Hacker Entrepreneur in Residence - <AUTHOR>

I run a small, but successful Web1.0 company, but am looking for a new bright spark as Hacker Entrepreneur in Residence.
What's that? All the fun of a startup without all the risk.  YC folks who don't want VC might be interested.
inevitable.cc or http://tinyurl.com/5hr434 <comment><USER2> This looks like a cool op. 99.9% of people can't afford to do a startup unless it has near-zero costs.

Of course, a lot of what makes startups succeed is scarcity of resources and fear of imminent and public failure. You're taking that away and functionally creating an incubator, which have long histories of producing mediocre startups/products.

If I were you, I'd adjust it to: 1) Pay bread/water wages. 2) Give them skin in the game (equity). As much as you can stand. 3) Tell them they have 6 months to build something people want/like or their salary goes to zero and they can continue on like any other entrepreneur (for the love/belief in the project and the hope that they can make it go big). 4) Hire 2 people, not one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I am willing to do exactly this if more feedback comes in supporting it vs what I'm currently proposing. Thanks Tony.

<comment><USER3> I agree, for what it's worth. Fear is an essential component to the mix.

One thing I'd add -- building something people want isn't a silver bullet. Building something people want enough that there's value generated is. Mixing that up, which is way, way too often done on this site, is fatal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This doesn't make any sense to me. What do you get out of it? What do you require of said hacker? Do want partial ownership or just someone to bounce ideas off of? What do you mean by in-residence combined with we-don't-care- where-you-live?

There's really not enough info there for someone to decide if it's interesting or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you get out of it?: Great products/apps What do you require of said hacker?: Build Interesting Stuff Do want partial ownership or just someone to bounce ideas off of?: Partial Ownership. What do you mean by in-residence combined with we-don't-care-where-you-live? It means you're a part of our existing company charged with acting & creating like an entrepreneur. Basically you get a salary to work on your cool ideas.

<comment><USER3> Ok, now I get it. You're more or less looking to hire a zany creative person to bring in some creative energy. Which is cool.

That said, in my opinion, the suspense, and really, the hard part, of being an entrepreneur is figuring out how to get a business to fly. Ideas and implementing them is the easy part. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> My feeling and experience has been that you have to iterate through enough ideas until you find one that actually works. Good ideas fail too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tis days like these I kick myself for never getting any of my hobby projects into a psuedo-finish, presentable state...

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. Finishing is a key characteristic.

<comment><USER5> Seems like the normal thing. From your blog: "You can't be normal and expect abnormal returns". Advice: open your mind. Some people are amazing at starting great things but not so good at finishing them. If you can balance that out, you win.

Out of curiosity, I presume the reason why you want a "young hacker" is because you can't afford an older one?

<comment><AUTHOR> LOL no. Just someone who hasn't a lot of pre-conceived ideas of what is/isn't possible. We have those already. LOL

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is essentially like the patronage movement Giles talked about in one of his talks, eh?

Cool idea, good luck!

</comment><comment><USER7> Whats the deal? Are you looking for an engineer or a partner for your firm

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking for someone who creates cool apps to develop them in my company. If they're a hit we spin them out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> does it pay as much as being a real EIR?</comment>


Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos credit Montessori education as a major factor in their success - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaelolaf.net/google.html <comment><USER2> Montessori schools seem ideal. But this looks like a bogus site. There's practically no content here. He even has Larry & Sergey mixed up.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, site looks totally bogus. Jeff Bezos is mentioned in the headline, but not in the "article". The sentence structure is horrible. I think that the part, "Having been friends since childhood ..." is supposed to mean that Larry and Sergey were friends from childhood. If so, that's wrong, at least according to Google: "Larry Page and Sergey Brin were not terribly fond of each other when they first met as Stanford University graduate students in computer science in 1995." (<http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html>)

<comment><USER4> Maybe the author considers grad school to be part of childhood :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been reading Maria Montessori's "The Montessori Method" anthology and it's been interesting to see how her "children's houses" were like startup schools, err... schools that are like startups. The theory side is a little hard for me to fully grok, but her insights into the mental world of children are outstanding and the way she applies them quite interesting.

For the record, I went to a Montessori school for kindergarten and first grade.

</comment><comment><USER6> I had a very similar type of education. WHERE ARE MY $$$BILLIONS???

<comment><USER7> Ah yes, selection bias. In surveys of centenarians (people 100 years or older), a surprising number of them credit their longevity to eating onions. Now, onions are good for you, to be sure, but will they make you live to 100? Yes---if you have good genes, do a bunch of other things right, and are really, really lucky. And so it is with all these "multi-bazillionaires attribute their success to X". Are they smart and savvy, with possibly unusual backgrounds that give them an edge? Sure. But a bunch of other things have to go right as well---and even then I hear that the _most_ successful people also eat lots of onions.

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as research that shows a causal relationship between X and success, all we have that I know of is YC.

For research on the results of Montessori education, look here:

<http://www.montessori-ami.org/research/research.htm>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think you can really call Montessori school 'education.' The word education comes from the latin e+ducere, meaning to be lead. The entire concept of Montessori schools is that they're supposed to be an environment for autodidacts.

<comment><USER9> The etymology of a word and its meaning are not identical.

<comment><USER8> Although arguably the meaning of a word and its definition are also not identical. (That is, words are defined as used, whereas the meaning is, according to some, the impression the word creates in your mind.)

Personally I just hate the idea of being forcibly lead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So does Will Wright <http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/146>

</comment><comment><USER11> Ok I'm really interested in Monterssori for my unborn child. So perhaps the graduates here can help me out a bit. Why is it a frozen curriculum? I appreciate Montessori made great improvements in teaching retarded children but surely any methodology advances?

I guess you could say if it works why change it, but I'm suspicious of what seems like dogma.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand why self-directed education stops so early. Why aren't there high schools and colleges employing Maria Montessori's profound insights?

I wish I had been lucky enough to attend a Montessori school as a kid. :-(

<comment><USER13> There are, it's just that they're fairly rare and you need to know where to look.

I went to a high school with very similar methods ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Charter_Essential_School...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Charter_Essential_School#Philosophy)), though to my knowledge they were developed independently. And I do think that whatever limited success I've achieved so far has been largely because of it.

On the college level, there's Hampshire. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampshire_College>.

<comment><USER14> The evolution of my own methods has largely been due to my own self directed education: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cool, we just signed up our son for Montessori. I can see the success already.</comment>


Top Mistakes that C# Programmers Make - <AUTHOR> http://www.toptal.com/c-sharp/top-10-mistakes-that-c-sharp-programmers-make

<comment><USER2> 11\. Not buying Resharper.

On a separate note I much prefer the lambda style Linq to the SQL style. I think it easier to work with, but I'm not sure why.

With regard to classes versus structs. I rarely use structs. What are the real world use cases for them over classes?

<comment><USER3> When I was learning C++, it was conveyed that structs were more for combining like data that didn't necessarily require a class because it had a bit less overhead. An example would be a lot of variables that are related, but have no methods (such as a creating a node data structure for making an implementation of a linked list or tree).

Though the above was related to C++, that's generally when I use structs for C# as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very misleading title. It should be called "My personal opinions on top mistakes that C# programmers make". There's otherwise, no data, no study, no reference on what's actually the top mistakes that C# programmers make.</comment>


NYC taxi visualization - <AUTHOR> http://nyctaxi.herokuapp.com

<comment><USER2> The taxi data just has startpoint and endpoint correct?

So the route in between each trip is just a guess?

Edit: Whoops, from the about page:

> The raw data include only start and end locations for each trip. These > points were run through Google's Directions API to create the routes shown > in this visualization. Of course, these are Google's best choice, not > necessarily the one the taxi took.

<comment><USER3> This explains some very slow drifts in the middle

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was surprised at how inefficient some of the drivers' behavior was. I thought after dropping off a fare they would all immediately head to an area they knew of that might have a high likelihood of generating fares. Instead many of them seem to just wander around aimlessly looking for the next fare.

edit: spelling / grammar

<comment><USER5> It's also the case that taxi drivers need to eat, use the toilet, do their shopping, see the sights, etc. They aren't robots, and they don't necessarily have to dash to the next customer in a mad scramble for survival.

Imagine if somebody made a visualization of your workday and put it out in public. Would your manager say "he seems to just wander around aimlessly instead of efficiently moving from one piece of code to the next. I thought after compiling one project, they would all immediately head to the next one."

<comment><USER6> The analogy is ok, but mostly fails because as a developer, we are not paid commission for each line of code written. Whereas taxi drivers have a very strong profit motive to act efficiently and quickly. I think your examples of why they would deviate from this believed behavior is pretty solid on its own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This doesn't seem to work on OS/X Mavericks, Chrome 36.0.1985.103 beta. When I click on "Begin", nothing happens (also no Javascript errors).

<comment><USER8> I'm getting a 503 after it finishes loading the initial assets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems like this data could be used to build an app that suggests where a taxi driver should go at any given time to maximize their chances of getting a fare. Uber & Lyft already do this for their drivers, but I'm not aware of any app that does this for NYC yellow cabs.

<comment><USER10> Do they really? I just asked my Uber driver yesterday and he said that Uber does not provide him anything like that. I was quite surprised.

<comment><USER11> An UberX driver said the same to me and I was surprised as well, but after thinking about it, it started to make more sense. What could Uber really tell them beforehand that they wouldn't already know, or learn very quickly from driving around?

The driver thought Uber didn't provide the information because they want to be able to charge surge pricing, but that cannot be right. Uber doesn't want to charge surge prices unless they absolutely have to because they reduce the number of rides people take.

