Show HN: Stormia – 2mi precision live rain radar and storm tracking - <AUTHOR> https://stormia.io <comment><USER2> I have seriously been searching for something like this for years. Thank you for building it. Accuweather, Weather.com, and Weather Underground all have bloated, worthless interfaces that make me cry.

<comment><USER3> You might also like WeatherSpark. It's a similar concept. Stormia has a live wind map, which is super cool, but WeatherSpark has a bunch of other graphs that you can look at (like humidity, cloud cover, and a bunch of others).

[https://weatherspark.com/](https://weatherspark.com/)

<comment><USER4> Yes. Weather spark. The guys who wrote it are super chill and I love their product. I love looking at the averages they have before I plan a vacation and the great way they integrate historical information with forecasts into a time series has tons of information that I love.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's not quite 8PM on a March evening here and the forecast says "Next 1H: Sunshine, Next 3H: Sunshine".

Clear is not the same as sunny. Especially at night.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sadly, central Oregon is not served well by NOAA radar:

[http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-other-radar-gap- ea...](http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-other-radar-gap-eastern- slopes-of.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Cities are pretty messed up when clicking around - for example my home town of Livermore CA is nearly impossible to find as most of the region comes up as various formerly unincorporated towns that haven't existed for decades. Ex, Ulmar and Trevarno...

</comment><comment><USER8> My zip code shows up as 'Austin, CA' when I searched 78701 which is Austin, TX.

<comment><USER9> Similarly, mine shows 'Oakland, PA' when I search for 94612 which is Oakland, CA.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, should work now!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hmm, doesn't seem to load for me in Google Chrome. Just hangs for a long time.

<comment><USER11> Works for me in Chrome on Windows + OSX + Ubuntu. Have you tried turning it off and on again?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I use Dark Sky on the iPhone which gives me similar data and alerts.

But I have to say I really like the game/fun UX/UI feeling of your site.

</comment><comment><USER13> Very cool.

Every time I move location it adds another history item :(, so backing back out to HN is like dozen backspaces if you drag it around a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the hint! Should be fixed in a minute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's neat, I guess, but it's really no different to Dark Sky, Forecast.io, RainToday, etc. and so on.

</comment><comment><USER15> Would be great to see Europe as well!

</comment><comment><USER16> Nice website!

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow. Something really new and amazing.

</comment><comment><USER18> nice!

</comment><comment><USER18> nice</comment>


Probabilistic Programming and Bayesian Methods for Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-Programming-and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers/blob/master/Chapter1_Introduction/Chapter1_Introduction.ipynb <comment><USER2> Gah, this reminds me so strongly of undergraduate Economics, where all the textual information and explanation was completely clear to me and all the manipulation of formulae was completely impenetrable to me. I deeply regret not studying maths to a higher level. There is an entire language of symbols and notation that I don't understand, and it's frustrating because I imagine the symbols and notation are trivial in difficulty to learn compared to the underlying logic of the operations.

<comment><USER3> I feel the same way whenever I think about quantum mechanics, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, medical terminology, probability/statistics, functional programming, APL, and internal combustion engine repair manuals. For me, the biggest barrier to grokking something is almost always terminology.

I'm not sure if not knowing is better or worse than forgetting. I used to really excel at multivariable calculus and now I have to ask people on physics forums or wolfram alpha to solve basic integrations. I really, really wish they made Cliffs Notes for people who already learned something. For example I think every college course should have on the order of a one hour review video that covers everything. Maybe a hybrid of spaced interval learning and Khan Academy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > If frequentist and Bayesian inference were programming functions, with > inputs being statistical problems, then the two would be different in what > they return to the user. The frequentist inference function would return a > number, representing an estimate (typically a summary statistic like the > sample average etc.), whereas the Bayesian function would return > probabilities.

Wouldn't a "frequentist inference function" typically return a probability distribution, not a summary statistic?

</comment><comment><USER5> I just love that IPython-driven style of explanation becoming popular. I wish there will still be appearing more of this. Maybe something a little more advanced: I guess Bayesian methods is something most of us already know.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hate being one of the, "Hey this isn't the original title, downvote!" but the submitted title here doesn't do justice to the already relevant title of the OP, and the breadth of OP's material:

"Probabilistic Programming and Bayesian Methods for Hackers"

This is truly a labor of love, and at version 0.1, very readable. I got through about half of it on the subway ride to work.

</comment><comment><USER7> Every time I see "Bayesian Probability," I mentally re-load [http://plover.net/~bonds/cultofbayes.html](http://plover.net/~bonds/cultofbayes.html)

Love the statistics, hate the cult.

</comment><comment><USER8> A really great start. Keep it up!

Would be helpful to have a version that doesn't depend on internet connectivity... e.g. so I can read it on my iPad offline.

Does iPython easily allow saving as a pdf?

<comment><USER9> "printing" it as a pdf works sort of ok. Also, you should be able to view it in an ipython notebook running locally offline on a traditional computer.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The movie "12 angry men" sounds like a Bayesian inference, starts with some assumption and then changes over new information.</comment>


Release Notes for Safari Technology Preview 71 - <AUTHOR> https://webkit.org/blog/8517/release-notes-for-safari-technology-preview-71/ <comment><USER2> Ooh, I also like the Dark Mode stuff. I was just thinking about how I love dark mode, but the fact that I have to enable it on every single site makes it kind of unwieldy. Having a media query for it seems brilliant!

<comment><USER3> Yup, it's really nice. I added support to my website for this, and Safari will automatically switch it whenever I enable dark mode. Now if only more websites supported it…

I'm also happy to see that I can force a certain appearance through the web inspector, since my system appearance varies throughout the day and that means I need to either keep switching it if I want to debug appearance or only work in the light theme during the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does this mean we can finally login to U2F-required Google accounts from iCal?

<comment><USER5> Hopefully someone more knowledgeable will chime in as I'm waiting for FIDO U2F support as well but I think CTAP2 is the browser-to-user layer of FIDO.

edit: just tested it on Mojave with gmail and fastmail and it doesn't recognize that the Yubikey has been inserted, so looks like support is not there out-of-the-box

<comment><USER6> You need to enable it in Develop->Experimental Features, but also you need to be sure you have a CTAP2 key. "U2F" keys are all CTAP1, which is not supported yet. Yubi's 5 series are CTAP2, as are the blue keys with a 2 printed on them.

<comment><USER5> Cool I just tried it with Fastmail and a Yubikey 5 and it worked. Gmail however still checks if you're running chrome so it doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think it would be nice if the title was changed to "Safari Technology Preview Release 71", since this isn't in mainline Safari yet.

</comment><comment><USER7> More details on supports-color-schemes: [https://github.com/w3c/csswg- drafts/issues/3299](https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/3299)

Web inspector also has a widget that toggles between light and dark mode.</comment>


Special Contact Lenses Could Allow Diabetics to 'See' Glucose Levels - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=special-contact-lenses-co

<comment><USER2> Wouldn't it be better to have a tiny dot in your field of view? No need to look at a mirror.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just to note, this is from 2003. Not that it's not interesting.</comment>


Ask HN: Which design tool (open source) do you use for webpage design? - <AUTHOR>

Which open source HTML editor do you use for webpage designs? I have basic knowledge of HTML+CSS and have been using notepad and more recently Aptana to create web pages. <comment><USER2> IDE's are handy if you do not know how to setup your local testing environment, however, it is not hard to setup that local testing environment, there are several options online to have an installer do all the work of installing a webserver and a dynamic webserver language like PHP.

The pro's of that are that you develop directly into a setup that is comparable with the real deal and issues that come floating to the surface will also do in the production environment.

Second, a finished product just needs to be copied to the production server to simply work.

Third pro is that when you use a development environment you simply do not need an IDE, a relative simple editor with syntax highlighting and snippet management will suffice.

The downside of IDE's are that they tend to make the development road overly complex and most have their own quirks so you have a relative steep learning curve for that and it's hard to switch so you are more or less jailed to a particular IDE.

All this time on learning your IDE and learning to deal with it's quirks are better spend on your web project.

</comment><comment><USER3> Aptana is pretty good. Personally I prefer something a bit more minimalistic (yet still powerful), so I use emacs. Here's some footage of emacs in action: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2r8JfJJgy8>

It has a bit of a learning curve, but it feels pretty productive once you get used to it, especially when taking advantage of it's many plugins. It's not for everybody, but be sure to check it out, along with some of its tutorials on the web.

</comment><comment><USER4> This probably isn't what you are looking for, but I do a LOT of design in Chrome and Firefox/Firebug. I experiment with CSS rules inside the browser and tweak them with a live preview.

</comment><comment><USER5> Notepad is a basic text editor and Aptana is an IDE (IDEs are normally massive, no personal use of this one).

Normally people go for a fully featured text editor, with at least syntax highlighting. Macs have a ton of options (Textmate, Kod, Dashcode, etc).

On Windows I use Notepad2 or Opera's edit source. I find Notepad++ awful. This may be of interest to you <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code_editor> .

<comment><USER6> Just as a side note, what don't you like about Notepad++?

<comment><USER7> I'll pipe up here. I've found it gets buggy once you move beyond basic editing. E.g. regular expression search or search/replace. I've run into several other things.

