Gigaom Closes Down - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2015/03/09/techs-pioneering-tech-blog-gigaom-closes-down/ <comment><USER2> This is part of a trend that's just starting.

I was the editor in chief at Dr. Dobb's, which many of you know closed down in December. As I explained in my farewell editorial [1], our ad sales were squeezed by a comparatively recent phenomenon in media, which is a very steep drop in vendors' willingness to buy Web ads--a lifeline for most web sites.

The reason is that vendors have (finally!) discovered that effectively nobody ever buys anything by clicking on a web ad.

For certain consumer sites, that's a survivable problem. For example, Budweiser's ads aren't intended to make a sale, but rather to remind people of the brand. However, for many tech companies (those that aren't tier 1), they don't have the funds to do brand-oriented ads. Their ads need to result in clicks and purchases. And that's just not happening on pure websites. (FB and Twitter are a wholly different category.)

Personally, I expect that more web sites in the tech sector that have depended in the past on advertising will either fail or drastically cut back on their offerings.

[1] [http://www.drdobbs.com/240169421](http://www.drdobbs.com/240169421)

<comment><USER3> > which is a very steep drop in vendors' willingness to buy Web ads

Any relative or absolute numbers you'd like to share?

> The reason is that vendors have (finally!) discovered that effectively > nobody ever buys anything by clicking on a web ad.

My favourite experience with this was when I was selling a computer case and researched its specs on newegg.com. Then for a while all I saw were retargeted ads from newegg trying to sell me that case. Nonono, I didn't have one too few computer cases, I had one too many. I was the complete opposite of their target audience, heh.

<comment><USER4> You're example is obvious because Newegg can't tell the difference between market research because you're about to buy versus research because you're about to sell.

But it's always amused me (in a not very amusing way) that immediately after I purchase something I'm inundated with advertisements from the same vendor trying to sell it to me again. Big data is supposed to be about finding statistical relationships between events, right? In what world would the probability of someone buying something be highest when they're holding a brand new one in their hands?

What it really makes me think is the web advertising folks are pulling a con on their clients. They're not actually doing the critical analysis they promise but simply sorting by linear distance in n-dimensional space and hoping no one notices how useless the measurement is.

<comment><USER3> > Newegg can't tell the difference between market research because you're > about to buy versus research because you're about to sell

I agree. I think it would be very difficult for them to tell the two states apart, but I found it amusing.

<comment><USER4> Isn't this a market opportunity, though? Make a website that provides product information for people who want to sell an item. Give tips on how to advertise and mail the item. Sell packaging supplies. Why isn't Ebay already doing this?

<comment><USER3> Only if newegg had a "Sell One Like This" button, they'd earn a commission, though cases aren't worth shipping, so it was a local sale anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is sad, and not entirely unexpected. Look for a large number of websites to go under just like Gigaom.

Oddly enough, the reason these folks are failing is that Google's CPC (the money they get for an advertising "click") has gone down Year over Year for the last 13 quarters. What that means is that if your web site depended on advertising from Google (and most do), and your traffic remained constant, you have seen a 33% drop in gross revenue over that same period. Google doesn't call out their click fraud numbers, but they do improve their ability to detect it over time, which means your "quality" click through rate has been going down as well, for a double whammy. So unless you can improve volume, you die. In their Q4 report[1] they make this note:

 _Network paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on non- Google properties participating in our AdSense for Search, AdSense for Content, and AdMob businesses, decreased approximately 11% over the fourth quarter of 2013 and decreased approximately 7% over the third quarter of 2014._

A third less advertising revenue on a 11% fewer clicks over all? Serious pain.

As of the fourth quarter, Google also mentions it is paying nearly a billion dollars a quarter ($968M) to get search traffic. If you're a GigaOm and your traffic is already generating less revenue and fewer clicks are getting through, you can't really add insult to injury by paying people to send you traffic.

[1] [http://investor.google.com/earnings/2014/Q4_google_earnings....](http://investor.google.com/earnings/2014/Q4_google_earnings.html)

<comment><USER6> So here's a pesky theory that pops into my mind every time I hear a story like this. I really hope everyone will say it's crazy, though, because the consequences are pretty dire.

Advertising is good at selling some products, but advertisers are spectacular at selling advertising. So we've had almost a century-long bubble in bullshit.

The best way you outsell other advertisers, masters of bullshit themselves, all spinning how effective their ad is, is by selling metrics alongside your advertising. Metrics are the anti-bullshit. Well, almost...

You want something that looks like "actual sales caused." You want to tell a guy, "pay me $10 per ad, and I will generate 10 sales, each giving you $2 profit you wouldn't have otherwise made. We'll split the winnings."

You want to claim metrics for sales caused, but you don't really want those exact numbers, you kind of want something that looks hard that you can spin. Something loosely correlated with "actual sales caused" where your art of bullshitting can get slightly better returns than the exact numbers would get. Play to your strengths, right?

So magazines come along with subscription numbers, and that's great sauce. Then television comes along with the Nielsen family and, ok, actually Nielsen starts way back with radio in the 1920s, but same idea. Radio/television advertising reaches the most people and every company starts to pay a premium.

Advertisers have the whole industry sliced, diced, catalogued and formulated. Superbowl is the premium end, free weeklies are the bottom of the barrel. Everybody has a place, but everyone's using the same game to guess at eyeballs, to guess at actual sales caused.

Suddenly, though, there's this new game on the internet. Not a lot of eyeballs at first, so it starts in free weekly category. Suddenly though, Google (and maybe some other companies) can tell you how many ads are actually getting action rather than just eyeballs.

It's a metric like we've never seen before, it's the killer metric. Sure, you could get this from surveys, or test markets, but this is like measuring everyone who sees the ad. It's pretty cool.

But remember, metrics this accurate are dangerous, it shows when advertising doesn't work too.

And a lot of advertising is spin, a lot of it isn't all that great, because advertisers are better at selling ads than they are at selling your product.

I hope someone tells me this is all nonsense, though, because if it's true, then Internet advertising is both absorbing the advertising industry then destroying it.

That'd be sad. I mean, sure, it's showing us which of our emperors are already naked. But it might mean the constant death of random content sites like this.

<comment><USER7> _Advertising is good at selling some products, but advertisers are spectacular at selling advertising. So we 've had almost a century-long bubble in bullshit._

This should be inscribed in 50-foot tall letters of fire hanging in the air above Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I think the demise of newspapers is largely from those buying advertising finally having hard and credible evidence that they were overpaying for a few centuries.

Advertising wasn't (and isn't) valueless, but the benefits were overextolled.

<comment><USER8> > I agree. I think the demise of newspapers is largely from those buying > advertising finally having hard and credible evidence that they were > overpaying for a few centuries.

There is something else at work here though. It could be that people were overpaying for advertising, but it doesn't cost a lot more for a print ad than it would cost to have the ad printed and mailed to the same number of people who subscribe to the newspaper. The newspaper makes money because they put your ad in the newspaper they were already going to print and deliver and then they get to stick your ad money in their pocket. It's a nice deal for them.

But the internet equivalent of direct mail is spam. Or mailing lists to be more charitable. In ether case there is no printing and delivery cost. And the advertiser will now also have their own website which anyone can go to and view their products at trivial expense to the advertiser.

So sellers of advertising are no longer providing printing and delivery services or access to finite broadcast airtime. The equivalents of those things are no longer scarce or expensive.

The only thing they're selling is the ability to put your ad in front of customers who otherwise might not see it. Which might still be valuable if they had some kind of exclusivity in providing that, but they don't. Eyeballs aren't scarce either. Everybody visits many websites every day. The advertiser can get their ad in front of the customer by putting it on any subset of those websites, which then have to compete with each other for the advertiser's money.

So the price of advertising goes down. Somewhat fortunately for the likes of Google, then the Jevons paradox kicks in and people realize that if advertising becomes cheaper then it's profitable to buy more of it. So companies aren't spending less money on advertising.

But there are still many times more people selling it. And if companies spend twice as much on advertising but there are twenty times as many websites offering ad space, at the end of the day they each end up with ~10% of what they used to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> GigaOM (or, Gigaom, given the rebranding following Om's departure) was my first internship in SF. I always really respected Om. While often to the detriment of Gigaom's bottom line and readership numbers, Om was adamant about avoiding controversy and clickbait. I was always proud to say I worked at Gigaom.

Really sad to see it go.

</comment><comment><USER10> After receiving $8m in funding 12 months ago: [https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all- grown-u...](https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-up-its- time-for-the-next-chapter/)

<comment><USER11> They tried to pivot, raised a bunch of money, hired 70+ people, and likely burned through it all.

<comment><USER12> Any source on the 70+ people?

<comment><USER13> Here it is: [https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all- grown-u...](https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-up-its- time-for-the-next-chapter/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are so many tech publications, and I never knew why I should read Gigaom instead of others. Perhaps that's one reason they didn't attract enough revenue. Can anyone answer that question?

Even better: Can anyone advise what publications they would read if they were interested in innovations in technologies and in their applications, rather than in products? That is, I'm interested in innovations or developments like IoT or blockchain or HTTP/2, and innovative ways to utilize them. Generally I'm not interested in something like the latest MacBook Air; it's significant in the marketplace, but for my purposes it only marginally improves and repackages existing tech.

<comment><USER15> I read a bunch of different tech sites, but it my opinion, the most relevant stuff is on HN. It basically aggregates all the best stuff from all the tech publications anyway, so you are probably just as well off in the end. Of course, if you want to read more academic articles per se, stick to the big science publications like Nature, etc.