Considering how much money Uber invests in giving away free rides and temporarily reducing prices to increase ridership, they clearly see a lot of value per ride, especially for travelers who are more likely to be at an event, try Uber for the first time, and then bring that demand home to their own cities.

Surge pricing only makes sense in situations where drivers need additional incentive to go out in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's super interesting.

I wonder why my guy wandered really slowly up Riverside Ave for like 30 minutes instead of going inland to find a fare. Looks like it's really slow between 11am and 3pm, and constant driving otherwise.

<comment><USER2> The route information between trips is just a guess. So he could have really just stopped for dinner or something.

<comment><USER13> Taxi drivers don't usually stop for dinner when on shift. The closest they will do is run into a bodega, or stop on the corner and have a streetfood vendor hand them something into the cab.

<comment><USER5> I've seen halal carts where the taxis line up down the block and a guy takes their order on the south end of the block and they pick it up at the north end, just like a drive-thru burger joint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was making a heatmap for taxi data : published for first 5 days for july

[http://akuchlous.github.io/NYC_CAB_ANALYTICS/](http://akuchlous.github.io/NYC_CAB_ANALYTICS/)

maybe can help Uber / Taxi drivers figure out where to get most taxifare pickups are!

hosting on github.io

pushing to github.io is awesome. make maps, save and push!

</comment><comment><USER15> I was surprised by the amount of fares that just went a few blocks. Looks like it should have been pretty walkable in a lot of those cases.

<comment><USER14> [https://github.com/akuchlous/NYC_CAB_ANALYTICS/blob/gh- pages...](https://github.com/akuchlous/NYC_CAB_ANALYTICS/blob/gh- pages/NYC_TAXI_STATS/taxiRideMiles.png)

data from chriswong : 22% rides are less 1 mile long

<comment><USER16> Small nit, but guessing this is crow's flight distance which doesn't equal path distance. Regardless, this still isn't surprising. Short rides happen all the time.

<comment><USER14> :-) this data is equal path as measured by odometer : I was lazy and did not use longitude/latitude for distance. The data itself has miles travelled.

though a bit surprising : 45% of rides are single person rides. But then I wonder : what's surprising : is it low or is it high?

<comment><USER17> How is the data input on # of passengers? Could it be that it's just easier to hit "1 person" all the time regardless? Are there cabbies that always have the same #?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You shouldn't serve your assets (/js, /css) off of heroku. They aren't loading because of the request volume.

<comment><USER19> I think Chris was exceeding his Mapbox limits, and that was causing problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> First of all... this is really great. Really good job.

On the ipad a few things are wonky with the layout, you may want to test on there and fix the few UI issues.

It would be cool to see $/hr precalculted as well. It may be better to make the right side a table with each row being a ride and then totals at the bottom too.

</comment><comment><USER21> One interesting observation is that the mean fare is ~ $10. That's the same as 4 subway rides (each one with unlimited transfers and can take you from one end of the city to the other). You need to be pretty rich to be riding a taxi regularly nowadays. Taxi fares have gone up at a far greater rate than subway fares.

<comment><USER22> Of course, you can also share a taxi... it may be an indulgence to hop on a taxi alone as part of your daily commute, but it becomes much more convenient, private, and cost-effective when in a pair or small group.

These taxi data do not seem to capture taxi capacity factor / number of seats filled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I just followed a taxi that had a 12% tip rate. I thought with the new automated payment systems [1] they were supposedly getting 25% now...

edit: I should have read about the * before I posted, but it's interesting to show then how much are cash/charge transactions by the discrepancy.

[1] [http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/05/14/how-3-simple- but...](http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/05/14/how-3-simple-buttons- raised-tipping-by-144-million-in-nyc-cabs/)

<comment><USER2> From a brief look at the data it looks like cash tips might be counted as 0%. So that 12% average might be originally closer to 25%, but brought down by the nulled out cash tips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What's happening when I see a green blob which then turns red a few seconds later? The cab hasn't moved, but the passenger count and fare tally have both gone up. The cab then moves at a normal pace from that location to the next fare, so I don't think it's missing GPS data.

Edit: just saw another comment saying the points were calculated through a Google API, so maybe it's just gremlins in that.

</comment><comment><USER25> I see a taxi route on: Sunday, June 29th 1913...

<comment><USER26> Me too, both of the taxis I watched showed 1913. This is some weird Y2K stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> it hit bloomberg news

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-14/let-me-out-here- one...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-14/let-me-out-here-one- taxi-24-hours-of-data.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> Today I learned that Heroku is awful at keeping up with Hacker News + Reddit traffic.

<comment><USER28> Well it doesn't autoscale, if thats what you mean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wow, I totally understand Uber's valuation now. $D

But really, UberX and Lyft driving makes more sense viscerally. Taxis earn decent money but have lots of expenses. I see potential indeed. Ha

</comment><comment><USER30> To see some quick action: `for(var i = 0; i < 50; i++) $(".faster").trigger("click") ` it gets interesting to watch at that speed.

</comment><comment><USER31> I watched a few different cabs and they all seemed to generate around $600 in a 24 hour period. Am I the only person who thinks this is astonishingly low?

<comment><USER32> astonishingly low? I thought that was pretty high

<comment><USER33> It's a decent change. but...

\- Most people do 12 hour shift. Not 24 hours.

\- Most drivers lease their cabs at $100/day

\- Fuel bill adds up to $15-$35 depending on car.

\- There are other fees.

I think you're doing well if you net $200 in a shift on average. I think it's an optimistic figure.

<comment><USER34> I was chatting with a UberX driver yesterday in NYC and apparently his insurance is $7K a year (it's a Toyota Camry too, nothing super fancy).

That works out to ~$27 a day if you drive the car 5 days a week, every week of the year. Not a massive amount, but significant in the numbers we're talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Anyone know if there is similar data available (for any city) that actually includes real-world routes, rather than just endpoints?

</comment><comment><USER36> Hitting "next" on Chrome 35 (Win 8) doesn't do anything for me. Any ideas?

<comment><USER37> I was seeing the same a few minutes ago (also in Chrome) but it's working for me now so it's worth giving it another try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> ITs interesting to see how busy a taxi is in New York even at 3.30 in the morning..

</comment><comment><USER39> They certainly drive a lot faster when they have a fare.

</comment><comment><USER40> OpenStreetMap attribution...

<comment><USER41> Removed at this commit.

[https://github.com/chriswhong/taxitracker/commit/8565b71ae74...](https://github.com/chriswhong/taxitracker/commit/8565b71ae74c17442354176441fc055df66dad1f)

I'm sure the developer would appreciate an issue or a pull request.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Does not work in Safari. Come on people, if you're using some non-standard or cutting-edge feature, at least use Modernizr to detect it and tell users instead of just having a completely non-functional "begin" button.</comment>


Japan machinery orders fall most in eight months - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-economy-orders/japan-machinery-orders-fall-most-in-eight-months-in-worrying-sign-for-economy-idUSKCN1U301J <comment><USER2> So 8 months ago was a bigger drop. Why should we panic now? Was 8 months ago an aberration due to extraordinary events and now isn't? Is there something else we're missing?

Whenever I see a story like this I always wonder "well, what were they saying when this happened the last time?". Here's one example [1].

This article actually seems more focused on "what does this mean for Japan?" and seems to use this data point from a self-proclaimed "highly volatile" series as a stalking horse for the planned sales tax hike, assumedly to argue it'll hurt the economy.

[1] [https://www.euronews.com/2018/11/02/japan-september- machiner...](https://www.euronews.com/2018/11/02/japan-september-machinery- orders-set-to-drop-but-firms-capex-seen-staying-firm-reuters-poll)

</comment><comment><USER3> All the usual signs have been pointing toward a US recession for quite a while. (US recessions generally result in a global recession.) However, the bottom has yet to fall out. Nobody is sure why, but based on historical record, I wouldn't bet against the bottom not falling out.

Lack of inflation seems to play a role. It allows the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates relatively low. However, it also means that interest rates may no longer be a good tool to regulate the economy in terms of smoothing booms and busts. That could be a problem after a crash because other stimulus tools are weakened due to the deficit. The next slump will be interesting...

<comment><USER4> Relying on interest is a predatory and harmful behavior in the economy. Any economy based on interest is inherently unstable and un-equal. It's no wonder the Abrahamic religions outright banned interest (i.e. usury).</comment></comment>


Stop Saying "Hardware Is Hard" - <AUTHOR> https://blog.bolt.io/stop-saying-hardware-is-hard-62fdd3052a2#.w0ivtnwyt <comment><USER2>
      I hear the phrase "hardware is hard" dozens of times a week.
      Repeating this cliche misses both the point and the opportunity.
      If we want to live in a world of autonomous cars, consumer space travel,
      and a green energy grid (I know I do) we have to stop defining hardware
      by its difficulties. The truth is, it has never been easier to start a
      hardware company. Why is this phrase so common?

Because hardware requires more rigor and process to handle correctness in its implementation than software does because the iteration cycle is longer and more expensive than just pumping a PR into a CI pipeline, and people keep getting the advice when starting a new company that they should avoid applying any engineering rigor to their development cycle for as long as they possibly can because it's supposedly a giant waste of time until after you've got your product-market fit sorted out? Perhaps?

So in that vein, "hardware is hard"(er) because what counts as "minimally viable" is a more strict and higher bar than what people have been incentivized to create with software.

Or at least that's the impression I get from people when I hear them say, "hardware is hard".

