The Invisible American - <AUTHOR> http://www.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/195680/invisible-american.aspx <comment><USER2> Small business doesn't get the support it needs from government, in terms of ease of starting & doing business. In places like Singapore you can have a legal firm chartered in an hour. It took a couple of weeks for some friends & I to get an LLC set up (receive the paperwork from the Secretary of State).

I think this is due in part to your Senator/Congressman not really knowing any small businessmen. All the lobbyists he sees are from large corporations. And he doesn't interact with a local dry cleaner, barber, or auto repair, as those services are provided by the capitol complex. If they did, they'd be more aligned with their needs.

<comment><USER3> It took me 30 minutes to set up my C-corp in Colorado. You just go online and register.. pay $50 and pick a name. What did you do?

<comment><USER4> It's a spectrum. One of my buddies started an LLC in NY. I'm just going to quote him:

      New York State:
      1. When you incorporate an LLC in this state, they require you to publish your LLC's incorporation in two different newspapers, at a cost of about $1200. They choose the newspapers.
      2. Their LLC incorporation website only works during business hours. Yes, that's right. The website only works 9 to 5.
      3. They can only receive information by fax and mail and the fax numbers don't work.

<comment><USER5> I was under the impression that if you want to start an LLC, you do it in Delaware if you ever want to upgrade to a C corporation or be acquired, in Nevada if you worry about taxes, in Wyoming if you want privacy, or in New Mexico if you want anonymity.

Then you register it as a foreign corporation with your state's Secretary of State.

Incorporating in your own state is unnecessary, unless you have a fixed business location that is always staffed during business hours, and are keen on avoiding registered agent fees.

Just incorporate in Delaware. Administration of U.S. corporations is their cash cow. They can't afford to make the process too burdensome, or some other state will eat their lunch.

<comment><USER3> People say that a lot. The truth is, if you don't get acquired/ipo it won't matter. If you do, you'll hire an expensive lawyer anyways and they will move it and handle anything related.

Its easier just to do it in your own state. If it ever really matters, you'll have a ton of money and an expensive lawyer to deal with it for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who supports all business large and small, the #1 thing the government needs to do is get everyone taxed at the same rate. Large companies who can play games with taxes, moving profits offshore, loopholes, etc. wind up with 0 to 20% corporate tax rate while small businesses who can't afford to figure that out pay full freight of 35%. I don't know what the solution is, but until this is figured out, an enormous subsidy and competitive advantage is given to big business which small businesses cannot possibly match.

<comment><USER7> What would happen if we shifted away from income tax to property taxes and import tariffs at the federal level? (adjusted as needed to be "revenue neutral")

<comment><USER8> Property taxes are usually the county's way of generating revenue. Assuming the Federal Government could come up with mileage rates for the entire country and survive the huge backlash from the transition...

Businesses with small footprints would see a tax benefit. Businesses would probably start implementing mandatory work from home policies and reduce their office space. Most businesses rent so property holders would feel the tax burden and rents would go up significantly. Businesses would also start moving to locations with cheaper mileage rates. Businesses would start downsizing their office spaces at the detriment of employees. Businesses have already started the practice of selling their property assets and then renting them for other reasons, this would only increase. In the end you'd be penalizing businesses that need store fronts to operate and encouraging more teleworking.

Tariffs would only affect a small portion of business and you might see an increase in manufacturing in the US but that would depend on the property taxes.

With both you'd be missing large business segments. Service providers that don't need physical locations or produce products would have to pay no taxes? That's basically a potential free ride for any call center operator, software development firm, or any other company that can outsource or telework it's staff.

<comment><USER9> > Most businesses rent so property holders would feel the tax burden and rents > would go up significantly.

Property holders would feel the tax burden, decreasing the net revenue from rent, and decreasing property values.

Rents are already at "market rates", and property values adjust to reflect the return on renting property. There might be some short-term price fluctuations as property owners try to maintain their existing margins, but an efficient market for real estate will stabilize rents close to the existing prices. The real losers would be those who purchased real estate assets expecting a consistent future return.

<comment><USER10> > Rents are already at "market rates",

Rents are at market rates given current market conditions. Increasing costs to hold property by imposing new taxes on property holders decreases supply of rental property -- that is, it reduces the quantity supplied at any given price point -- which, with a normally-shaped demand curve, decreases the quantity traded and increases the market clearing price.

Market prices aren't independent of market conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > The percentage of Americans who say they are in the middle or upper-middle > class has fallen 10 percentage points, from a 61% average between 2000 and > 2008 to 51% today.

This statistic is psychological. Americans want to be middle class and tend to identify as such even if their income does not fall into what is considered a "middle class income" (lower or higher).

So, while it is significant that fewer people identify as middle class, it is not clear what that actually means. And we certainly shouldn't take it for granted that everyone who no longer identifies as middle class has seen a salary drop from 65k to 28k.

<comment><USER12> It's still pretty interesting. Historically Americans have always considered themselves middle class, regardless of whether they were on food stamps, received EITC, or drove a Bugatti. The fact that now many more people are identifying themselves as poor or working class is a shift toward the international norm, which might presage a change in America's political "exceptionality."

<comment><USER13> > The fact that now many more people are identifying themselves as poor or > working class is a shift toward the international norm, which might presage > a change in America's political "exceptionality."

I really fear that it may. Once folks realise that they can make their lives better (in the short term at least) by using State violence to rob those who are better off (rather than through hard work), the long-term results are going to be ugly.