Here's a list in no particular order:

1) recode

2) pando daily

3) techcrunch

4) techmeme (another good aggregator)

5) Mit tech review

6) New York Times Bits

7) WSJ D

8) CNET

9) Mashable

<comment><USER16> Ars Technica?

<comment><USER17> Ars Technica is basically an aggregator that dumbs things down almost to Associated Press level. Ars will give you a clue about what's newsworthy, but if you want technical details you have to track down their sources (which were probably on HN and Reddit the previous week).

<comment><USER18> [http://arstechnica.com/science](http://arstechnica.com/science) is a little bit better than the rest of the site, but its median article quality is also going downhill.

<comment><USER19> Yep, I saw a sharp decline in quality and increase in clickbait right around when GamerGate picked up steam. Maybe it was happening before but it's very noticeable now. Too bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Om Malik just published "A Statement about Gigaom" to his personal blog.

[http://om.co/2015/03/09/a-statement-about- gigaom/](http://om.co/2015/03/09/a-statement-about-gigaom/)

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm pretty surprised by this, particularly in part because their events business seemed robust. My company sent me to an event of theirs in NYC two years ago, and it had a very high caliber of presenters/panelists (David Karp, Andrew Sullivan, Tim Ferriss, a few others). The tickets also weren't cheap.

Sure, the company didn't go down the clickbait road, but it also had come up with revenue models that made up for that. Beyond events, they also had a research group—something that, to a degree, arguably made their real competition Gartner and Forrester.

I wonder what role Om stepping away from the day-to-day played in this. What he said a year ago makes this turn of events seem shocking: [https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all- grown-u...](https://gigaom.com/2014/02/20/now-that-gigaom-is-all-grown-up-its- time-for-the-next-chapter/)

<comment><USER22> I went to, probably the same, (big data) Gigaom event.

I really enjoyed it - good people and talks.

There weren't, however, many customers there. It was all other people selling stuff. So I didn't go again.

The recent wave of data related businesses are now generally at the phase where they need to meet potential customers from corporates at events.

Not sure how/if this affects business model though! The profitability of events is opaque to me.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My personal take is that Gigaom will be sorely missed. They've had some top notch writers and they've put out a lot of great stuff lately. But.. they've also had several funding rounds over the past 8 years and when you take $20m+ over 8 years and you can't hit a crazy level of growth, the VC grim reaper rears its ugly head.

</comment><comment><USER23> Damn. I read Gigaom regularly, really appreciated the straight up news. It will be missed.

Gigaom had an excellent writing staff, hope they get back on their feet quickly so we can keep reading their pieces.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://gigaom.com/2015/03/09/about- gigaom/](https://gigaom.com/2015/03/09/about-gigaom/)

<comment><USER24> > Gigaom recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time. As > a result, the company is working with its creditors that have rights to all > of the company's assets as their collateral.

Sounds like a fairly hostile takeover that no one was expecting. I wouldn't be surprised to see something very similar be spun out of it, perhaps not bearing the name of the departed founder.

<comment><USER25> More likely the company had debts it couldn't service

<comment><USER26> I think the phrasing "in full" is important here. It implies that a debt was "called in" and thus something more political is at play. I don't think this means they couldn't pay their bills. I wonder if venture debt is involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Thanks to Mathew Ingram for his valiant articles and twitter commentary on journalism ethics. Maybe he will consider following the Ben Thompson / stratechery business model.

<comment><USER3> The Globe and Mail could use his abilities again too, I'm sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I time to time read gigaom, the articles were mostly somber devoid of sensationalism, I will sorely miss gigaom.

</comment><comment><USER29> I thought they were on much more solid footing, considering the funding last year and the very strong talent in their ranks. For instance, Laura Hazard Owen is one of the best reporters covering the ebook industry.

This could be a sign of things to come for other online pubs once the funding runs out. Too much competition, too little in the way of sustainable revenue sources, and not enough AOL acquisition cash to go around.

</comment><comment><USER30> [http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/10/tech-site-gigaom- is...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/10/tech-site-gigaom-is-shutting- down/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Could this be a canary for the end of this investment cycle?

</comment><comment><USER29> From the GigaOm media kit (1)

 _Display advertising:_

Charging $35-$45 CPMs, depending on the channel. Rates dependent on campaign duration, budget and targeting. 300x250, 300x600 and 970x250 ad units available.

Flipboard campaign: $55 CPM, over 1.5 million readers/month

"1-week channel takeover" \- Gigaom homepage channel (1M+ impressions per week) $22K per week - includes two sponsored posts.

Mobile channel $15k, cloud $8k.

 _Sponsored posts:_

$3,000 250-word sponsored post $5,000 800-word sponsored post

 _Event sponsorships:_

$5K–$85K

 _Research:_

Annual cost appears to be $10k

1\. [https://gigaomabout2.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/gigaom- medi...](https://gigaomabout2.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/gigaom-media- kit-v3.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER32> With "dead tree" publications dying, and online ad supported publishing not being lucrative, how will the demand for content be satisfied?

Here in South Africa, our newspapers and magazines are in steep decline (but still profitable), and it seems everyone under 35 gets their news from ad- supported websites that are probably losing money.

Perhaps Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos were ahead of the curve. People may yet turn back to more traditional news sources, even if they are delivered via more modern mediums, such as tablets, if web advertising supported sites die.

</comment><comment><USER33> First guess, they didn't take the native advertising wave, losing thousands per article to _cough cough_ Techcrunch-likes _cough cough_

</comment><comment><USER34> > Every founder starts on a path — hopeful and optimistic, full of desire to > build something that helps change the world for the better, reshape an > industry and hopefully become independent, both metaphorically and > financially. Business, much like life, is not a movie and not everyone gets > to have a story book ending.

Quite daunting. Everyone hears the success stories and dreams of doing the same, or maybe even better but most fail. The reason I believe people push themselves to entrepreneurship is they ask themselves - "Why can't we? We are as smart as them and we have all the knowledge before us". Failure sucks and not everyone is capable of handling it in a positive way - "So what, I'll do better next time. I won't quit.". Perhaps, what scares me the most from my own 'business adventure'.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm not too surprised. I feel as if they've fallen off the radar in the past couple of years.

<comment><USER36> Same here, I used to read it but not much so in the last couple of years, probably ever since I started to read on HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Further confirmation: [http://recode.net/2015/03/09/techs-pioneering-tech- blog-giga...](http://recode.net/2015/03/09/techs-pioneering-tech-blog-gigaom- closes-down/)

<comment><USER38> Thanks. Since that has more information, we changed the url to it from [https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/575090046572736512](https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/575090046572736512). If someone suggests a better url we can change it again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> You can build a lean website on CPC advertising...but it's hard to build a real business based on that. Advertising should be viewed as supplemental revenue, rather than the main business model. I assume that's why GigaOm began to shift over to the subscription model.

It could also be one of the reasons Google just came out with the "Contributors" beta last week. They may have realized the CPC ad model does not pay enough and content creators need better business models to make it worth their time.

</comment><comment><USER40> I've worked in the adtech industry for years and now run a new company focused on content/native ads.

Online advertising is a vast and complicated ecosystem with hundreds of companies and lots of politics but all this is to say that sites like Gigaom failing are almost never just down to simple factors as "ads pay less". Some points on online advertising itself though, in random order:

\- Overall pageviews online are up, a lot. More people are online now and with more devices (desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, even tvs).

\- Ad blockers (depending on the site) can be anywhere from 10-50% of users.

\- Desktop is now the minority, usually about 35% of traffic.

\- Ad blockers are mostly on desktop, so while they are making an impact, it's somewhat minimized by the shift to mobile.

\- Ad blockers are also mostly run by corporations that make money and most allow companies to buy exceptions (Google does this, along with all those recommended links guys like Outbrain, Taboola and dozens of others. To be perfectly honest, we're trying to get on this list as well.)

\- There's a difference between branding/awareness campaigns (like for GE) vs performance campaigns (like for Newegg). Awareness is about getting you to recognize, remember, engage with and otherwise think about the brand. Especially important for B2B/enterprise and other companies that don't have things for consumers to buy, or even cheap enough for mainstream. Performance is all about getting a click, or these days even a signup, purchase or some other "action".

\- The ability of digital advertising to track things to such a granular level has made everything more efficient, driving down prices to a few cents per click in some cases. The ads you see on a webpage have gone through an entire auction process with dozens of bidders in about 100 milliseconds before you ever see anything.

\- Fraud is a huge issue along with viewability (whether an ad actually shows up inside the browser window vs. never being scrolled into view, inactive tab, etc). Early studies have pegged fraud/viewability problems at almost 50% although this is rapidly going down with new companies and standards. Nobody wants fraud and it's a constant arms race.

\- There are lots of ad types, everything from display (banners) to rich media (interstitials, popups, expanding/moving/interactive stuff), to native ads, to video, to email, and more. They all work on different parts of the "sales funnel" and there are different strategies in place. One of the biggest is called retargeting. It's when you visit a site then see ads for that same company across the web, even days or weeks later. It's all about making you remember and come back to learn more, buy something, etc. And it works really well.

\- Display ads do work. While everyone seems to think that _they_ won't ever click on a banner, Google sees hundreds of millions of clicks a day. Those recommended widgets get tens of millions of clicks a day. Ads work, whether you want to believe it or not, otherwise this industry wouldn't exist. Those billboards on the side of a freeway are far more expensive than small campaigns online but they're still bought because you can measure the effect before and after and see a measurable increase in whatever you're interested in.