</comment><comment><USER3> I didn't find the Hardware Myths section very convincing, because it keeps comparing B2C products (fitbit, gopro) to B2B businesses (SaaS). Scaling business customers is always going to take longer, hardware or software.

I think the advancements in contract manufacturing covers most of what makes hardware easier today.</comment>


Google Cloud Storage throwing a large number of 503's - <AUTHOR> Seems that GCS is throwing a boatload of 503's and is sometimes taking >10 seconds to respond. Anyone else seeing this?<p>Google has denied anything is wrong, but I'm seeing a lot of images not loading on other sites that I know use GCS as well... <comment><USER2> This is now reported at [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/storage/17002](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/storage/17002).

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Our monitoring says it started at 4pm pacific. So the incident lasted 2.5 hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm unable to OAuth in to a variety of Google Services e.g. Asana, FullStory.

At work, our applications using Google Calendar V3 is seeing a ton of 503s in all environments (dev, staging and production).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep - we're starting to see proof from a lot of different sides that Google is having a rather major issue. Now to hope they find the culprit and resolve it quickly :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's happening to us too. Firebase status page was updated, but it looks like GCS in general was not.

</comment><comment><USER6> How is this not getting more notice? It must be isolated to only a few of us...

<comment><USER7> I guess it shows how widespread GCS usage is among enterprises</comment></comment>


Is the Answer to Phone Addiction a Worse Phone? - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/technology/grayscale-phone.html <comment><USER2> Maybe if you use your phone for shiny things this might work. I use my phone for information. The only thing that'll make me use my phone less is if my phone couldn't multitask and crashed constantly. But then I'd just use my laptop instead.</comment>


$21,243 in 8 Days: Why AppSumo is Going to Keep Crushing It - <AUTHOR> http://www.clickminded.com/why-appsumo-is-going-to-keep-crushing-it/ <comment><USER2> I actually picked up a few great deals from AppSumo right around the time they launched, but I feel like the quality content / products offered through there has gone down significantly over time - this is not a knock on the OP's course, I'm sure its quite good, its just that AppSumo used to have great stuff - I used to look forward seeing what they had each week - and now when I get their emails its kind of 'meh'.

Or am I the only one who feels this way?

<comment><USER3> AppSumo's Brand Sumo here.

First, thank you Rob for taking the time to share your experience and about how you feel regarding AppSumo. Feedback like yours—and that of everyone else in this thread—is painful but also important, especially considering many of the comments start with something like, "I used to love AppSumo."

I agree that the quality has declined over the past year, so I wanted to take the time to respond to you and explain that we have spent a lot of time in the past two months gaining insight and clarity into our situation. We came to realize that our copy is overly sales-y and many of the products we feature lack the substance necessary to really help entrepreneurs drive their businesses forward. That's not to say AppSumo is failing; we're still a profitable business and we have many fanatic customers who can attribute their growth and success to the fundamentals they've learned and tools they've found on AppSumo.

We've become beyond obsessed with customer happiness, with taking pride in everything we do (down to how clean we keep our individual desks), and with keeping the fun and quirky attitude we've become known for. Transparency about customer happiness is important to me personally, because it holds us accountable to make every experience with AppSumo memorable—for this reason we publicly display our daily stats on customer happiness at <http://appsumo.com/happy> .

I think this article, which Tommy was kind enough to surprise us with, is evidence of our new vision and a good indicator of the pride we place in our behavior and obsession with our customer and partner happiness. We're grateful that many here on Hacker News have become part of our community, and I am personally interested in hearing your experiences with AppSumo and how you feel. Feel free to share your thoughts with me at firstname.lastname@example.com or @stevenkovar on Twitter.

<comment><USER4> Here are my thoughts.

I used to love app sumo. There was interesting new apps and productivity/work/business programs that I could buy at a discount that allowed me to use the full apps without restrictive freemium controls. It was an excellent way for businesses to get new clients to trial their software IMHO.

Over the past year or two all the emails I get are either the same courses or offers over and over again or seem to be targeted at the hacker equivalent of a Nigerian Scammer.

I don't think that the copy is too sales'y, I think that the products you have for sale are generally shite compared to what you used to have.

People being happy will keep us on the mailing list for a while but in my opinion you need to improve the quality of the products you're selling.

My intention of this is that you get 100% true feedback. I think the people that work at sumo are great and I hope you guys get back to the top again. If you're profitable now then if you can do this then I imagine it will help the bottom line :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Considering a $50 discount and a guess of 70% for AppSumo, OP paid an effective $120 CPA. In return, did OP gain lifetime value from bought actions? Did he increase exposure for his book so that more people will buy at full price? Will he have repeat customers? Is this a positive ROI move? I think that is a better metric to measure this type of _marketing_, not "we sold x copies in y days!!".

I understand that there is no variable cost, but by offering a permanent "discount", OP may have permanently devalued his product. If that steep of a cut was viable, then author might have had a bad price point to begin with.

In general, the same thing must be considered for products with little to no variable costs. I'm not sure what the optimal solution is, but I would think that one would want to sell even at $0.01 - because a sale on a product with no variable cost has to be better than no sale at all...

<comment><USER6> _I would think that one would want to sell even at $0.01_

You _definitely_ don't want to do that. You're going to be overwhelmed with support requests (for an e-book, even!) from the least competent potential users imaginable. Moreover, you're going to blunt the reason for writing the book in the first place, because the people best positioned to get value from the book will not do so because it is _too cheap to be taken seriously as business advice_.

<comment><USER7> You are right for $0.01 cost, but I wonder if that changes for $0.01 _profit_. What if your COCA (cost of customer acquisition) eats all but $0.01 of the revenue ? You are bringing in positive marginal revenue, and you don't have the downside you mentioned. Of course, you have others, such as this cost structure means you're making someone else rich, not yourself, and it's a very fragile situation, you can't absorb COCA increases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really wish AppSumo would change their homepage. Apart from the tag line (and reading the article), I had no clear idea what AppSumo did.

<comment><USER9> That's exactly the point, so you just click "Login with Facebook".

<comment><USER10> Right, but... I'm not going to do that unless I know what I'm clicking.

<comment><USER11> I feel the same.

I got more information about AppSumo from their Google search excerpt than from their website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Gypsy ninjas? Gypsy is a highly offensive ethnic slur practically everywhere in the world except America.

<comment><USER13> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(term)#Gypsy>

The word 'slur' is not mentioned once on that page. At best, its use as an offensive slur is context sensitive (at least according to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs>).

<comment><USER14> It does actually mention it's an insult a lot of the time half way down the page. You wouldn't use it as an ethnic slur like 'roast beef', people accuse others of being a gypsy or a pikey. It is 'considered to carry pejorative connotations' as wikipedia delightfully puts it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I usually stay on topic while on HN, but I have to say that the phrase "crushing it" is extremely annoying, and I wish people would stop saying it.

<comment><USER16> Crushing it totally jumped the shark

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've heard that AppSumo's percentage is as high as 75-80%. Is what you got for your product?

</comment><comment><USER18> The good news is if they're taking a split of the revenue with you then at least when they say "Let's lower the price!" they also have skin in the game.

50 - 70% may seem like a lot. If you really only think you'll do a one time sale and not repeat sales then it might be too high. However, I assume that if you have a good service or offering that you'll get future repeat sales? So it's a marketing expense to capture a customer and the more confident you feel around the "lifetime value" of a customer the more you might be ok with such a big up front or initial revenue share cost.

</comment><comment><USER19> AppSumo seems like a pretty incestuous (or maybe better 'self-referential' or 'recursive') business, meaning: here is a startup which is totally oriented toward taking commission on sales of other people's startup services oriented to customers who want to make startups.

By that measure, Advocare is also 'crushing it.'

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting that I once purchase $50 of AppSumo credit for $25 and ended up using most of it to purchase a 3-year Hacker Monthly subscription as most of the stuff on sale didn't appeal to me!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if I'm allowed to talk about commission percentages, so I will refrain. However, I can reiterate that the commission rate is extremely high, but has proven to be well worth it.

<comment><USER21> Why shouldn't you be allowed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It is 2012, and i am surprised these "marketplaces" still exist in the same format, instead of a thoughts.username.com, books. username.com, tutorials.username.com etc, and a totally unique discovery algorithm powered by past analytics (a google scale algo version of stumbleupon).

Device lock-ins do not help either. just adds to the we have a marketplace hence users give us x percentage model.twitter, for example shd have been a protocol and not a private firm.

</comment><comment><USER23> Excellent well crafted title for Hacker News. This is exactly the sort of content that does well here and hopefully will help you sell more passes to your courses.

</comment><comment><USER24> Not surprised to see Noah being a customer service boss. He is a tireless entrepreneur and a great guy.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is it possible that AppSumo just shifted their customer focus from the HN/startup type to more of a general entry-level audience?

If that's the case, then the products they sell might not be so scammy... maybe they actually help real people solve real problems.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is great, thanks for the breakdown. Never dealt with Noah or the AppSumo guys but I get all their emails. Really nice to know there are guys behind it all and they're being conscientious with what they are sending out.

</comment><comment><USER27> Very interesting review. I also get the AppSumo email (although rarely read them any more), but good to see people are seeing much success with it.

</comment><comment><USER28> I read the article and now all I want to know is what % AppSumo takes. Super high like.. 90%?

