Ask HN: What is the best way to initiate conversation with Enterprise customer? - <AUTHOR> We have tons of Enterprise users (they register with their corporate email address), but when we send them follow-up email, the response rate is not as high as we would like it to be. Any advice? <comment><USER2> [random advice from the internet]

The proven method of talking to individuals in enterprise is a 'meat eating' sales team walking into the lobby of the building where people work and talking to the receptionist. This is probably worth doing outside of enterprise, too.

It is expensive. It is time consuming. It is valuable.

On the other hand, I think most people hate most emails because every email is an item on their TODO list because every email must be processed and processing emails takes time. The most time efficient way to process emails is to mark them as spam and never see an email from that source again. For me, if a company sends me an automated email, that's usually what happens because if and when I want more information or to learn about updates, I can just visit the website (and odds are that the content of an autogenerated company email consists of links to the website).

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comments. Still, I don't think what I should do is to go to a lobby. When I'm in the lobby I still need to figure out which person I need to speak to...

In my situation that person has already come to me. But I cannot convince him (it's usually him, not her) to talk to me. He is window shopping. He is just looking around and playing by himself, but whenever approached acts as if he wasn't there.

These guys are on my website because they need a custom app. But I don't know what app, with what features and how I can help them.

I'm looking for a hint on how to approach these guys and make them talk.

Anyone?

<comment><USER2> In the lobby, the person to talk to is the receptionist. The receptionist is the gatekeeper and can be an ally. Be nice. Make their job pleasant. Ask for information. Be polite. Thank them.

Maybe you get a lot of useful information. Maybe very little. At least you know what getting past the front door entails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Do you track the usage of the free trial to the email addresses used to activate them? Better still do you track any interactions on your forum, wiki, etc?

It is very easy for staff to create fake email addresses to get a free trial and kick the tyres. Unless they end up using your product they won't be interested in demo-calls, etc. Most technical staffers hate sales calls, so offers of demo-calls are more likely to be seen as pushy sales calls.

BTW what is your conversion rate from free-trial to paid plans?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually yes - it is "technical staffers" who come and check our platform. Is there a good way to reach out to this "type" of people? We really want to help them, by saving a lot of their time.

<comment><USER3> I am intrigued by your product and marketing problem. I did a quick Google search and found several firms that are taking a consulting approach to your solution space. Ok, so you have some sort of on-line web app that lets you create mobile apps?

So does Intercom tell you that people have tried using your product once, deemed it too confusing and have ditched it?

Since I don't know which of the many products that the Google search came up with is yours -- you do have paid ads? -- I can only broad brush presume that the product promises more than it can deliver and thus is quickly discarded after one failed attempt. If the persons trying out your product wanted consulting services, then there are number of firms who explicitly are offering that approach to solving the mobile app creation requirement.

Perhaps you could provide a wiki / FAQ / forum which is only accessible using the email that was used to activate the free trial. Then with a bit of instrumentation you might be better able to discern the steps that evaluation users take.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it is a web app, which allows to create mobile apps.

I wouldn't say it promises too much, because it indeed enables developing mobile apps. But I have to fully agree with another sentence you wrote: the product is quickly discarded after failed attempt.

The product is good. But because it is powerful, it comes with a learning curve. Imagine Photoshop - nobody is a master right after starting to use it. How long would it take a human being to learn how to develop apps? Let's say a few months or years - because it requires to learn how to code. With our product learning how to create an app and actually creating it, takes a few hours in total. But still, this is a few hours you need to invest.

So what I would like to achieve with those enterprise prospects, is to get them speak to us right after they fail, instead of discarding.

Any advice on how this can be done?

<comment><USER3> [random marketing advice from internet]

Psychologically people will not admit to failing, they will blame the product instead and most won't be wanting to speak to anybody about it. I might be over-generalising, but many techies prefer to avoid telephone calls.

There isn't much you can do about past subscribers to your free trial. Possibly a bulk email about a "new version".

You could revamp your website, include your bit about "Powerful Product requires some learning curve to become proficient." AND include a video to developing a mobile app with your product. I would go about this by coming up with an example mobile app, then video tape the entire spiel as you would do it over the phone, but this time to a video. Make it easy for new users as well as returning users (invited by above email) to follow along. Then include in the video an invitation to call for "your complimentary one-on-one ramp up session".

It would be an idea to update your app as well. Include the link to the video, etc in the splash screen. If possible detect when a session has been exited quickly and display the offer of consulting.

I would even go as far as suggesting that you recruit a friend who has never used your product to have a go and video their attempt, etc. You could even then come to their aid. In the past usability studies often used videos to identify problems with products, you could go further and use it not just to improve your product, but to also demonstrate its ease of use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much, your advices sounds like good points to me. Although the video is there (app from scratch in 10 minutes), I guess it might not be convincing enough.

All the best to you. If there's anything I could do to return the favor, please just let me know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's difficult to give feedback without knowing what your emails look like.

What specifically are you trying to get them to do? Why do you want to initiate a conversation? How are you getting them to sign-up? Clearly you're doing something right in getting the sign-ups, maybe you can tweak that process to get them to expect or initiate the conversation themselves.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sign-up is super-easy: just give your email (or anything that looks like email) and here you start the free trial.

Our follow-up email is professionally-styled. And short. Offering a personal free demo-call on how to operate our platform. The email is based on examples by other successful companies.

So perhaps someone has gone though these roadblocks and can give an advice?</comment></comment>


California Senate passes universal health care bill - <AUTHOR> http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article153931299.html <comment><USER2> Why is the level of conversation on this topic so low?

There's two top level comments here that effectively say: "Healthcare costs money! You didn't think of that did you, commie!".

And this is on a forum full of intelligent techies who are interested in business. I shudder to think what the opinion of the average Republican voter is. Some fever dream involving death panels no doubt.

</comment><comment><USER3> This won't pass the house, the Property class won't let it. (Their two departments are the Democrats and Republicans.)

If it were possible, in a hypothetical sense:

Raise corporate taxes, they're much too low to be sustainable.

Care would need to be more efficient than Cuba or UK NHS in order to be cost- effective, this means preventative medicine and QALY will be front-and-center. The question will be how to pay for major operations and expensive, ongoing conditions without ending-up with Greece-style finances and IMF bailout austerity conditions. Even with cutting costs to rest of the world prices (1/4 of current prices), it would still be hundreds of billions per year. It's not impossible, but it would be an up-hill climb all the way and might not be very good with compromises, loopholes and back-room deals that will likely infest it.

Maybe there's enough rich corporations and wealthy people with taxes to raid, but their lobbyists on both sides of the aisle won't allow anything more than crumbs and getting back to sucking the blood money out of poor people.

<comment><USER4> Last I checked both houses were over 2/3 Democrats. Is this not the case now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _The bill does not include detailed language about how the state would come up with hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for health care coverage for nearly 40 million residents._

Perhaps they expect to go bankrupt and let the rest of the country bail them out?

<comment><USER6> You mean the red states that California have been subsidizing to help us out?

<comment><USER3> California is indeed a profit-center in the United $tates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> $400B a year with no way to pay for it.

<comment><USER8> Instead of everyone paying insurance premiums, they pay through taxes. And no need to argue: almost every other first world country provides universal healthcare funded by taxes. It's both financially possible and prudent.

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

<comment><USER9> > And no need to argue: almost every other first world country provides > universal healthcare funded by taxes.

Almost every other developed country provides universal healthcare, but there's a mix of systems and all-public systems are not overwhelmingly dominant. Mandated-purchase with public safety net programs are not uncommon.

<comment><USER8> I think we're in agreement? There is a basic level of care in those UHC countries, but then private insurance/services/etc for above and beyond.

<comment><USER9> In some the model is very similar in outline (but superior in execution) to the US ACA model: everyone is required to buy insurance with certain minimum standards, with subsidies and/or a public fallback program for the indigent. In some there is a universal public baseline program that everyone is on that you may be able to supplement on top of, as you describe, but that's not at all _generally_ true.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


VC using Covid to back out of SPA and crush healthcare startup - <AUTHOR> Israel's TheMarker reports OrbiMed is using the COVID19 pandemic to pull out of a signed SPA. Article in Hebrew (use google translate): https://www.themarker.com/technation/1.8842591 <comment><USER2> Isolated case, Ferrum Health raised $9M just as things were getting bad a couple months ago.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Does the SPA allow for them to get out of the deal?</comment>


What's new in CSS4 - <AUTHOR> http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/10/discover-whats-new-in-css-4/

<comment><USER2> Web Monkey calling this "CSS 4" seems a bit misleading -- it's a spec for _Selectors Level 4_ ; I don't think there is a monolithic "CSS 4" in the same way there isn't a monolithic "CSS 3". I assume the wide variety of CSS3 modules will be mostly unaffected.

<comment><USER3> Correct, as far as I know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't need new selectors, I need a way to specify layouts. You know, to do the same things as tables did back in the days, but without all the ugliness.

<comment><USER3> <http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/> <http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-grid-layout/>

<comment><USER5> Are the ms-grids and the multicolumn layouts in CSS4? It doesn't look like it from that draft. Are they just free-floating proposals at this stage?