Overall, I'm left with the impression that it's "a mile wide and a foot deep".

<comment><USER8> I second it getting buggy, particularly for search/replace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Choose the one you are most comfortable with. I prefer Komodo Edit when I am doing HTML and CSS because I have saved snippets on it and it also support auto-completion. I also use VIM by using zen-coding plugin with it.

</comment><comment><USER10> HTML editor? VIM or Eclipse, depending on how involved the task is.</comment>


Object-recognition dataset stumped the world's best computer vision models - <AUTHOR> https://news.mit.edu/2019/object-recognition-dataset-stumped-worlds-best-computer-vision-models-1210 <comment><USER2> Being able to measure our successes and failures is the first step towards better algorithms :) This is always exciting. I don't think anyone thought that vanilla CNN architectures were all that would ever be needed.

This paper which received an honorable mention this year from NeurIPS conference first attempts to convert the image to a 3d scene before detecting objects. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.01618.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.01618.pdf)

<comment><USER3> The thing about AI/CV and other interpretation simulators is that there is always a quantization of nature in the end result. This is why the Uncanny Valley exists, "Uncanny Valley" being a term that refers to the difference between nature and the model itself, and I'm pretty sure it can't be engineered out of the technology. That is, the simulator can not picture an object from _any_ angle, only an angle greater than its mathematical-precision limits. Analog vs. digital doesn't always have to be about audio. ;)

So, "construct an internal 3D model of [something in the natural world]" will always be deficient, and any conclusions derived from these models will always have inherent errors (even before you get to algo bias). Self-driving cars, airport face-reading gates, Pixar blockbusters...their models can never represent reality in anything but a temporarily-convincing way. Those that affect policy and peoples' lives (aka not-entertainment) will always come up with the wrong conclusion sometimes, sometimes fatally.

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

<comment><USER4> > _This is why the Uncanny Valley exists, "Uncanny Valley" being a term that > refers to the difference between nature and the model itself_

That is incorrect. From the Wikipedia page you references:

 _as the appearance of a robot is made more human, some observers ' emotional response to the robot becomes increasingly positive and empathetic, until it reaches a point beyond which the response quickly becomes strong revulsion. However, as the robot's appearance continues to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once again and approaches human-to-human empathy levels_

> _The thing about AI /CV and other interpretation simulators is that there is > always a quantization of nature in the end result._

That's just not true in any meaningful sense. Computer vision can process images with a higher resolution than the human eye can distinguish.

> _So, "construct an internal 3D model of [something in the natural world]" > will always be deficient, and any conclusions derived from these models will > always have inherent errors_

Humans do this too (hence optical illusions). There's no reason to think that machine models can't surpass human models (and in some domains they already do).

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

<comment><USER3> > _as the robot 's appearance continues to become less distinguishable from a > human being, the emotional response becomes positive once again and > approaches human-to-human empathy levels_

The gap implied by "approaches" is where the problems occur, and how that gap is dealt with is where inherent bias in the process(es) fits.

> _Computer vision can process images with a higher resolution than the human > eye can distinguish._

The problem is not in the resolution, but the "process" part. Also, "resolution" is not the right word to pivot the situation on, since we'd have to be comparing a digital system with an analog one.

> _All models are wrong, but some are useful._

Useful I'll give you, but for life and death decisions? It's not going to help me evade downvotes, but...not so much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have been working on this problem for the last year. As it turns out this problem is especially prominent when doing object detection in the real world on a drone platform. Besides a large number of angles/contexts being able to move in 3D adds a large number of scales also, and there is hardly any open training data besides the VisDrone dataset[0] which doesn't even address the scale issue.

It is certainly an interesting problem though. I can't talk much about my work but if anyone wants to collaborate on something open source addressing the core problem check my profile.

[0]: [http://www.aiskyeye.com/upfile/Vision_Meets_Drones_A_Challen...](http://www.aiskyeye.com/upfile/Vision_Meets_Drones_A_Challenge.pdf)

<comment><USER6> I recently saw a paper (which I reposted here on HN a while back) that perhaps _could_ help with your problem. The paper proposes an approach that sort of induces models to learn representations of objects that are good at predicting "the most agreed-upon" rotations of the inputs. I'm not explaining it well. Anyway, a model in the paper achieved SOTA on a change-of-viewpoint dataset with a really tiny number of parameters. Might be worth a look: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.00792](https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.00792)

<comment><USER5> I have been looking for an excuse to use capsule networks. I can't investigate it as a possible solution at work because even if good results are achieved the performance problems[0] would prevent real world use. Definitely might look into that as a side project though. I have also been looking for an excuse to do something beyond like SENet in Julia.

Maybe a new benchmark like this is what we need to get out of the rut.

[0]: delivery.acm.org/10.1145/3330000/3321441/p177-Barham.pdf

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems like, to be really good the AI needs to construct an internal 3D model of objects so it won't matter which way it's rotated.

It seems to be how the human works. I can rotate an object in my mind and picture it from any angle.

<comment><USER8> You can, but I don't think that's what happens when looking at stuff. When I look at the hammer, I don't rotate a hammer to see what orientation matches what I'm seeing, I see the handle and... metal bit (don't know the term, sorry), realize those look like they belong to a hammer and go "oh yeah, it's an upside down hammer".

<comment><USER9> It took me a while to recognize that wooden chair. At first I tought it was a wooden hammer on top of some squared background, but then I realized it was a chair seen from above.

For me, I actually imagine these objects moving/rotating to make sense of them when seen from unusual angles. That hammer you described, I look at it and imagine myself flexing it.

<comment><USER10> Another thing that seems overlooked is that we don't just randomly happen to look at objects from weird angles. If you're looking at a chair from that weird top-down angle, probably you walked to it previously and expect to see it like that. And you feel the direction of gravity in your ear, so you feel your viewpoint. The object itself may still be in a random orientation, but then just moving your head around a bit or turning the object clears up any confusion.

We do heavily rely on context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if the exact some models that failed this test would succeed if their training data included images of weird angles/unusual contexts?

My guess is every "hammer" image in the training data set was "conventional" \-- a convenient angle and orientation. If half the images of "hammers" were instead "unconventional", would the model adapt to realize "my existing model of a hammer is incomplete; there must be a way to consolidate these two different images"?

Or does this require an internal 3d modeling, and better inputs wouldn't help; instead the model itself would need to be more advanced?

<comment><USER10> They show in section 4.3 that fine-tuning the last layer of ResNet-152 on half of ObjectNet (25k images) and testing on the other half increases the top-1 accuracy from 29% to 50%, while the corresponding accuracy on ImageNet is ~67%.

Nevertheless, I agree with you. Given a huge dataset with millions of of unconventional images may be enough. Who knows.

Things kind of go in cycles in machine learning (similar to other fields). There is nowadays growing dissatisfaction of having to use so much (labeled) data, and people want the models to be better "primed" to capture the variations and structures existing in the real world. Partially because labeling a lot of data is just very expensive, but partially it's also seen as inelegant and "black-boxy" or it's just not in their scientific taste.

Other people argue that learning it all from data is fine and this kind of robustness shouldn't have to be baked in to models. Rather they should/could be learned from vast amounts of unlabeled data instead (Yann LeCun seems to be in this group.), with unsupervised/self-supervised methods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > But designing bigger versions of ObjectNet, with its added viewing angles > and orientations, won't necessarily lead to better results, the researchers > warn.

Curious if there's supporting reasoning for this type of statement? Imho most of these "objects" should still be learnable with vanilla CNNs if you had sufficient data, especially more angles. Starving a vision network of data is an interesting problem, but I don't think it can be used as a blanket statement for all state of the art techniques. And if I'm allowed to make a naive comparison to human intelligence, I don't think lack of viewing angles is a factor.

</comment><comment><USER13> I bet if you gave a human a short amount of time to identify these images, they'd have some mistakes too. Particularly the middle top one on the article

<comment><USER14> ... it's a _chair._ Wow that took a minute. Some of these are devilishly tricky; clearly they're designed to hit all the difficult edge cases within the domain. What a fun dataset!

<comment><USER15> Spoiler alert. Thanks for ruining the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks like a nice dataset, but as someone who works in an adjacent field (ML on text) it doesn't seem as revolutionary as it is being presented as.

When a model is trained on ImageNet the training dataset is (usually) enlarged by doing artificial image augmentation. This does things like rotate, skew, crop and recolor the images so the model understands what the object can look like.

This dataset appears to find angles of objects that are difficult to reproduce using this process.

That is useful, but I can think of two ways to solve this pretty easily that would be achievable and would make a good project for a undergrad or Masters student.

1) Acquire 3D models of each of the object classes, render them at multiple angles in Unreal (or similar) and augment the ImageNet dataset with these images

2) Assuming you want to use the whole ObjectNet dataset as a test set, follow their dataset construction process using Mechanical Turk, and train on that data.

I bet either of these processes would take back 20-30% of the 45% performance drop very easily, and I bet the ones left would be the ones that humans have a _lot_ of trouble identifying.