<comment><USER29> I think Groupon takes 50% and it's mostly actual physical products (like a meal at a restaurant), so I wouldn't be surprised if AppSumo takes something like 70%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice backlink to PayPal.com :)</comment>


[Show HN] Judgmint: Turn guilt into good. Hopefully. - <AUTHOR> http://judgmint.org/about

<comment><USER2> Hmm, an interesting notion! I certainly could see the popularity of encouraging others to do something they already like doing [and who but a monk doesn't enjoy the occasional judge fest?]

Would there be any option down the line to find out what the guilt-weight for a particular action was?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, but we need a critical mass of votes to figure out what each offense is worth.

We'll start by directly sharing the feedback with the submitter and eventually letting visitors "browse morality" across a bunch of issues.</comment></comment>


Childs bullying causes worse long-term mental health problems than maltreatment - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150428082209.htm

<comment><USER2> Isn't that kinda... obvious?

<comment><USER3> Not really, at least not for everybody. I know people who are of the opinion than bulying at school is part of education, to teach how to deal with bullies and not to get into fights. Very frequently people will try to teach a child how to oppose bullies or find a fault in child's actions and then try to "fix the fault" so that the bulying stops, rather than engage bullies directly.

It is common view that engaging bullies by parents would make it worse for the child, but I don't see people teaching children how to deal with abusive parents.</comment></comment>


Why you should not develop apps for Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> http://www.irrlicht3d.org/pivot/entry.php?id=1485 <comment><USER2> It's crazy just how… _unfinished_ everything involving Windows 10 seems to be. Half-assed UI concepts implemented clumsily, supported by an unsupported store, updated haphazardly at a pace that makes enterprise scream bloody murder… and all Microsoft does is trying to trick more users into accidentally updating.

What are they _thinking?_ They can do better than this. Much, much better.

<comment><USER3> Full Disclosure: I worked at M$ from 2014-2015.

MS has some very talented programmers. They're not very common, but they exist. The problem is that the entire company is completely and totally focused on developing an absurd number of new features and products, giving them completely unrealistic deadlines, and then shipping software on those deadlines no matter how half-assed or buggy it is.

The idea is that everything is serviceable over the internet now, so they can just "fix it later", except they never do. This perpetuates a duct-tape culture that refuses to actually fix problems and instead rewards teams that find ways to work around them. The talented programmers are stuck working on code that, at best, has to deal with multiple badly designed frameworks from other teams, or at worst work on code that is simply scrapped. New features are prioritized over all but the most system-critical bugs, and teams are never given any time to actually focus on improving their code. The only improvements that can happen must be snuck in while implementing new features.

As far as M$ is concerned, all code is shit, and the only thing that matters is if it works well enough to be shown at a demo and shipped. Needless to say, I don't work there anymore.

<comment><USER4> It's not just Microsoft, but this "update culture" is pervasive in software today. New features make for exciting marketing but in the end what most users probably want more is stability. All the stories of forced updates and accompanying reboots (with not even a chance to save work?) remind me of the old criticisms of Windows being so unstable it needs to be rebooted frequently, and how uptime was a highly-valued result of good system design.

I personally think near-daily updating to fix bugs that should've been discovered and fixed _before_ actually shipping product is absurd. It's been argued that this is because systems are more complex now, but maybe we don't actually need all that complexity...

<comment><USER5> Most users say they want stability but when it comes to actually paying, unfortunately most users will only pay for features, especially new shinny ones that demo well. This is the challenge faced by software companies.

<comment><USER6> Not buying your argument.

Mac is a much more viable choice today than in the past, and I think the Mac's slowly but steadily increasing market share has something to do with the perceived reliability and stability of the platform.

I'm only basing this off of personal experience. I have Windows at work and Mac at home.

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry, if we're talking about features being buggy, OS X is not something you exactly what to point a finger at as a good example of an OS that has features implemented in a stable way.

Thankfully, OS X is cheap/free. I use OS X, Windows, and Arch literally every day of my life, both at work and home.

To be quite honest, I blame consumers for all this non-sense. No one wants to actually pay for software. I can go into this in a more nuanced fashion, but I seriously think software across the board is a good bit cheaper than it needs to be. From OS's to games and everything in between.

<comment><USER8> I'm always a bit shocked when I see people express this. I work in a office with roughly 100 macs and 100 windows. The macs are FAR more stable and less buggy. I've had this experience three different times at various companies. Yet online I see people saying that OS X is just as buggy but they never point what part is.

<comment><USER9> Are the macs running the latest version of OSX? From what I've read and experienced, OSX declined in quality when Apple stopped charging for OSX and started using it to drive hardware upgrades. These days OSX works fine if you have the latest, greatest, most expensive Mac hardware but if you try to upgrade an existing machine, that's when you get errors.

<comment><USER7> I have the latest 15 inch MBP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The worst thing in my experience about windows 8/windows 10 apps is that you cannot install apps from 3rd party sources. Sure you can install on a temporary/testing basis by signing in with a dev license, but you have to keep doing this every 3 months until microsoft decides to pull the plug.

This is a problem if you are writing an app for a client who doesn't want to publish on the app store. The only option is the very expensive and opaque volume-licensing program which is useless if your app won't have many activations anyway.

Ultimately Windows 8/10 is a closed platform similar to iOS. Are we as developers willing to pay 30% of our revenues to Microsoft when the day comes that UWP will replace .net/win32?

<comment><USER4> I find this trend of platforms becoming walled gardens very unpleasant. The whole idea that some entity has control over what you can run on your own hardware just doesn't feel right --- and more so, the fact that most people seem to be completely fine with it.

Windows, and DOS before it, used to be _very_ open. Anyone could just download a compiler and create a binary, then use it themselves or share with everyone else. In fact you could even use the built-in debugger (DEBUG) to write tiny assembly-language utilities, and computer magazines --- not even developer ones, but regular ones like PC Mag --- would publish source code listings. Advanced users were also programmers, but there was no real distinction.

Now it seems even getting started writing some sort of program for your own system requires going through a huge amount of bureaucracy and could involve payment. The customary way of installing software has been termed "sideloading" and recommended against. There is a rising wall between "users" and "developers", making it harder for the former to become the latter.

I suppose Linux is more open, but there is still the very noticeable centralisation of app-store-like repositories, the discouragement of installing software via other means, and the bureaucratic process of getting software into those repositories.

Ostensibly, the whole reason for this is security, but it's easy to see other motivations. The idea that almost all users are completely stupid idiots who can't decide for themselves, and effectively locking them up so they can't do anything, is horrible for the continued advancement of computer literacy.

Certainly before and outside of these closed platforms there is malware and other threats, but there is also something closed platforms don't have, and which I think is also very important --- freedom.

Relevant story: [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to- read.en.html](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html)

<comment><USER10> Indeed. I didn't realise how "open" microsoft's platform was until iOS/Android came along. Now the old open platform model looks to be fast disappearing without any protest from developers. 30% revenue share for something that was free until now is a big deal.

Regarding Linux, the centralisation is at least justified (convinience, security). Furthermore Linux provides full freedom to ignore/bypass it. Not true with iOS/Android/ Windows 10 UWP.

<comment><USER11> Just a bit confused, but are you saying Android isn't open? All you have to do to install third party apps on Android is un-check one box in the settings, under security (allow installation of apps from unknown sources) and find your apps through whatever means you prefer to the app store. There are third party app stores, or you can just download and install from a web link. Definitely not comparable to iOS.

<comment><USER12> Not all androids allow that though. Some manufacturer customizations turn that off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From the article: "Unless you know the exact name of my app, you won't find it."

His "Website constructor" app is in 3rd position when I search for "Website". Not that bad for such a generic keyword.

Also, I guess one thing with these apps is that the price range (between $12 and $20) is a quite high compared to the majority of the other apps on the store and (unfortunately?) a lot of people are not ready to buy apps >$2.

I guess that the store search algorithm depends on the conversion rate (people buying the app VS people trying it) and that conversion rate is probably pretty low, so maybe lowering the app price could lead to more sales and higher ranking.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. I see the same result. The search results are as I would expect. I understand there is an issue with languages and regions, maybe the OP's region is not US English. It would be interesting to see what other users' searches show from different regions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's just like every other new Microsoft product. They produce enough materiel to get something started -- lots of demos and howtos and samples -- all by Microsoft employees or surrogates -- and then they leave it for something else, and hope the world figures out the rest. They try to suck you in up front, and hope that you get committed enough to not leave when you discover the mess that's waiting for you behind the curtain.

I've come back to full-time Windows development after over a decade of PHP and Rails, and you could lift my experience with trying Entity Framework and lay it on top of these complaints, and not notice a difference.

I've always said this about Microsoft products: they make it really easy to get to 70% of what you want, and then make it nearly impossible to finish. There's a massive bend in the effort/results curve. With open source, it's more difficult in the early stages, but it's a steady progression to 90%, and then you have the tools to work out how to get exactly what you want, if you want to make the effort.

</comment><comment><USER16> I use Chrome OS as my daily driver/recreational computer, and I work from the command line on FreeBSD and Linux machines during the day, so maybe I'm just out of touch with Windows, however:

My partner has a laptop with an Core i3 processor and above-average RAM, and is on the whole a beast compared to my Dell Chromebook 11. My partner upgraded to Windows 10 and I have since used it occasionally to check something here or whatever.

From a couple of admittedly brief sessions using it, I have noticed that Windows 10 seems extremely "laggy", for want of a better word, as though there is a 100ms delay between clicking something and that click registering. It's nimble enough at starting up, it's just interacting with the thing that seems to be slow.

Anybody else experience this, or am I just used to instant feedback from UI?