<comment><USER3> The reality is that there's no such thing as CSS4, and no such thing as CSS3 either: starting with CSS3 the spec was "modularized", meaning it was broken up in a bunch of separate and mostly-independent "modules", which are grouped in a "level" but are specified on their own[0].

So the situation is that TFA talks not about CSS4 but about "Level 4 Selectors" (a draft), talking about "CSS4" is language abuse. The specs I linked are Level 3 specs, but independent of selectors and of one another (columns are a CR, grid is a working draft).

To sum up, your question does not really make sense. Grids and columns are part of "CSS4" insofar as they are part of "CSS3" through being Level 3 specifications, but that's completely meaningless. Level 4 selectors could become recommandations before (level 3) grids reach that state, or not. There's no dependency. (columns are already supported by all modern browsers except MSIE).

I'd recommend using (and abusing) <http://caniuse.com/> to see the implementation state of each spec, it's become especially important with modular level 3 specs as implementors are free to add one level 3 spec and ignore an other.

[0] You can see a list of specs at <http://www.w3.org/TR/#tr_CSS>, note how some Level 3 specs are Recommendations, others are Candidate Recommandations, yet others are Last Calls or Drafts.

<comment><USER5> In summary: no, they're in CSS3; but it's all modular and might not be implemented at the same time.

There is incentive for MS Grids to go forward soon, they're important to MS for use in Windows 8.

Also, they're cool, or rather they're a sane layout scheme and it's awful that CSS hasn't had one up to now.

The irony is that Firefox and Chrome will implement them at about the same time that they become official. But we won't be able to use them widely until IE7,8 and 9 have faded from the web. MS giveth, MS taketh away.

<comment><USER3> > In summary: no, they're in CSS3

No. In summary, the question itself does not make sense, it's like asking if the sun tastes better than communism.

<comment><USER5> That's not quite right though; there is a CSS level 3 and these specs are in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does this accomplish anything above and beyond what XPath is capable of? I've always wondered why W3C has been pushing more than one standard for selecting elements in SGML and XML documents.

<comment><USER3> > Does this accomplish anything above and beyond what XPath is capable of?

Nope. In terms of pure capabilities CSS selectors are still (mostly) a subset of XPath selectors (even XPath 1.0 I'd say)

> I've always wondered why W3C has been pushing more than one standard for > selecting elements in SGML and XML documents.

I don't have an answer, but I see 4 reasons:

* NIH, the W3C is not really a big coherent group, and technically CSS selectors predate XPath (CSS level 1 became a CR in December 1996, XPath 1.0 did not reach this status before November 1999)

* CSS selectors are purpose-built for HTML and have efficient (and simple) shortcuts for a bunch of tasks: selecting on ids or classes has a 1-character overhead in CSS versus XPath having 5 for ids and classes... well you're looking at a good 50 characters in XPath 1 (w/o exslt) I'd say, there just isn't a convenient way to say "an element with this value in an attribute which is a space-separated list of names". Another one is XPath being built for parent/child relationships where CSS selectors default to ancestor/descendant relations, and makes it easier and shorter to broadly apply rules. The last one would be pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements, to handle these in XPath you'd have to add a bunch of functions to the core set (see point 4 for what I think of XPath functions)

* For rendering-speed reasons, CSS are processed back-to-front, I'm not sure how good/easy it would be to process XPath that way (not too hard I'd guess, but it definitely wasn't standardized based on this thinking)

* XPath is actually pretty complex, much more so than CSS selectors (even CSS3 or CSS4 selectors), I know I always a hard time with getting those fucking funcalls right, the syntax is fiddly and different XPath libraries tend to behave very differently on namespacing & al of funcalls. Also, the data-typing is complete shit.

I like XPath 1.0 (though I think XPath 2.0 went full retard in backporting XQuery stuff and integrating a bunch of garbage relevant only to XSLT 2.0), but while I regularly pine for some specific XPath features in CSS selectors (usually more flexible axis modifiers) I really wouldn't enjoy having to use XPath instead of CSS in my style sheets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hope they introduce variables/mixins/functions (Akin to SASS or LESS)

</comment><comment><USER8> Parent selector is cool but I've needed it at most 2-3% of the time when designing a site. As of now, it doesn't appear to support things I really need in almost all mid-large site layouts: variables, mixins/functions, operations, and namespaces. This means even 5 years from now, I'll need <http://lesscss.org/> because browsers with CSS4 won't support variables. How does one go about suggesting to W3C that they should support variables in CSS4?

<comment><USER6> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3162221>

(which links to through to a www-style list discussion from October 24: [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www- style/2011Oct/0699.h...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www- style/2011Oct/0699.html))

<comment><USER9> This is definitely better than no variables, but is it the best solution? I think most of the advantages of variables can be achieved through a technique that introduces no new syntax and a minimum of new keywords:

      .element {
    	color: #06c;
    	border-color: #006;
      }

      h1 {
    	apply: .element;
    	border-style: thick;
    	border-width: solid;
      }

This will make H1 "pretend" that it has .element class applied to it, even though in HTML source code it doesn't. I think it's a conceptually simple and orthogonal solution. True variables differ from the current metality of CSS way too much.

<comment><USER10> I'm torn on this. Inheritance already exists through assigning multiple classes and the cascade, and now it's impossible to use a "child" class without dragging its parent along with it unless you override "apply" inline.

Not terribly clear as to why we need specific functionality for inheritance when we already have an expressive way of defining it.

<comment><USER11> The above comment was addressing the lack of variables, not the lack of true inheritance (a single level of inheritance is not really inheritance at all, simply applying attributes en masse). What the comment does address is the lack of variables and the need/want to set a color (or anything else) once and then use that through an assortment of other definitions. This is something that is only currently possible through CSS preprocessors.

<comment><USER10> It really doesn't look like variables to me. A variable would be a reference to a singularly defined property, such as a color or border style, not a hook to an entire list of properties. Certainly it could be used as a variable: that is, defining a class with a single property and hooking to that. But let's assume it's being used as a variable, why not write something like this?

        .data {
            font-size:11px;
            font-family:Courier;
            color: #555;
        }
        .magic {
            color: royalBlue;
        }

Magical data

Normal text with magical data.

I've inherited .magic into .data without sacrificing the ability to use .magic and .data by itself. As long as you keep your CSS classes semantic and disperse them intelligently into the markup, it's really not an issue of making large scale changes with minimal effort. Of course, in practice, this isn't always the case, but I think adding more ways to inherit properties will increase complexity more than help write good styles.

I think the outcry for these features is a symptom of a poor understanding of the cascade and the language. There are much larger issues I'd like to see addressed, like the wide adoption of layout definitions which has better rules for defining vertical positioning and more fluid widths, both of which are pretty nightmarish without resorting to tables.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Single Neuron May Cary Up to 1000 Genetic Mutations - <AUTHOR> http://neurosciencenews.com/single-neuron-genetic-mutations-2813/ <comment><USER2> The authors are answering questions about this paper on reddit. (5 Oct)

"tl;dr Mutations are happening in your neurons every day! We looked at individual neurons to find out how many.

We will be back at 2 pm ET (11 am PT, 6 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask us anything!"

[https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nkdj5/science_ama...](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nkdj5/science_ama_series_we_are_mollie_woodworth_and/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think a lot of the mutations can be attributed to infidelities of single cell sequecing. The amplification of DNA that has to be done has a tendency to incorparate errors. If you start with a single copy of DNA then an copy error early in amplification will look like a mutation. The neuron data is compared to non-single cell sequencing of heart cells.

<comment><USER4> They actually did something kinda clever. They were able to calculate/model a false positive rate by looking at the homozygosity of the X chromosome. Since the samples were male, there should only be one X, so any heterozygosity would have to be errors.

Not saying this is an absolute correct way of going about this (no one really knows), but it shows they did at least thought about this issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Assuming those mutations have effects on neurons functions (and not e.g. just remnants from ontogenesis) seems this should make future "immortality" tech much more difficult (post-cryonics resurrections, brain uploads, etc).

Not enough to scan brain connectivity info, neuron types and per-person genome, you will now also need per-neuron genomes to truly capture and reproduce a brain.

Not that we were anywhere close to any sorts of brain uploading, but this news just made it orders of magnitude more difficult.

<comment><USER6> If these mutations are random they can probably be ignored. They likely have no effect or negative effects. Your brain might actually improve a lot by removing them.

If they aren't random and there is some purpose or information encoded in them, then you have a good point. I think that's unlikely though.

<comment><USER7> Clearly you haven't worked on an old buggy codebase. Sure that function has a bug, but the rest of the codebase has adapted to it and worked around it. If the function suddenly doesn't have a bug, dozens of other functions will fail in new and strange ways.

The brain would work in a very similar way. If a neuron has a mutation that effects it's function, surrounding neurons would adapt to that.

<comment><USER8> Having worked in such codebases, the only difference that _should be_ happening is that a lot of that old, redundant code inserted to work around the bug would no longer be visited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if this is related to neurite repulsion. In Drosophla, the DSCAM gene is alternatively spliced to provide an "expression signature" for each neuron so they can maintain neurite repulsion. Maybe these point mutations are providing a similar function?

</comment><comment><USER9> Is that related to the fact that neurons have much longer lifespan than most of other cells in human body? How many mutations connective tissue cells have for example? Hard to say whether 1000 is much or not without knowing about other parts.