\- People complain that they get crappy ads, unfortunately they also complain about being tracked. Trust me, ad networks want to get you the best ads as possible. Showing you what you're interested helps everyone. But we can't know who you are, what you've seen or anything else if we can't track you in some way. And for those who are worried about privacy, for all the legit ad platforms, you're nothing more than a randomized id number. Not personal information. If you're worried about that, then stay off Facebook where most people willingly give all their info.

\- Most advertising is being shifted to be bought on audiences rather than sites. Native ads are shifting this back somewhat but most modern platforms work by selling audience segments primarily, so as an advertiser you would run a campaign targeting 18-25 males interested in sports for example. Doesn't matter what site, as long as the audience matches and this is facilitated by the efficiency of running the aforementioned auctions (called RTB for Real- Time Bidding).

\- While privacy is important, there's an arms race with tracking because advertisers want this audience access. The recent issue with cookies has only made tech companies even better at tracking and there are entire sub- industries dedicated to tracking people across all of their devices. We can do this today. And it will only get better. Again the intentions are to get you better ads but if you're worried about privacy, just be aware that it's not that easy to "hide".

\---

If you've read this far, I hope that helped give some insight into online ads. I'm sorry I can't give exact sources as this is data that comes our ad network and it's not published anywhere, but we do have global coverage and this is very accurate in the US/European region. Disclaimer again: I run [https://instinctive.io](https://instinctive.io) but feel free to email/message if you want more info.

<comment><USER41> > People complain that they get crappy ads, unfortunately they also complain > about being tracked.

Is it so hard to understand? Give us ads related to the website content and pay CPM instead CPC to the website owner. On IT sites it would be helpful to see some ads about hardware devices and books, on digital news papers show us cars, holiday destinations, etc.

Instead we are followed by ads of products that we just bought like a plague. With personalized ads, you just make it worse, as more visitor get annoyed and root their mobile device to install adblock.

<comment><USER42> Agreed. I searched for a pair of boots (for research - I buy those offline, since I like to try them), and since I happened to click on an Amazon link, I'm now getting inundated with ads for boots, most of which don't even ship to me!

Meanwhile, Hack-a-day is the only site I remember buying something through their ads, since they actually show relevant stuff. It's not an amazing discovery that I'd be more interested in buying a Raspberry Pi after seeing an article about someone using it in an interesting way, than a pair of boots!

<comment><USER40> Yes, this is called retargeting. By clicking on that link, you've expressed interest (however slight) in boots. Amazon is pretty big and they work with all the major retargeting networks so now you've been instantly put into several "segments" denoting this interest along with attempted lookups on every network for your user profile (including social networks, major exchanges, some large site/publisher networks, etc).

Now eventually those retargeting segments will expire (usually somewhere between 10-30 days) but for the vast majority of people, the constant reminder of boots will actually lead to a sale. Remember we wouldn't do it if it didn't actually work.

There is an issue if you do buy something as ecommerce data is valuable and under strict privacy controls so we don't always get to know you already bought something. And it's much harder if you walk into a store and buy it offline. Add in all the other privacy complaints and its like trying to do the impossible, users expect us to know exactly what they're interested in and what they've bought but don't want us to track anything... We're trying but it's not magic, something in that equation has to change. Either better/more accurate ads or more privacy. It's up to the users to choose.

<comment><USER42> How can users choose? I don't remember being given the choice.

As a user, what I know is that not only am I being tracked, but the result is fucking boots everywhere. Frankly, I see absolutely no gain from my perspective from the whole thing.

<comment><USER40> Adblock/proxies/private browsing are one way (not recommended really) to choose. Another is to opt out of major networks, just search for "ad network opt out". Here's a starting point: [http://www.aboutads.info/choices/](http://www.aboutads.info/choices/)

Btw, we track that you've opted-out using the same methods we track everything else. So if you try to get around with adblock, etc then we don't know you've opted-out and we don't know your history either so we show you even worse/generic ads. It's a catch 22 but that's reality.

You've expressed interest in boots, now you'll keep seeing ads for boots until you either buy boots (and that purchase data somehow finds it way back to the retargeting networks) or until the history segment expires. That's what advertising is for. Do you complain about billboards for movies you've already seen? At least online we can be a little bit more dynamic about it. But again, it's very tough with users complaining about privacy and the dozens of companies that data has to go through. You want us to know whether we can ship to you, but we dont have your address. We dont know who you are, where you live, or any of that. There are ways to try and figure this out, but it's usually not worth the cost and again there are privacy issues. Do you want us to know your address? If no, then how do you suggest we solve this?

It's not perfect, there's a massive amount of technology involved but it's still a challenge to tie everything together so I hope you understand that this isnt something we take lightly but its unfortunately the best we can do right now.

Now if you're saying you've never been impacted by ads online, that's pretty much scientifically wrong. Even the smallest impression does add up and eventually influence something down the line. Nobody wants to admit it, and you might not even notice, but I promise it's working.

<comment><USER41> > then we don't know you've opted-out and we don't know your history either so > we show you even worse/generic ads

But that's what people want - generic ads. Instead of spying on user the ad networks should spy on content (crawl the web pages were the ad is on).

It's very easy, the first time an ad is served from a specific page it's new for your network and you show a generic ad related to the topic of the website. Then you crawl the new page. For every new visit of that page you now have some information and can show a related ad to that page!

Hint: That's how Google Ads work. There is no need to spy on visitors.

<comment><USER40> Actually they don't. People want ads for what they're interested in. Time and again, that's been the number 1 complaint, that they see ads that aren't fit for them.

Contextual relevancy is hard (and what you talked about isn't scalable) but that's not the only issue. A mainstream news site can get a massive amount of people of all kinds, an ad about cars to one might be irrelevant to another. It's just not that simple to show "generic" ads, especially when advertisers increasingly want better and more accurate targeting.

It's better for both sides to have this tracking, companies get better performance and users see what they're actually interested in. Again the legitimate companies don't know anything personal about you... at most we know what you've seen, what you've clicked and can guesstimate that maybe you like a certain thing or another. And 15-30 days later we delete the profile because it's old. Not exactly a giant NSA database of your life here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> One idea for a business would be being a subscription service. Partner with some big names, which already offer/consider offering subscriptions. Users select a monthly payment, and tick boxes for the websites they want to support. Much less hassle than subscribing to each and every website which wants/needs your money. Maybe with an RSS feed aggregating content from your selection.

</comment><comment><USER44> The long-term solution is to form a consortium of online media and charge a monthly subscription fee of $9.99/month or so. (Tech media comes together: techcrunch, venturebeat, recode, etc.) Having individual paywalls will not incentivize readers to pay an annual subscription fee. And then the revenue can be split between various media outlets.

</comment><comment><USER45> I think one of Om's earliest blogs (may have even been an acquisition) was about being a digital nomad. I was just getting in to tech/startup news at the time and for whatever reason, that one stuck out to me. (Can anyone find a link?) I've always enjoyed reading their content over the years and will be sad to see them go.

</comment><comment><USER46> I had pretty good click-to-buy success but only at a narrow subject, dedicate vertical sites. In other words selling backup software to the readers of data backup tech site.

GigaOM is a wide subject site and only brand awareness ads would make sense. For click-my-ad-to-buy-my-stuff hopeful advertiser - it's a waste of money.

</comment><comment><USER47> 70 people full time? that sounds like an awful lot. If these are SanFran salaries then their running costs are already immense without even considering other running costs.

Cannot a site like this be ran by 10-15 people? Maybe I'm missing where the labour is going.

<comment> mkr-hn They probably needed a few people for events.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> With 'more than 6.5 million monthly' they should do between 50K - 200K/m depending on the bizdev and sales skills.

50K is not enough to keep operations running, 100K would work with editors from low-wage countries.

But still a bit odd that they ran out of money.

</comment><comment><USER49> While some of the podcasts seemed to be a bit fluffy, I always appreciated the Structure Show as a survey of where infrastructure software was. Any suggestions of similarly aimed content to subscribe to?

</comment><comment><USER50> Unfortunately their paid-wall model of content really didn't work. When Gigom went into the multi-site model the fragmentation (and the quality) went down hill

They tried to resurrect it but the damage was done

</comment><comment><USER51> "How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."

― Ernest Hemingway

</comment><comment><USER52> Any insight why? I'm guessing ad revenue is down, not enough traffic, etc. But more light on why Gigaom shutting down would be of value.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no inside knowledge (other than being in publishing generally) but they're in a hot space with relatively good advertising opportunities right now, they also run events which should, in theory, be quite profitable.

My totally unfounded theory/opinion is they were overfunded and the investors wanted to get out after not seeing the growth levels they wanted (which in publishing is not a big surprise, you almost never see SaaS or consumer app levels of growth there).

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Many people discussed that it happened due to Adblocker. If that's true then how sites like Mashable and Techcrunch still surviving?

<comment><USER54> Mashable isn't a tech site any more, really, so their target market doesn't use Adblock as much. It's a bad HuffPo / BuzzFeed clone. Started when they took funding two years ago and has gone way downhill ever since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wasn't a heavy reader of the site, but it always struck me as very fact- oriented and professional. That's too bad to hear.

</comment><comment><USER55> Another triumph for Adblock

<comment><USER56> Adblock is merely a symptom of a larger problem. Advertising itself is hostile to quality content and good practices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Another one bites the dust. Pity.

</comment><comment><USER58> maybe it's time for paid subscription model?

<comment><USER56> I'm leaning to something closer to a patron / member model, though with most content generally available.