<comment><USER17> As a counter-anecdote (on a somewhat more powerful laptop, Core i7 with 8 GB of RAM and an SSD): I just upgraded from Windows 7 to 10 three days ago, and have been amazed at how much snappier everything seems. In particular, app switching and window resizing now seem smooth and instantaneous.

<comment><USER18> You are experiencing the effect of a fresh Windows installation.

<comment><USER17> It was an in-place upgrade on a 3.5-year-old installation of Windows 7.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For a long time Microsoft was a monopoly and it shows.

Recently I contacted Microsoft technical support over a product that has some serious issues. Basically they tell me that they have no intention of paying for the repair even though the product is under warranty, in blatant violation of European law.

<comment><USER20> Did you buy the product from Microsoft?

<comment><USER19> I bought it from a retailer.

<comment><USER21> That's probably the issue.

Under the EU Consumer Protection Act, which I believe is what you are referring to, it is the responsibility of the retailer to deal with faulty products, and not the manufacturer.

In this case MS is the manufacturer and not the retailer so they are not obliged to help you.

I suggest you take the product back to the retailer, as they are responsible for any claims under the consumer protection laws.

<comment><USER20> _> In this case MS is the manufacturer_

Or, more likely, Microsoft provided the OEM with one of the many components used in the product.

Microsoft, of course, has no control over what the OEM does with it, and doesn't know unless it goes out and buys the product.

Where things get interesting is when Microsoft ships an update directly to the user. This is something the OEM has no control over.....

<comment><USER21> Yes, that's an interesting point. The digital economy leads to some grey areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's not only Windows 10 app store support that's like that. Every Microsoft product support shares the same constraints and lack of solutions/answers.

After moving abroad I was unable to access my Microsoft account(locked), for more than a month, just because I couldn't provide them with the last IP address I had used to access my account, along with last 5 received email subjects, 5 contacts in my contact list among many other unreasonable questions the common user doesn't even know how to answer. All this because I didn't own my recovery email address any longer.

<comment><USER23> Wait... they can read your email to verify who you say you are? Really? When did that happen?

<comment><USER4> Why are you surprised? Microsoft owns the servers. Email is by default _not_ a secure form of communication. Assume everything you send that isn't encrypted _by you_ to be in plaintext and readable by all the systems it passes through and is stored in.

<comment><USER24> That's the issue, right there. MS owns _the servers_ \- and extrapolates that it also owns whatever is on them, because "obviously you should have known better than use our servers." Even though this is probably legal, the "w3 0wnz0rz y00" _mindset_ is the toxic ingredient here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> While I sympathize with the author's rant, bad service is bad service, I don't know if not developing for Win10 is the conclusion, it sounded like the App store sucks but so does the OSX App store and it doesn't mean you don't develop of OSX, it just means you don't use the App store.

Sounds like side loading is a better choice on both OSes.

<comment><USER26> Yeah Bitwig seems to be doing well as a powerful side load. Steams store is also an alternate channel to sell to windows users.

<comment><USER26> Of course steam also targets mac and linux users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands As a user who has not only Windows 8.1 but also Windows Phone (now Windows Mobile) 10, this blog is spot on and indicates a much larger problem on the horizon.

I can't tell you how many times I saw an article about an app and tried to find it in the store, only to come up empty handed. This has happened so many times on my Windows Mobile 10 phone, I lost count. Just this week I was looking for a better Twitter client app. I would type in "twitter" "tweet" "twitter client" "twitter app" and all I would get would be the main Twitter app and nothing else. Then I had to start doing Google searches for "best twitter client for windows mobile 10" which then gave me articles from 2013 and 2014 and for WP 8.1 - not exactly an up to date list of current Twitter clients.

Compare that to the Google Play store. You simply enter "Twitter" and get a dozen other apps, none of which have Twitter in their name. Plume, Echofone, Fenix, Talon, Persiscope are just a few of the examples.

It was such a massive headache, I actually decided yesterday I'ms scrapping Windows Mobile 10 and going back to Android. I've been a huge supporter since WP 7, and held out hope things would improve, and they haven't. Their app store is a massive failure, you can't find anything in the store you want, developers have no reason to build for the platform, and I'm not going to start with the myriad of UI problems I see already in the latest build (build 10586.63) that still have not been solved. Just basic shit like battery life is still a major problem. Not to mention they took away some very basic features from 8.1 that everybody loved like the ability to show Bing weather on the lock screen.

I've finally reached my breaking point with their platform.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is a problem Microsoft has had since their Phone 7 store. I tried out their app submission process with a small and uninteresting but perfectly functional dice rolling app back when the windows store was brand new with nothing on it, and saw the same thing. It doesn't really matter what tags you add, the search is crap and my app didn't show up on any of the tags I added. Only by searching it's name letter-perfect could I find it. I wonder sometimes if theres a hidden seam of quality apps on the windows store that no one knows about because the search is so bad...

</comment><comment><USER28> I have an hp split laptop. It's really anemic and I regret to have thought that processors had come as far as not having to think about them (you do). It has an Intel Pentium N3510. Anyways, it came with windows 8 and it was a slow and buggy product from day one. Linux on it runs worse then windows somehow. But since windows 10 it's at least bearable now. Windows 10 is faster at least on this machine.

</comment><comment><USER29> I like windows 10, it's better than windows 7 IMO. Things have a smoother feel, the console works better and I feel more secure due to all sorts of new security improvements. I haven't noticed huge issues, the only thing that really bothers me if the fact that explorer has a tendency to freeze for a second when accessing a large spinning disk for the first time since boot up.

<comment><USER30> Which new security improvements in particular do you feel make you more secure?

<comment><USER29> @op & @EasyTiger_

Well an example are the improvements to the various authentication implementations, the fact that I can now finally configure my personal workstation to be impervious to certain types of pass-the-hash attacks. A nice matrix that illustrates the improvements can be found here:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BfZw8iiCQAApq0T.png](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BfZw8iiCQAApq0T.png)

Where 'green' is secure, as you can see a 'domain protected user' in windows 10 protects against almost every type of attack. These I have personal experience with from the attackers perspective, and windows 2012 domains are quite impervious to attacks that used to own the entire domain in as little as 2 hours. Not to mention that in addition to the matrix shown here, traditional psexec has finally been restricted to a special group of users, so that local administrators can no longer remotely take possession of a system unless explicitly configured to be able to.

Most of those improvements are really only applicable to enterprise, and some of them came about by switching to a more secure default (instead of new technolly).

New in windows 10 is also control flow guard (CFG), which most applications that I run at home and work already support. With the new addition of CFG use after free exploits should be harder to achieve on windows 10 than windows 7, although I don't have any personal experience with developing exploits for windows 10 yet.

In addition to the general improvements to credential protection and CFG, windows 10 is further isolating critical system components from each other in the kernel. I haven't experimented/looked at it in any detail yet, but I get the impression it's conceptually similar to qubes OS. In windows 7 the kernel patch protector (KPP) ran in ring 0, just like al l the other kernel code, if you got code execution you could simply patch KPP too, and then your rootkit had free roam over the kernel. Now Microsoft claims that in windows 10 KPP has been isolated so that normal 'ring 0' (if that still means anything in the traditional sense) can no longer patch it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Now if only I could push libreoffice/gdocs or ms would release office for linux, I could deploy linux. Also, way too many scada systems require windows machines for the various proprietary ide's.... and it drives me nuts! Where's the foss scada?

Windows is dangerous and 10 just made it more so. It's not easy, but break free of the proprietary os chains now before they lock your brain in with iBrain and update it without your permission.

</comment><comment><USER32> apps? Whats wrong with saying applications as for the last 20 years in windows environments ?

<comment><USER33> It's a good system. If it's called an "application" or a "program" it's probably worth having. If it's called an "app" it's probably not.

<comment><USER34> "The TeX app" doesn't sound _that_ bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It never made much sense to focus the desktop app store on commercial products. Windows has a plethora of high quality open source software that most users never find and would have trouble downloading safely. Why wait for the commercial market to catch up when you can make good software available right now that benefits users? App stores work because of easy availability and without that they are mostly useless.

</comment><comment><USER36> Yeah, hopefully more people listen and opt out. A future where Windows has a reduced market-share is ideal for the consumer. It doesn't even have to be that OSX or Linux take over. Maybe the void could be filled by some other vendor with a completely new design.

<comment><USER37> There is serious room for a 4th competitor. Windows is commonly used but gets a lot of hate, OSX is great but expensive, and linux is way too difficult for 99% of people to use.

Give me something else, please. I now hate windows, can't afford osx, and don't want to deal with linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is your daily reminder that linux exists, is free, and doesn't make your life miserable.

[http://calculate-linux.org](http://calculate-linux.org)

</comment><comment><USER39> And the apps work very slow.

</comment><comment><USER40> Couldn't they forward you to someone that can help you with the problem? The support seem to shut you down and close all the doors which is infuriating at best.

</comment><comment><USER41> It sounds like he's talking to a bot when emailing Microsoft. I'm not surprised they'd use one to respond to emails.