<comment><USER10> Probably. On the other hand, cells which have a shorter lifespan might have more mutations, since some mutations are introduced during replication-- several per genome per replication, I think? On the other other hand, if they're produced from stem cells, that would keep the mutations down.

It probably also is related to the fact that neurons use a lot of energy and have a lot of mitochondria. Energy requires oxidative phosphorylation in the mitochondria, which produces a lot of free radicals, which damage DNA.

Yet, 1700 (the number they reported is 1700, not 1000) is about typical. Many cancer cells have been sequenced; typical findings are that about 100 genes in cancer cells have acquired mutations, about 10 of which contribute to the cancer. Genes comprise about 1% of DNA; this suggests that the typical somatic cell has 1000 to 10,000 acquired mutations. (1000 assuming that all 90 mutations past the 10 that caused the cancer happened after the tissue went cancerous; 10,000 assuming they all happened earlier. Though that linear interpolation is a bad estimate, because genes and intergenic DNA mutate at different rates, owing to transcription and chromatin.)

However, if they sequenced just the exome (the expressed genes) rather than the entire genome, then 1000 is 10x typical. I can't tell, since their paper is paywall-protected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Given that this was whole-genome sequencing, is 1700 mutations higher than other tissues? The paper doesn't appear to say that.

If they were claiming that this were an unusually high mutation rate, I'd wonder why everyone doesn't die of brain cancer. If other tissue had N mutations per genome, and cancer typically takes 10 mutations to create, in the absence of compensatory mechanisms, the ratio of brain cancer to other cancers should be about (1700 choose 10) / 50 * (N choose 10). If N were, say, 100, that number would be so large that not one person would ever had developed any cancer other than brain cancer.

</comment><comment><USER11> I like thinking that the mistake 'Cary' in the title of this article was a meta-commentary on the nature of genetic mutations.

</comment><comment><USER10> Are you sure you're not counting mitochondrial DNA mutations? A single neuron has about 1000 mitochondria, and would easily have tens of thousands of unique mitochondrial mutations.

</comment><comment><USER10> It says "~1700 mutations per neuron", not "up to 1000 mutations".

</comment><comment><USER12> Why do I feel like this makes a cure for Autism just that much harder?

<comment><USER13> ... Well don't leave us hanging: Why _do_ you feel that way?

<comment><USER12> Because when you have a disease or disorder or whatever, and you see research being done on the organ that contains said disease or disorder, and said research is both expensive and very awesome, yet does not look like it is leading to a cure or an effective treatment, science just slowly gets ruined for you, and you eventually lose hope.</comment></comment></comment>


NSA employee spied on nine women without detection, internal file shows - grey-area http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/27/nsa-employee-spied-detection-internal-memo

<comment> grey-area This is indefensible in my opinion, and indicates systemic problems:

 _In another case, from two years ago, which was only discovered during an investigation [of] another matter, a woman employee of the agency confessed that she had obtained information about the phone of "her foreign-national boyfriend and other foreign nationals". She later told investigators she often used the NSA's surveillance tools to investigate the phone numbers of people she met socially, to ensure they were "not shady characters"._

Some of the other examples are American employees tasking friends in the US, so it's clear that in spite of the NSA's mission there are absolutely no controls over what data is accessed or by whom after people have clearance, or even checks after the fact by supervisors. The scope for abuse here is really broad (financial espionage, blackmail, judicial sabotage) - it undermines most of the things we take from granted will be free from corruption.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Remember, Alexander claims this data is in a "lockbox": [http://www.opposingviews.com/i/politics/foreign- policy/war-t...](http://www.opposingviews.com/i/politics/foreign-policy/war- terror/nsa-head-general-keith-alexander-wants-all-phone-records)

</comment><comment><USER2> Pics or it didn't happen.</comment>


A time when the French aristocracy was obsessed with face stickers - <AUTHOR> https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/sexy-face-stickers/ <comment><USER2> I didn't realise that they had survived so long — up into the 1940s!

<comment><USER3> It will be a thing again, imagine defeating facial recognition with these.

<comment><USER4> I don't know why turk184's comment is dead. But yeah adversarial mouches seems like an amazing idea! And why not QR-codes.</comment></comment></comment>


Why the Sanders Movement Matters - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/dialogue-and-discourse/why-the-sanders-movement-matters-96cc4ccb3a65 <comment><USER2> I liked how he raised his staff's pay to $15/hour and then cut their hours.</comment>


"New home page seems like Stack Overflow doesn't allow free use any more" - <AUTHOR> https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386505/3834 <comment><USER2> First, it looks like the StackOverflow homepage was changed to not require a sign-in. The heavily downvoted (about -50) answer[0] by Cesar M at the bottom of the page also shows the screenshot of the change.

Second, I'm guessing that revenue from job postings (Careers section) and banner ads did not bring enough money. From what I remember reading, I think SO also had high hopes of the other StackExchange specialty sites using the same Q&A engine would be more successful (i.e. more banner ads, more money, etc) but it turns out they were only a modest impact on revenue. (E.g. MathOverflow is an interesting community with Fields Medal mathematics PhDs but it probably doesn't bring much revenue.)

Therefore, this leaves the "enterprise sales" revenue idea of licensing the Q&A engine to private teams. (Hey, Slack just had their IPO and some companies pay for Gitlab and Github -- so let's push for selling SO Q&A for enterprises.) This monetization pressure leads to using the SO landing page as a giant billboard for their enterprise product. (I'm not making a personal complaint but just observing that they seem to be in a difficult monetization dilemma and their actions to improve their financial situation just irritates the users.)

IMO, I'm skeptical that internal Q&A platforms would actually be useful for companies and I made a previous comment explaining why.[1]

[0] [https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/386566](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/386566)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14804834](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14804834)

<comment><USER3> Having worked at a large company before that had their own instance of Confluence Questions (i.e. Atlassian's SO clone): it was incredibly useful. As a new employee, it allowed me to relatively quickly find the relevant people, or even to come across answers by them to questions people kept running into over and over again.

As I became responsible for an internal library used company-wide, I pushed for the Q&A site to be our primary means of communication, and would always refer to it after answering questions from people contacting me directly. I saw the same pattern repeat itself for many new hires.

Otherwise I think your observations are spot on.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps for a large company with multiple offices etc, sure.

For a smaller company though, other than as a search tool (previously asked questions) I don't see what advantage it has over just using Slack/Teams etc. in a relevant channel to your question.

<comment><USER5> I mean, I assume that they don't actually _care_ about small companies, they don't have much money anyways. In these scenarios, they tend to act as a "loss-leader" for marketing purposes, mostly.

<comment><USER6> FWIW Atlassian's perspective is generally more like "they don't have much money _yet_ , so let's get them while it's easy to get them". Small companies grow into big companies, and small single-team deployments tend to spread into big whole-company deployments - but small customers are much easier to get than large customers :)

Disclaimer: long time Atlassian employee but all words are my own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Based on my own experience, the way I find answered on SO is by searching on Google. Maybe they just see all the traffic coming to them from the search engines, nobody, unless already logged in, really go to SO.com and type a question. Maybe not logged in users on the homepage are usually people trying to buy a software for their team or more business, finance people, stockholders?

<comment><USER8> Same. I had to go into incognito mode and specifically navigate to the page to see what the fuss was about. I don't think I'd ever seen the SO homepage before that.

<comment><USER9> I'll add another same here. I _still_ can't figure out exactly what the fuss is about, after reading the linked question and many of the comments here. Is it that the SO home page doesn't offer any way to search questions, instead giving you links to either sign in or purchase one of their products?

If so, I _really_ don't get the problem. Has anyone without a SO account _ever_ gone to their home page to try to look up an issue? Surely it's overwhelmingly more common to just search for an issue directly in a search engine and check the SO links in the results if they turn out to be relevant.

And right now, visiting [https://stackoverflow.com/](https://stackoverflow.com/) in a private browsing window, I still see a search bar right at the top. I really have no idea what anyone could have a problem with here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Favorite quotes from the answers:

> You're alienating the product that makes you big. But that's okay, all > companies do that eventually, giving rise to the competition that appeals to > the alienated user base.

Tschallacka is right, it seems the be part of the normal lifecycle of most online sites/apps. Perhaps SO's expiration date is near, for those users who made it popular enough to be "ruined" by the devs.

<comment><USER11> As with most American enterprises, they must continue to grow -- indefinitely. They cannot be content to exist statically, even with whatever profit margins they currently have (if any).

I'm no economist, but this precept is obvious nonsense in the sense that nothing can grow indefinitely. And so things are subsumed by other things which therefore grow, or they morph into things that can continue to grow indefinitely.

SO is morphing into some other thing -- a quasi social/hiring/Q&A/team thing. Something, no doubt, that they can more easily monetize.

<comment><USER12> Most American companies are just normal small to mid-size businesses that happily exist for decades. Growth at all costs is the venture capital path and it's choice that requires the (completely expected) payoff for the investment.

<comment><USER13> > Growth at all costs is the venture capital path

And since SO raised 68M$, it's the path it has to take

<comment><USER11> The worst thing about this is that I'm _so completely uninterested_ in SO's stupid social/team/hiring product that will supposedly forever revolutionize the tech world.