<comment><USER10> 1) Training with synthetic data is definitely a thing in computer vision, exactly the way you describe. You can even throw a GAN on top of the results to make the renderings look less artificial. 2) They do something like this, in section 4.3 by splitting ObjectNet in half. They fine-tune (the last layer of) ResNet-152 (I wonder what happens if you fine-tune more layers) on half and test on the other half. This pushes results up by about 15% points. There's still a gap, but it can be plausibly argued that the gap would close up if we scaled things up by one or two orders of magnitude. The question is whether there's a better way.

<comment><USER4> > _I wonder what happens if you fine-tune more layers_

Generally it improves some, but most of the gains are in the final layer retraining.

But it's a lot more data hungry.

> _They do something like this, in section 4.3 by splitting ObjectNet in > half.... here 's still a gap, but it can be plausibly argued that the gap > would close up if we scaled things up by one or two orders of magnitude_

This is interesting. It's worth noting that this training is on only 64 images per class, and it is unclear if they augment this in anyway.

Before retraining, the paper itself notes:

 _Classes such as plunger, safety pin and drill have 60-80% accuracy, while French press, pitcher, and plate have accuracies under 5%_

It is worth noting that the _plunger, safety pin and drill_ classes are ones that have multiple orientations already in ImageNet, while _French press, pitcher, and plate_ are almost all the "right" way up.

To me this indicates this is simply a data problem - the model has never seen what an upside-down French press looks like so it gets it wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What are the implications for ML used in real-world situations with no training set (or a very limited one) that could have life or death consequences - passenger vehicles, industrial use, military, etc.?

Or is the consensus that it is a matter of time before compute and algorithms make these situations "safe enough," even for edge cases?

<comment><USER17> It's clearly delusional to think that computer vision will go from soft computing (erroneous) to hard computing in less than a decade, at the rate of current incremental improvements. We will soon hit an accuracy wall that only breakthrough research will allow to beat. The problem being: there's too much research exploring the search space in the same direction and not enough foundational research.

<comment><USER2> I disagree. There is a huge amount of research on adversarially robust classifiers and detectors going on. One can also programmatically test a neural network on real data, synthetically damaged data, fully synthetic data, and adversarial data, and everything in between. You can statistically ensure you get any desired accuracy level on those tests. While that's not a hard proof of anything, it can allow you to be very confident in the nets abilities.

<comment><USER18> Well, anyway it doesn't seem worse than how we test our biological neural networks before letting them drive huge chunks of metal around

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Again another source looking at the angle of objects rather then the refraction patterns. I ran the first IR testing at Google and the one thing that tripped up the engine was lighting variations, which the source I see didn't consider.

</comment><comment><USER20> Perhaps the idea of not having a training set means that one should use other datasets such as image net and use transfer learning.

</comment><comment><USER21> Nonsense.. most of cases a bigger object is prevalent. Chair? No its a fricking bed.</comment>


Ask HN: Where does news originate? - <AUTHOR> Is news still coming from the same sources(ABC, NBC, Reuters, AP, etc.) or are we seeing news coming from Twitter/Facebook etc? <comment><USER2> On-the-spot records of breaking news often comes from mobile device video now. Initial commentary also comes from nearby people with mobile devices. The commentary is often useless beyond telling you "something is happening." You need to wait a few days for a coherent explanation of e.g. a big terrorist attack or a coup attempt. Unfortunately, traditional news media just forwards fevered speculation without checking while an event is happening; the incentives for them are "better wrong than slow."

News about events that don't leave corpses in the streets comes less from random bystanders and more from traditional reporting. Financial news, investigation into political corruption... as I started to type out a list I realized that specialized blogs often provide better reporting _and_ commentary about less-spectacular events. But you have to know where to look first. Reading the right blogs versus AP news wires is sort of like the difference between reading scientific journal articles and a stream of university press releases about scientific research. The latter are full of spin, simplifications, and hype, but at least provide an entry point so you know that a topic is worth reading about from better sources.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any news outlets that consistently serve a readership that's _broadly educated_ but not _subject matter experts_. I suppose that publications like the New York Times and the Economist aspire to that middle role, but I don't think they are quite filling it. In articles about global warming, efficiency legislation, solar technology, etc. I see constant mistakes like confusing power and energy. If the general public can't assemble a coherent bigger picture from these articles, no wonder: they're not coherent as written.</comment>


Review my app: For you NYC Hackers/Subway Riders - <AUTHOR> http://www.exitstrategynyc.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! My buddy and I just released an app in the App Store for all you NYC Subway hackers.

If you like saving a few seconds to a few minutes on your subway rides, take a peek at our app :)

We figured some of you here in NYC love little hacks to save time so we thought we'd share and here your thoughts. I always love the discussion here on HN so I'd love to hear some feedback if you have any!

<comment><USER2> I used to live in NYC, and I have sent this to all of my NYC friends. Awesome app!

For those of you who thinks this is stupid... trust me, New Yorkers value every second of their commute. And exiting from the wrong end of the exit could mean 5+ more min just to get out of the subway... considering the hundreds of people exiting the subway at the same time.

Great job, great idea, great execution!

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow thanks for the great words :)

The second paragraph really nails it. Thanks for summing it up so concisely!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I live in Atlanta, where the subway system is much simpler (and shittier), but this is exactly how I think when standing on the platform.

In short, the app is awesome.

Feature addition: Running ticker for total time saved, both for the current user and all users overall. Make it as accurate or "imaginary" as you want. ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooh, good idea ;) Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is fantastic! I sent this to some other friends here in NYC who have all had the same response: "I always thought that would make a great app."

It hits the iPhone sweet spot of being a perfect blend of mostly fun and somewhat useful.

 _Edit_ I just purchased the app. Really nice and slick. Though living off the G (a cross-town line), it's hard to choose from only Uptown and Downtown options. Otherwise, this is great.

</comment><comment><USER5> In Tokyo (and maybe other cities), this data is displayed in all the train and metro stations. Also, there is data on which car to ride if you want to use the escalator or elevator when you get out.

</comment><comment><USER6> I bought it, and I have to admit, I'm a little underwhelmed.

A basic subway map would have been useful.

For the extra points, a schedule would be wonderful.

<comment><USER7> I think the singular focus is great. It has one goal - saving you time by optimizing your car position.

If it saves me five minutes, it has already paid for itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> FWIW, the Tokyo subway posts this data throughout the stations. I always wondered why they don't do this in the US.

Edit: here's the best picture I can find: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/eloketh/320918361/sizes/l/>

It's that blue sign in the background/center. I will try and find a better picture. But at least I know that I am not imagining this :)

</comment><comment><USER9> I really like the video presentation. Short and sweet while being entertaining enough to watch.

<comment><USER10> yes, the video is good. but it's in flash, which means it can't be viewed on a real iphone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's nice how you released it for a lot of different platforms. Would you mind sharing the % of sales / platform once you have some sales?

<comment><AUTHOR> Will do! I always enjoy "the numbers" type posts so I'd love to share when we gather a bit more data

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's exactly what I always do, especially for fastest transfers and being the first one on the stairs. Recently I have been taking the 6, L and G a lot, terra incognito where your app comes in fitting perfectly. Love it!

Edit: Installed it, very smooth operation, took less than 6 seconds to find a perfect exit strategy for L -> 6 train transfer. Nice!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it! :) It's saved me a bunch of time already and I hope it does for you too

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I only see one problem with this: During rush hour trains, choosing the optimal exit location is a good way to not get on the train, because people that take the same line every day know where to stand.

Maybe a "Overcrowding" mode that does the exact opposite and shows you where the least crowded cars are likely to be?

</comment><comment><USER14> Nice. This is application equivalent of a comedian "saying what everyone is thinking". When I lived in Tokyo, I always tried to do these kinds of mental calculations on the train on unfamiliar lines (already 100% optimized by daily commute).

<comment><USER15> Yep, I've lived in both Manhattan and Tokyo, and one of my first thoughts is that Tokyo is the other market that needs this. Is the code portable enough to subcontract development of the Tokyo version to native Tokyo-ites? I'm sure there are several other metro regions that would love this, too.

But I'm sure you will have your hands full just keeping up with the NYC version, for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice! You should add data for other subway systems too. Here are the exit locations for the TTC: <http://www.ttcrider.ca/download.php>

</comment><comment><USER17> That's just nice… I've had the same strategy, and obviously I know the station exits of my commute perfectly… :)

But it makes it all the more annoying to go to some station I don't know, so I think it's just awesome!

But as it is right now, I won't buy it. Simply because I'm talking about the Parisian metro… So tell me, do you plan on supporting more subway systems in the future? How do you plan to gather the data? Tell me if I can be of any help.

</comment><comment><USER18> Extending your idea to it's wildest reaches - could you make an app that used the GPS data and date/time of day to build a statistical model of the best street-level routes and optimum time of day between any given point in the city?

It would take a really long time to aggregate enough data to make it useful, but it would be pretty handy eventually.

</comment><comment><USER19> I haven't bought it yet, but I probably will for my work Blackberry. A suggestion: mark where the elevators are for all the subways too. It would be useful for disabled people and also anyone carrying heavy items or bags. Hopefully you wrote down that information so you don't have to search all the stops again!

</comment><comment><USER20> This is magnificent. I haven't tried it out yet, so I'm obviously jumping the gun—but that is exactly what I'm working through in my head every time I get on and off the subway. N -> L is an easy one. I'll let you know what I think but this is an app that's very much in line with my own obsessive concerns.