<comment><USER14> You seem to be doing that extreme-libertarian thing where you call taxes "robbery" while ignoring the negative economic effects of the general lack of safety nets in the US.

You may want to read up on the concept of the "tragedy of the commons" first.

<comment><USER13> > You seem to be doing that extreme-libertarian thing where you call taxes > "robbery" while ignoring the negative economic effects of the general lack > of safety nets in the US.

I don't know what else you would call threatening people with deadly force unless they give the threatener money, other than 'robbery.'

You'll note that I didn't say that taxes aren't necessary: they are. They are, in fact, almost the textbook definition of a necessary evil: we must have them, and they are evil. We don't live in a perfect world.

What concerns me is that we have already raised the economic footprint of the State far beyond what is necessary, and that it is in fact deadweight holding us all back — to include the poor, whose ultimate interests are served not by dragging down the rich, but by being lifted up.

<comment><USER15> You walk into a store, take an apple and walk out of the door without paying. The police stop you and threaten you to forcefully deprive you of your freedom, unless you give money to the shop owner.

Would you call this robbery too? It seems to fit your definition.

<comment><USER16> No. He would say that the stealing is the initiation of force so use of force in retaliation is justified.

<comment><USER15> Yes, but no violence, or even force, is used by the thief in this example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This seemed strangely political for a polling company.

edit: following some links, they have a real consistent focus on small businesses as being the answer to economic problems. That's actually something I believe as well, but it still seems strange to see it being pushed so heavily by a polling company.

This seems to be his key manifesto:

[http://www.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/186638/killing- small-...](http://www.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/186638/killing-small- business.aspx)

<comment><USER18> On the other hand, most "support small business" proposals boil down to "make someone else pay to keep this person in business". It's worth asking some tough questions about which businesses generate enough value to be worth making others pay to keep them afloat.

<comment><USER16> > most "support small business" proposals boil down to "make someone else pay > to keep this person in business"

When really, they should be, "don't make anyone pay to keep anyone in business"

Corporate bailouts and monetary policy are socialized risk and privatized reward, benefiting the large and entrenched firms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of the > total U.S. adult population that has a full-time job has been hovering > around 48% since 2010 -- this is the lowest full-time employment level since > 1983.

I've never heard the statistics for full-time employment. I knew that it would be low, but below 50 percent? That's incredible.

<comment><USER20> I also wonder what the rate would be if you subtracted out people who involuntarily have to stitch together 40 hours from 2 or more jobs.

<comment><USER21> [http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment- chart...](http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts)

<comment><USER22> [http://www.economonitor.com/dolanecon/2015/06/15/deconstruct...](http://www.economonitor.com/dolanecon/2015/06/15/deconstructing- shadowstats-part-2-in-search-of-an-alternative-measure-of-unemployment/)

<comment><USER22> tl;dr: "The bottom line here is that the ShadowStats alternate unemployment rate of 23 percent for May 2015, and similar rates for other recent months, are completely implausible. To get an unemployment rate that high, we have to include millions of people who do not even claim to want a job, let alone make any effort to look for one. We have to assume that the status of long-term discouraged worker is a trap from which almost no one escapes from year to year, by finding work, by making even a single unsuccessful attempt to find work during the year, by changing their mind about wanting work, or by death."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Unemployment is high, wages are low, debt is high, savings are low, and cost of living is high and rising rapidly in the only geographical places which don't suffer from high unemployment and low wages. Consumption is low due to the above factors. Job generation is low. New business founding is low. Taxes are the most burdensome to those who have the least; capital is heavily concentrated at the very top, with most of the bottom 70% owning very little whatsoever. Retirement accounts are being filled slowly (if at all), not filled at all, or withdrawn from prematurely. Mortgages are being reversed in order to liquidate owned shares in exchange for cash.

The upper class has flourished, and is richer than ever before, including the gilded age, with fortunes the size of Rockefeller now common among their ranks. The upper middle class has taken a minor hit, but has largely recovered and is reaping the gains of their investment funds. Middle class families have fallen into instability, and must now accept a lower standard of living, worse education, and high levels of debt. Lower class families have fallen into desperation, and many have their stuff repoed and their homes foreclosed. The underclass is hopelessly trapped working in multiple minimum wage jobs if they are lucky enough to work at all, packed in with a dozen to a household. A growing population at the very bottom lives in utter squalor, frequently in the context of complete municipal anarchy such as in Detroit or Flint.

How hard is it to understand that the economic health of the majority of people in the US is very poor?

<comment><USER24> Almost none of the things in your first paragraph are true.

<comment><USER25> Because you don't want it to be or because you have proof? If you have proof, show it.

<comment><USER24> Let me get right on proving other people's arguments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The author posits that three metrics have to be turned around in order to save the middle class: (1) the full-time job rate, (2) the number of publicly- listed companies trading on the US exchanges, and (3) the number of new "startups" (which author seems to use as a blanket term for all small businesses)

You can't expect the number of small businesses to increase if the vast majority of people in the country have no idea how to run a business.

The cultural norm in America is to entrust the doing of business to the elites of major corporations and aspire to be lifer employees for them. This worked until these companies started buying each other up, blowing their profits on stock buybacks and shareholder dividends, and laying their experienced workers off in the 1990s.

The reality changed very dramatically, but the culture did not change with it. Our education system is very much biased towards STEM and liberal arts, not business and trade. It is very, very odd contrasting with such an aggressively pro-capitalist foreign policy.