I'm sure there are little teams of product managers and marketers just brimming with enthusiasm about it, but I have nothing but fatigue for these things anymore. It's not innovation, it's just more suckling at the enterprise teat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Every profit-driven knowledge service that has ever existed has lost this battle in time. About.com, Answers.com, Quora, Genius, and so on. You can serve one pursuit as the primary - knowledge or profit - but not both. They're inherently in conflict. Given enough time, the profit pursuit as a primary driver will always destroy a knowledge service. It leads to decisions that are not solely about being the best knowledge service possible (whether that's commercial abuse through ads, features that exist solely for commercial exploit, dark patterns, or forced volume content aka spam). The only alternative that is viable to maintain a very high quality service over time is to ensure that being true to the pursuit and presentation of knowledge is the highest goal of the service (not making money). That requires aggressive commercial minimalism, operating very thin, never taking venture capital, and or a non-profit route. Anything else results in corruption that inevitably leads to a decay in quality over time. Stack Exchange has made it longer than most with only a few for-profit cavities to show for it. I applaud them for that, it has been a tremendous service. Their venture backers will want a big fat return eventually however, and the clock is ticking. I'd expect their behavior to get worse in the coming years.

<comment><USER15> Or maybe they actually sell things that are useful to companies that allows them to invest in making the public website more valuable? But because they always put the community first, they have until this recent change been hesitant to even mention anything that they sell for fear that users would revolt. Of all the services I have used, SO has been consistently the best at being user and community centric. Without SO, I am pretty sure I would spend 5x longer to get any useful coding done, that is how much value SO has given me and I suspect the same is true for millions of other developers.

By the way, Quora and Genius are both super useful. I really do not understand what you mean by "lost the battle".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "I will start off by saying that I'm a bit of an oddball. I browse exclusively in private browsing mode."

I don't think this is odd at all. I do most browsing in private mode, and I think that should be the default.

Letting every random link I click get added to my URL history is just distraction bait later. Password managers and autofill make it easy to log in when I need to. When I'll need to come back to a page later, it's easy to bookmark.

Persisting cookies and recording every URL clicked is one of those ideas that was neat 10 years ago, but on the modern web it causes more problems than it solves.

<comment><USER17> _Most_ people in the real world don't. You do realize this, don't you?

<comment><USER16> Yes. I thought that was implied by "I think that should be the default", i.e., that this is better behavior but most people won't go to the extra effort, but I can see how it might have been ambiguous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I get it, and I'm sure that if SO hadn't driven me away from contributing years ago, I might be upset too. But for me this is in the category of "cows realizing that all that grain wasn't free after all". That these people are expert SO users doesn't make them experts in marketing and revenue maximization.

<comment><USER19> You're being a little condescending and are not exactly making a good comparison. Stackoverflow was (is?) a really cool company and website, and as far as I knew they were making a reasonable profit. Consider that they allow visitors to post questions and answer, edit other people's questions and answers, and even query the database for any info that's public (e.g. not user passwords, but pretty much anything else), all without having an account. That's unique.The moderation model (that it's based on reputation except for a few _elected_ members) is also also very unique. It's really a site by programmers for programmers, moderated by everyone who spends time there. Having them change the site completely, solely for making more profit, is unexpected. It would be similar to Linux announcing that the kernel will have a license fee from now on - you can be snarky about the cows and the grain, and indeed the kernel project is of huge value so it would make sense from a commercial perspective, but the kernel becoming paid and stackoverflow using annoying UI patterns are both not in line with their previous ways.

<comment><USER20> _" Consider that they allow visitors to post questions and answer, edit other people's questions and answers, and even query the database for any info that's public (e.g. not user passwords, but pretty much anything else), all without having an account."_

This is not unique. Wikipedia's Reference desk[1] allows asking/answering any question by anyone -- even unregistered users.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk)

<comment><USER21> Does anyone use it? By some combination of skill and luck, stackoverflow was clearly better positioned to fill this role, at least for software related content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Given the fact that Stack Exchange has been community vs. company for years now, and all SE answers are Creative Commons licensed, I wonder how hard it would be to create a clone, import all the old questions and answers, allow the existing (community, not SE staff) moderators to moderate, and create accounts for everyone who had one on SE.

Appearing as high in Google search seems impossible, but if the community got behind it this could fix the SE problems once and for all.

<comment><USER23> I think it would be wise to leave a good chunk of the mods behind.

It has been an idea for me for a while to create a site where

\- questions are answered

\- and useful answers rewarded.

Note there is no "good" in front of questions, and answers are rated by their usefullness, primarily to the person asking the question and secondary to everyone else, not by how well they conform to a site script.

In particular, if someone wants to ask what JavaScript framework should I choose in 2020 and someone finds it worth answering and the asker of the question likes the answer, then: Fine!

Duplicate questions? Fine! Answering by pointing to a previous question? Fine! Answering again without mentioning the previous question? Fine!

It should be a site for people wanting to ask or answer questions, not a site for people who want to be mods.

Now, since that would be the purpose of the site and not something abstract like: make a repository of everything we know, all these questions and answers will be fine.

There should also be some inflation or maybe even better "karma tax" so both accounts and questions lose something like 10% (or a dynamically calculated percent) of their value each year, so we aren't stuck with "Top JavaScript libraries for 2019" on top of the lists forever.

Another thing I would consider is making it harder to create accounts as soon as possible.

<comment><USER2> _> I think it would be wise to leave a good chunk of the mods behind. [...] Note there is no "good" in front of questions, and answers are rated by their usefullness, primarily to the person asking the question and secondary to everyone else, _

Yes, the moderators are often vilified instead of praised but this gives a false impression that an alternative Q&A site with different mechanics (i.e. no moderators) would be superior.

The "game theory incentives" problem with your proposal is that the _desirable experts who answer_ the questions _benefit_ from the strict moderation.

Almost every proposed Q&A alternative to SO prioritizes the question askers and _underestimates the answerers_.

These 2 perspectives contradict each other:

(1) Moderators are useless: The question askers just want to ask their question. There are no "stupid questions". They don't care that their question is a duplicate. Therefore, the mods are just a-holes on a power trip and just get in the way.

(2) Moderators make the site usable: (Unpaid) experts with some spare time to answer questions _don 't want to wade through duplicate questions_ or _do someone else 's homework assignment disguised as a Q&A_, etc. The mods aggressively filter out as much junk as possible to keep the expert answerers from abandoning the site.

When discussing "platform economics", economists often like to identify the "constrained supply" because that dictates where to prioritize efforts. In Uber, the constrained supply is the _drivers_ , not the passengers. In dating apps, the constrained supply is _women_ , not men. In a Q&A website, the constrained supply is the _expert answerers_ and not the question askers. (This matches our intuition that generating new questions is "easy" and a larger population can ask them but answering questions is "hard" and therefore it's a smaller population that can do it.)

Therefore, the mods make the site a little better for the _people answering the questions_.

Another economics thinking framework is Frédéric Bastiat's "seen vs unseen":

\- What's seen : a question gets "closed as off-topic". This action is very _visible_. It feels like an insult to the question asker and adds to the perception that SO is unwelcoming to newbies.

\- What's unseen: cleaned up questions make the queue a little more sane for experts willing to spare time looking for (hopefully interesting) unanswered questions to answer. This positive effect on the queue is _invisible_. It's not easy for experts to comment on moderator actions _they don 't see_ because that's the whole point: filter the queue down to something more manageable and make it less annoying for the answerers.

If you deliberately optimize a new Q&A website for the question askers (i.e. no mods) at the expense of the contributors answering the questions, the experts will avoid it. That leads to a hypothetical website with less answers and lower quality answers. That will make it less popular with the question askers which is opposes the goal of making the site better for those seeking good answers to their questions.

<comment><USER24> This is a perspective I've not heard before and helps me take a less dim view of the SO rules.

While Im pretty sympathetic to the "RTFM" style rules, the one that really annoys me is the prohibition on question that will elicit answeres which are opinion based. It appears to me that experts often love to answer such questions. I don't see how this fits into your framework of making things better for the answeres. Would you disagree?

<comment><USER2> _> , the one that really annoys me is the prohibition on question that will elicit answeres which are opinion based. It appears to me that experts often love to answer such questions. I don't see how this fits into your framework of making things better for the answeres._

I agree that questions seeking opinions are valuable. I'll attempt to explain why opinions are discouraged and then I'll offer up my idea of how they can be added.

The "Q&A" aspect of Stackoverflow is widely misunderstood. From what I've read from SO's creators (Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood), they intended a "wikipedia" style authoritative site that was seeded with questions. But not just with _any_ kind of question; only questions with _objective answers_. Yes, opinions are also valuable but they discourage it because they invite endless _discussion_ and they thought the best place for that was Slashdot/Reddit/HN. Therefore, the ideal question had an objective authoritative answer instead of triggering debate, controversy, and meta-commentary. To add to the issue, the question's "discussion" eventually degrades into arguments with low signal-to- noise ratio. (Fyi if you didn't know: some mods tried to move "opinion questions" to _" programmers.stackexchange.com"_ but that triggered a meta discussion discouraging that[0].)