</comment><comment><USER21> I love the idea. Had it myself, but please please don't tell anyone about it. Isn't it nice being the first one to the stairs? Let's keep the best exits to ourselves.

Downloaded the sample on my kindle. It would be nice to see an actual map, if only just one instead of a huge listing of all the stops.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like the idea! Hopefully we will get one in future versions. The MTA has some weird licensing for all of their trademarks so we'll have to work it out with them ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There is a similar app available for the London Underground at <http://www.tubeexits.co.uk/>

The data is pretty good (only found a single sub-optimal station so far), whilst the UI is fidgety at times but I'm sure it will improve.

</comment><comment><USER23> Haha, that's great. Clever idea. Wish there was some kind of interface for those of us without smartphones who just want to look stuff up online, but that sort of defeats the point of having it as an app. Still, good idea.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 Interesting idea - if I were you I'd figure out how to extend the software/engine behind this to support other cities before others become to copy the idea.

(and if you're already working on this, then kudos!)

</comment><comment><USER24> I like the idea, although honestly not that useful for me given that the exits I care about I already know.

You've got a decent start on an offline subway map though -- I'd pay for a good one of those.

<comment><USER25> MTA.info offers a downloadable PDF. Also, if I recall correctly from my jailbroken iPhone days there was a very good offline NYC Subway Maps app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> awesome app - even though i dont live in nyc, i've visited nyc often & i can definitely see how useful it could be to a daily commuter.

ohh - and you get double brownie points for the name 'exitstrategy' - gels so well with what your app does..i bet nyt will come calling for a writeup soon - so stay prepped :)

</comment><comment><USER27> isn't this the kind of thing that people who live in NY know just by virtue of riding the train everyday?

<comment><USER28> Ideally yes, but most new yorkers only go on a few lines regularly. I've only been in the city for a month now, but going to lines that you've never gone to before gets a bit confusing.

<comment><USER27> 1 month isn't much for a system with 468 stations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Great demo video and music, fun to watch. A good example of how a demo should look.

</comment><comment><USER30> love the video you guys put together. Im in SF so have little use for the app, but I really like the ingenuity and looks like you've done a really job of the pr side of things.

</comment><comment><USER31> A very clever app. One of the best I've seen for iPhone :)

</comment><comment><USER32> This is great! I only wish I had thought of it first :)

</comment><comment><USER33> Something like this would also work for airports.

<comment><USER8> How? You don't get to pick which gate you arrive at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> wow, great idea. I was in NYC the other weekend and this would have been handy.

</comment><comment><USER35> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER36> well. It certainly can "sHave minutes" from my trip... You may want to change that typo on your homepage

<comment><USER37> That's a colloquialism, not a typo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> 3 questions: 1) wont this lead to everyone standing at the same positions?

2) isnt this useless at peak times ( exactly how often can you choose where to stand)

3)isn't this simple enough to build it yourself rather than pay someone else to do?

PS:i see that you and your sister are trying to build a business, rather than making an interesting project. If so, your site looks rather amateuristic

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Vincent, thanks for the questions.

1\. If that becomes the case, we'll be rich ;)

2\. Do you mean because you're running to catch a train? Usually I find myself pacing back and forth not knowing where to stand.

3\. The data for this app is not publicly available so my partner and his sister had to run around the city to every station and mark down every exit and stairwell. The whole process of checking, rechecking, and confirming took them ~2 months

re: website. We hadn't planned on releasing this just yet but a major newspaper had a blog post that ran early this morning so we had to hack this together :) It'll get better in time!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review Merecal, a new release notification website - <AUTHOR>

We just launched Merecal today.  It's a site for tracking new and upcoming releases in books, movies, music and video games that can be personalized based on your own interests.  We'd love for you to take a look and give us any feedback you might have.  Thanks in advance!
http://merecal.com/
http://blog.merecal.com/2009/07/23/weve-launched/ <comment><USER2> Nice. I tried to look through the Jazz music new releases and bailed after the first page. Why? When I clicked "Jazz", it showed me 8 or 10 albums but at the bottom it said, "Page 1 of 52". Sorry - I'm not interesting in 52 page views to see what's up and coming.

Neat idea though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking a look, Scott. If you register, one of the many benefits is you get to decide how many items are displayed per page. So you can set it to 100, for example, and therefore have far fewer pages to explore. There's also the list of subcategories on the left, if you wish to drill down and get more specific that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks great! Haven't signed up yet, but will take a look later... so far it seems pretty useful to me. I was looking for something like this to keep track of music releases.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice one :)

A wishlist api/widget might be a good way to promote the site, and you should install the FF SenSEO plug-in as there are a few things you can improve on that front.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've definitely been thinking along those lines as far as the wishlist goes. We want to explore ways to make the site more social.

Thanks for the tip on the SenSEO add-on. I hadn't seen that before. It looks like we're doing pretty well in quite a few areas, but could also still use some tweaking in others (especially keyword relevance).</comment></comment>


2008 - A Year of  JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nihilogic.dk/2009/01/2008-year-of-awesome-javascript.html

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure Javascript will ever take over as a preferred technology for browser-based games. I have always seen Javascript games and advanced effects as more novelties than anything else. It is a great language for enhancing user experience for web pages but I can't think of a reason to use Javascript instead of Flash for an identical task given the current support for HTML5 and the performance of js right now.

The HTML5 specification brings a lot of cool new features that may have me eating my words if it's ever fully supported by all major browsers, however, right now advanced js creations are better suited for the demoscene than the mainstream.

<comment><AUTHOR> Browsers are nowadays pretty much regarded more as application platforms than as web page viewers (see any social networking site and its "apps" section). Still, those are mostly server-side applications; cross-browser compatibility alone makes game programming in JavaScript nightmarish.

I have to agree, though it hurts me to say that because I make JavaScript games (<http://scriptnode.com/lab/spacius/>).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Playing WAV files out of data: URIs does't rely on Quicktime, does it? JS909 was pure JS, although it was more of a clever hack than a programming feat.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is currently no "A-grade" way of providing audio using only JavaScript. The best fallback is flash, unfortunately.

And probably the best flash->JS library: <http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/></comment></comment>


Neuralink: Elon Musk unveils pig he claims has computer implant in brain - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/28/neuralink-elon-musk-pig-computer-implant <comment><USER2> The article ends with:

"Most of the current cutting-edge research in brain-machine interface is conducted on animals, scientists note, with safety challenges and lengthy regulatory approval procedures preventing larger human trials.

Notably, Musk, who has been a frequent source of misinformation about coronavirus in recent months and fought to keep his factories open during the pandemic, did not wear a face mask during his presentation, despite being in a room with dozens of employees, a camera crew and veterinary staff. He eventually put on a mask during a question and answer session."</comment>


Ask HN: A good Google Adsense alternative? - <AUTHOR> I have been working on a website for a few months and it has picked up in traffic. I applied for Google Adsense but they declined me because of the coronavirus (and apparently they are denying everyone). Are there any good alternatives? <comment><USER2> Related "Ask HN: Google Adsense Alternative?" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21397274](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21397274) from 5 months earlier

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


Making of the new Codecademy UI by Pentagram - <AUTHOR> http://new.pentagram.com/2014/04/new-work-codecademy/

<comment><AUTHOR> A startup pays a big established design firm for making their user interface. That's not a good sign. You could argue, that the work is at least just "average stuff", and not worth the money, but that's not the point:. Paying a lot of money for an established design firm feels like buying Armani suits for the whole team. What were they thinking? That someone who wants to start to code cares about the fact that Pentagram made the design? Let alone that Pentagram is maybe one of the greatest Identity and Graphic Design firms out there, but they did not one great work for screens. Codecademy stands for Learn Hacking. Do It Yourself. Pentagram stands for New York and Artsy Gallery People. I have respect for the work of Pentagram, and I really liked Codecademy, but this made me sad.</comment>


Ask HN: Seeking a cofounder - <AUTHOR> I've been creating a service targetted at indie filmmakers (but any indie video content can use) for Internet distribution.
This includes a digital distribution platform Which let's end users keep their purchases in the cloud and let's producers sell their work online as downloads. This also includes API integration with social sites like YouTube to help with viral Internet marketing.
I've consulted, and still am consulting with, indie filmmakers about their specific needs to fine tune this for them. The above two were the main ones: mechanism for distribution and marketing. So this is going to be more like 37signals than loopt in that we're not going to focus on any one specific thing that is profoundly new.
I'm only looking for technical founders, and you'll probably have to like the indie industry (circumventing Hollywood distributors) or at least indie films, to be passionate about this.
Also i've already finished at least 50% of the prototype (I'm sufficiently technical). EDIT: I forgot to mention that so far the work is using PHP, python (for a desktop thing), mongodb, amazon s3, amazon cloudfront, and jquery (not a lot of JavaScript). Planning to use amazon FPS for payments.  So unless you want to rewrite this in another language (which honestly wouldn't be too hard if you're good), then knowing these technologies would help. Familiarity with git would help too.
Email email@example.com if interested. Also, I'm applying to techstars in the next few days.
Thanks <comment><USER5> So, I'll play the devils advocate. What exactly is the value proposition here? Are there people scouring the internet for certain indie movies? I like indie movies, and I like the idea of rewarding the people who are behind them, but it is hard for me to imagine what an itunes for indie movies with a marketing spin (is that what we are talking about here?) is really going to accomplish. I have netflix. I can get a lot of movies from there, for cheap. (including many of the more famous indie films). I also have HBO, more cheap movies. Granted, they aren't indie movies, but I can't see my self spending extra money for movies by people I don't know and have heard nothing about. Maybe I just don't get it. So, I guess, could you explain a little more about what the niche you're filling is?