<comment><USER27> I think more people would start businesses, and go through the learning curve of running a business, if it weren't for the state of health insurance. Unless you're rich, the only affordable way to get _good_ health insurance is through an employer.

If you've got kids, or some expensive medical condition in your family, a lot of people are going to suck it up and work for the man, for health insurance.

<comment><USER28> Purely anecdotal but this is the massive, major reason I've not seriously considered starting my own business as well. Hell, I don't even have kids but generally, it's the lack of "stability", whether real or imagined, in health care and other less formalized forms of insurance (likelihood of stable income over 5-10 year period) that keep me away.

I do all sorts of work with photography, video, multimedia, and that general intersection of tech and the arts. In my case, do I want to start up a production company or identify a market for people who want or need these sorts of services and contract with them?

Or do I find a gig with a company or university that pays a decent salary, includes health insurance, retirement investment, and the usual benefits? It's pretty obvious from my post which way I've gone despite the fact that the work isn't always inspiring or challenging or terribly lucrative.

Because at the end of the day, it pays me that middle-class salary and offers some promise of stability. Could I be laid off or my position cut? Sure. But if I had to put a wager on it, the odds of unemployment/underemployment are much lower this way.

Anyway, I don't intend to complain. My field is one of those where you may consider yourself lucky to have steady, non-gig work and I do consider myself fortunate to have a steady income, benefits, and some savings while doing something at least somewhat related to my interests and skillset.

But if we're looking for the psychological picture of why people might be trading entrepreneurship with the potential for even greater earnings and contribution to the overall economy, I'd say the major issue by far is stability. There's not a whole lot of "safety net" in place for someone who wants to start a small business.

When you constantly hear about them shutting down due to competition from big corps or dips in the economy or just shitty luck, the effect it has on most prudent adults is to make the prospect of entrepreneurship seem awfully risky and likely to leave you back on the job hunt within a few years.

<comment><USER26> I'm in the same boat as you, but people like us who actually have a career they're confident about are the exception, not the norm.

Immigrants start small businesses all the time without a safety net. Restaurants, smoothie shops, tailors, cell phone stores, contractors, convenience stores, etc. are often small businesses owned by foreigners (anecdotally at least, in my experience). Why do we always say that we need a safety net when we interact with these sorts of businesses all the time?

Is it because we have big, amazing careers ahead of us as employees that we can't risk? Or is it just a cultural perception that those occupations are mostly for foreigners?

<comment><USER29> > Why do we always say that we need a safety net when we interact with these > sorts of businesses all the time?

My two hypotheses, purely from personal experience, not at all based upon any valid statistical data. YMMV, freely-given opinions worth what you paid for it, etc.

Immigrants likely have not yet grown up in the kind of media-pumped, over- saturated hyper-aware-of-health-factors as developed-nation (especially US) native-born citizens. If this hypothesis is correct, then native-born would have an exaggerated sense of risks, while immigrants have a more proportionate sense tempered by their lives' constraints (making do without what native-born would consider necessary safety nets).

Native-born citizens might statistically be unhealthier than immigrants. Immigrants are a self-selecting group who are statistically going to exhibit certain degrees of greater perseverance than the wider population. This perseverance could be a contributing factor in diet choices, a major contributor to the rising poor health outcomes in native-born populations in the US. If so, then the immigrant group might not feel as much pressure to secure the safety net as the native-born population.

Most diet choices in the US are unhealthy. Like very poor nutrient:calorie ratios, excessively high portions, or encouraging poor convenience-oriented habits over selecting and preparing whole foods closer to raw than processed. All only possible with the kind of extravagant energy per capita spent in the US that are not generally available in the nations immigrants tend to come from, leading to catastrophic US general population health outcomes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I find it amusing when people think they have discovered for the first time that the unemployment numbers are "wrong" in some way, e.g. only people who are actively looking for work are considered unemployed (as opposed to people who gave up looking), people who take new jobs for lower wages than their old jobs are considered fully employed.

The unemployment figures have been that way the entire time! It was never a secret.

<comment><USER31> Not "the entire time" \-- they have changed the way that unemployment is calculated multiple times over the years, and always in favor of lower unemployment. And while it's not a secret, it's definitely not actively publicized. That's the point; lower unemployment numbers are published to try to lower unemployment.

Never trust numbers if the one collecting the data has any inclination towards the result, no matter how trustworthy the source seems to be; bias will find a way in. Any government's numbers on unemployment and inflation will always be suspect for that reason. S&P/Moody's/Fitch? Years ago, I remember a trader in Zurich laughing at my question as to their trust-worthiness.

If I was a full-time investor with a large portfolio, I would pay to do my own tracking of prices across a wide basket of goods, as well as research to get my own numbers on unemployment, underemployment and jobless, the same with credit ratings. Any large discrepancies with the official numbers would be a sign as to what is being sold and how desperately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Part of the Johnson/Weld platform is to get government out of the way of entrepreneurship.

[http://fortune.com/2016/07/07/small-business- libertarian/](http://fortune.com/2016/07/07/small-business-libertarian/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Invisible meaning not represented, not invisible like Fussell's "top/bottom out of sighters" \- which I thought the article was going to be about

<That devastated American remains counted as "full-time employed" because he still has full-time work -- although with drastically reduced pay and benefits. He has fallen out of the middle class and is invisible in current reporting.

<More disastrous is the emotional toll on the person -- the sudden loss of household income can cause a crash of self-esteem and dignity, leading to an environment of desperation that we haven't seen since the Great Depression.

I would challenge the author to prove, expand and support this.