All that said, I agree that many experts would enjoy providing their opinions on SO and question askers would also benefit from reading them. For opinion- based questions to avoid the problems mentioned in the previous paragraph, SO would have to put restrictions such as... only users with a certain karma threshold (e.g. 10k+) could answer them, and only if the question got a high amount of votes (e.g. 200+) which broadcasts to the community that members are _desperately_ seeking quality opinions. Another rule might be the an answerer must also provide the opposing view to try and minimize bias. Whatever the mechanism, the game theory and secondary effects must be considered so trolls don't degrade the site.

If that was pursued, StackOverflow would be surrendering the original ideal of "no opinion questions"... but on the other hand, they could also embrace it with a new slogan: _" Yes, opinion-based questions are subjective but with our tough rules, StackOverflow has the best collection of high-quality opinions anywhere on the web."_

I'd like to see some good ideas on how to handle opinion-based questions.

[0] [https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/73382/please- stop-u...](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/73382/please-stop-using- softwareengineering-se-as-your-toilet-bowl)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I visit StackOverflow on a daily basis so I haven't seen this - I just tried in incognito mode, and wow, this wasn't an exaggeration!

I've always felt like the owners of SO have had good intentions, and for the most part felt like I trusted them.

But there are now some worrying signs - first they allowed obtrusive ads onto SO, and now this looks like a PI data-grab. Clamouring for PI is always worrying, because it means that PI has _value_ to them - but why?

<comment><USER26> because the questions and answers have not made them enough money. Engagement on the platform is declining due to strict editors and lazy question askers. and with a majority developer audience, the ad blockers are stopping advertising revenue.

this is when a site start compromising its stated morals. not out of greed, but out of necessity.

<comment><USER25> But what of Jobs? Their cheapest package (which allows max 1 job ad at any time) is around $7,500/year. They have 5572 jobs advertised right now, so I guess it's pulling in 30-41M a year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "We <3 people who code"

...so we'll remove a useful home page and replace it with a marketing junk page which confuses everyone.

<comment><USER13> > We less that 3 people who code

No wonder there's no progress on moderation tools and the new ask question page has just been rolled out /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Depressing, hopefully it gets remedied.

Yet another reason to share your knowledge on a blog you control and not give your invaluable content over to someone else's business.

Do these kids of communities all become just crowdsourced content farms in the end?

<comment><USER29> The problem with personal blogs is that they are likely to get labeled as a "personal" site and blocked by some stupid corporate filter.

<comment><USER30> How common is this?

At the smaller companies I've worked for the only filtering was of the big, distracting sites like Facebook.

<comment><USER31> At one of the large companies I've worked before, the corporate filter barred access to [https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html](https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html) because it was a hacking website. Which it cleverly determined, you've guessed it, by checking the URL and seeing it had "hack" in there. _Everything_ with "hack" in the URL was banned.

Pretty sure all those JavaScript ninja hackers they'd hired were a little baffled that they hire hackers but don't let them view nasty hacker pages...

<comment><USER32> I also take it that this company didn't have any offices in es _sex_?

<comment><USER33> Scunthorpe is a common example for this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem)

<comment> D-Coder The standard joke is "Scunthorpe, Arsenal, and Manchester fucking United."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't quite get this. I'm not logged into SO at the moment. I went to the home page, and the first thing I see is "For developers" and "For businesses". I clicked "For developers", and under "Public Q&A" There's a big button "Browse questions". I click that button, and I'm on a page that looks exactly like SO always looks: questions, answers, and a big blue "Ask Question" button.

To ask a question you have to log in, but that's standard practice. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER22> The answer with a score of -49 on the linked thread is a response from SE staff telling us that they've made the change to address the immediate concern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> To be honest: I think SO is in a difficult position here. They're absolutely essential to the software dev community, but their service is incredibly hard to monetize without alienating users.

<comment><USER36> "They're absolutely essential to the software dev community"

Posting a question there has been pointless for years. I also dont think I've seen any answers there via duckduckgo useful to me in a long time. I dont think I'd even notice if it disappeared tomorrow. (I am not a web dev btw)

<comment><USER37> > Posting a question there has been pointless for years.

Isn't that mainly because it's already been answered? (Apart from new tags) I've got dozens of questions on my SO account, but it's been quite a while since I wrote one now.

<comment><USER36> No, The trend I noticed starting years ago, which according to various articles Ive seen is now complete and institutionalized there, is that:

High ranked mod/troll types, who seem to spend all day there trying to get more karma for some reason, constantly cruise for new questions. They dont know much about programming in general, and have zero knowledge of my specialist field for example. If they see a question that superficialy resembles or shares certain keywords with another one they will close it as being answered already (pretty much acting like particularly dumb bots) even if it has nothing to do with the existing question, or if the existing question is massively out of date and irrelevant because of updates to the software in question.

<comment><USER37> You may have a point there. It happens quite often that I google for something, and the article containing the answer is marked closed or off- topic.

<comment><USER24> Yes. Some of the best, most valuable questions and answers are closed for pedantic reasons.

<comment><USER38> I upvoted you and the gp, but I also would like to point out that the useful answer often still arrives before the pendatic closure.

Some of my own questions followed that route, without being dupe questions and while being a code-based success or fail state. The closure of tickets is detrimental to the site, but somehow, it's still worth asking a question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The response here is over the top. SO have been building Teams for some three years now. I know because I signed my company up for the beta, but we weren't in a position to try it when it became available. The value prop should be obvious. It would archive and surface institutional knowledge.

Many companies are currently using Slack for this, but then your search terms have to be precise to reveal what you're looking for. And if you're on the free plan, your data will eventually get deleted.

Obviously this doesn't affect the free product.

<comment><USER40> How does that value proposition for an organization of 100 compare to Confluence?

Comparing it to slack, I believe, is a apples to oranges. Slack isn't a knowledge management system and was never meant to be.

<comment><USER39> I haven't used Confluence but I imagine one advantage SO Teams would have is familiarity. Many developers/engineers already know about its benefits and how it works.

Yes, apples and oranges with Slack. But if you've ever found yourself searching Slack for some piece of knowledge from a colleague then you've used it for that off label use case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Running a business is hard. It takes cash. As others have said (and better) it is likely that they're doing this in the hopes of raising cash. Not because they are jerks, but because they need to. So they can eat. I worry this tactic may kill the golden goose eventually, though! Newcomers may be daunted by this experience, but I'm sure they thought of that and have tested it. Easy enough to pay some college kids for an afternoon. I suspect that SO is enough of a (hacker) "household name" that newcomers will already know the legends with no help from any marketing team. As others have said, primary access is by way of search engine results.

It would be tricky to do it well and proper, but perhaps they could introduce monetary rewards for question. Take a cut of transactions, pass on cash to recipients. Could obfuscate the % of the cut by using tokens or similar.

I've definitely received answers so good I'd have paid for them! I've also had questions that were difficult enough to warrant attaching a real monetary bounty.

Perhaps another angle would be something like CodeMentor. A system where you could pay someone to mentor you, but buying from a user profile backed by the credibility of answering questions on the subject at hand.

</comment><comment><USER42> They need to do more with the World building section. It's fun and educational

</comment><comment><USER43> Not sure where SO would have been without google obviously giving it a leg up for all these years. I literally cannot for the life of me find another search engine that brings me to the correct question no matter how vague my search terms are.

<comment><USER44> Exploiting Google's SEO was the plan from the very beginning. They just did an excellent job of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Sounds like quora implosion v2

</comment><comment><USER46> Lately I have seen many SO clones on google which show crawled SO content or translated copies. Maybe google does not care ir actively try to sink SO?

</comment><comment><USER47> There is a big search box at the top of the page. Type in what is foo? and see answers.

</comment><comment><USER48> In all my years, this is literally the first time I see the Stack Overflow home page. Why would I ever want to go there? All the information is in the pages with questions and answers.

<comment><USER49> I used to go to stackoverflow.com to check for the new questions and write answers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Sounds like an argument for a decentralized knowledgebase, similar to how P2P social networking services work (ala Matrix?)

<comment><USER51> It was already there, the usenet newsgroups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is like Google not allowing free use of its search</comment>


Japan's earthquake early warning system - <AUTHOR> http://blog.japantimes.co.jp/japan-pulse/an-early-warning-system-in-every-pocket/

<comment><AUTHOR> With the probability of a major earthquake on the Hayward or San Andreas faults at 76% within 30 years, we need to invest in a similar system. How can we make this happen?</comment>


Amazon Kindle 2 Slated For "Early Q1″ - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/25/amazon-kindle-2-slated-for-early-q1/ <comment><USER2> When the kindle launched my reaction was "What?" then the idea grew on me. I now want one, but only if the price is right. Has there been any decent tip offs on what the price for Kindle 2 might be?

</comment><comment><USER3> Of the books I read in the past year, the bulk were strong recommendations by friends who then proceeded to say, no really, read this, and then GAVE ME the book. If the Kindle platform eventually gained the ability to "give" your copy to a single other user (who could then give it again) then I would buy. Without even that very limited re-sale right, I could care less.</comment>


Opera 15 released - <AUTHOR> http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2013/07/02/opera-15 <comment><USER3> I'm downloading it right now. But based on first impression, and reason why I started using Opera in first place, it may alienate users.

I started using it because I was on a slow connection and back then, Opera was a 10 MB internet package. It had email, download manager, chat and everything.

I am not sure about these features but size is 29.7 MB! Curious, did it increase just because of brink?