<comment><USER6> Playing devils devils advocate, I think the "right" answer would be that you provide a more efficient market that existing distribution channels -- easier to access, more readily available information, freer access. Then you combine that with deeper engagement and virality that existing channels don't have (and one that actually works instead of sounds good on paper)

That's probably the "right" answer. Not sure it's theirs, but it's how I would answer the objection if I were them.

<comment><USER5> Hi Daniel-

I guess what my argument comes down to is this: if I were an indie director, given the choice, I would prefer to get my movies seen by more people, and make less money (at least in the beginning), than set a price and make people pay, which will inevitably decrease viewings. I think the best way to accomplish the former, would be to put it on youtube and promote it. Yes, casual browsers would be lost. But, with the pay-per-view model, we are not getting too many casual browsers anyway, since they have to pay. So, perhaps the best way to do such a thing would be to have a youtube for indie movies and just let them be free.

Further, I also see problems with the distribution model. If we store these movies in the cloud, you need internet to watch them. That kind of sucks. If you store them locally, they take up a ton of space. That also sucks. If we can delete them after we watch and then download them later, that still necessitates an internet connection, and kind of sucks anyway.

As a final note, I guess I haven't convinced myself either way, so thanks for playing along.

<comment><USER6> Yeah I haven't convinced myself either, just trying to work through the idea in my head :)

There are a _lot_ of problems with definitions and such. What's an Indie movie? Is it different than the usual YouTube amateur dreck? Who is really the customer, the watchers or the producers? How does reputation, goal-seeking, and game mechanics fit into the usage model? Why would I come back to the site? What kinds of real-world strategies are going to get you around (and make you attractive as a pickup for) big-time distributors? What are the distributors afraid of? What can't they master? Lots of loose ends.

I love movies, and I'd love to see some good Indies, but the signal-to-noise ratio would have to be abnormally high for me to be a regular participant. Videos, shorts, and movies are a much different art form than, say, music or blogging.

It's a neat overall idea. Like everything else, though, the devil is in the details.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me define what an indie in my scenario is: any one/group trying to distribute video content he/she/they created without the aide of a third-party distributor, whether it may be a direct-to-dvd company, or Twentieth Century Fox.

Now the main target of this service, at least initially, is to find an audience for and distribute the films that

a) can't find even a direct-to-dvd distributor let alone Fox

b) have found a direct-to-dvd type distributor but have found it unfulfilling/unsuccessful

Like I've said before, I believe the internet will allow films to find audiences they may not have if it only went to DVD or on Netflix, or Blockbuster online. For this reason initially we want to target the low end of content on the quality spectrum, charge them to try to distribute their films using our platform online, and go from there. So their goals may not be to get picked up by a big time distributor. Our goal is to simply let them get some sort of return, or exposure, for their film (or web series).

One of the directors I'm consulting with had found a distributor, but has decided that looking back he would have self-distributed. He still has the internet download rights to his film so he is planning to use the service when it goes live.

If you have any specific concerns, please ask so I can alleviate your concerns, or revise my ideas. I've thought this over a lot and am perfectly comfortable revealing my secrets.

<comment><USER6> So you're in the distribution business, like BlockBuster, not in the promotion business like a producing company, or in the storage business, like YouTube. That begins to draw in the focus.

You are looking to distribute marginal-quality videos to the maximum number of people possible. This allows people with unseen work to get noticed (forget follow-up revenues here) As a distributor, then, you are going to have to have some hoops directors are going to have to jump through -- you interest in in your value chain, not in content or indy providers. That means you need to come up with a quick way to vet/categorize indy movies in such a way that the maximum number of people will get to see each one.

Oddly enough, this might not be a volume play. Or in other words, you might be better off "showing" one movie a month rather than trying to get as many as possible. In fact, the more indy movies you get, the worse it may actually get for you -- remember you are not YouTube -- unless you have some easy way of engaging users and directing them to appropriate content.

Neat business idea. Lots of cool little twists and turns in there. Good luck in the execution!

<comment><AUTHOR> Almost correct.

I am in the distribution business, but with a focus on indie films and web series. This means helping them as much as technically possible with features to aide in promotion (without promoting it for them).

So the focus is to bridge the technical gap for indie content producers looking to distribute via the internet.

Marginal quality videos will be the main focus, because it's the group that will likely have immediate need for this service.

>That means you need to come up with a quick way to vet/categorize indy movies in such a way that the maximum number of people will get to see each one.

Not necessarily. I'd like to eventually have a content discovery platform, with content worth discovering, but with marginal quality content, I think the best way to approach this is to first provide them the means to distribute their work, and work up from there. So they will be able to easily obtain a means for distribution that's more targeted for their purposes, with a low barrier to entry.

<comment><USER6> I'm going to hit this one more time to make sure you understand what I'm saying.

Let's say you want to run a trucking business. Your job is to take groceries -- any groceries - from point A to point B.

This makes you a storage and movement (warehouse and transportation) business. Your differentiators will be how easy and fast you can deliver whatever goods there are. Your customers are people who need to move all kinds of groceries, whether on the producer side or consumer side. You don't care. You're making your bucks on volume.

Let's say that instead of just trucking, now you are selling doughnuts. You paste a big sign on the side of your truck that says "Doughnuts!" You don't make the doughnuts, you just get them to people.

This puts you in the distribution business. This is much different than the trucking business. In this business, people care about quality of product and whether or not you're delivering the right kinds of doughnuts to the right people. Your ability to find the right doughnut and get it to the right person is what is going to make your business work (or not) Everything you do should be based around targeted quality delivery to the appropriate recipient. Volume doesn't matter as much any more. Targeted delivery does. You're not just hauling groceries from point A to point B, you're figuring out which exact thing needs to be where at what exact time. Much tougher (and potentially more profitable) problem.

But they're completely different business models, with different customers and different drivers.

It's just an analogy, of course. I hope that made my point clearer. I think you guys are in for a wild ride if you can get the details worked out.

<comment><AUTHOR> My main goal right now is to bridge the technical gap. So in your analogy, I would be the trucking service, but perhaps with special features like refrigerated trucks specifically for the grocery industry.

So yes, we aren't acting as a distributor, we're simply providing the tools to make _self-distribution_ via the Internet more attractive, and with some features to help marketing, the other big challenge, to be more easily overcome by an indie. And with Internet, marketing is made significantly easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clarification: > This includes a digital distribution platform Which let's end users keep their purchases in the cloud and let's producers sell their work online as downloads.

People will be able to download DRM-free videos, and storing in the cloud is simply a backup to their purchases. There are several ways I've come up with to try to make this model sustainable. I won't go into that unless requested.

Also the reason I emphasize DRM-free is that it's quite clear to me that it would be impossible to compete with other DRM-enabled services with another proprietary DRM system. THis would mean lock-in to a small unknown service. But DRM-free video is universally compatible and not locked into any specific platform.

</comment><comment><USER7> Did you already talk to the guys from OpenIndie? <http://openindie.com/>

They seem to be working on a similar idea, though focused more on screenings.

Arin Crumley (one of the founders) did quite a nice job with the distribution of his film Four Eyed Monsters.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did take a look at their site, and while they similarly have the goal of circumventing Hollywood, my main goal is to provide a better drm-free digital distribution method.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What stops Netflix from coming out with a long tail model for self-publishing indie film producers?

Right now, most of their cost is in the DVDs, but already many movies are offered with a streaming option. The next step would be to offer a streaming- only option for long tail content. They would appear to have no barriers to doing this any time now, and a formidable user experience model behind it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. And there's no way of stopping iTunes either. Right now you have to sign a contract with iTunes and your content has to cross a quality barrier to get entrance, but Apple could easily remove that.

But I also believe that Apple and Netflix aren't in the business of selling a service to indie filmmakers. They are more in selling a service to the end consumer. And because of this it's in there interest to not have their libraries polluted with 90 minute long low quality videos.

My focus is on providing a service to filmmakers first, and to simply provide a usable platform for the end users who purchase it (hence the DRM-free videos).

<comment><USER8> _> 90 minute long low quality videos_

If that's what you are offering, then I don't think it will do very well. Isn't the premise that there is good content to be found? Otherwise, why would anyone pay to view it? I know you're charging the producers, but if there's no end market, then the service isn't really legit. Am I missing something?

I'm not really an iTunes customer, but I do use Netflix, and they are set up very well to recommend long tail, otherwise unknown, independent content. IMO, they can do it without dragging down the quality of their service. They have a best of class recommendation engine. Also, because the service is flat rate, with no penalty for browsing, the viewer can have a great experience sampling unknown indie films. A pay-per-download model discourages exploration, doesn't it?