</comment><comment><USER34> Class status is self reported so I wonder how much can be traced to economic vs mentality changes.

</comment><comment><USER35> _The percentage of Americans who say they are in the middle or upper-middle class has fallen 10 percentage points, from a 61% average between 2000 and 2008 to 51% today._

That number is still too high. It should be about 33% (but then about 80% of Americans consider themselves "above average" drivers, too).

 _That devastated American remains counted as "full-time employed" because he still has full-time work -- although with drastically reduced pay and benefits._

Nonsense. 2015 saw the largest income increases ever recorded at each of the bottom four quintiles.

<comment><USER36> As itbeho pointed out, the census moved the goal posts, rendering that whole claim questionable at best [1].

Additionally, income increases don't refute what the author said at all. If I lost a 75k a year job and replaced it with a 30k a year job, an increase of anything less than 150% leaves me worse off than I was before. You can see this if you look at real median wage information - we are still well below 2007 levels, even with the census tricks.

[1] [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-15/deconstructing- medi...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-15/deconstructing-median- income-farce)</comment></comment>


Ubuntu Tips and Tricks - <AUTHOR> http://techcombo.com/ubuntu-tips-and-tricks Having already made a review on the newly released Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, I would like to express a number of basic Ubuntu tips, which many of you may have heard of before but for the sake of the Ubuntu beginners, bear with me! These tips and tricks which I am going to explain will work practically on most Ubuntu distro's, but not on all of them.
Alter the colour of your Ubuntu
In order to change the colour of your Ubuntu, use the following command
sudo apt-get install gnome-color-chooser
In future you can then discover the colours, under System >> Preferences.
How to convert Ext2/Ext3 file system to Ext4 (in 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope)
- Make sure you have Ubuntu 9.04 installed so that you have an Ext3 file-system.
- Back-up all of your valued data.
- To convert the partition, reboot from the real CD, and run this code,
sudo bash
tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/sda1
e2fsck -pf /dev/sda1
In this case, the partiton you need to convert is /dev/sda1.... <comment><USER2> Its not advisable to switch to Ext4 until at least kernel 2.6.30, which is not out yet.

[http://www.h-online.com/open/Kernel-Log-What-s-coming- in-2-6...](http://www.h-online.com/open/Kernel-Log-What-s-coming- in-2-6-30-File-systems-New-and-revamped-file-systems--/news/113157) (Read 'Data Security' section)

</comment><comment><USER3> Erm, I'm pretty sure 99% of the people hear can figure this stuff out for themselves. Run of the mill Ubuntu tutorials definitely do not belong here.

</comment><comment><USER4> What I don't like about the average Linux tutorial is that they hardly ever explain anything. They are all "go to file /ehh/dsf/dsfjlfdsjjk.grbl and edit the line saying 'fkfjfhjg%%&' to say '%%%fjj887744', then reboot the system and your sound card will work". I guess it is better than nothing, but ultimately it feels a bit like wasted time. If it is complicated to make something work, at least I want to learn something while making it work.

Also, a lot of these cryptic tutorials seem to be outdated, because modern distributions offer easier ways to do the same thing.</comment>


Color names and their wave lengths and frequencies - <AUTHOR> http://partow.net/miscellaneous/colours.html <comment><USER2> I'm a little confused about the approach to the frequencies here. Most light that we see (apart from laser light or the result of separating or filtering light with optical equipment) is not pure monochromatic light at a single frequency. This is clearly true for many colors in this chart which are given as combinations of additive primary colors. So, it is misleading to say that these colors have a single frequency or wavelength. Is the frequency given in the chart just the pure color that would be closest to the indicated color in some color space metric?

<comment><AUTHOR> @schoen You do make some very good points, the wave lengths in this list are based on the assumption of pure colour forms using Dan Bruton's Spectra approximation. [http://www.physics.sfasu.edu/astro/color.html](http://www.physics.sfasu.edu/astro/color.html)

Furthermore as you can see in the list composite colours such as white, gray and black have undefined values.

<comment><USER3> "<...> pure colour forms using Dan Bruton's Spectra approximation<...>"

Approximation or not, you cannot assign a unique wavelength or frequency to perceptual (extra-spectral) colors if for no other reason than that the given λ(f) is factually incorrect. Moreover, even an approximation doesn't make much sense, as simply human vision perceives magenta as a very different color to say various shades of pink (white + red) or any other color near red [orange. orange-red, etc.]. Basically, there is no single λ(f) - spectral - color that looks even vaguely like magenta (similarly for cyan, 'fuchsia' etc.).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This chart is misleading in that it intersperses both true spectral colors (red, yellow, blue etc. that actually possess unique wavelengths) with extra- spectral colors such as magenta, cyan, etc. which, per se, DO NOT have unique wavelengths/frequencies—but which this diagram incorrectly assigns to them.

Non-spectral/extra-spectral colors (magenta etc.) do not exist as true colors on the visible spectrum as such, rather they are 'perceptual' in that they are created in our minds by mixtures of other colors (e.g.: magenta being a mixture of red+blue).

Why extra-spectral colors exist is a rather complex matter and stems from the very specific way we humans perceive colour (Young-Helmholtz tri-color perception theory [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young%E2%80%93Helmholtz_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young%E2%80%93Helmholtz_theory))

A better understanding of how extra-spectral colors fit into the overall color schema and the way we perceive color can be gained from the 'CIE 1931 color space' (Chromaticity diagram).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space).</comment>


Show HN: Masma – Your Virtual Asthma Management Coach - <AUTHOR> http://praxishealth.org

<comment><USER2> Cool concept, how do you scale the amount of content? Or is this more like packaged classes.</comment>


Explaining the many paradigms of PLT Scheme to a 16 year old - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/plt-scheme/t/33a1531bf3ed3610

<comment><USER2> Some great hackers took turns tutoring the kid; what a lucky SOB!