</comment><comment><USER42> from the windows 10 hello world:

To make your window resizable (!) and responsive, use the following XAML

        <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups>
    	    <VisualStateGroup>
    	        <VisualState x:Name="wideState">
    	            <VisualState.StateTriggers>
    	                <AdaptiveTrigger MinWindowWidth="641" />
    	            </VisualState.StateTriggers>
    	        </VisualState>
    	        <VisualState x:Name="narrowState">
    	            <VisualState.StateTriggers>
    	                <AdaptiveTrigger MinWindowWidth="0" />
    	            </VisualState.StateTriggers>
    	            <VisualState.Setters>
    	                <Setter Target="inputPanel.Orientation" Value="Vertical"/>
    	                <Setter Target="inputButton.Margin" Value="0,4,0,0"/>
    	            </VisualState.Setters>
    	        </VisualState>
    	    </VisualStateGroup>
    	</VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups>

i lolled.

theres also this gem:

        bmp Windows::WinForms::XAML::Imaging::Bitmap = ^new Windows::WinForms::XAML::Imaging::Bitmap(filestream)

Which can be avoided by putting `namespace Windows::WinForms::XAML::Imaging` in every CPP file.

<comment><USER43> Well, once you understand visual states, that XAML example starts to make much more sense. I don't think the issue with W10 development are the tools because they are generally quite damn good.

<comment><USER4> Once you understand what the equivalent would be in a pure Win32 application, XAML starts to make much less sense... making a window resizeable involves setting one bit in the window styles and responsive just means a loop over the contents to move them to the right places when WM_SIZE message is received.

Declarative UIs in XML are more verbose and less flexible than just putting the appropriate expressions in a simple resize-recalc table, which is what the Win32 equivalent would be.

<comment><USER44> Without addressing the XAML mess, Window resizing in WINAPI is a complete mess too. You toggle whether a window is resizable by setting the window style (wtf!) with WS_THICKFRAME. When resizing windows, you need to handle three different messages (WM_ENTERSIZEMOVE, WM_EXITSIZEMOVE, WM_SIZE). To set minimum/maximum size, you respond to a WM_GETMINMAXINFO message.

All I wanted was SetWindowMinMaxSize(hwnd, min_size, max_size) and an event to tell me the window has resized. That's it.

This complexity allows apps to misbehave in various ways, either unintentionally, on purpose or maliciously. Windows programming is so darn complicated that it doesn't make any sense.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mainland Chinese Traders Milking Hong Kong for All Its Worth   - <AUTHOR> http://world.time.com/2013/02/04/mainland-chinese-traders-milking-hong-kong-for-all-its-worth/

<comment><USER2> My wife was just asked to send back 10 pounds of baby formula to a friend in mainland China, they really do NOT trust Chinese brands.</comment>


Satya Nadella just fixed Microsoft's biggest problem - <AUTHOR> https://besttech.io/satya-nadella-just-fixed-microsofts-biggest-problem-82e29fe03df2 <comment><USER3> Bit too much Ballmer bashing. He made plenty of mistakes so he's an easy target for the ignoranti, but the adoption of open source, the move to the cloud, the writing of Android and iOS apps etc all started under Ballmer.

Ballmer also cleaned up the anti-trust mess and -- while his hands were somewhat tied by a dozen years of constant DoJ supervision -- tripled Microsoft's sales and doubled its profits. This was despite competition from free Linux and OpenOffice, whose fans used to tell me that Microsoft would be out of business within five years....

<comment><USER4> Ballmer's biggest mistake was the review system at Microsoft.

\- Managers spent easily a quarter of their year on reviews

\- Employees often competed against one another (have a great idea? Okay, but That Guy down the hall found out about it and did a half-assed implementation and got a great annual review, and you got slammed for not accomplishing enough. Or maybe your idea simply got sabotaged in some closed-door meetings. Customers? What are those?)

\- Sorry, we know all the people on your team are good, but you have to fire five of them. And . . . don't bother picking them, HR already did that without your input.

In 11 years I went through four changes in how reviews were done, and things got steadily worse with each iteration. I hear things are better now; it wouldn't be hard. There was a ton of bad attrition, of really good people who got fed up with things and quit.

In a Q&A session I asked Lisa Brummel, the then head of HR, what she was doing about bad attrition, about good employees who were leaving because of the review system and politics. She wouldn't even admit that the problem existed.

The board should have fired Ballmer five years earlier; on the other hand, they might have wound up with Kevin Turner running things, OMFG. Microsoft Kremlinology is a thing.

<comment><USER5> _Sorry, we know all the people on your team are good, but you have to fire five of them. And . . . don 't bother picking them, HR already did that without your input._

Ha, this happened to me. I found out I was getting laid off _before_ my boss and boss' boss did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >At Microsoft, those resources are so disconnected from engineering that they seem to rely on whitepapers and customers to learn about their own products.

This is so true. My company was being courted by Azure folks so we got some premium access and it was always laughable and frustrating how much more I knew about their cloud architecture than they did. I remember finally being able to talk to the head of network engineering, who was able to talk me through the finer points of how their load balancers worked (we were bumping up against some limitations). That 5 minute conversation was worth more than all their white papers (which were incorrect and contradictory at times) combined. I think I asked her why they didn't publish this information. She didn't say anything.

<comment><USER7> This isn't all true, is it?

I replied to one of those "Welcome to Azure" emails and mentioned I had some questions about integrating the Key Vault with a bunch of their other offerings. Someone from MS reached out to me and setup a meeting with a developer from one of the (many) Azure team. And this guy knew his shite, and was very helpful (still have notes from that meeting on my desk, many months later).

I was a solo developer, with a startup idea, no revenue, no company. And I got help ASAP. I thought it was awesome.

I'm sure my experience doesn't reflect the whole picture, but i think that's true all around.

<comment><USER6> I'm sure that for basic functionality it's true, but we were stretching their load balancers so I needed some deets on what was going on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've always said sales (and marketing) was Microsoft's biggest problem. The are finally starting to be cool again as the engineers take over.

The silo between Windows and development (Azure, .net etc) needs to come down fully to fix Sinofsky's mess too.

We're still left with a desktop OS UI with huge animated icons designed for a phone even though they've now given up on the phone market anyway. They gave up too easily just as Windows phone was starting to overcome that screw up and become popular with some non techy users as it really is the most user friendly.

<comment><USER9> Very well said on the Windows phone.I have used three windows phones before switching to Android and I think the UI for simpler things like dialer ,messages or emails was better on windows phone.Especially email was so good ,it used to work a charm even on 2G.I have used built in clients and other options on Android and nothing beats the basic email client on windows phone.May be it was not feature rich for gmail but usability was better .Many of my colleagues is of the same opinion who switched from windows phone to Android.All Microsoft had to do was fix the developer ecosystem but looks like the platform is abandoned. An alternative other than Android or iOS would have been better

<comment><USER10> But those are just apps, not the OS and there are any number of replacement dialler, messaging and email apps for Android - are you suggesting that NONE of them are as good as the Windows Phone default apps?

<comment><USER11> >replacement dialler, messaging and email apps for Android

It's a smartphone; communication is its entire raison d'être. Those things ought to be awesome right out of the box and, on Android, they're definitely not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Try this: Google "Office 365"

The first result just says "Email". The second result says "Office 365 login"

I'm not an internet dunce, but this is just bad user-experience. Why not have a modern landing page that tells me a bit about the product, it's price and what I can expect from it?

Why is the first result a login page?

I've been using Google Docs almost exclusively for work now. I've ditched Word completely. I was willing to give Office 365 a shot, but the signup process is so infuriatingly out of date that I don't feel like bothering.

<comment><USER13> One of the problems Microsoft has that others don't is brand confusion. They like to ride on their own coat tails so distinct and unique products that are completely unrelated are often called the same thing.

What do you call Microsoft's personal email client? Outlook.

What do you call Microsoft's web based personal email service? Outlook.

What do you call Microsoft's enterprise email client? Outlook.

What do you call Microsoft's web based enterprise email client? Outlook.

Google doesn't have this problem because Gmail is Gmail.

<comment><USER14> Good lord, the brand confusion.

I work with Microsoft's enterprise instant messaging/unified communications platform. It used to be called Lync, which, whatever, meh, it's a name. When Microsoft acquired Skype, they decided to rename the next iteration of Lync, Skype for Business. Skype and Skype for Business are two completely different products, running on top of different protocols that just barely inter- operate. It's absurd how much confusion this rebranding has caused.

<comment><USER15> And there's Office Communicator - was that another name for Lync?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Use my bookmarklet to hide that horrible image of Balmer sticking his tongue out

javascript:(function (){var x = document.getElementsByTagName("img");for (i = 0; i < x.length; i++){x[i].setAttribute("src","");}}());

<comment><USER17> Here's one you can use to delete arbitrary elements from a page by clicking on them. It's handy in this age of unfortunate design decisions.

        javascript:for(var%20i=0;%20i<(document.getElementsByTagName('a')).length;%20i++)%20{(document.getElementsByTagName('a')[i]).style.pointerEvents%20=%20'none';}function%20handler(e)%20{e%20=%20e%20||%20window.event;var%20target%20=%20e.target%20||%20e.srcElement;target.style.display%20=%20'none';document.removeEventListener('click',%20handler,%20false);cursor('default');for(var%20i=0;%20i<(document.getElementsByTagName('a')).length;%20i++)%20{(document.getElementsByTagName('a')[i]).style.pointerEvents%20=%20'initial';}}document.addEventListener('click',%20handler,%20false);cursor('crosshair');function%20cursor(cur)%20{%20document.body.style.cursor%20=%20cur;%20}

<comment><USER18> Or in Firefox, select "Inspect Element" from the right click menu then press delete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is one damn thing I would _love_ from Microsoft. And that's to get rid of adverts from their software.

I use Windows 7 and Windows 10 Enterprise. We paid for those licenses. It boggles my mind that anyone at MS would think sticking ads in the Windows Weather App or Skype would be a good idea for paid for software.