Edit:

 _> They are more in selling a service to the end consumer._

I guess I'm also missing how your service adds value if it's not also performing this function. Otherwise, as a filmmaker, what am I paying you for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right and initially we're not focusing on providing a discovery platform.

We're simply providing a means to self-distribute, customized to the indie filmmaker's flavor.

The 90 minute low quality content is an extreme. I'm saying these guys have put effort into something and they will look for a way to distribute. They will try, even if they know their content doesn't have much of a market, and there will always be these films and people who make these films. These films will probably make up the majority of films produced. So this is simply one monetizable group.

This is in fact Lulu.com's business model. Lulu.com wants to sell a service to low quality content. Of course my ultimate goal is not just to cater to these people, but to target this service to content of all quality, and then create a marketplace later of higher quality content (once they come). I believe that with the internet, and with the speed of communication, managing marketing and distribution is accomplished much more easily.

So yes in a sense our immediate revenue model isn't too legit, because we don't really care if films succeed in making money, but our goal is to charge them very little, hope the volume makes up for the difference, and rely on the mass of new films that just don't make it to resort to our service.

Initially it will be do-it-yourself service for films that aren't good enough to be distributed otherwise, but the long term goal is to offer better films a more profitable distribution method.

And who knows, maybe one of these 90 minute low quality films that everyone ignores turns out to be a smash hit (<http://www.theroommovie.com/>).

<comment><USER8> Whatever happens, I'd enjoy reading about it, especially lessons learned. Good luck to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I should say, as a warning, that I've had 3 different clients approach me with roughly this idea, since 2007. There is a lot of interest in this area. There is a lot of investment going on. I do not doubt that eventually there will be a big hit in this area, but anyone who wants to get into this area has to be aware that the competition is intense.

Also, attacking this idea from another angle, it should be noted that small- scale content producers are suffering badly in the current environment, and sites pitched to them are pursuing a market where there is, potentially, very little money.

When I was at Bluewallllc.com we started working on iHanuman.com, which sells yoga videos. Although yoga videos represent a very small niche, the goal was to eventually reuse the technology to build other niche focused sites - <USER2> infinite range of them.

The ihanuman store offers some basic services to yoga teachers who have videos to sell:

<http://www.ihanuman.com/store.php>

We worked on iHanuman for roughly 5 months, from April of 2007 to August of 2007. After it launched, the site was written up in Yoga Life magazine. It attracted some traffic and developed a small but steady stream of sales. I stopped working with Bluewall in late 2007. I think they may have had one week where sales got up over $1,000. The site was never well publicized or marketed.

I think the project cost roughly $70,000, but it would be tough to say for sure, since the project was one of many projects that Bluewall was working on, and it would tough to say which expenses belonged to Bluewall and which expenses belonged to iHanuman. At its peak we had 5 people working on the site:

a designer

a PHP programmer (me)

a Flash programmer

an HTML/CSS specialist

a project manager

The site runs on a dedicated server from RackSpace.

The ultimate goal was to build a backend that would allow any yoga teacher to upload their videos and sell them. I think the revenue split, at that time, was 50/50. We got the frontend working nicely, though we never finished the backend.

There was some really cool technology on that project. The Flash programmer was Starrie Williamson and she did an impressive job, utilizing a lot of what was then cutting edge ActionScript 3 techniques. The Flash player could function as a widget on other websites, reading RSS feeds off of the iHanuman site (the RSS feeds were full of data from our database). In other words, it could be embedded, a lot like the YouTube player. Last I heard (early 2008), they were working on adding the ability to sell videos through the player. Very cool stuff. Anyway, if you ever need a really good Flash programmer, Starrie can be reached here:

[http://www.linkedin.com/profile?goback=.con&viewProfile=...](http://www.linkedin.com/profile?goback=.con&viewProfile=&key=22608405&jsstate=)

Some of the yoga teachers sell lectures as MP3s, and we knew we wanted to also use the same software for online music stores, so the Flash player also plays MP3s, and the PHP code handles the sale of both MP3s, FLAC files, and videos.

We also ported the software to the Monkeyclaus.org music store (also owned by Bluewall), and we added in the ability to import hundreds of MP3s at a time, using their embedded meta tags to fill out the info in the database. Out of all the code that I wrote for this software, almost a full year of my life (if you include the time spent on the monkeyclaus music store), this import code is the code that I am most proud of.

The management problems on that project were epic. The owner/designer and the project manager, who were boyfriend/girlfriend, had some strong disagreements with each other about what direction to go, and how much funding was appropriate.

There was, at one point, talk of pursuing a white label strategy, where Bluewall might sell the software to others. However, the code, as I left it, would not sustain a white label strategy. I wrote this code at breakneck speed. There is considerable technical debt. I was told that as soon as the site launched there would be time to clean up the code, but in fact, as soon as the site launched all development on the project ended. Also, Bluewall was very sloppy in its legal affairs - they never sought a copyright agreement with Starrie regarding her Flash player, so she still owns the copyright on it (or at least she did the last time I talked to her, which would have been the spring or summer of 2008).

The PHP code was written using a framework I developed during the period 2003-2007. I have since abandoned that framework and now I use Symfony for all PHP work. If I were going to do a project like that again, I'd probably build it in Symfony (or, if the JVM and Tomcat are acceptable to the project, Groovy/Grails).

Now, this particular project went nowhere, largely due to misjudgements on the part of those in charge. However, my point is that a lot of entrepreneurs have been looking at this space for several years now. There has been a lot of investment. The competition is intense. It might be wise to assume that there is no real profit to be made in this space, since no clear winner has emerged yet. Or you should assume that creating a winner for this space is going to be very, very hard.

I do believe that targeting niches is the correct way to move forward in this field. I do think that targeting indie filmmakers is an interesting and exciting niche. I have a friend who recently finished a documentary about the culture of the workers who worked at a somewhat notorious parking lot, in Charlottesville, Virginia. I'm aware that she is looking for distribution channels. But here is the problem: most indie developers will either be broke, or they will get funding, and if they have funding, they may not need this site.

So I would be wary.

All the same, if someone can go into this field and create a hit company, then they have my admiration.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the info. If this wasn't going to be tough, I wouldn't have been interested.

> But here is the problem: most indie developers will either be broke, or they > will get funding, and if they have funding, they may not need this site.

You're right. Most indie filmmakers are extremely strapped for cash. So I was hoping to charge very little (in fact beat out existing services in terms of price), and depend on volume. However one indie filmmaker I know is cash- strapped, but had funding. They still had to find a means for distribution after production, which is where a lot of the money goes to.

I'm banking on being open to anyone, and any video content, and having an ultra-low if not completely zero barrier to entry.

<comment><USER6> _I'm banking on being open to anyone, and any video content, and having an ultra-low if not completely zero barrier to entry_

Then you're a video storage service, like YouTube. Video storage services don't care about content, knowing that the more they store the more people will use their service for various long-tail reasons.

You can be video storage, or you can be an internet indie distributor. But I don't think you can be both.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I agree with this. A service that is open to everyone is probably too generic for 2010. If I were going to try again in this area, I'd want to go niche by niche:

yoga

cooking

travel

political protests

car races

horse races

fixing cars (how to)

fixing up your house (how to)

There is a huge range of niches. To try to do a generic service in 2010, I think you'd $10 million to spend on marketing. But if you take a niche approach, and you do a good job with the code and interface, then you can rely on word-of-mouth among enthusiasts to spread the word.

If I was doing this again, I'd actually pursue something of a franchise model. The core team should mostly focus on the technical stuff: code, interface, servers. The marketing team should consist of 1 or 2 people from the niche that is being targeted.

I said above that iHanuman had poor marketing. Really, its only marketing came from Tilak Pyle. It was crucial that he was part of our team. And it helped, very much, that he was also a yoga teacher with a video to sell:

<http://www.ihanuman.com/albums.php?id=48>

Since he is basically non-technical, he made a great beta-tester, telling us what would be non-intuitive to a non-technical audience. And since he himself was selling a video, he wanted to see the site succeed, so he went out and tried to spread the word. And because he was a yoga teacher, he brought instant credibility to the site.

The site would have gone nowhere without him. What little success it had was largely due to the marketing he did (though note that my info about the site ended in early 2008).

So, I would take a niche approach. And I would look for the equivalent of Tilak Pyle in each niche that I decided to go after.

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to ask you a few questions about your suggested niche approach.

If a cook wanted to sell his videos online, what advantages would a cooking themed video selling site have that a generic video selling site not provide?

Why "target" any specific niche. The way I see it, you're selling videos in the end and you'll want to market them, but in the end any targeting is probably going to sum up to just changing the theme of the site.

That being said my main focus right now is a niche: independent films and web series. Although theoretically any video content can be sold.

As for people trying to find niche content, a themed website would certainly help, but that's assuming I'm trying to build a marketplace. And even then, categorizing videos should suffice. At this point I'm simply building the platform: the set of tools to enable people to sell, and the set of tools customized for indie films/web series. The way I see it, people who would discover the content sold on this platform will do it through traditional new web means. Word of mouth, facebook, twitter, Youtube. That's why I want to make it easy for these films to cross upload and maintain their social presence, so they can use the instantaneous communication speed of the internet to help word of mouth spread their films.