We're seeing a reprise of earlier forms of media. Truth is: there _is_ a social (and business) need for quality and reasonably unbiased information. There's also value to those who want to control such a feed (the dark side of media). Advertising has sustained the concept in some form or another for several hundred years, with a few big shake-ups. But there've also be (and continue to be) highly ideological organizations (see Fox News / NewsCorp / WSJ, well know, but also _The Economist_ , and on the left, papers such as _The Guardian_ , _Mother Jones_ , or _The Christian Science Monitor_ ).

The problem, in an online era, of subscriptions only is that it closes your distribution down _too_ much. Providing early access might be a way around that, though information tends to get out very, very quickly. Of numerous bad options, it strikes me as one of the less-bad (see LWN.net which uses it).

Another is partnering with someone who has a clear interest in your demographic -- DICE buying Slashdot, for example, though that doesn't seem to be going all too well from either a content or business stand point so far as I can tell. Hacker News follows the same model, more successfully (on both grounds) via Ycombinator.

Advertising, though, seems to me a dead end. And it's going to be all kinds of hurt for the current iteration of Silicon Valley if it plays out as I suspect it will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Is it just me or does there seem to be significantly more of a recode.net presence on HN at the moment?

I hadn't heard of the site until recently and now I've seen a few fairly low- brow articles from it on the front page here in the last 24 hours.

<comment><USER38> I looked at the data and am pretty sure it's just random fluctuation.

If there's a higher-brow article on this story we'll happily change the url.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Really??

</comment><comment><USER61> How does a tech company run out of money? Isn't this where some VC steps in with a billion dollar valuation for the series G round?

<comment><USER62> I don't think they are a tech company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> That's one problem naming a business after a person. Still the domain is worth something. No sense "parking" a domain like that.</comment>


I'm learning Rust so I can move away from C# - <AUTHOR> http://earlz.net/view/2013/10/12/1812/im-learning-rust-so-i-can-move-away

<comment><USER2> If I posted to HN every time I learned something new, I'd have a lot of nickels.

<comment><USER3> I've enjoyed the post.</comment></comment>


The Leica Q: A six month field test - <AUTHOR> http://craigmod.com/sputnik/leica_q/ <comment><USER2> I could understand the point of leica, in the 40s-60s

it was quiet, well built, had good lenses and was reliable. (it had a fabric shutter, or something similar, which means it didn't click. This allowed people to be "in the moment")

In the digital world, I just don't understand the point of them. Sure yes its a full frame with a decent lens in a similar body size as the old compact rangefinders.

But.

the image quality just isn't worth the $4K. Thats top end SLR price. Under its all its just a panasonic lumix. If it was a separate entity, I could sorta see the point. You are paying for the name, and thats it.

What I'd really like is a leica/fujion style body, but with a nikon sensor and lens adaptor. (Although I suspect that its not really possible because the focal point is much too deep.)

<comment><USER3> I'm someone who thinks Leica is a bit overpriced.

But as the owner of a 5D Mk III and several L lenses, -and- a Lumix DMC- LX100... the Leica is not a Lumix.

This isn't even the best article for image quality (though there are certainly many very good shots). But where the Leica excels is razor sharp images that don't have any hint of "is that sharpened in Photoshop?" (for example: [http://i1.wp.com/www.stevehuffphoto.com/wp- content/uploads/2...](http://i1.wp.com/www.stevehuffphoto.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/11/L1000366.jpg) )

<comment><USER4> It looks pretty ordinary to me, to be honest. Even entry level DSLRs produce very sharp images these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love how thorough and thoughtful this article is, especially since it's on a personal web site. Reminds me of what the web used to be, before big clickbait sites took over. Just someone writing at length about something they are passionate about.

</comment><comment><USER6> The alternative camera (and one for 1/4 the price) is the Fuji X100T. Many people love this camera:

[http://www.kenrockwell.com/fuji/x100t.htm](http://www.kenrockwell.com/fuji/x100t.htm)

<comment><USER7> I posted exactly this comment and then I noticed yours. Are these camera's actually comparable or is it apples and oranges?

<comment><USER8> Yes and no.

They are comparable, in that they are both fairly compact, fixed prime lens cameras that offer high quality (camera build and image).

They are not comparable,as the Leica has a better/faster autofocus system. In theory it has better optics as well, though I haven't seen a side-by-side.

A good friend is a professional photographer. His carry-around fun camera is the X100T. I think his professional-grade stuff is Nikon. I'm sure he'd love the Leica, but it's a lot of money for what is unlikely to be used professionally (at least not by him).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Craig Mod's reviews convinced me to get the GF1 many years ago, and I am still very happy with that camera. Though it has interchangeable lenses I often use it with a prime 20mm (film equivalent of 40mm) which, I discovered, are simply a joy to use: the lack of the "feature" of a zoom can free your mind in the moment of exploration.

<comment><USER10> I should have replied to your comment, instead of posting a new one. I agree with your sense of freeing, but if, as the author talks about, you'll crop many of your shots, it doesn't sound so freeing then.

<comment><USER9> I was also surprised about the cropping! For my own photographs I never crop, I don't really see the point. But perhaps he is publishing photos, in which case I understand it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Under the heading "Video": "I think the Q does video."

That's it. I love his writing style.

</comment><comment><USER11> Glad I googled the camera and found out it cost +$4000 before reading are review about it. It should have been the first sentence of the article since most of us will never dream of spending that on a camera.

<comment><USER12> You'll want to file "Leica" away in that area of your brain where brands like "Ferrari" or "Rolex" are. It's basically the equivalent in cameras.

<comment><USER13> A camera produces artifacts. To _me_ that makes it a bit different than a car or a watch: Roli tell the same time, Ferrari's pick up the same cartons of milk, but lenses and sensors and firmware capture different images.

I see Leica as of a kind with other multi thousand dollar cameras...it's not as if a Nikon or a Cannon is any more or less reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I never quite understood Leica. The quality of their products is undoubtedly extremely high, I won't try to deny that and they deserve credit for decades of excellence in the field.

But as the owner of a Voigtländer R4A coupled with a Nokton 35mm f/1.4 (bought for a total of $1200, which was quite the investment for me) I can't help but be amazed by how much it would have cost me to buy the Leica equivalent (5 times that amount). It's quite obvious looking at the results that Leica does not offer that superior a result for that hefty price (and even though I know that it's a tad simplistic to reason in those terms, it certainly wouldn't have bought me 5 times the quality).

Leica reminds me of Apple, it's all about status and perceived value. Hats off to them for reaching that lucrative niche market.

<comment><USER15> > it's all about status and perceived value

Yet the author of this post taped off the lettering to make it look like a generic camera.

<comment><USER16> Here in Asia Leica is sold in high end fashion malls, not in the photography equipment or electronics area of town. In fact in Japan there's a Leica counter in the men's fashion accessories area of Mitsukoshi Mens in Ginza. In Hong Kong there's one in Harbour City, a high end fashion mall. In Singapore there's one in ION Orchard, another fashion mall. Where as if you want any other brand of camera in all those cities you go to the electronics area of town. Akihabara or Shinjuku's Yodobashi Camera in Japan, Mong Kok in HK, Sim Lim or Funan Digitallife Mall in SG

In other words, Leica themselves are positioning their cameras as fashion accessories. Something to show you have $$$$$$

<comment><USER17> If I were Leica and I could sell my camera as accessory in a fashion mall, why not? This tells me more about the people shopping there, than about Leica. It's probably not Leica positioning themselves there, but some smart business people seeing good margins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd struggle with the idea of shooting at such a wide angle, and relying on cropping later. Theoretically, at least, I like the idea of letting a fixed focal length in the camera guide how I frame images around me.

<comment><USER18> 28mm isn't really so wide on a full frame. In some ways it is more natural than 50mm, in that it frames more like we see with two eyes side by side (50 is closer to the projection we see though) without much in the way of distortion. Once you get used to the frame, you would't need to crop all the time, but I guess it saves you some foot zooming.

<comment><USER8> WRT to foot zooming, shooting portraits with a 28mm requires some SERIOUS foot zooming. You have to be VERY comfortable getting close to subjects. Fine if you know them; possibly awkward if you don't.

<comment><USER10> Interesting. Do you tend to crop portraits you take at 28mm?

<comment><USER19> You shouldn't take portraits with a 28mm lens, at least not if you can avoid it. It'll distort your subject's features, making their chin, or nose, or whatever look abnormally large. Better to use an 85mm lens if you can.

<comment><USER4> It will distort their features if you get in close. For the same distance from the subject, any focal length with give you the same amount of (perspective) distortion. So if you shoot from 10ft away and crop, you'll get the same results (modulo resolution) as you would have gotten if you'd shot from 10ft away with a longer focal length and filled the frame.

<comment><USER19> 10 foot subject distance on a 28mm lens isn't much of a portrait. Unless you're doing an environmental portrait with an emphasis on the environment.

<comment><USER4> Well, that's why I said "shoot from 10ft away and crop".

<comment><USER19> How much resolution does your sensor offer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For anyone looking for the 80/20 alternative here (80% of the experience/results for 20% of the cost), take a look at the Ricoh GR.

It doesn't have a viewfinder, but the ergonomics are superb. APS-C sensor, fixed 28mm lens (a very sharp one at that), and 16mp. Goes with me on every trip.