<comment><USER4> It alienated me. I like Opera 12 very much. But the things I like are missing in 15. Tab-screenshots for example.

And the overall look and feel is just Chrome. So I think people will skip Opera 15 and download Chrome instead. Or they will stick to Opera 12 like I will.

Strange. The new mobile versions doesn't get a lot of positive reviews and now this one. I hope Opera didn't loose track.

<comment><USER5> regarding "tab-screenshots": Opera calls them visual Tabs. The linked article says "Right now, we are focusing on synchronization (aka Opera Link), enhanced tab management (visual tabs and so on) and support for themes – and these are just a few of the features you can expect to find soon in our next releases!"

<comment><USER6> these two things (better tab management and synchronization) are what restrain me from updating.

Also the kind of bookmarks "stash" is not searchable in search bar, which is not really handy

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I didn't expect them to release a stable build this fast. The current build is still lacking a lot of features which might alienate some users forever.

And while they didn't add native bookmark support (they really seem to want to push this) they have released an official bookmark extension which is also a work in progress. You can get it here: [https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/bookmarks- man...](https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/bookmarks-manager/)

<comment><USER8> > The current build is still lacking a lot of features which might alienate > some users forever.

This is one of the things I severely dislike about HN - comments for the sake of commenting, or as someone else might put it - the "no sh*t Sherlock comments". Your point here is discussed in the original story, so there is no reason for you to state the obvious, wasting people's time when they read your comment. Don't worry, you're far from being the only one doing this around here.

"We have neither asked nor forced our 12.x users to upgrade to Opera 15, as we know that some features that are important to you are still to come. So, while you are very welcome to test and use Opera 15, Opera 12.x will still be alive for some time. You can expect that we will keep Opera 12.x up to date and secure. In the future, once we are comfortable with the feature set, we may ask you to upgrade."

<comment><USER9> The thing is, while they may bugfix 12, it is now a dead platform. There are a ton of features in 12 that it is looking likely will never come back but they won't say what is coming back.

Looking at every Opera threat it is clear they have alienated many users already and the way they are responding to those users it's clear they want them gone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> More in-depth release message on their developer blog: [http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2013/07/02/introducing- opera-1...](http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2013/07/02/introducing-opera-15-for- desktop-and-a-fast-release-cycle)

</comment><comment><USER10> I am unable to download version 15 for linux, probably it doesn't exist.

<comment><USER11> I wonder if they will still support freebsd with blink based opera.

<comment><USER5> All I have heard is "Linux will follow", no mention of FreeBSD so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Users who may be alienated from this new version will probably not ever hear of it. It's kind of a beta, you can play with it but it's not ready, I mean what did you expect so fast?

I think it shows the Opera team is motivated and tackles the engine switch fiercely.

<comment><USER13> They should definitely move this from their homepage. Right now it's the default download = BAD IDEA. Considering the font antialiasing problems and all the missing features, the should probably make it the default download around 16 or maybe even 17.

They're rushing it and it might hurt them badly. Reputation loss is hard to recover from :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was excited of the switch to WebKit, but I expected a straight under the covers replacement of just the rendering engine. As in if you didnt follow the news, you wouldnt be any wiser. The UI changes are unwelcome.

<comment><USER13> This is the initial, rough port to Blink. I'm quite sure that as development advances it will look a lot less like Chrome and a lot more like Opera.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The UI of Opera 12.5 on Linux is way faster than the UI of Chrome, Firefox. Tab opening for example is significantly faster. Back, Forward buttons also provide faster results. See it for yourself.

</comment><comment><USER16> This has so many missing features that I would expect from an Opera browser. Lots of seemingly little things that add up (where's the mouse chording!)

Where is this bleeding edge Opera Developer version that they mention in the post available for download, so I can at least see if the little things that have kept me on Opera for 9 years are in the pipeline?

</comment><comment><USER17> Bring back embedding folders in folders in the bookmarks (Speed Dial) and it's a winner. I was an Opera user for years but moved to Chrome when the odd site would break now and then.

I'd love to go back to Opera, I'm actually quite a fan of the new v15 but the lack of folders in folders in bookmarks is a dealbreaker for me.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow, this is fast! Then again so was Chrome when I didn't bog it down with all my preferences, extensions, etc. Off-Road looks like a rebranding of their Turbo feature, which was my main reason for using Opera in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER19> Still no Love for Linux :(

</comment><comment><USER20> "Although most users don't use bookmarks"

Wow. I'm sure they have the data to back that up. I guess most people now get the news from their Facebook stream perhaps.

<comment><USER6> I think they say that in the way of a left bookmark pannel.

The new stash feature is IMHO a better way to do bookmarks as you get a quick glance at the page and you can even search for words inside the pages.

However, I do not currently use this release because it lacks a lot of _important_ features:

->ability to stack tabs in expandables groups

->no opera link (bookmark sync), even if they do it with stash

->stash is not searchable via the address bar (huge step backward in my opinion)

->I use opera turbo daily (now called off road mode) and I miss the F12 menu to switch it on (you can also disable JS, accept popups, etc in the same menu)

In an unrelated note they could improve custom search engines to display a logo of the site (like they did for google, wikipedia yahoo bing and amazon) I have a lot of "custom search engines" and they just appear the same way as a magnifying glass

for the plus side: think it's a good thing that they got rid of the search bar as you can search in the address bar anyway

EDIT: typo

<comment><USER21> Stash feature is only great if you have a small amount of bookmarks. If you say, have like 1000+ accumulated since first using Opera in 2003, then stash is not so desirable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I hope IE realises like Opera and move to either Gecko or WebKit...All web devs will be happy :D

</comment><comment><USER9> I was an Opera user for more than a decade. Opera 15 is unusable.

</comment><comment><USER23> When are they planning to release Opera 15 for Humans?

</comment><comment><USER24> Does it have Tab-Overflow?

</comment><comment><USER22> is it webkit based??..

<comment><USER25> Yes, from the About Opera menu item:

 _Browser identification

... AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.52 Safari/537.36 OPR/15.0.1147.130_

<comment><USER26> I really like the "OPR" thing to subtly avoid UA sniffing :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't get the point of Opera anymore.

<comment><USER28> Well, it's the only mainstream alternative Chromium-based browser for Windows and Mac at this point? Also, only half jokingly, it also comes non-NSA- approved (because it's Norwegian).

Considering this is the first version of a product seemingly built from scratch it features a LOT more than any other browser had on their first public releases. I expect a lot of innovation here in the coming months based on Opera's track record. It has the makings of being a great browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> 15 releases and still almost nobody uses it. Couple of years ago Opera was a solid browser and a great hope. Today it's on the verge of being forgotten.

<comment><USER30> Why nobody? Opera is quite popular in some communities/regions.

<comment><USER29> Right now Opera has 1.6% of market share. Safari - 4.1%. Back in 2011 - <USER2> had 2.5% and Safari 4.0%. You can actually see that Opera is in bad shape. And probably you're right - Opera might be popular in some communities. Globally though - it doesn't matter and its market share is actually shrinking.

<comment><USER31> I bet if Opera will be default browser in OS X it will be more popular than Safari.

<comment><USER32> This is a great point to bring up. Safari and IE get a sort of default market share given that they ship with a mainstream OS.

<comment><USER31> I think you choose your browser in Windows before you use it (at least in Europe). // I'm not sure I agree with this law, but it for sure affects browser share.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup, devvox.com - <AUTHOR>

http://www.devvox.com/
Devvox is an online network that aims to give people the voice they should have for anything they want to share.
When you create an account, you can post either an update, a discussion, a quote or even a photo and other people can find new content by using the Discover Page.
People can also post something into Topics such as Startups, Tech etc... which allows users to Follow these topics and get new content in what they are interested.
I have been around HN for some time but mostly browsing and reading... so i thought i would give HN Community a shot and hopefully get some feedback for my first startup.
Thanks for checking it out!
EDIT: here is a link for those who dont want to wait for an invitation link: http://www.devvox.com/invited/from/dvx <comment><USER2> In 5 minutes I could probably compile a list of 20 failed startups that tried to do something similar. In 10 seconds I can show you 5 sites that did it right. This space is full, there is no room for your startup and unless you pivot into a product that actually solves a pain, you will fail.

Take a close look at Reddit. They own this space.

Also, what you describe above is essentially a social network. How are you any different than say... Facebook? I can share my links, photos, quotes, etc.. there. 800,000,000 users a month login. Everyone I know is on it. Why would I bother with devvox?

<comment><AUTHOR> Users can create topics where they can post their thoughts and also follow the topics their interested in... so when you post something you want it to be heard other people can find it easily... that's basically what we're trying to solve...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> we're doing something similar at Dialoggs [1], where people can have private discussions for collaboration (with file uploads, embeds, etc.) as well as public Dialoggs about whatever topics you want. for example, i created <http://dialog.gs/amir/cloudplay> where all the beta testers of my app can post feedback, etc.

it's really hard to differentiate in such a crowded space. i'd focus on a superniche and nail it right, even if you only have a small number of loyal users. don't call yourself a social network because you won't be delivering on that promise (we don't call Dialoggs that either since it's a ghost town compared to the giants) in the beginning.

also, i'd work on improving the logged-out experience. much like twitter used to have a public timeline on their frontpage iirc, you could show the latest content on there.