I also think focusing on any of the niches you suggested would just narrow the potential customer base (considering content producers as customers), even though it may make stuff easier to find for end users.

As for why I'm looking for a technical founder, just because someone's technical doesn't mean he/she's incapable of other things. But more importantly, having a technical founder frees me from those duties, and allows me to focus more on implementation.

Additionally I know some indie filmmakers. I've worked on an indie film as a production assistant, and I've invested in an indie film. I've also wanted to be a filmmaker since I was 10ish. I didn't simply choose something to start a business with. Creating a service for indie films/web series was the most natural course of least resistance for me.

<comment><USER9> You write:

"If a cook wanted to sell his videos online, what advantages would a cooking themed video selling site have that a generic video selling site not provide?"

This question only makes sense if you reject my thesis that this project will mostly be about marketing (not technology). If you accept that this project is going to be mostly about marketing, then the question answers itself - <USER3> take a niche approach because it makes the marketing easier.

The statement "makes the marketing easier" rests on 2 assumptions:

1.) you will have on your team someone from the niche that you are targeting

2.) you are willing to share revenue so as to avoid the expense of marketing

Again, if you have $10 million to spend on marketing, you could take a brute- force approach and try to do a generic site and just market the hell out of it. But if your marketing budget is $0, then lining up partners who are in the niche that you are targeting is a wise move.

Above (in another comment) I listed 4 attributes I'd look for in the partner who is in the niche that I'm going after. The important thing is that they have some videos to sell, and the ambition to want to go out and make the site a monster hit. That way you can leave a lot of the marketing work to them. Again, my reference here is what Tilak Pyle was able to do for iHanuman. His video was the best selling thing on iHanuman, and its sales were an important part of what made that site seem legitimate to the other yoga teachers who eventually joined the site.

You write:

"just changing the theme of the site."

I think that is an astonishing phrase. You are seriously discounting the importance of marketing. You are seriously discounting branding and the value of good graphic design.

You wrote:

"my main focus right now is a niche: independent films"

If I were to try this again, I'd go after consumer niches, not producer niches. I mean, the niche should be defined by the consumer group, not the producer group. The niches I'm thinking of are the consumer niches: cooking, hunting, racing, gambling, yoga, health, stock market trading, etc.

You wrote:

"but that's assuming I'm trying to build a marketplace"

Sorry, I must have misunderstood you. What are you building then? I can not imagine how you would bring distribution to indie film makers without building a marketplace. If you are not selling then what are you doing for them?

You wrote:

"And even then, categorizing videos should suffice."

You may have better luck than what I've seen in the past. I certainly wish you luck. I can tell you, with great certainty, that the enthusiasm that the yoga teachers showed for iHanuman would not have been there had we simply had a generic sell-videos site that just happened to have a "yoga" category. The marketing strategy that worked for iHanuman was "We belong to your community. We are one of you." After all, doesn't Amazon have a digital video sales channel at this point? The yoga teachers could just use that if they wanted some soulless, generic service.

You wrote:

"I also think focusing on any of the niches you suggested would just narrow the potential customer base (considering content producers as customers), even though it may make stuff easier to find for end users."

It seems to me that this is the essence of your business plan, and it is the crux of where you and I see things differently. What you describe is exactly what I think will fail. However, I certainly wish you luck. I've known a lot of good folks who tried to launch similar services and I know it is a tough market to crack. If you can make this work, then you'll have succeeded at a terrific challenge. I do not think it will work, but I wish you well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not trying to sell films for these producers. Especially since I'm targeting the long-tail, where a lot of the stuff is unsellable. Like I said in my main post, I'm more like 37signals. I'm providing a service to the people who produce the stuff for the end user. Except in my case I'm also trying to slot in a great user experience for the end-user.

Amazon's CreateSpace has a 20-minute length minimum. So unless the Yoga videos are each longer than 20 minutes, this would be a barrier. On top of that I'm pretty sure Amazon takes a 50% cut, and their videos can't be downloaded to a mac because of DRM restrictions.

This is in fact an example of an area I'm trying to improve. You'll get great distribution platforms, but they're bottlenecked by a lackluster post-sale customer experience. So while the mechanism is there for someone to sell a video on a generic site, the mechanism is clogged up with gunk.

So I believe there was a misunderstanding. I'm not creating a marketplace. Not yet at least. So marketing is not my concern. I'm only trying to provide the tools to sell online, make marketing online easier, and a platform that will encourage people to purchase without being tied down to proprietary DRM. I also want to tailor this tool specifically to independent filmmakers. A publisher will create a film, but after they finish it, they're going to want to find a way to get it seen and probably make a return on it. This is where my service steps in. I will provide them an alternative to their current options, and I will provide the alternative via the internet. Already I have several advantages over traditional physical distribution: instant gratification, less overhead from packaging and using a distributor, easier to market because word of mouth spreads at electron speed. And if after all that work creating something and they can't find a traditional distributor, they still have to get it out there somehow. I want to catch those potential customers.

<comment><USER9> chrischen, I'm not sure that you've thought this through.

You wrote:

"I'm not trying to sell films for these producers."

but up above you wrote:

"This includes a digital distribution platform Which let's end users keep their purchases in the cloud and let's producers sell their work online as downloads."

You will be in the business of selling videos, regardless of whether you are doing the selling directly, or whether your customers are doing the selling - which means you are indirectly helping them sell. Either way, you are in the business of selling videos.

You wrote:

"I'm only trying to provide the tools to sell online".

That is what I understood your goal to be. That was our goal at iHanuman - <USER4> were giving the yoga teachers the tools to sell their videos online. And, of course, we had plans to roll that software out to other markets, and give a lot of other people the tools the sell their videos online.

2 years ago we were using nearly identical marketing text to woo a cook to consider doing a cooking-oriented web site, using our software. Really, this is almost verbatim what we said then:

"A publisher will create a film, but after they finish it, they're going to want to find a way to get it seen and probably make a return on it. This is where my service steps in. I will provide them an alternative to their current options, and I will provide the alternative via the internet. Already I have several advantages over traditional physical distribution: instant gratification, less overhead from packaging and using a distributor, easier to market because word of mouth spreads at electron speed. And if after all that work creating something and they can't find a traditional distributor, they still have to get it out there somehow. I want to catch those potential customers."

We used all of those lines: instant gratification, speed-of-light distribution, world-wide reach. We told them that we were the green alternative to creating DVDs and mailing them out, since we used less resources. Less packaging. Consider some of the text used on the Join page (which hasn't been updated since launch):

<http://www.ihanuman.com/join.php>

If your service is radically different from that (other than the focus on yoga) then you should explain yourself more clearly.

I think I understood the gist of what you were saying. And, as I said before, it is a very tough market.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it is radically different. Initially at least. I will not have a "store" featuring indie films. This is something I don't think I can accomplish initially, and must be slowly built towards. The barrier to entry to using our service to sell digital downloads (on their own sites) is low, but if I were to launch a digital store, I would have to erect some sort of quality minimum in order to build a reputation for that store. I would want to keep such a store from turning into YouTube. Instead, what I'm trying to accomplish immediately is more like paypal. It's a tool, a mechanism to digital download distribution. Except the difference from paypal is that I'm also offering a better post-sale experience, as a feature to the publisher to attract sales, and more customized toolset for indie filmmakers, including things that will help them market.

Indie filmmakers usually have their own websites. They probably don't need a community to sell their films to. Even if they do, they can target those communities themselves.

Hey thanks lkrubner, I think I just got my answer to the "What are you making?" question.

<comment><USER9> I think I now understand your comparison to Basecamp, which I did not before. The Basecamp comparison is somewhat misleading since, when I use Basecamp, I go to the URL basecamp.com. But that is not what you are suggesting, if I understand you. You are actually suggesting some tools that will show up on the indie film makers own website. You're trying to give them the tools so that they can sell their movie, if they wish. A sort of instant, private Netflix on their own site, if they wish.

It's an interesting idea. I wish you luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much. This conversation really helped me clarify my idea, even to myself. And it's allowed me to identify the things I've said which may be confusing or ambiguous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> where are you located?

<comment><AUTHOR> Michigan. Ideally I'd like to get in a program like y combinator or techstars and relocate, but unless that happens it'll probably be a telecommute initially.</comment></comment>


Your home's online gadgets could be hacked by ultrasound - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2110762-your-homes-online-gadgets-could-be-hacked-by-ultrasound/ <comment><USER2> This sounds like it would be fun to detect. What would I have to know, to detect ultrasound signals and recognize them as a signal?

It also sounds like something that ublock origin will want to get interested in.

What an arms race, right in my pocket.</comment>


Stats for Translating an Android App - Is It Worth it? - <AUTHOR> http://neatocode.tumblr.com/post/34108497318/localization-profits

<comment><USER2> All the contender OSs listed in this article have a Web runtime for applications. All are making the same bet, that Web apps are ready to take on "native" apps.