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=640994>

\--

      So the last question is:
        -- perhaps you really want to learn to program in PLT Scheme so
      that you can see what
             elegant lazy functional programmers do,
             strict lazy programmers,
             OO programmers,
             logic programmers,
             and imperative programmers
      without ever leaving the language.

PLT is entering Mozart/Oz territory here, with clean syntax as a major plus.

Good read.

<comment><USER3> I don't know that PLT is _clean_ , but it's consistent and straightforward. I still believe it has a long way to go to really compete with languages like Python in terms of presentation, but they've done great work and it's very nice to work with these days.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Webhook – incoming webhook server to execute commands - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/adnanh/webhook/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> For what it's worth, I've also created a little similar tool that we use - it's specifically for Github and does a _lot_ less for you, basically just routing JSON bodies to the standard input of commands.

On the other hand it's quite lite and simple. About 9 out of 10 of our hooks are written in bash using jq.

\- [https://github.com/donatj/hookah](https://github.com/donatj/hookah)

<comment><USER3> I did similar thing quite a while ago :)

[https://github.com/piranha/webhooker](https://github.com/piranha/webhooker)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The amount of ads on this GH project summary is completely unacceptable.

<comment><USER5> Not sure if there were ads the other 11 times this was submitted as Show HN.

It's a nice little tool and I was planning to use it in production but does it really need a Show HN submission every 20 commits?

<comment><USER6> Surely this could be automated. If only HN had webhooks for new submissions...

 _Show HN: New version of Pandora Nexus released. (Build #163)_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Jesus since when do "free code" repositories include so many ads?

</comment><comment><USER8> why would I use this instead of aws lambda?</comment>


Time to Rank - <AUTHOR> http://www.timetorank.com/

<comment><USER2> What assumptions are being made? For instance:

\- Is this assuming your competitors will not be making any changes or optimizations to their website?

\- That the backlinks are from relevant sites or general content sites? What would be their page rank? Is page segmentation factored in?

\- Is it assuming no optimizations are done to the site trying to rank? Meta tags only? Full optimization? If so, what would a full optimization entail?

That's just scratching the surface. It's too early yet to think of more (just woke up), but I'd imagine the list would get pretty long.

The Google algo is somewhat known, but still considered a black box, with many outside variables. That's why any true professional SEO would never make any guarantees on website position in organic search or time frame.

</comment><comment><USER3> Although submitted later, this duplicate submission is attracting the comments:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2001898>

Probably best to go there if you have anything to add.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand this... time to rank if you sucked at seo?

Time to rank if you just plop your domain down and wait and no one else does anything?

I can't see how this could mean anything. Please explain?</comment>


Bill Gates Has an Idea for a History Class - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/so-bill-gates-has-this-idea-for-a-history-class.html <comment><USER2> "To his bafflement and frustration, he has become a remarkably polarizing figure in the education world."

There's kind of a reason for this. If you're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting a specific academic agenda, one even more focused on the standardized testing that parents, students, and teachers alike tend to loath, and geared towards preparing kids for jobs rather than educating them (look at English in common core where now 70% of what students are supposed to read is not classic literature, plays, poetry, contemporary fiction, but newspaper articles and speeches and the like), he should at least educate his own kids in that way. Instead he seems to defy his own investment by sending his children to a school that emphasies no testing, a big focus on the classics and letting kids do their own thing and become well rounded.

As a student of history this sort of line of thinking looks interesting, though I wouldn't want to replace our entire history curriculum with it. Perhaps as an elective, though at this point Bill attempting to touch education is just asking for trouble...

<comment><USER3> It is not true that any education solution that works for Bill Gates' family will work at scale across a hugely diverse population. It's possible --- likely, in fact --- that it's impossible to effectively (and cost-effectively) deliver the education Gates' kids get to the entire country.

With that in mind, I'm not sure how Gates' own school selection impacts his ideas about education. It seems rather like it has nothing at all to do with his ideas, in which case the appeal to Gates' own actions is fallacious.

Where do I have this wrong?

<comment><USER2> I've read interviews previously where Gates has spoke wonders of the benefits of the school allowing kids more freedom for things like coding, of a well- rounded background in things like English as opposed to using the class more for non-fiction purposes, etc. This is in regards to his own education at that same institution. So my point is essentially that his ideas about what helped lead to his own success, and the educational model he likely believes will be good for his own children, differs fairly substantially from what he funds for the majority of the country.

I do agree that a single solution is not the answer, but the issue is that Common Core actually is much more along the lines of creating a one size fits all model, rather than a community focused model. Much of what Common Core focuses on is actually being very well received in some areas, particularly in low-income, 'troubled' schools. However, the problem is that it is being applied, and that it is being preached by Gates and others, to the entire country, where kids with a more stable environment don't benefit as much from the same structure.

<comment><USER4> Gates' kids are probably exceedingly smart. Giving them freedom is probably a good idea. Giving the average high schooler freedom is definitely /not/ a good idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> What about the unidentified high school kid who will be the next Gates or Jobs? Let's not repeat La Serrata of Venice.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serrata_del_Maggior_Consiglio](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serrata_del_Maggior_Consiglio)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Council_of_Venice](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Council_of_Venice)

<comment><USER5> Perhaps it's already too late --with US inequality having risen up to gilded- age levels, as it has, for over a generation now.