Ming Thein's review: [http://blog.mingthein.com/2013/05/06/review-2013-ricoh- gr-di...](http://blog.mingthein.com/2013/05/06/review-2013-ricoh-gr- digital-v/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Um, is the price really $4,000!? Am I the only one that thinks nothing costing that much is a "travel camera"? The one of several cameras I own that I toss in my bag when I don't want or need capabilities of my "expensive" gear.

I wouldn't carry something costing $4000 on me anywhere I wasn't very familiar with / felt safe in.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how this camera compares to a Sony A7 (or it's successors) if the Sony is paired with a comparable lens.

I recall having heard that either the first or the second generation A7 has the same sensor as the Leica Q but this might be wrong.

</comment><comment><USER23> Images look like they lost contrast due to some sort of flare effect.

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice advertisement...

</comment><comment><USER25> blah... Full Frame is overrated.

For reasons one may want full frame, someone else may want a cropped sensor for other equally legitimate reasons.

I love my Fuji X100. Manual Focus is also overrated. As long as you have a quick phase detecting AF solution, you won't miss the tactile mechnical MF. The X100 is not there yet, but future generations will surely provide satisfactory AF speed.

<comment><USER25> oh yeah.. all the people who think bokeh downvoted.

Do you know the concept of non-shallow DOF and how that is beneficial in many low light/wide-open aperture circumstances?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Maybe there should be a separate site called Hacker Ads

</comment><comment><USER27> The article contains referral links for amazon at the bottom.

Just saying.

<comment><USER8> So? Bloggers deserve to eat too.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Europe work VISA without undergraduate degree? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working remotely for a Berlin-based company lately, while trying to get a work VISA and finally live there. Unfortunately, i don't have an undergraduate (or similar) degree and i've been turned down twice by the german authorities. Do you guys know any countries which are friendlier to software engineers with vast experience and certifications, but no degree? <comment><USER2> Sweden, if you first convince a company there that they want to hire you.

"My" company has hired maybe 15 foreigners from all over the world. Getting the work visa (including visas for partners and children) is quite streamlined.

Here are the rules for Swedish employers looking to hire foreign people:

[http://www.migrationsverket.se/info/6113_en.html](http://www.migrationsverket.se/info/6113_en.html)

\- advertise the job in Sweden and the EU for at least 10 days

\- offer terms of employment that are at least on the same level as Swedish collective agreements or that which is customary in your occupation or industry

\- offer a salary that is at least on the same level as Swedish collective agreements or that which is customary in your occupation or industry

\- offer a monthly pretax salary of at least SEK 13,000

\- fill out a offer of employment and give the trade union concerned the opportunity to state its opinion about the terms of employment

Processing time is usually okay, a couple of weeks.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are thinking of getting a visa for a different country and working in Berlin, I don't think it works like that.

EU citizens have the right to work anywhere in the EU, but a visa is still granted by an individual country and only gives the ability to work in that country.

</comment><comment><USER4> Only reason I can see from the rules would be that your employer offers less that the minimum salary (kollektivvertrag) for your position.

See below for EU Blue Card Germany, Non EU Citizen, No Degree, No German based training, WITH ICT(information computer technology) experience will qualify.

[http://www.bluecard-eu.de/eu-blue-card-germany/work- permit.h...](http://www.bluecard-eu.de/eu-blue-card-germany/work- permit.html#information-communication-technology)

What "WORD FOR WORD" in German is stated on your VISA rejection cause in BOTH CASES?

</comment><comment><USER5> There can be an option to move to Poland, Czech Republic or check options via internal company transfer.I don't know where you live, but there are some large outsourcing companies with offices in Poland so you can probably apply to work for them in your country and then move on via internal transfer.

</comment><comment><USER6> The only regret from dropping out of college, really. I don't want to continue working in my country, because it has a low standard of living and low salaries. I have been thinking of getting a remote job, or at least starting freelance/consulting. Looking forward to the answers here.

</comment><comment><USER7> They turned you down even though you are already working for someone?</comment>


SpaceX Successfully Lands Rocket on Drone Ship - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-08/spacex-attempts-to-land-a-rocket-on-a-drone-ship-for-the-fifth-time <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11457263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11457263).</comment>


"Proof-Of-Work" Proves Not to Work (2004) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious to know how relevant this study is to the tech used today... Especially cryptocurrencies..

<comment><USER2> It isn't relevant to crypto. This is specifically about spam email mitigation. I don't agree with their conclusion, which is "we can't reduce spam to the level we'd like without imposing undue burden on legitimate senders so we shouldn't do it at all". The "all or nothing" doesn't make sense. They never consider things like whitelists (legitimate senders need to do zero work), different levels of work required for different senders (eg a sender's IP address isn't recognized so dramatically increase the work requirements), etc.</comment></comment>


The elevator pitched me a curve ball... - <AUTHOR> http://ocastaneda.weblog.tudelft.nl/2008/05/27/elevator_pitch_ing_curveballs

<comment><USER2> Old riddle: How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice, practice, practice.</comment>


Classic WTF: We Use BobX - <AUTHOR> http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-We-Use-BobX.aspx

<comment><USER2> I wrote an XML-based language in Java years ago. It worked a bit like Rails macros, allowing arbitrary Java classes to be instantiated and their results displayed in a web page.

In my defense, this was in the late 90s. There was not much out there for not- completely-ugly web development. It actually worked pretty well. It let us write our business logic in POJOs and then rapidly code up XHTML web pages with embedded XML tags to invoke these and display the results. It was also pretty fast. The alternatives were crummy old PHP3, a bunch of proprietary junk that was mostly worse than PHP, and servlets full of out.println("
"+var+"	"... madness.

But apparently it's still in production. That makes me shudder, since there are _much_ better things out there now.

Edit: just checked. Finally, it appears to be dead. Heh.</comment>


Ask HN: Freelance subcontract opportunities? - <AUTHOR> I'm part of a 2 man mobile and fullstack development team. We've had success subcontracting in the past but these opportunities are seemingly rare. Currently finding clients has been frustrating and slow. Is there a reliable method to secure subcontracts without cold emailing other freelance or contract firms? <comment><USER2> I believe you can do several things:

\- find a partner who can handle the business development part;

\- reach out for new project through your network;

\- ask your previous clients if you can help them out;

\- ask your previous clients if they are willing to recommend you to their network;</comment>


Is Being a Digital Nomad a Lie? - <AUTHOR> http://coastery.com/2015/digital-nomad-truth/ <comment><USER2> A routine is an excellent thing to have even if you aren't a nomad. I have countless little rituals I've collected and iterated on for years that serve to ground me and make my time productive no matter where I'm at.

I've noticed two different kinds, bottom-up rituals and the top-down variety. Bottom up rituals evolve organically out of whatever space / situation I happen to find myself in. In some situations I find I need a daily walk to help collect my thoughts whenever life is getting a bit too chaotic. Another ritual I might use when my workload is high is to collect tasks onto a sheet of paper, one per line. This happens perhaps twice a year and is a signal that there is mental cruft that needs to be cleaned out. The process of clearing out the list and striking the line items off of it is meditative and serves to bring that cruft to the surface so I can deal with it.

Top-down happens whenever I decide I need to make a focused change in my life and need a new set of ruts to run my wagon in. I started going to the gym every day a few months ago. I have a very specific routine that I change from time to time to keep it fresh. I often have to acquire things and maintain them in order to keep the routine convenient so I don't have an excuse to skip it.

It's gotten to where if I'm feeling unproductive, I start looking at my rituals, have I stopped any recently without noticing? Do I need a new one?

<comment><USER3> That's a good idea about changing your routine from time to time. Had the same idea recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Every time I see a laptop on a beach on Facebook I think to myself "Well, that's a lie".

I've worked from home for the past 5 years and one of the "secrets" is to have a dedicated home office as a work environment.

I personally don't see this working for the job I do. Never thought it's actually a sustainable option for more than a couple of months at best.

<comment><USER5> But I see laptops on the beach on Facebook with the same frequency that I see them at the office.

<comment><USER6> I find it hard to work while on the beach. The sand gets everywhere, the wind gets annoying and you have to watch out for the sun too! OTOH if you have a house by the beach and you're just at the house, overlooking the beach... that's a different story.

I'd rather find a cozy Starbucks. That's where the work gets done. Doesn't matter the continent or the country :D The coffee quality varies a bit (good in most places in Asia, passable in UK, ok in States) but it's "home".

In many places there are better alternatives. Cool hipster coffee shops and whatnot but when I'm in a new location and need an anchor place I just go to Starbucks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> All my stuff is location-independent. I have cloud machines for anything calculation intensive, and also for web infrastructure (naturally).

\- Best thing about being remote is scheduling. There's no commute, so that's extra time to get things done. If you need more time before dinner, no problem. If you have things done early, you can go wrestle with the kid immediately.

\- Not everything you do requires 100% attention. Writing emails, updating people on Slack, reading about some new tech, that can be done while you're hanging out with the family.

\- You can be updated constantly. Some people would find this annoying, but I like it that way.

\- You can spread your work out so it's lower intensity. If you're not on a weekend trip with the family, you can get things done and still have time to hang around the kids.

\- When you're travelling, you can still get things done. I've checked in code from an airplane. You can visit friends in different places while not feeling like you're falling behind.

\- It helps a lot to be self employed. Not sure I'd want to always be working if I had an ordinary job.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've daydreamed of one step beyond the Digital Nomad to 'Citizen of the World'. The plan is fairly well formed, and combining a 'placeless' vocation with such citizenship can make one globally and indefinitely nomadic.

My thinking is to spend one month in a locale, explore it to the extent I desire, get to know a few people, learn how the locals live, and then move on.