One thing that sets Windows 8 apart: Windows has a mature application runtime, the Common Language Runtime, that is roughly equivalent to Android's Java- based application runtime.</comment>


Unusual Wikipedia Articles - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles <comment><USER2> After reading the discription, I'm very much in favor of unusual articles. It seems that they are generally useful, and as such, I see no need to force them into a particularly well-known style.</comment>


Nokia's MeeGo is doomed - A summary of Dublin's MeeGo Summit - <AUTHOR> http://www.techeye.net/software/nokias-meego-is-doomed <comment><USER3> I've had Maemo in my pocket nearly four years now--first the 770, then the N810. I _love_ my N810. The browser's only so-so, but the xterm is fantastic. I can do development on it, running gcc, python, python3, clisp, guile, hugs, mosml, emacs, and I forget what else. git and svn, of course.

When I got a new phone a year ago, I considered the N900, but held back because its 3G was only for T-Mobile. (Yes, I actually travel in areas where T-Mobile doesn't have 3G. I spend one week a year in a spot where they don't even have GSM coverage.) But I figured I'd get its successor in 2012 or so.

Then Nokia and Intel announced MeeGo. I still haven't seen a good explanation for this--merge two OSes, only one of which has shipping products, instead of dumping the one that doesn't? Cue sinking feeling.

Nowadays I don't think I'll ever run MeeGo. Even when I get an Android phone, I'll have to carry my N810 until it dies. When it does, I'll have to try building a decent dev environment on Android. People have xterm running on it, but it doesn't have most of the tools that make Unix useful.

Sigh.

<comment><USER4> Just being curious, are you comfortable doing serious coding on a machine with such a little keyboard? I can't even imagine using Emacs efficiently on a device like that. Don't you think a small netbook would increase your comfort and productivity without a considerable loss of portability?

<comment><USER3> > _Just being curious, are you comfortable doing serious coding on a machine > with such a little keyboard?_

It's certainly slower than with a larger screen. The keyboard doesn't actually slow me down much. Hacking with one of the crappy 3-row keyboards common on phones (e.g., the N900, mrphl) would be a lot worse; but the N810 has most of the symbols I need right on the keys. For the others ({}, [], |), the xterm has a customizable palette; I just tap the right button on the screen.

> _I can't even imagine using Emacs efficiently on a device like that._

Shrug. It's emacs. I've been using it for 20 years now; the control keys are burned into my brain. The main impediment is the screen size; I can't see much of my code at once.

> _Don't you think a small netbook would increase your comfort and > productivity without a considerable loss of portability?_

No. With the N810, I can hack while walking down the street. Can't do that with a netbook.

<comment><USER5> I am impressed that you can hack while walking down the street! When I'm coding my wife has to call my name 3 or 4 times before I notice she is speaking to me. I would be doomed on a busy street.

<comment><USER3> Long years of practice reading while walking through crowds. Mind you, I do have to look up to _cross_ a street. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "You will have a browsing capable machine in your car, kitchen, living room, pocket and probably bathroom. For optimal convenience, each of these devices needs to communicate."

iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch.

"Doug played us a charming little video that showed cartoon MeeGo-people pausing movies on their televisions, stepping out into the car and playing the movie immediately from its last pause."

Netflix streaming, more or less. Wii, XBox, PS3, iOS, Windows, Mac, some Blue Ray players, I think. All of which know what's in your queue and even where you left off watching on your other device.

The future happened while this guy wasn't looking.

</comment><comment><USER7> Well, that's a downer. I had such high hopes for Maemo/MeeGo. It just wasn't meant to be.

I do love my N900. Coincidentally, I just started getting into app development the past few weeks. No SDK for Windows or OSX? Seriously? The SDK only works on specific versions of Ubuntu? Really? It all makes sense now why the platform has been a failure.

<comment><USER8> It's early days... it's a bit early to say that it's a failure, Maemo was never really pushed and Meego is not finished. Of course this is an ominous start. The SDK will come to Windows, thats pretty much a given, KDE works in Windows. If it doesn't, then virtual machines are not too painful, this has a chance of working after all the stack is pretty much the standard Linux stack.

This one should be the easiest for developers, your not stuck with a language or framework that is foreign, getting started should be easy.

As it is now, we haven't even got any phones running it, so of course it doesn't all work and hasn't been polished yet. Whether Nokia can survive long enough to see it through, we'll have to wait and see, I hope so.

<comment><USER9> I really don't trust Nokia. They have a systemic internal culture that thrusts engineering into the lowest possible role. The number of engineers within Nokia who would fail at the FizzBuzz problem is staggering, often in key roles. The problem is that upper management doesn't understand why that's a problem.

Their hoping that Open Source will save them from themselves I suppose, but that rarely works. As long as Nokia is largely fronting this project, I don't have a lot of faith in it's long-term viability.

I just don't.

<comment><USER10> I concur. I once spent a couple of days in Tampere "attempting" to fix a couple of serious bugs between our app and the telephony layer on a S60 device. Never once did Nokia pair us up with a hard core device engineer - <USER2> honestly don't know if they exist. I can tell you all about the fluffy product manager types and the great times we had eating Reindeer!

<comment><USER9> Or the Finnish Sauna?:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There was a pretty good discussion of the alternatives available to Nokia on ESR's blog yesterday - <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2772> \- all the real alternatives: Windows Phone 7, MeeGo, and Android were discussed.

</comment><comment><USER12> How does one get an invite to an event like that? Are they common? All I ever heard of are the 'MS Tech Days' for which you have to pony several thousands and you don't even get cool stuff, afaik.

<comment><USER13> It was totally open and free. One needed to just sign up on the website and turn up.

Which is probably the most damning thing about the platform: when such effort is spent at luring developers in, one wonders.

<comment><USER14> Pretty much everyone is trying to lure developers with cash/devices. Except Apple, which don't need to do that.

<comment><USER15> I'm not so sure. I tried to get a free Android device to see if Android is an interesting platform to develop for, but couldn't find anyone that could get one for me (and I'm not ready to sign a 2-year contract just for an experiment :)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I strongly disagree with the blog's author opinion.

Before basing your opinion on MeeGo on a biased article, read Arstechnica's article too: ( [http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/11/meego- confer...](http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/11/meego-conference- momentum-intact-despite-lack-of-hardware.ars) )

P.S. "At one point, after a long explanation that failed to answer the question of why MeeGo didn't yet have a framework for developers to sell their apps, a developer from Norway shouted out: "We don't care about openness, we need to be able to make a living.""

What is Qt then? <http://qt.nokia.com/products/platform/meego/> Come on...

<comment><USER17> Qt is a very nice cross platform gui framework - it's not an app store

<comment><USER16> Well an app store isn't a framework either :) The author's sentence then doesn't make sense. Either-ways, my point was MeeGo has a great platform for developing applications, Qt is great, and QtCreator is an excellent IDE.

<comment><USER17> I think in this context 'framework' means "a way is provided to" not in it's technical sense.

The developer was complaining that there was no system in place to sell apps to users - not that there was no gui toolkit to write them.

<comment><USER14> How can you sell apps for phones that don't exist yet? Ovi store and Intel AppUp will allow sales for MeeGo when the time comes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _MeeGo is doomed, and Nokia with it if the suits holding the purse-strings aren't careful._

Nokia are the 120th biggest company in the world ( [http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/full_l...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/full_list/101_200.html) ) (falling from 85th in 2009); they have leeway to do a lot of things wrong before they are "doomed".

<comment><USER19> General Motors is the 38th biggest company in the world ([http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/full_l...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/full_list/index.html)) and they went into bankruptcy protection in 2009.

Assets value and size doesn't protect you from a fall in demand. Their revenue fell 23% in 2009, and their profits fell _78.8%_ ([http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/snapsh...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/snapshots/6652.html)).

Their biggest concern has to be their share price. In December 2008 it peaked around $40. It's now around $9. If it keeps falling like that people will start talking about takeovers and/or private equity buyouts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think the complained availability of applications will improve pretty quickly when this stuff is done: <http://www.qaiku.com/go/a25h/>

Currently maemo.org is serving some 1.5 million open source apps for the N900 per week.

</comment><comment><USER21> wow, pretty damning report. initially it sounded like a cool platform to me.

Nokia should just drop Meego and throw in with android while they are still profitable.

<comment><USER22> Using Android would put them in direct competition with (very) low-margin Chinese manufacturers. This is what Apple got right: if you have your own operating system and ecosystem nailed down correctly, people do not mind paying larger margins, and you are in a different game.

I guess this is what Nokia is aiming for with Meego. But, despite the excellent work of the Qt trolls, it doesn't really seem to get off the ground...

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but it worked for Apple only because they were first (more or less). Nokia can't go that way. Their only hope is to adopt a successful OS and produce top-notch phones.

<comment><USER23> Nokia has always produced top notch phones. Their only problem is that it looks like they couldn't write decent software for phones if their life depended on it (randomly shuffling browser bookmarks every time I open the IMAP-client? Come /on/...)

Sent from my Nokia E sixtysomething or other.

<comment><USER3> Right, that's my point--I've been using Nokias since 2001. If they built an Android phone, its phone bits could be dramatically more usable than stock Android.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fact 1 : Nokia bashing is fashionable

Implication : Posts bashing Nokia are bound to get lots of views

Example : HN item id:195100

<comment><USER18> For your example you pick a comment about lisp datastructures?

<comment><USER24> oops ! typo .. should have been 1954100 :D</comment></comment></comment>