<comment><AUTHOR> As long as parents and teachers are free to invest their resources into one vision over another, it's never too late to measure competing visions of measurement.

<comment><USER6> Assuming we can meaningfully measure competing visions of measurement.

The turtles, all the way down, they burn!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sci-Fi author L. Sprague de Camp's 1963 book, "The Ancient Engineers", is also worth a look, from early Egyptian engineering up to Galileo. From an Amazon review: _"History, technology, culture, finance, and sociology intersect here. It's not history from the top (kings and such, which some say is dry), nor history from the bottom (average people, which is necessarily endless and perhaps not very revealing). It's history from the nuts-and-bolts middle–how structures were built, how materials were transported, how wars were fought. When you know this sort of foundational information, everything else becomes more real."_

Review: [https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/l-sprague-de- camp...](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/l-sprague-de-camp-14/the- ancient-engineers-2/)

Preview: [http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Engineers-L-Sprague- Camp/dp/03...](http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Engineers-L-Sprague- Camp/dp/0345482875/)

Excerpt: _" Everybody has heard of Julius Caesar - but who knows about his contemporary Sergius Orata, the Roman building contractor who invented central indirect house heating? Yet Orata has affected our daily lives far more than Caesar ever did."_ ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergius_Orata](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergius_Orata))

<comment><USER7> There are no constraints on history other than that it happened in the past. If a story hasn't been adequately told, it should be.

<comment><USER8> I disagree slightly. An additional constraint I would put is that there is enough time past for the historians to have a good view of the events (and their consequences). There is a lot of debate among historians (according to a historian friend of mine) about the legitimacy of historians specializing on "recent" history, because of the lack of distance and the inherent subjectivity (not that the distant past is any less subjective).

<comment><AUTHOR> > enough time past for the historians to have a good view of the events (and > their consequences).

One example is [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bury_My_Heart_at_Wounded_Knee](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bury_My_Heart_at_Wounded_Knee)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Considering David Christian's history for my own uses, I know little about the quality of his work besides his endorsement by Gates (who is very smart but not an expert in these fields). Before I spend a lot of time on Big History, does anyone know:

1) What is David Christian's professional reputation among his peers?

2) What do professional historians see as the strengths and weaknesses of Big History?

3) Does he really know enough about all these subjects to provide expert knowledge and analysis? Wouldn't it be better to have the evolution section taught by an evolutionary biologist?

If these questions are answered in the article, please forgive me. I skimmed it, but it's 12 pages (converted to PDF).

<comment><USER10> I personally took his Introduction to Big History course last semester and had him as a tutor so my experiences may be useful to you!

1) While I don't know a lot about academic circles from what I gathered his method of teaching history is seen as different but not at all bad, he has connections in other fields who seem to love what he's doing.

2) Can't really answer that unfortunately.

3) David Christian is interesting as he'll readily admit if he doesn't know something in a lot of detail. That said, I found his knowledge to be quite good across all of the history we covered and he answered student questions well, pulling on others with more knowledge if he was unable to fully explain something or was unclear. He does in fact enlist the support of other professors for teaching certain topics, the lecture of the formation of the Earth was given by a Geologist and Evolution was in part covered by Dr Greg Downey, an anthropologist.

I actually really enjoyed the course as, coming from an IT background, it was quite a bit more engaging and interesting and the group discussions in tutorials were very interesting with many good discussions had.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems a lot like Burke's "Connections" series (which is very good).

<comment><USER12> Connections is a thought-provoking series, but I don't think it acknowledges how speculative it is, and by extension how speculative almost all historical explanations are.

<comment><USER13> Loved the series. To your point, Burke apparently has a pretty amazing track record:

[https://audioboo.fm/boos/1574606-james-burke-predicted- the-f...](https://audioboo.fm/boos/1574606-james-burke-predicted-the-future- in-1973-now-he-does-it-again) (WARNING: webpage auto-plays an audio track of Burke)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Mentioned in the article: [https://www.ted.com/talks/david_christian_big_history](https://www.ted.com/talks/david_christian_big_history)

</comment><comment><USER15> This approach reminds me of a course I took on Coursera a while ago called "A Brief History of Humankind": [https://www.coursera.org/course/humankind](https://www.coursera.org/course/humankind)

It is the best enrichment course I had ever taken. I wonder if the lecturer (Yuval Harrari) was influenced by this "Big History", or he arrived at this teaching method independently.

</comment><comment><USER16> Isaac Asimov's nonfiction often took the historical, chronological approach to explaining any topic, from chemistry to Shakespeare. It becomes a story, and people are really good at understanding (and remembering) stories.

Maybe it shouldn't be framed as a "history class" though. It's really not "history, expanded." It's more like "The Big Picture, of Everything You're Learning."

</comment><comment><USER17> it's always interesting to me that we (north americans in particular) seem to think that just because a person is rich, that they therefore:

\- are interesting people

\- are smart

\- have opinions that are well founded and worth listening to

\- are good leaders

\- are role models

... moreso than people who are not rich

<comment><USER18> I think north Americans are looking for the secrets about how to be rich.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me of Carl Sagan's quote "To bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe"

</comment><comment><USER20> It sounds more as if a history professor has an idea for a history class.

But Bill Gates has a lot of money, which means (apparently) that he's more worth paying attention to, regardless of the topic.