[1] <http://dialog.gs>

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciated the feedback ammmir! Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is looks like on Chrome 22, on Linux (ignore the white box on the right): <http://i.imgur.com/qW87o.png>

<comment><AUTHOR> I really don't have Linux at the moment... but i just tested it on Windows 7 using Chrome 22 and it seems to be working fine... are you sure that aren't any plugins that cause the problem?

edit: could you give it another shot and tell me if its fixed now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't like the design. It reminds me very much of something like Digg.

Reddit's format works for a reason.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have a specific page where its design doesn't work for you?

<comment><USER5> The search results page, in particular, but overall the centered, narrow-width layout really doesn't do it for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> well everything is fixed-width for a reason... for example, the posts are on a 601 pixel width... if i increase it to fit the search input field in the search page it wouldn't appear as good as on the designed width also there would be too white space... we are open in suggestions that could improve the site experience

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This sounds a lot like reddit, or even pintrest. What's your differentiator?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comment!

We are really most on giving users new content on what their interesting in and finding out whats new...

Pinterest is most likely a photo-sharing community where Devvox allows you to share from a variety of options and make sure it reach your audience... as for reddit which i will be honest i dont really use it... looks like more of a link-heaven kind-of...

<comment><USER6> Reddit allows to post just text, or share a link. Commonly, when someone wants to share an image, they upload it to another site (usually imgur.com, in the case of reddit), then link to it. This way, reddit ends up sharing a very large amount of images/photos.

One suggestion I have would be to have actual content on the splash page to pull me in. Pintrest, Digg, reddit, tumblr, HN and other sites usually let you see what people are posting to see if it interests you, before requiring sign up/sign in. In this case, I see your site, but I see no reason why I should bother signing up. Some examples of popular posts, or new things that people are sharing would be helpful to pull people in.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are planning on revamping our landing page so as you said, to include some posts whether it be popular or new posts... this is definitely into our todo list... thanks for your suggestion

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable: <http://www.devvox.com/></comment>


Ticketmaster Migrates Infrastructure to AWS - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/02/17/for-those-about-to-rock-ticketmaster-migrates-infrastructure-to-aws/ <comment><USER2> Well after skimming this PR Ad piece for AWS, I have to wonder if AWS gave a discount to Ticketmaster with a PR testimonial in return as part of its contract terms.

<comment><USER3> I'm slightly less cynical. I'm certain they got a steep discount - it doesn't make financial sense othewise - but it's in the interest of Ticketmaster too to use this as a PR opportunity so I don't think there's really any reason to "buy" PR for these deals. Both sides will love any opportunity to highlight how they're making big important deals with each other whether or not there's money involved.</comment></comment>


Primer on Neural Network Models for Natural Language Processing[pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~yogo/nnlp.pdf <comment><USER2> Yoav is one of the smartest guys in this space. He and Omer Levy also wrote a great explanation of word2vec:

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.3722v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.3722v1.pdf) [https://levyomer.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/word2vec- explained...](https://levyomer.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/word2vec-explained- deriving-mikolov-et-al-s-negative-sampling-word-embedding-method/)

<comment><USER3> I found that explanation to focus almost entirely on the negative sampling, not explaining too much of the actual Skip-Gram and CBOW-models.

However as I've understood it, the negative-sampling is a big part in why those models are so calculation-efficient, combined with Hierarchical Softmax to reduce the complexity further.

<comment><USER4> This current article seems to cover the various choices for constructing 'contexts' (which include skip-gram and CBOW) pretty well.

Note that negative-sampling and hierarchical-softmax are actually _alternative_ choices to interpret the hidden-layer and to arrive at error- values to back-propagate. Each can be used completely independently.

If you enable them both, you're training two independent hidden layers, which then in an interleaved fashion update the same shared input-vectors. (Essentially, it's joint training of each example via the hierarchical-softmax codepath to nudge the vectors, then via the separate negative-sampling codepath to nudge the vectors.) So the actual combination doesn't reduce the complexity – it's additive to model state size and training time – and I think most projects with large amounts of data just use one or the other (usually just negative-sampling).

<comment><USER3> Ah, thank you for pointing that out. I guess I got confused in all the papers I've read on the topic recently. It's hard to get into.

However, I would still not agree that the comment-linked article explaining negative sampling really explains how word2vec works, well enough, or maybe I just didn't understand.

Either way I recommend looking at this article as well if anyone wants to understand word2vec. [http://www- personal.umich.edu/~ronxin/pdf/w2vexp.pdf](http://www- personal.umich.edu/~ronxin/pdf/w2vexp.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice paper. I especially like how he has equations, pseudo-code, and Python code snippets. He could turn this paper into a book, adding full Python examples, and I would buy a copy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Huh, I wrote a few pages on neural networks for Natural Language Processing just a few days ago. Too bad I didn't have access to this. It seems to mention all the different kinds of networks I figured to be relevant to mention, and it has a comprehensive explanation on Recursive Neural Networks, which I didn't really find.

Nice one.

<comment><USER6> I glanced through the entire PDF. While it looks like an outstanding comprehensive overview to neural networks, it doesn't appear to really address NLP all that much, despite the title.

I would gladly welcome if you or someone could write a guide that has the comprehensiveness of the PDF above but with more NLP domain-specific discussion and concrete examples.

<comment><USER7> I think you should give it another look because, by my observation of the PDF, it's most definitely all about NN-based NLP.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Armchair Athletes – Free College and Pro Football Pickem Leagues - <AUTHOR> http://www.armchairathletes.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Any college or NFL football fans here? Would love some feedback on our new pick'em app.</comment>


Ask HN: How does it feel to trend on Hacker News? - <AUTHOR>

Does this glory last for a long time, or is it for just the days on which the news trends?<p>Looking forward to answers from people who have experienced the amazing moment and have seen some drastic changes in their Analytics count. <comment><USER2> It lasts for a couple of hours (or a day if it's _really_ popular).

What's much better than the (relatively short) visitors spike, is the discussion. If it's an article, the comments are often quite insigthful. If it's a Show HN post, the feedback is very constructive and can be quite helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you see first time users being converted to dedicated users or are they mostly interested in just watching the new product trending?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The only real effect I see is I tend to pick up a few Twitter followers and I like to read the comments that result because they tend to be intelligent, insightful and often challenging.

<comment><AUTHOR> Challenging, in way of proposing another solutions to the problem you just solved, or asking for more features in the product?

<comment><USER4> In my case, both. HN users are not the typical web surfer. They will provide insightful criticism of your work/opinions without using personal attacks. This is the most powerful feature of HN. Trending here is like getting a thousand years of advice in a few hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> true.. and it has also become the first place to get reviews for your Hack by a large group of Tech savy audience(one which is hard to get at least for the weekend hacks).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GeForce RTX Propels PC Gaming's Golden Age with Real-Time Ray Tracing - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/08/20/geforce-rtx-real-time-ray-tracing/ <comment><USER2> Bah. I am much more interested in their "Scene AI", I think they are branding it NGX, but I can't tell.

Basically, an AI has access to the scene geometry and the renderer is feeding it information as the scene is rendered. As the scene completes, the AI begins to learn hidden surfaces and other aspects of the scene. It starts to fill in pixels for the renderer, and after enough of the scene is understood, the AI takes over, finishing the render.

Infinity more interesting than ray tracing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Props for NVIDIA for taking this courageous step. A huge amount of the die is devoted to RT and Tensor Cores. This is something like the second biggest chip ever made? It would have been the easiest thing in the world to jam the chip full of traditional CUDA cores and just have a faster traditional card without pushing forward visual quality but I'm super happy that nvidia is finally bringing us the future.

</comment><comment><USER4> Discussed here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17802237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17802237)

</comment><comment><USER5> > with high-end GeForce GPUs resulting in 1.5x the kill/death ratio in battle > royale games.

Resulting in...? Please.

</comment><comment><USER6> Huh? The golden age of PC gaming was like 10 years ago and could run on a 8800GT perfectly.</comment>


Weirdest Things Said and Done in Job Interviews - <AUTHOR> http://quickbase.intuit.com/blog/2013/07/09/10-weirdest-things-said-and-done-in-job-interviews/ <comment><USER2> Guess what? Employers do weird shit during interviews, too. Cuts both ways.

<comment><USER3> You must have liked #8. Haha.</comment></comment>


Warren Buffett Buys World's Largest Solar Project from SunPower for $2.5 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/warren-buffett-buys-worlds-largest-solar-project-sunpower-25-billion.html <comment><USER3> The SunPower facility has already sold its power under long-term contracts to SoCal Edison: [http://www.elp.com/articles/2013/01/antelope-valley-solar- pr...](http://www.elp.com/articles/2013/01/antelope-valley-solar-projects- will-generate-579-mw-for-southern-california-edison.html)

So from Buffett's perspective this just looks like a bond. I don't think it's a bet for or against solar, but rather a bet on deferred cash vs present cash (so on interest rates).

<comment><USER4> I wasn't expecting this comment in Hacker News. I can only agree. Indeed, this is an investment with a risk/return profile of a utility, not the technology.

<comment><USER5> The telling point, and why this is on HN, is the important threshold that a seasoned investor can buy solar to make money for the purpose of making money.