<comment><USER20> This is my least favorite thing. I realize that often when you pay for software you don't truly own it in the legal sense, but I still want to feel like it's _mine_ and ads don't let me do that. For this reason, even though I think it's an interesting idea, I am deeply repulsed by Amazon's discounted "with special offers" Kindles. Somehow, just the fact that those exist erodes my sense of ownership of my "without special offers" Kindle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was a Windows user for a long time.

5 years ago I switched to OS X, because I think it's closer to the deployment environment I use as a dev.

However what OS X did ( when they killed the old one - MacOS 9 and rewrote the whole thing on UNIX based kernel ) was the single greatest move, which I think pays off even these days.

This is what I hope should happen with Windows. They should decide on POSIX kernel and completely rewrite most of it. This will put Windows as an option for me.

<comment><USER22> Suggesting a rewrite of something as important as the NT kernel is ignorant at best.

I think Bash on Windows is a great compromise.

<comment><USER23> Why is the NT kernel so important? It hasn't touched my life much in about eight years, private or professional. Nokia thought Symbian was very important too.

<comment><USER24> Unless you're OK with breaking compatibility with all existing Windows apps - most of which you have no control over - rewriting the kernel as a POSIX thing is going to look a lot like 'bash on windows' in reverse. You'd have to have some kind of shim layer to translate all the old system calls, so most everyone's existing software is going to be slower and there will be bugs, etc. Including your own, since Windows is a kernel, a ton of drivers, a userland (including basic runtimes), a windowing system, a basic set of productivity tools and games, etc.

I think this would be a total disaster that killed Windows, personally.

<comment><USER25> > 'bash on windows' in reverse

That would be "wine", which has worked surprisingly well several years.

<comment><USER26> Wine is fine for getting around an expected limitation, but would you run your workloads on wine in a production datacenter? It would be a disaster.

<comment><USER23> I wonder what companies really have designed new backends for windows for years anymore? Technically you could run many generic things there (databases or JVM), but what would you actually _gain_? Likely if you have to use windows, you're left in some legacy niche, looking backwards and not into the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Writing software(GNU) != Selling software(Microsoft/Oracle) != Selling support(RedHat) != Selling solutions(IBM) != Selling gadgets(Apple) != Selling advertisements(Google/Facebook/Twitter) != Selling consulting(Accenture) != Body shopping(TCS/Infosys/Wipro/HCL/Cognizant)

</comment><comment><USER28> > He drove smart acquisitions ...

And the author has "LinkedIn" listed?!?!?!?!

Does _anyone_ \- aside from some MS staff and the article author - <USER2> LinkedIn was a smart buy for MS?

Everyone I know is welcoming the likely fade out of LinkedIn in not-many- years.

<comment><USER29> Not to mention, the acquisition was _announced_ a month ago. It's not even close to being approved yet by LNKD shareholders or closing. No case could be made that it was smart, since...it hasn't happened yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm reading this from my linux laptop running firefox. my colleagues use macs. I don't think microsoft is gaining anything. nothing against the guy but perhaps its too little too late.

<comment><USER31> Microsoft has shifted focus from the laptop to the cloud. And they are most definitely gaining there. You're just measuring the wrong thing.

<comment><USER32> Microsoft has no product for private cloud. You're sure about the measure?

<comment> UK-AL Microsoft have tons of tools for private cloud? Including the upcoming ability deploy the azure platform to your own machines.

<comment><USER32> Tons of tools? Dare to mention any? Upcoming ability - any official announcements?

<comment><USER32> These tons of tools yet to be released in September 2016 :)

<comment> UK-AL One major one is not yet available. There's still Hyper-V+ System Center, + Azure Pack which makes running your own private cloud relatively easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Maybe, but I'm worried they've given up on consumer devices, and decided to stick to the enterprise cash cow, in the Oracle-lesser-evil model.

Entirely egotistical of me, I came from an iPhone to a Lumia and I'm not too enthusiastic about going back (although I also use iPads, and like them). I find Android a bit of a swamp, and having only iOS as an alternative is sad.

<comment><USER3> They're still doing Windows 10 for smartphones and there are other hardware suppliers besides Microsoft. The OS is free, after all.

Whether the Surface phone will make any difference is open to doubt, but it _might_ ;-)

As an Android user, I'd be prepared to have a serious look at one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Interesting article, IBM seems the same, Sales and everything else.

Maybe this is a relic of old apex predators that are past their age.

<comment><USER13> You can throw Cisco, Oracle, HP, and just about any other enterprise company on that list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> So by "becoming Sales and everyone else", they actually got bad at sales. Ironic.

</comment><comment><USER36> Microsoft caters more to business and OEMs than to anythybody else. Consumer market is largely irrelevant to them.

Why you sell your stuff this way, you need a good salesman.

Yes, Microsoft is "uncool", but it doesn't matter to them

</comment><comment><USER37> Bashing on NT kernel without knowing what VMS is, and what improvements were made that we all can learn from is terribly ignorant at best.

Sure, Microsoft has had terrible problems, but the true innovations and improvement on kernel design and implementation are truly amazing.

Kernel programmers are underappreciated.

</comment><comment><USER38> If 'Engineering and everyone else' beats 'Sales and everyone else' (Google vs MS) How about Twitter ? it's of the former type. As an engineer, engineering first company is more appealing. However, we'd end up again with a different silo.

</comment><comment><USER39> > Microsoft's Outlook iOS app is probably the best mail client on iOS

I used it about a year ago and it was horrible, many broken features and fairly slow and unresponsive, and also exceptionally poor UX (like office for web).

<comment><USER40> It also stores your email on their servers to get push messages, which no UI can fix.

<comment><USER41> Worse than that, it stores your email credentials on their servers, so it can retrieve email on your behalf. Terrible, terrible security. I wouldn't be surprised if the passwords are stored in cleartext in the database.

<comment><USER42> If you're talking about Gmail accounts for example only the oauth tokens are stored (which you can revoke from your google account config panel). If you're talking about an IMAP account of yours, how are they supposed to log into it without storing your password in clear text?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> They're definitely sending more marketing people to post on reddit and Hackernews.

</comment><comment><USER44> Click bait title?

</comment><comment><USER45> We'll see what happens when profitability takes a dive.

</comment><comment><USER46> Clickbait title</comment>


Realtime Related Tweets Bar: Another jQuery Plugin - <AUTHOR> http://www.moretechtips.net/2009/09/realtime-related-tweets-bar-another.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a highly customizable jQuery plugin to create realtime Twitter search- driven bar of tweets related to your post</comment>


Ask HN: App launch check list? - <AUTHOR>

My app is almost ready and should be submitted to the "Mac" Appstore next week. I was wondering if someone has already worked on a pre-launch checklist?
- Website - Demo Video - Submit to sites like Macupdate etc.. - ??
Would appreciate your comments.
Thanks <comment><USER2> [http://entropydigital.co.uk/wp- content/uploads/2009/11/webgr...](http://entropydigital.co.uk/wp- content/uploads/2009/11/webgrab.png)

</comment><comment><USER2> Good question. If there isn't one, lets create one.</comment>


Adobe manager puts partial blame on Apple for mobile Flash failure - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/11/11/adobe_manager_puts_partial_blame_on_apple_for_mobile_flash_failure.html <comment><USER2> If I were going to blame anything, I think it would be Adobe's decision to treat every desktop platform other than Windows as a second class citizen. The Linux and OS X flash players have been horrible for a long time. When mobile OSes were released that were derived from these two, the results of this strategy were fatal to mobile Flash.

<comment><USER3> It _really_ bothers me that people seem to think that flash works well on windows.

And that's even before taking into account that flash is a gigantic security hole (on _all_ platforms) and that adobe still can not, after all these years of misery, push updates well (to windows clients at least).

Google did the world a huge favor by developing Chrome and thus make it so blatantly obvious what crap flash really is (putting the blame where it belongs as they so delicately put it). It's become much better the last year but some things you just can't rescue and it should be banned from use just for security reasons anyway.

<comment><USER4> > It really bothers me that people seem to think that flash works well on > windows.

It pretty much works (at all), which is a far cry from the experience on OSX and Linux both.

And that's not limited to plugin either, during the holiday I've been out with only a macbook. Wanted to play Binding of Isaac, which is in Flash and cross- platform.

Performances on my Win7 machine are good, especially in fullscreen (there are some slowdowns when windowed). On OSX it was absolutely dreadful, any time half a dozen missiles were on the screen the game would just crawl down to single-digit FPS. I was not able to play any Binding during the holiday, it was just too horrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Adobe doesn't need to point the finger at anyone, they only need to look as far as their own product to see why a company so focused on user experience and security, like Apple, would decide against it. Adobe never seemed to take Flash on Linux based OS's seriously. Now that those systems are becoming more popular, Adobe is trying to play catch up, not succeeding, and trying to point the finger elsewhere.

However, I read Mike Chambers' blog post that this thread's article is based on. It doesn't sound like he's explicitly blaming Apple for anything. He states:

 _Just to be very clear on this. No matter what we did, the Flash Player was not going to be available on Apple's iOS anytime in the foreseeable future._

... and ...

 _... given the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple's iOS) was not going to allow Flash Player in the browser, Flash was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity [it has on desktops]._

Is he going after Apple there, or merely stating facts?

<comment><USER4> > Adobe never seemed to take Flash on Linux based OS's seriously.

*nix-based, OSX is not (and has never been) Linux-based, and Flash has always been absolutely dreadful on it. Still is.

<comment><USER5> Understood; thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's all this "blame" and "failure" stuff? It's like Windows Vista blaming Windows 7 for its failings.