The foundations of this lifestyle are Around-the-world air tickets from the major carriers [0] and AirBnb. I like the notion of finding friendly AirBnb hosts and learning from them what the local lifestyle is: Where they shop for food, how they get around, what activities they enjoy, what their days are generally like... Then spending a month more or less doing the same things. In the meanwhile, working for pay as a remote consultant.

Total cost of this lifestyle would depend on the class of digs you want to live in. Some cities are really inexpensive, say, Athens or Aukland. You could be comfortable averaging US$125/day for a place and $25/day for food. Another $25 for 'other stuff', entertainment, etc. Call it $175/day, 365/year, throw in the air fare, health insurance and taxes, and you're looking at about $85,000 in income to live this way.

What is interesting is that with this lifestyle, you don't need to own an apartment, or a car, or closets full of clothes. So the money you spend where you are is all the money you need.

[0] [http://www.staralliance.com/en/book- fly](http://www.staralliance.com/en/book-fly)

<comment><USER9> How would you work out the visas and taxes though?

<comment><USER10> Did almost exactly this for all of 2014 (part of 2015). With a US citizenship, and visited 10 countries for a month+.

Working remotely for a foreign corporation generally isn't against the terms of a tourist visa (consult the specific country you're visiting). All officials I asked had no problem with it, from South America/Asia/Europe (Germany will actually let you stay longer, up to 2 years, if you're a remote worker/freelancer). You do need a work visa if you're planning to do work for a company that exists locally (competing with the locals, etc).

It was hugely income tax advantageous. There's a huge US tax credit if you aren't living in the US (your first $95-120k tax free), and I wasn't staying long enough in any country to meet their reporting requirements.

<comment><USER8> What types of places did you stay in?

I had forgotten the income tax advantage for expatriates. Makes it even more compelling.

<comment><USER10> Mostly Airbnb's, an occasional hostel/hotel if I didn't plan ahead.

My routine when arriving in a new country would be to quickly find a place to stay and a coworking space, then explore the city/country when I wasn't working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's about whether you can manage your time properly - I thrive in a "digital nomad"-style work.

I programmed on the beach in Barcelona via their free Wi-Fi, overlooked Pu'uhonua o Honaunau while writing some advanced math/programming stuff, had a blast jumping off bungy, rafting and MTB downhill in New Zealand between the session of writing world-class code many people use now etc. It's all about whether you can _focus_. Learn to focus 100% on what you need to do, leave your brain rested by doing crazy inspiring things on a side and you'll manage digital nomad lifestyle and your output will be far higher than sitting in an office, especially open one. I noticed when I focus for 3-4 hours on some tough problem, then interrupt and do something completely unrelated or sleep, I get surprisingly many ideas quickly leading me to a solution. If I just sit in front of a monitor, it might take a week to solve the same. Weird, but works for me.

<comment><USER12> > I noticed when I focus for 3-4 hours on some tough problem, then interrupt > and do something completely unrelated or sleep, I get surprisingly many > ideas quickly leading me to a solution. If I just sit in front of a monitor, > it might take a week to solve the same. Weird, but works for me.

Oddly, I have almost this exact same experience. If I work on a tough problem for 3 or 4 solid hours and then either do something completely different or go to sleep, I usually come back with at least three or four plausible solutions.

There's a 50% chance that we're both weird and a 50% chance that you're onto something....:)

<comment><USER13> Anecdotes are fun, but I have the same experience. One of the benefits of working from home is I can go play with my daughter for 10 minutes when I'm stuck spinning my wheels, afterward I usually have the solution I've spent 2 or more hours trying to come up with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think a lot of people are enamored with something more specific, like a "digital backpacker," someone who acts like a backpacking college kid, and then wonders why months of bus travel, hostel living and camping aren't conducive to knowledge work.

I spent age 22-30 in remote coastal South America. I may have been a digital nomad, but I wasn't a backpacker.

I always had a "home base."

Having a "home base", and _living_ somewhere for at least a couple of months (rent a place, or even buy a house, which is what I finally ended up doing in a little fishing village) is far from what some would consider being a "nomad," but personally I think it's more edifying.

Why are you traveling? Is it really that you love packing and moving? Or are you trying to find great places to _live_ in? Focus on the living part first.

</comment><comment><USER15> We work remotely. All of us. Remote worker or Digital nomad, pick whichever you feel like sounds better to you.

We have several blog posts about this topic since the entire company is 'Remote'. A couple blog posts that you all might find useful straight-from- the-source below, I've listed them in importance from what I think is the biggest bang-for-the-buck for remote workers.

Schedule your days: [http://www.sofetch.io/blog/2015/5/19/stay-productive- schedul...](http://www.sofetch.io/blog/2015/5/19/stay-productive-schedule- your-days)

How to work remotely: [http://www.sofetch.io/blog/2015/8/4/how-to-work- remotely](http://www.sofetch.io/blog/2015/8/4/how-to-work-remotely)

How NOT to work remotely: [http://www.sofetch.io/blog/2015/8/3/how-to-not- work-remotely](http://www.sofetch.io/blog/2015/8/3/how-to-not-work-remotely)

Last but not least, all of our 'desks', some have offices to stay focused, some don't: [http://www.sofetch.io/blog/2015/7/23/so-fetch- desks](http://www.sofetch.io/blog/2015/7/23/so-fetch-desks)

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been digital-nomading from a sailboat for the past 3 years... Works great as I get to have my office and take it wherever I want in the world (on the coast). See my previous comments for more info.

Since I sorta have a base for work I'd call myself a remote worker. I rarely work outside the boat, nothing ridiculous like working at a beach... So at the end of the day it's just a home office, so it's not too hard to get back into the work mindset after changing location as everything is static inside. Except my backyard changes all the time. I'm currently in downtown Barcelona after taking some time off the cross the Atlantic.

The lifestyle is not for everyone, sometimes it's quite hard, and I wouldn't say it helps my work that much... It's just something I enjoy doing (sailing and changing location), but have to compromise and do some work from time to time.

<comment><USER17> I've been planning and saving towards working remotely, with a stretch-goal of doing so from a boat. Would you mind sharing some details about your boat- type/unexpected costs?

trstowell[at]gmail

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not knowing anyone where you go, or being 'lonely' has a positive side. John Carmack used to get a hotel room in a state where he didn't know anyone, so he could work for a week without distractions.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's do-able. Perhaps if _adventure_ is the goal, it's kind of a lie. If you have other goals, it can be awesome. It helps if you have a background where moving around was normal.

I do freelance work online. I went "nomad" nearly four years ago, but generally use a less glamorous label. I self identify most of the time as _homeless_. But having portable income and a past life as a military wife who moved and traveled a lot on a budget has empowered me to design a new life from the ground up to replace a life that simply did not work with one that did.

My income is gradually increasing, I have traveled enough to feel comfortable that I have finally found a city that should work for me for the foreseeable future and I am currently researching what I will need to do to go from sleeping in a tent to owning a house.

I think it is kind of a lie to think you can do portable work and be "free" to just live life as one big adventure. The fact that you have to work prevents you from playing tourist every minute. But, having been a military wife, I already knew what I could and could not get out of moving around. So I didn't have unrealistic expectations.

</comment><comment><USER20> I know a very successful digital nomad. He, his wife, and their 3 kids have lived in an airstream trailer for the past several years. He has a good job, which he works remotely, and they move to a new location every 1-2 weeks.

His kids have explored every state and national park, and every museum of note. I envy that life more than a little.

They have a blog at CurrentlyWandering.com

<comment><USER21> Do their kids have friends, or are they just being dragged along on dad's vacation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Digital nomads certainly aren't limited to freelancers. There's a wide spectrum of careers ranging from "normal FT but away from the office" to that with flexible hours to occasional high value freelance projects to running businesses where income is decoupled from hours of work.

Amazon FBA, kindle ebooks, online courses, affiliate sales, SaaS, mobile apps and high traffic ad-monetized sites are fairly common self-funded businesses for digital nomads.

I actually wrote a fairly detailed piece on the topic recently: [https://toshuo.com/2015/what-is-a-digital- nomad/](https://toshuo.com/2015/what-is-a-digital-nomad/)

</comment><comment><USER23> >We have become like the most primitive Palaeolithic man, once more global wanderers, but information gatherers rather than food gatherers. From now on the source of food, wealth and life itself will be information.

-Marshall McLuhan

</comment><comment><USER24> Does any digital nomad could share a bad experience with laws against working remotely in a foreign country?

</comment><comment><USER25> "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word _no_."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)</comment>


Link-time optimization in GCC, part 3 – LibreOffice - <AUTHOR> http://hubicka.blogspot.com/2014/09/linktime-optimization-in-gcc-part-3.html

<comment><USER2> For some reason all the charts and graphs fail to load. I think it's because blogger insists on loading over http, but the google docs in question are linked over https.

<comment><USER3> I think it is a permission issue.

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_kalk9Bsgl5Pj- EiGOsW...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_kalk9Bsgl5Pj- EiGOsWmiuedfx8NonNJzAKkLUNKFg/gviz/chartiframe?oid=1026424494)

Is one of the documents and that simply won't load for me.

I think the docs are still set to not be publicly readable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Didn't know about the GCC amd64 array alignment issues >16bytes and >32bytes. Horrible for my method dispatch, not just C++ vtables (fixed with gcc-5.0).