<comment><USER10> I took this unit last semester (at Macquarie University, with David Christian as my lecturer and tutor) and am happy to answer any questions you might have on teaching style or such. Personally I really enjoyed it and found it very thought provoking and interesting (history usually doesn't capture my attention as I like to see a broader view).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> David Christian's concept, especially the "thresholds", reminds me of an excellent course[0]/book[1]/website[2] written/taught by the wonderful astrophysicist Eric Chaisson[3]. Not exactly focused on "history" in the traditional sense, but on the history of the universe, focusing on different "epochs", from the big bang, to present day and beyond. I highly recommend the readings (and the course for those who are monetarily and geographically able to do so [Boston area]).

[0] [http://www.extension.harvard.edu/courses/cosmic-evolution- or...](http://www.extension.harvard.edu/courses/cosmic-evolution-origins- matter-life) [1] [http://www.amazon.com/Cosmic-Evolution-Rise-Complexity- Natur...](http://www.amazon.com/Cosmic-Evolution-Rise-Complexity- Nature/dp/0674009878) [2] [https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/doc...](https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/docs/fr_1/fr_1_site_summary.html) [3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Chaisson](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Chaisson)

</comment><comment><USER22> I've listened to Christian's audio classes. It is darn cool! You travel through all realms of knowledge. It celebrates evidence, reasoning and science. A simple audiobook is more intellectually stimulating than the excellent Cosmos Series. Man, if I had billions of dollars these would be the kind of things I'd love to spend my money on.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well, I'm thoroughly convinced. I want to take this class!

<comment><USER24> Here you go: [http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/big-history-the- big-b...](http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/big-history-the-big-bang- life-on-earth-and-the-rise-of-humanity.html)

<comment><USER25> The audio edition is cheaper through audible.com :

[http://www.amazon.com/Big-History-Bang-Earth- Humanity/dp/B00...](http://www.amazon.com/Big-History-Bang-Earth- Humanity/dp/B00DTNW86O/)

<comment><USER26> Also available on the iTunes store

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Isn't this how Steiner education works?

</comment><comment><USER28> Is it possible for mods to make title less linkbaity? Even if the target's title is.

<comment><USER29> Why does it matter?

<comment><USER30> I'm not who you're responding to, but in general I think it's a good thing when the article title gives you an idea of its content.

<comment><USER31> I poke fun at the OP in my comment (as of right now) above, but to more seriously discuss what I brought up (would literal titles render quality content less discovered) but I have seen title changes on HN that made me glad I read the article before the title had been changed otherwise I would have missed it.

Edit: to further expand, there have also been articles I click through to with "linkbait" titles, that ended up being poorly written or not what I thought they were going to be about. I close them after a couple of paragraphs (and don't feel cheated or tricked). Were I on another community I might be more wary of links to crap but since HN tends to skew more towards quality stuff I'd rather let the "linkbait" if enough of the community thought it was good enough to get it to the front page. I get suitably more discriminating when browsing the New section.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Toss education into the private sector, problem solved. The market will sort out what education formats perform best - what else you guys want to talk about?

<comment><USER33> Don't all people have an equal right to education?

<comment><USER32> Education isn't a right. It is a choice.

<comment><USER34> >Education isn't a right. It is a choice.

That's a poorly thought out platitude. Plenty of rights are also choices such as the right to vote, to remain silent, to bear arms, to a trial by jury.

<comment><USER32> I just said its not a right. So to equate it to other rights doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER35> You said _" Education isn't a right. It is a choice."_ By the pragmatics of English, this is reasonably interpreted as _" Education isn't a right [because] it is a choice"_. Pointing out that other rights are choices refutes that. If it wasn't what you were trying to say, you should clarify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is what I've learned from this article:

* Dave Christian has Bill Gates' email address

* Dave Christian lectured at San Diego State University

After a minute of Google searching, I discovered that [http://advancement.sdsu.edu/marcomm/experts/department/al_hi...](http://advancement.sdsu.edu/marcomm/experts/department/al_history.html) lists d</comment><comment>-@mail.sdsu.edu as his email address.

This means that the sysadmins of mail.sdsu.edu have Bill Gates' personal email address. So if any of their IIS machines go down, they have the rare opportunity to complain directly to the man who started it. ;D

<comment><USER37> I know you can find it on Google and all, but I don't think it's appropriate to call out Dave's contact info publicly like this...

<comment><USER36> > I don't think it's appropriate to call out Dave's contact info publicly like > this...

I do think it's appropriate to call out Dave's contact info publicly like this...

We have reached an impasse.</comment></comment></comment>


MG Siegler: On The Next Venture - <AUTHOR> http://parislemon.com/post/11005151954/on-the-next-venture

<comment><USER2> If this means less Siegler writing in the mainstream tech press, then I'm all for it.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, an Apple fanatic becomes a VC. Can we all agree we're in a bubble?

</comment><comment><USER4> Not trying to be snide, but, does anyone care outside of the arguments of VC / funding bubble?

</comment><comment><USER5> " _yes, I'm becoming a VC_ "

he specifically says he that he will BE a VC and not JOINING a VC. I don't get it. Does that mean he will be investing his own money specifically? I never knew mg had that much personal funds to invest in.

For those of you who knows about this specifically, can someone enlighten me?