<comment><USER6> ... thanks to government subsidies. This is still not an industry that is profitable on its own.

<comment><USER5> It seems a fair argument until you notice that oil is subsidized too though the relationship of these subsidies and how they compete with eachother is complicated and not worth debating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Am a huge follower of Charlie Munger, and I re-read his writings every so often ( [http://www.tilsonfunds.com/motley_berkshire_charlie_speeches...](http://www.tilsonfunds.com/motley_berkshire_charlie_speeches.php) ). What the two of them do is so much of a one-trick pony. They always seek massive rent capture via outright purchase of a corp with a very large moat. Then reduce the fiat risk by converting the cash into non-fiat income producing assets. This way they lock in wealth preservation regardless of what happens to the fiat. When I lived in New Mexico for a bunch of years, there was one constant - the incessant back and forth of the trains carrying coal containers from one end of the country to the other, and on the return trip carrying giant walmart containers shipped from China to the US ports, to their destinations in the rest of the mainland US. Everybody knew BNSF was the coronary artery of the US. One day I remarked to my wife - just you watch, Buffett is going to own BNSF. And then when it happened, she was like - <USER2> did you know ?! Its just so obvious. This SunPower thing was on the cards too. Prediction: He'll buy Vestas. Or Nordex. Just you watch...ofcourse you can't time these trades. Nobody knows the when, but the what is fairly well known at this point.

<comment><USER8> Could you explain what this means? I don't understand your terminology

 _They always seek massive rent capture via outright purchase of a corp with a very large moat._

<comment><USER7> > I don't understand your terminology

I think you do :) Probably you disagree with the characterization. I don't see why rent capture generally has such a negative connotation outside of finance circles. Its a perfectly legitimate strategy. And who has a larger moat than BNSF or Vestas or SunPower ? Even if you were a Zuckerberg you couldn't build these things in decades. Takes forever just to buy the land, spec out these things & get the specs approved by regulatory bodies. So if you could buy these concerns outright, you would. You would buy, whether it was making solar power or your underwear. ( He owns the largest underwear maker Fruit of the Loom ). Given the asymmetric info advantage he has, he's sold millions of puts expiring in 2019 & is sitting on top of billions in premium ( while simultaneously telling the American public that derivatives are instruments of the devil :) Got to park those assets someplace, otherwise fiat risks accumulate. His stock purchases for 2012 are quite ho-hum...utilities, banks, big media ( [http://static.cdn- seekingalpha.com/uploads/2012/12/4/sauploa...](http://static.cdn- seekingalpha.com/uploads/2012/12/4/saupload_Berkshire-13F-Q3-2012-Update_1.jpg) )

<comment><USER9> > I don't see why rent capture generally has such a negative connotation > outside of finance circles.

Well, it violates a lot of views of how the market "should" operate, on both the left and the right. On the right, some simplified versions of free-market views assume relatively perfect, efficient markets will normally develop absent government distortion, so they're suspicious of areas where rent is being extracted as probably due to some kind of intervention preventing a proper free market from operating. And on the left, many see rent-extraction as a paradigmatic example of the power of capital relative to labor (the ability of passive rent-extractors to in effect collect a "tax" from active economic activity).

<comment><USER10> people who do not own "rent producing assets" have a bias towards those who do, because a "rent producing asset" is something that gives the owner money, without the owner producing value, other than making the asset available. It is basically a facet of jealousy if you ask me...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a feeling that this is not an investment to Buffet, but rather a means for him to influence the market. People now follow his investments religiously, and an investment like this in to solar could spur a lot of people to make similar capital investments.

In effect, Buffet is now making a _demand_ for green companies for copy-cat investors to invest in.

<comment><USER12> If by "not an investment", you mean that he doesn't believe that it will throw off more net-present value cash than a similar investment in the S&P, then I strongly disagree.

He may think that it would not have done that without his investment -- so it could be both, but Buffet promises investors that cash will be deployed more efficiently than you could by just buying an S&P index fund.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, I should clarify :]

I don't think this isn't an investment, but I think there were motivations beyond purely investment; and having heard him speak and read what he has written, I am taking a guess that he was motivated out of an idea to influence good (while still making a sound investment).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is most likely a tax play. Renewable energy projects are almost always financed through tax incentives that can be used to offset tax liabilities elsewhere. Could be seen as hypocritical of Buffet considering his recent musings that rich people should pay their fair share. Here he is trying to avoid taxes.

<comment><USER14> First of all, he's not personally buying it, so it's not like this would reduce his personal taxes. Secondly, your first sentence is clearly speculative, but then you act as if it's definitely true for the rest of your comment - do you have any evidence for this whatsoever?

<comment><USER13> You are correct. Berkshire Hathaway would benefit, not him personally. The tax credits are a big reason these things get built. There is a 30% solar tax credit that can be passed through to owners against other income.

[http://www.dsireusa.org/incentives/incentive.cfm?Incentive_C...](http://www.dsireusa.org/incentives/incentive.cfm?Incentive_Code=US02F)

The reason this may not be a tax play for him is that ConEdison or SunPower may have already stripped the tax credits from the project and sold them independently. This means there may only be a long term investment vehicle that insurance-type companies like to hold. But someone benefited from the tax credits and I wouldn't be surprised if they were part of the deal.

<comment><USER15> According to your link, the tax credit is only available to the original installer of the solar facility, i.e., the solar plant in this case. In order to take advantage of the creditk, the solar plant company would have to file a consolidated return with Berkshire Hathaway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It will be interesting to see where the energy market will be in the next ten years. I do believe that at some point people will need new forms of energy since the forms we currently have are too expensive (or getting to expensive) for the average person to afford. Since the market needs the majority of people (in the popular cases) to need their energy, maybe it will adapt. I would like to see some more competition in the market of energy; in most small cities in the midwest and some of the larger ones there are virtual monopolies allowed by the cities. This is sad, and I think the business sector can do a lot better. Warren Buffet paying into solar is a promising sign, however I think there needs to be a lot invested in brand new technologies that havent been created yet.

<comment><USER17> I know I've noticed a boost in the amount of properties that have solar in my area in just the past few years. Solar pool heaters are very common now too.

With companies offering financing for the sell-back programs with solar it's going to improve, I know bungalows in our area that can get a decent sized system installed can make about $2200 a year, pay nothing for the installation of the system, and get tax cuts. Smaller systems are still worth it, you're just not going to get many people paying $10,000 up front for a few kilowatt system that'll take 7-8 years to pay back.

I expect as efficiency in systems go up there'll be a huge improvement in the numbers of people with solar. I know with the current systems I can only get a 2-3KW system on my roof (the south facing portion), which isn't worth it with the install costs, etc required for the sell-back programs. In 10 years when the solar panels being sold are close to the efficiency we see in labs today, it will be cost effective for just about every property in a suburban area to get solar systems set up.

We're literally on the precipice of a power revolution. I wouldn't be surprised if we see architecture change to increase the amount of south facing roof to increase the amount of energy properties can get. Imagine when the majority of power for cities is being supplied by the suburbs surrounding them.

Any abundance in electricity will absolutely fuck the natural gas market. I know running an electric furnace in my area costs about 50% more than natural gas, but when home owners are making more money from their solar system than they're consuming, electric furnaces and hot water heaters will break peoples energy expenses even. Paying $0 a month for all your utilities, or even getting paid per month, will change the entire energy market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article significantly misconstrues Buffets investment style. He does invest for value. But he doesn't even think whether a stock has "bottomed in the market price". Predicting when a stock has "bottomed" is not possible as it's dependent on the whims of an irrational market.

The first half of this statement is correct and the second half is completely wrong: "He only buys when he's sure that an asset is undervalued and is likely to have bottomed in market price."

</comment><comment><USER19> Isn't this something of a contrarian bet on solar technology, and energy technology more generally?

If you anticipate technology improving or prices for energy coming down, you wouldn't invest in today's technology.

<comment><USER11> Prices come down due to scaling of existing manufacturing -- which benefits the players who bet early to invest in those processes.

You're mixing the cost to the consumer with the investment return.

<comment><USER19> He didn't invest in a solar cell manufacturer, he bought a couple of solar energy plants - mostly fixed cost, variable revenue.

If energy prices come down, he will lose money.

<comment><USER20> Fixed revenue usually. Actually to be more precise, fixed price, but declining revenue because the production goes down as the panels (and inverters) degrade. Usually assumed to be .5% per year. The contracts with SCE are typically not based on market prices.

<comment><USER19> Thanks - that's helpful to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I really really hope that Solar energy takes off and is affordable/feasible enough to be used by consumer households. Yes we still are not quite convinced by it and probably not there yet, but imagine if we did.

</comment><comment><USER22> This actually fits Buffet's investment model. He tends to purchase only when a company is down or undervalued and then plays the long angle. He's not a trend investor, he invests based on assets and P/E, etc. AKA "Traditional" value investing methods pioneered by his mentor Benjamin Graham.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm surprised that the largest solar project is only worth $2.5 billion.

</comment><comment><USER24> It goes all along the profit way for buffet. Save TAX , make huge profit , CONTROL (energy, news media, etc) So its not about solar per sè its about profit , most probably Long-Term profit.

</comment><comment><USER25> What a buy.</comment>