Cannot this be overturned with the aligned or packed attribute? (if not on the stack as this was broken for aligned for while)

<comment><USER3> That's pretty easy to test, simply compile an array of pointers to functions in the BSS and then print the sizeof (or use nm), then do it again in packed mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> LibreOffice? Is this still....a thing? Is the OSS community still trying to beat MS at this meaningless game? What's wrong with Google Docs? First thing I do in Ubuntu is uninstall this cruft. A fat client office suite, how quaint and 1997-like.

<comment><USER6> It is

      * In country where google doc is blocked
      * In country/places where your connection speed is too slow
      * In places where you have no connection at all
      * For documents too big
      * For people that are used to it
      * For people that care about freedom etc. (regardless of your opinion on it)

etc. etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> For people who don't trust outside companies (known to work with governments) with their confidential and/or expensive data.</comment></comment></comment>


Divisibility by 7  - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/10/27/divisibility-by-7/ <comment><USER2> The rule in the article can be written as a regular expression.

And in general for every number m and base b you can build a finite automata that gives you x mod m for numbers x expressed as a string of digits in base b. The accepting automaton that accepts in case of x mod 7 = 0 for base 10 is just a special case and gives you the regular expression mentioned above.

I am working on the regular expression for 7. In the meantime, look at this regular expression for divisibility by 3 ([http://blog.vkistudios.com/index.cfm/2008/12/30/Regular- Expr...](http://blog.vkistudios.com/index.cfm/2008/12/30/Regular-Expression- to-determine-if-a-base-10-number-is-divisible-by-3)). The author shows his work.

<comment><USER3> If you're interested in deterministic finite automata, you might enjoy the game Manufactoria:

<http://www.kongregate.com/games/PleasingFungus/manufactoria>

In the game, you deal with robots that come with a tape of binary digits (red and blue dots), and you can build a maze using conveyer belts, branch points (which read a dot from the front of the robot's tape), and things that write dots to the end of the tape. You have tasks to fulfill; they start with easy things like "Accept robots with no red dots", then "Accept robots with the same number of red and blue dots", then "Reverse the input string" (that one is unpleasantly hard), and so on.

In particular, there are some user-submitted levels, and one asks, "Accept if the input number is congruent to 3 mod 7." (Input string is interpreted as a binary number, read left-to-right normally, with blue = 1 and red = 0.) I have a pretty nice solution to that one.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. I tried it. The biggest challenge seems to be to make your layout planar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the graph-way of dividing by 7. It's not intuitive and it's not easy to remember, but at least it looks cool.

<http://imgur.com/wCE6z.png>

Start at 0. Read the number left to right, and for each digit D, go D black edges. Whenever moving from digit to another, go a red edge.

<comment><USER5> How does this work?

<comment><USER6> It's a deterministic finite automaton (state machine) for dividing by seven. In effect, it's the graph expansion of a regular expression.

[http://blog.vkistudios.com/index.cfm/2008/12/30/Regular- Expr...](http://blog.vkistudios.com/index.cfm/2008/12/30/Regular-Expression- to-determine-if-a-base-10-number-is-divisible-by-3)

<comment><USER2> By the way, at <http://slexy.org/view/s2QFWeNxZo> is a (horrible) regular expression you can pop into "grep -xe" to test decimal numbers for divisibility by 7. (Found with a Haskell programm I wrote via conversion from the DFA.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 432 = (7 * 60)+12

So 12 isn't divisible by 7.

8631 = (7 * 1000)+(7 * 200)+(7 * 30)+(7 * 3)

So 8631 is divisible by 7.

Just keep guessing numbers that get you close and lopping off chunks.

<comment><USER8> Otherwise known as long division :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's what I generally do: Add or subtract multiples of 7 so that the final digit will be 0, drop the final 0 (i.e. divide by 10), and repeat. To illustrate:

37289 -> subtract 49 -> 37240 -> divide by 10 -> 3724 -> subtract 14 -> 3710 -> 371 -> subtract 21 -> 350 -> this is 35 * 10, and 35 is a multiple of 7.

The method described in the article is equivalent to my method, with the stipulation that one always subtracts, and that there is a mechanical process for picking the number to subtract (i.e. you multiply the number by 21).

37289 -> drop 9 from the end and subtract 18, which is equivalent to subtracting 189 and dividing by 10 -> 37289 - 189 / 10 -> 37100 / 10 -> 3710 -> drop 0 from end and subtract 0 -> 371 -> drop 1 from end, subtract 2, equivalent to subtracting 21 and dividing by 10 -> 371 - 21 / 10 -> 350 / 10 -> 35.

Advantages of my method:

a) This works with divisibility by any number at all (except for the factors of 2 and 5, which can be dealt with easily). For example, divisibility by 13:

594875 -> subtract 65 -> 594810 -> divide by 10 -> 59481 -> add 39 -> 59520 -> 5952 -> subtract 52 -> 5900 -> 59 -> not multiple of 13.

b) You don't need to remember any magic number to do it--in this case, you take the last digit, multiply it by the magic number -2, and add it to the remainder of the number. (For divisibility by a general m (coprime to 10), a magic number is any x such that x * 10 ≡ 1 (mod m). We see that _adding_ 5 times the last digit would also work for divisibility by 7.)

c) It is quite elementary. It's based on the facts that 1) adding a multiple of 7 (or whatever your number is) won't change the divisibility, and 2) dividing by 10 won't change the divisibility.

<comment><USER9> It seems like you're doing it backwards?

37289 - 35000 = 2289 - 2100 = 189 - 140 = 49 / 7 = 0. It's just quick and dirty long division, but easy to do quickly. I'm perplexed about what advantage you see in starting at the small end?

<comment><USER3> I think you're asking why I think my method is better than the long division you mention. I've used that method too, in the past. Hmm... On paper, they seem pretty similar, but I think it is easier to answer the question "What multiple of 7 can we add or subtract from the final digit n to get 0?" (a memory lookup if you know single-digit multiplication and pay attention to final digits) than "What's the biggest multiple of 7 we can subtract from the leading digits mn?" (requires a couple of tries and comparisons).

If the first two digits happen to be "21" or "42", etc., a multiple of 7 by themselves, then I will probably notice and subtract that out. But that's fairly rare (1/7 assuming uniform distribution).

Overall, I find working from the small end more rewarding. Note that I _never_ have to add or subtract anything larger than 7 x 5, and, 7/10 of the time, I don't have to add/subtract anything that isn't 7, 14, or 21. (I sometimes choose to add/subtract larger numbers to avoid carrying a hundreds digit.)

And note that I do this with 13 and 17 and so on as well. Then long division becomes even harder, whereas it's no harder to determine which multiple to add/subtract (as you just need to look at the last digits; 13 and 23 are like 3, and 17 is like 7), and maybe just a bit harder to calculate this multiple (e.g. last digit = 5 -> add 23 x 5 = 115; last digit = 9 -> subtract 23 x 3 = 69).

<comment><USER9> I guess it depends on how each person's brain works. Long division seems to just unzip itself without any real effort on my part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Also interesting is division by 7 resulting in a decimal.

1/7= .142857 repeating

2/7= .285714 rep

3/7= .428571 rep

4/7= .571428 rep

5/7= .714285 rep

6/7= .857142 rep

It's the same string of six digits, the only difference is which digit you start at.

<comment><USER11> <http://www.markorodin.com/content/view/7/26/>

<comment><USER3> My reaction to the above link is "lolwut". The page talks about the fact that the digital sums ("horizontal addition") of the powers of 2 form a repeating sequence (1,2,4,8,7,5), and proceeds to call this "the MATHEMATICAL FINGERPRINT OF GOD".

I can sympathize with people who look at the whole beautiful structure of mathematics and see the touch of God, but the premise of that page seems to be that this particular phenomenon--by itself--is huge and revolutionary and supernatural. In fact, a student of modular arithmetic would see it as fairly trivial. Two observations suffice to explain it:

1\. The digital sum of a decimal integer is just that integer mod 9. (This gives us, as a special case, the divisibility rule for 9: N is divisible by 9 iff its digits add to a multiple of 9.) To illustrate with five digits, the number N = abcde (base 10) is equal to:

      N = a * 10^4 + b * 10^3 + c * 10^2 + d * 10^1 + e

and since 10 ≡ 1 (mod 9), this reduces to

      N ≡ a * 1^4 + b * 1^3 + c * 1^2 + d * 1^1 + e (mod 9)
        ≡ a + b + c + d + e (mod 9).

If a+b+c+d+e < 10, then clearly that is the digital sum, and it's also N mod 9. If a+b+c+d+e ≥ 10, then we take the digital sum of _that_ , which will again be the same as taking it mod 9. For a quick concrete example, the number 758 -> 7+5+8 = 20 -> 2+0 = 2, and 758 = 2 + 9 * 84, so it is 2 mod 9. Or we could say that 758 = 7 * 100 + 5 * 10 + 8 = 7 * 1 + 5 * 1 + 8 = 7+5+8, which is clearly the same number we got while taking the digital sum.

2\. The powers of 2 mod 9 are periodic. (In general, the powers of N mod M are periodic, for any integers N and M.) Specifically, they are: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 ≡ 7 (mod 9), 14 ≡ 5 (mod 9), 10 ≡ 1 (mod 9), and we are back at 1. This is exactly the "1,2,4,8,7,5" sequence that page talks about.

So, the above page talks about an elementary result of modular arithmetic as though it, by itself, were some logic-defying mystery. Seems pretty dishonest to me. Maybe it's a joke site. I saw a donation link, so maybe these guys are successful trolls.

