcome with a strong support pitch. That's because the sales process for these products gives you the opportunity to lay out a business case.

But a lot of software doesn't get deployed that way. They may have a more casual value proposition, they may be more "niche-y" (and thus less visible to the pointy hairs), or they may be early adopter products.

In this second category, I think it's harder to make a "support" pitch. If your prospect isn't 100% sold on the value of the product (and companies buy "phase 1" deployments of products to test the water all the time), they're a lot more likely to optimize for cost.

I think it's worth being cognizant of which category you fall in to. I think if you're in the second category, the right play might be to open source yourself. Again, just because you open up your code, doesn't mean enterprises will be significantly more resistant to pay for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you look at all examples in this thread all the software they refer to is GUI based non-technical applications.

I think this highlights where Open Source competes the most, applications which the engineers build for themselves. Apache, for example, makes building a paid for web server pretty uneconomic (IIS is bundled).

When engineers doing Open Source are scratching their itch they tend to make world beating products, when they aren't scratching their own itch the momentum tails off because there isn't another driver (such as a wage, or a product manager).

</comment><comment><USER23> If there is a lot of good free software to compete with you, it might be that you're trying to sell what is considered commodity. Usually the mature open source software projects are usually infrastructure ones. Unless you've come up with something to reinvent that product, it might be more prudent to build on top of open source software, and use it to your advantage instead.

</comment><comment><USER24> FOSS lowers your revenue if you want it to or not, but if you play ball it can lower your costs so that you can make the same profit anyway. Aim for B2B sales of complex software over consumer - especially now - and the open source part won't actually cost sales while allowing students and hobbyists to learn your system for free.

</comment><comment><USER25> Take the fact that many people who buy software can't use it without help...free software will never out compete "paid" software, where help is a major portion of the product.

</comment><comment><USER26> Why did this get posted here?

It's a dude who thinks he wants to start a business, but he's saying "You can't do this." Is it a question, or is it an opinion?

And anyway, we all know, of course you can compete with free. Look at Microsoft. Look at Apple. Look at Adobe. Look at all the indie Mac devs and small shops. There are free alternatives to every one of their major products.</comment>


I'm getting ripped, healthy, and happy in 13 minutes a week - <AUTHOR> http://mkeas.org/body-by-science

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm happy to answer questions

<comment><USER2> Before and after pics / other evidence of effectiveness?

<comment><AUTHOR> Valid request.

After 2 weeks, I have dropped about 10 pounds from nutrition improvements combined with exercise.

I have gone from a slight pudge to a more flattened midriff.

I'm expecting in a few weeks to have a quite visible six pack.

<http://imgur.com/a/9jxkK#0>

and <http://imgur.com/a/9jxkK#1>

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

10 pounds in 2 weeks seems like a lot.</comment></comment></comment></comment>