This is an evolution of technology, plain and simple.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's true that it didn't help, but the main reason is the success of the app stores on mobile.

People install apps a lot more easily on mobile than desktop, it's better for developer as well especially regarding monetization which means there is really no reason for a plugin.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well, then, thank god for Apple for rescuing us from the tyranny of flash.

Now, if we could just get rid of it on the desktop, things might be much better. CBS.com, I'm looking at you. Hulu, you can do better also.

Once again, by the way, despite the cacophony of personal attacks that it produced at the time, Steve Jobs has been proven right.

<comment><USER9> He wasn't proven 'right' as much as 'successful'. He wanted to keep flash off the iPhone and iPad and he succeeded. Just because Adobe, faced with a ban on the most important mobile platform, decided mobile flash wasn't worth the development effort doesn't mean that they couldn't have created a viable player on iOS. With enough money and the improving hardware of devices, they almost certainly could have. But even then they'd be left with the fact that native apps are succeeding far better than web apps on mobile devices anyway.

<comment><USER10> The AIR runtime is basically Flash Player and it's allowed on iOS — it sucks. Adobe also spent years on Flash Player for Android and it's not that great.

<comment><USER11> What? I don't think air runs on iOS.

<comment><USER10> <http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/air_for_ios.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> To be honest, I never really liked the whole concept of an third-party "web plugin" for the browser? Either support the file-formats inside the browser or just download the file and let some (native) app of my choice deal with it? Would that be so bad?

I even question the wisdom of inline graphics? The screen is not really like paper. If there is a need for a "figure 1", then it would be almost always be more useful to have it display in a separate window next to the browser, so that you don't have to scroll up every time the text refers to something on this figure?

<comment><USER13> Navigating between two windows is much more annoying than scrolling up.

<comment><USER12> It might be in some implementations, but not always: Given a large enough display you could set them side by side and what could be easier then looking left/right?

Requiring scrolling is usually bad enough and only becomes worse the greater the distance.</comment></comment></comment>


"Cold fusion" moves closer to mainstream acceptance - <AUTHOR> http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=222&content_id=CNBP_024353&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=

<comment><USER2> A few years ago, David Goodstein of Caltech wrote an interesting look back at cold fusion. It's available here: <http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/fusion_art.html>

Where the story left off, there were a few competent researchers with well- designed experiments that were getting indications that _something_ was happening that was not covered by current theory. However, cold fusion research was by then out of fashion, and no one was interested in looking deeper into those results and confirming or refuting them.

As Goodstein notes, "What all these experiments really need is critical examination by accomplished rivals intent on proving them wrong. That is part of the normal functioning of science. Unfortunately, in this area, science is not functioning normally. There is nobody out there listening."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Doubters and such should note several things about this press release:

1\. It's from the American Chemical Society. While no one is infallible, they're not exactly flakes.

2\. There are some serious names and institutions involved. Same caveat as 1.

3\. Ask yourself if your doubts are based on hearsay of hearsay. Unless you are a nuclear chemist or physicist who has tried experimentally to produce low energy nuclear reactions without success, maybe there are reasons research has continued for so many years in the face of overwhelming public and professional ridicule.

<comment><USER3> Isn't the fact that it's interesting, and that the pay-off would be huge, reason enough? The idea that there is a confirmed, reliable, reproducible effect, but that people are hiding that, seems a little odd.

You seem to be confusing being hopeful or popular with being (proven) right.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you are referring to my point 3, there are plenty of problems (cancer, biotech, AI, energy) that are both interesting, and have the possibility of a large pay-off, while NOT suffering ridicule from the mainstream - in fact, while enjoying some respect. Most researchers will (quite rationally) choose career options that are interesting, potentially valuable, and safe.

Sure, cold fusion is interesting, and has the chance of a big pay-off, but it also presents enormous problems to a would-be researcher, including lack of funding, dismissive colleagues, and ignorant pseudo-skepticism from the public. For a professional scientist to pursue it in the face of such problems require more than faith and courage; it probably requires at least some evidence they've seen with their own eyes. If you're interested, lookup Francesco Scaramuzzi and Julian Schwinger along with keywords of "cold fusion."

<comment><USER3> there's some strange emotional subtext to your posting that i don't quite get.

these people can choose what they want to work on. i am not putting a gun to their heads forcing them to do this. nor am i laughing at them.

if they're right - great. who wouldn't want a free lunch? but i don't see the point in painting them as heroes or presenting this work as something successful when, as far as i can see, it is not.

i've done research. you do it because it's interesting, not because of what other people think. and everyone has problems with funding: it's a market; if there's more money in one area there are more people too.

as i said, i'm not sure why you're so emotionally involved with this, but it doesn't seem healthy. if you're involved in cold fusion maybe you should look elsewhere, because science isn't really about being loved or acclaimed by the public...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for playing psychiatrist. I'm not sure why you think I'm emotional about this. Are you?

BTW, if you do research solely by what you find interesting, more power to you. But to propose that most or all researchers do so, while not caring what their colleagues and peers think, doesn't square with well-documented reality (e.g. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mostly, I'm glad this isn't the Adobe technology.

<comment><USER5> Not sure why anyone would vote this backhanded comment up.

<comment><USER6> I upvoted it because it was my exact sentiment.

When I saw the submission title, I thought "oh no." And then I felt relief that it was not about the CF platform.

Coldfusion was pretty bad when it was first introduced, and it hasn't improved much. I've been dodging it for years, but some of my friends haven't been so lucky. Each of them hates it, and one had even quit his job because his employer didn't want to give it up.

Yes, I would be sad if CF became "mainstream" again and I had to learn it. If I recall correctly, everyone _needed_ ColdFusion when it was first introduced, and it is only barely alive due to that initial boom.

<comment><USER7> Few things are as ugly as

      <cfswitch expression="expr">
        <cfcase value="val"> ...

<comment><USER5> Isn't there a cfscript equivalent that is more pleasing to the eye? Something like:

      switch (expr) {
        case "val"....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not one of the listed papers was a successful reproduction of someone else's published work.

<comment><USER8> Well, very few published papers are. Reproduction of others' work is usually a foundational preliminary to original research.

<comment><USER3> We're talking about cold fusion, right? Maybe things have changed, but I was under the impression that it was not yet possible to reliably reproduce the effects. In such a context, reproduction would be quite noteworthy.

<comment><USER8> You're assuming that a replication of Pons and Fleischmann's original work is necessary for cold fusion to be an interesting research subject.

<comment><USER3> No, I'm not. As I've said elsewhere, I can understand why this is interesting to researchers. But to be interesting to _me_ (and, I suspect, at least some others) there needs to be some reliably repeatable demonstration of "new physics". I don't see any evidence for that here.

There are lots of people investigating lots of exciting ideas out there. That's great. But there's a big difference between "wouldn't it be cool if..." and "hey, I can _show_ that...".

When I saw the conference details, I hoped cold fusion was at the "show that" phase. Disappointingly, it continues to not be. Hence my post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _"The presentations describe... indications that cold fusion may occur naturally in certain bacteria."_

Are you serious? This boggles my mind more than anything about how bio systems work in nature in the last few years...

</comment><comment><USER10> One of my clients is working somewhere in this field; they're having a much easier time recruiting new scientists and other personnel, and they are well funded.

An NDA prevents me from saying much else, but I think I can say that the field is better developed than many people realize.

<comment><USER11> There is also lots of money in homeopathy. It's a going concern.

Then there's fundamentalist religious education. Plenty of funding there. Lots of impressively architected buildings. People with advanced degrees.

Recruitment, funding, and NDAs are but one metric of success.

<comment><USER10> Sorry, I didn't mean to imply private funding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "the first inexpensive means of identifying the hallmark of cold fusion reactions: the production of excess heat"

Shouldn't it be excess neutrons?

<comment><USER13> If they can reliably produce excess heat from these experiments, I don't think we care if it's due to fusion or not. It would certainly be something we want to study.

<comment><USER12> It could be something worth of study, but, unless there is Helium or neutrons, it's not cold fusion.

The Hagelstein explanation seems interesting, but, again, unless we see some nuclear fusion, those guys are studying something completely different. Not to say uninteresting, but not what we could call nuclear fusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> cold fusion won't move any closer to mainstream acceptance until people can start to show any examples of positive net energy cold fusion, either in the lab or in nature.

or, alternatively, show that it is possible to do coldER fusion. just, show that there's a process with the possibility of scaling down.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. Cold fusion is not necessarily 'junk science' but until someone uses it to generate net energy it is an interesting theoretical idea rather than solid science on which real world technology can be built.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "some describe cold fusion as the 'Fleishmann-Pons Effect' in honor of the pioneers, Marwan noted."

Really? In honor of the possibly-crazy-but-much-more-likely-liars-and-con men whose experiments couldn't even come close to being replicated. The whole article acts like any current research is a vindication of Fleishmann and Pons, but honestly, if cold fusion ever does come to pass, it will be despite Fleishmann and Pons' fraudulent work. How much time and credibility was wasted trying to recreate that BS?

<comment><USER17> _liars-and-con men whose experiments couldn't even come close to being replicated._

Well, in the first few weeks after the announcement, several labs said they _had_ replicated the experiment, so if Fleishmann and Pons were liars or con men, I suppose we must assume a vast conspiracy of such across several notable institutions... well, that or some people were excited, mistaken, and desperately wanted to find evidence of something that apparently wasn't there.

Bad results -- even replication of results ultimately found to be bad -- do not require liars, only error.</comment></comment>