I'm a bit curious as to the motives of the parent commenter. You seem to be a long-time member of HN (account is more than 2 years old). Was it a joke, or did you suspect something fishy but didn't know what it was and posted it here hoping someone would explain it for you, or did you actually take the author at his word, or what?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You can generate rules like these for arbitrary integers/primes(much easier than trying to remember them in my opinion). Take 41.

Example: 1476 is divisible by 41? 147 - 4 * 6 = 123. 12 - 4 * 3 = 0. Yes.

Example: 3321 is divisible by 41? 332 - 4 * 1 = 328. 32 - 4 * 8 = 0. Yes

What's the rule? Take the last digit off, multiply by 4 and subtract.

How to find the rules is left as an exercise.

</comment><comment><USER13> I usually just use a calculator.

Sorry, that's gonna sound rude, but the comments got me thinking.

In all seriousness, are we ever that far from a calculator? I'm sure just about every cell phone has one built in. I understand the importance of a fundamental understanding of mathematics, but at some point do we shift the approach?

Novelty vs. practicality.

<comment><USER14> Even sitting at a computer, if I can do a calculation in my head, it's usually faster than attempting to do it with a calculator and it usually allows me to keep the mental flow of whatever it is that I'm doing at the moment.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. I placed my comment after reading waterhouse's comment (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852464>) which on first read seemed like a lot of effort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> (warning: funny one)

Express the number in base 7. If the last digit is 0, then the number is divisible by 7. I win!

<comment><USER15> More seriously, if you consider that the series 10^0, 10^1, 10^2, 10^3, etc. in modulo 7 runs as 1, 3, 2, -1, -3, -2, (loop with period 6), the remainder upon dividing a decimal number FEDCBA by 7 = the remainder on dividing (A-D) + 3(B-E) + 2(C-F) by 7.

Ex: 23456 mod 7 = 3+9+8 mod 7 = 6

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Clever but most people won't remember these tricks. I for one would appreciate a refresher on the other divisibility rules/tricks.

<comment><USER17> I do math contests competitively, so I remember these things. Here are some rules:

Divisibility by 2: Last digit is divisible by 2 (0, 2, 4, 6, or 8).

Divisibility by 3: Sum of digits is divisible by 3. (You can repeatedly sum the digits until the sum is small enough to manage easily.)

Divisibility by 4: Last two digits are divisible by 4 (00, 04, 08, 12, ...). If you don't know your multiples of four, you can divide the two digits by 2 and then see if it's even.

Divisibility by 5: Last digit is divisible by 5 (0 or 5).

Divisibility by 6: Divisible by 2 and by 3. (Works similarly for all composite numbers, of course. Like 10, 14, 15, etc. Make sure the factors you're checking are relatively prime (share no common factors), or it won't work. For example, divisibility by 2 and 6 does _not_ imply divisibility by 12.)

Divisibility by 8: Last three digits are divisible by 8 (000, 008, 016, ...). Probably faster to divide the last three by 2 at least once then check divisibility by 4.

Divisibility by 9: Sum of digits is divisible by 9. (You can repeatedly sum the digits until the sum is small enough to manage easily.)

Divisibility by 11: Alternating sum of digits is divisible by 11. (Almost always turns out to be -11, 0, or 11. Example: 66374. 6 - 6 + 3 - 7 + 4 = 0, so 66374 is divisible by 11.)

<comment><USER18> Seeing this list of silly things one might find useful in high school math contests made me nostalgic for those days...

<comment><USER19> Silly? Some people do math for a living.

<comment><USER18> I do math for a living. Needing to now whether a small integer is divisible by 7 rarely comes up. And when it dos we tend to let dumb machines handle the easy stuff, leaving humans free to think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> You may want to post your jobs at

<http://www.hackernewsjobs.com/>

(Since last time people requested that I not cross post things from here, I am not going to do that, but you can email me (in profile) to do so, or post directly.)

</comment><comment><USER21> slightly different alorithm:

<http://www.cut-the-knot.org/blue/div7-11-13.shtml>

</comment><comment><USER22> -n = -10a-b ~ -3a -b ~ -6a -2b ~ a - 2b mod 7</comment>


Realistic iOS, non-game app earnings through ads? - <AUTHOR>

I'm in the process of wrapping up my an iOS app that I'll be releasing to the appstore.  I've written several in the past, but they were typically for fun and had no revenue stream.  This is the first one that I recognized A) Doesn't already exist in the appstore (which REALLY surprised me), and B) Has the potential to at least earn me enough to pay for my Developer Program subscription.
In talking it over with some buddies, we've decided that ads may be the better source of revenue over charging for the app.  But, I haven't really seen any testimonies saying how much you can actually earn via in-app ads for non-games.  This app is more social/utility.  Users may open it a few times per week, and will have the ability to share data with other users of the app.
For an app that is not a game, is it possible to make real money via ads?  What ad networks or aggregators seem to be the most effective?  Any recommendations?
I'd love to hear what your experiences have been with in-app ads to see if it's actually worth pursuing.  Thanks! <comment><USER2> I believe it really depends on your userbase. I just released Hakka News, a client for HN and I would never consider putting ads in an app gear towards this crowd.

In fact, I believe people on HN are more likely to just buy the app so I didn't bother with freemium or in-app purchase. HN people mostly understand how much effort it takes to develop quality software and they're not poor either.

Now, for something like a reddit client, I would still expect them to be intolerant of ads, so in-app purchase would probably work better here. Reddit userbase, I expect, are less likely to purchase the app.

Then, there are apps geared towards the common people, a much much bigger crowd. Mctube is good example. They used to free with iap, no ads in both version. Then afterward, the dev switched to free completely and with ads. I suspect they're maybe a lot more money with the latter.

</comment><comment><USER3> Speaking from personal experience, unless you expect a user base in the upper 100k to 1M+, you'll be talking less than a cup of coffee from Apple's ad base.

Direct ads may work, but you will need metrics on your users in order to prove the value to potential ad buyers. If you don't fall into either of these two categories, you're better off using either a nominal sum, if you think it's worth it, or doing a freeware version with some features and a paid "deluxe" version.

People will support reasonable prices for genuinely useful apps, but you have to taper your expectations and be prepared for criticism from some users. Even AAA quality apps have someone who "hates" it or thinks it's too expensive.

You only get responses from people who love or hate an app most of the time.

</comment><comment><USER4> It depends on the size of your audience. Typically if an audience is very niche (eg user demographics are similar), then selling ads to direct advertisers is more of a possibility.

What do your DAU/MAU numbers look like? How much engagement is there with your app, and how much time do users spend per session?

Feel free to reach out to me if you need more specific advice.</comment>


Gesture Control in JS using Webcam - <AUTHOR> http://revealjs.herokuapp.com/#/4

<comment><USER2> After Leap Motion, I've been very giddy to see where we will soon be in terms of parsing sign language in front of a webcamera.

Hopefully someone finds a financial incentive to pursue that venture. Maybe there's a Duolingo-like idea waiting to be taken advantage of.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's very impressive that this works at all, although it's extremely inaccurate for me.

<comment><USER4> My thoughts exactly. Not very usable, but I'm still impressed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really hard to navigate. I gave up.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks cool! I once tried something similar and released it as a reveal.js plugin:

[https://github.com/functino/reveal.js-wave- plugin](https://github.com/functino/reveal.js-wave-plugin)

But I just used the WebcamSwiper-Lib.

Maybe you could try to package it as a Plugin too - so there would be no need for a fork.

</comment><comment><USER7> Impressive. I've found that shaking my head was more effective for controlling the slides - but it gives a weird effect...

</comment><comment><USER8> This is pretty amazing – seems to just work. Probably quite dependant on the webcam though.

Remember to move your hand above/below the screen before swiping else you'll swipe back and forwards all the time!

<comment><USER9> Alternatively, you can move your hand back fast enough for it not to register.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I sometimes use this [http://www.cameramouse.org/](http://www.cameramouse.org/) when both my hands are too cramped to hold the mouse any more. I also find it fun to play with.

</comment><comment><USER11> This blew my mind.

It's weird how scrolling forward from your right to your left is more easily detected than scrolling backwards from your left to your right, but it's an amazing proof of concept.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just saw something similar done by my local tourism department a few weeks back. Got good press here. [http://when-it-rains.com/](http://when-it- rains.com/)

</comment><comment><USER13> i presented this a few weeks ago at the viennajs meetup [http://miniqr.com/onsnap.r](http://miniqr.com/onsnap.r) audiocontrol your presentation

</comment><comment><USER14> Didn't work very well. May be the quality of the webcam though

</comment><comment><USER15> For SlideShare lovers, you have [http://shirsenduk.github.io/SlideShareHandsFree/](http://shirsenduk.github.io/SlideShareHandsFree/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Seems to depend on proper skin detection, which can work out of the box if the light is right. Au contraire js-aruco needs preparation, but has some nice 3D capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER17> I really don't get the comparison to Kinect at the beginning, since this is _just_ a simple motion detector and the only fun thing is the execution environment.

</comment><comment><USER18> I couldn't get a gesture recognised with my MacBook Air. (Maybe the lighting is a little bad with a window behind me.)

</comment><comment><USER19> Doesn't work for me :( The webcam was clearly on, and it was taking microphone input.

</comment><comment><USER20> There's a bit of confusion on the slides. Mixing up getUserMedia with WebRTC.

</comment><comment><USER21> This reminds me Minority Report interface scene.

</comment><comment><USER22> For a proof of concept, this is pretty amazing.

</comment><comment><USER23> Very impressive. Well done!</comment>