<comment><USER6> A VC invests other people's money. Specifically, a VC is a general partner in the firm and they invest the capital of the limited partners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> i'd like to think a guy that has been at the center of the technology beat with some of the best opinions in the biz is a good person to have on the VC side.</comment>


Looking for love? Online dating algorithms won't help you | The Verge - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/7/2782397/online-dating-matching-algorithm-unhelpful-psychology-scientific-review <comment> steve-howard The university press release is here: [http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2012/02/onlin...](http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2012/02/online- dating-finkel.html?utm_campaign=&utm_medium=email&utm_source=enews)

Briefly, what the verge skipped is that the study had good things to say about mobile online dating on the basis that it enables immediate, short meetings with people around you (the best way to get a real impression of somebody).</comment>


Tell PG: Posting on HN is broken in Chrome - <AUTHOR>

Both submiting new links and replying to comments result in the deadlink page when using Chrome. Firefox still works fine though. <comment><USER2> On my Chrome4.0 + OSX seems fine

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you sure? Lots of HN users use Chrome, and no one else has reported problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm. I'm using 5.0.322.2 dev, it might be the dev branch of chrome is broken. Let me see if I can figure out exactly what's going on.

<comment><AUTHOR> ok, I just posted the above reply with chrome. Looks like it was just an intermittent issue. I did try both replying on multiple threads and posting a link, and both were broken. If it happens again I'll try and debug to figure out exactly what the difference was between what chrome and firefox were doing.

<comment><USER4> Works fine in Google Chrome 5.0.322.2 dev

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Works fine for me on version 220.127.116.11 beta (38071)

</comment><comment><USER6> Works fine for me with Chrome version 188.8.131.52.

</comment><comment><USER7> 5.0.307.9 beta on Ubuntu 9.10 works fine... if you can see this.

</comment><comment><USER8> Working fine in Chrome 4.0 here

</comment><comment><USER9> Everything is fine with Chrome 5.0.307.9 beta on OSX, except if Chrome has been open a long time, I eventually lose the ability to right click on my username on the upper-right hand corner of the HN website.</comment>


Show HN: Open Source NgTetris – tetris game built in Angular - <AUTHOR> http://ngtetris.com/ OpenSource Github Repo: https://github.com/davishacker/ngTetris If you like it, star the project and have fun. <comment><AUTHOR> OpenSource Github Repo: [https://github.com/davishacker/ngTetris](https://github.com/davishacker/ngTetris)

If you like it, star the project. Have fun.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you found any issues in desktop or mobile, feel free to report them in the github issues session. I say thank you up front for your support.

</comment><comment><USER2> cool project. I am addicted to the game.</comment>


Innovations and Discoveries in Medicine - <AUTHOR> http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.aspx?rID=17861&fID=345

<comment><AUTHOR> I know it's off topic but I have a feeling a lot of people will be floored by this video so I'm sharing it. What do you think?</comment>


Ask HN: Privacy sensitive ads? - <AUTHOR> Any good alternative to adsense? <comment><USER2> What ad systems have you looked at so far? What were your findings?

<comment><AUTHOR> Project wonderful which seems to be used a lot by comic writers. Carbon ads which is invite-only. Others which offer nothing special.</comment></comment>


Lobsters - <AUTHOR> https://lobste.rs/ <comment><USER3> No about page, no way to register, no mention of Yehuda Katz...

edit: Apparently, the site was launched by Joshua Stein (after getting hellbanned from HN), not Yehuda Katz. [https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...](https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker_news/)

<comment> why-el Yehuda is one of the active users: <https://lobste.rs/u/wycats>

Update: The site is also open source: <https://github.com/jcs/lobsters>

Last shameless update: Would love an invite. Email in my profile.

<comment><USER4> There's also some more information here: <https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters>

<comment><USER5> Thanks for that link. FTL: _Hacker News is operated by a company, Y Combinator, which has a significant financial incentive to censor or promote the links and discussion posted on the site that relate to Y Combinator-funded startups (or competitors of them)._

Haven't seen much discussion about this HN flaw. Interesting...

<comment><USER6> It is brought up constantly but it is not the kind of discussion which seems to be much approved of. (In the interest of disclosure, I don't even care)

<comment><USER7> As a YC founder, whose YC startup got torn apart on HN, I find no truth to this statement.

<comment><USER6> You don't think it is brought up or you do think that it is approved of? (edit: I never indicated any level of agreement with YC using HN to unfairly promote YC companies, so if you are responding to that then maybe you meant to respond to my parent)

<comment><USER7> I did in fact intend to respond to the parent. Apologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice. Notice how it so neatly slices off exactly one demographic from here and transplants it over there, without anything that would distract them. It's focussed just on one topic: Software development stuff for Software Developers.

There are four main camps here at HN:

\- "Software Entrepreneurs", building Big Important Startups or quaint little "lifestyle businesses" that let them drive their cute little "italian supercars" around their quaint little midwestern town.

\- "Computer Programmers", talking about languages, deployment strategies, open source stuff and how to configure their dotfiles to automatically convert tabs to spaces.

\- "Tech Gossip Afficianodos", excited about what Techcrunch has to say about who got funded, and taking sides in fights between giant corporations.

\- And the guy who just wants to point out that pirating movies off the internet is technically just "copyright infringement" and therefore not bad at all (and really HBO's fault anyway.)

These guys grabbed just their team, and now they're free to talk shop without any of the myriad distractions they'd get trying to do it here.

It's a little selfish to note that I actually see this as a good thing for a slightly different reason: If Camp 2 leaves, that's more HackerNews for those of us in Camp 1, which is the reason I'm here. We'll still have to flag stuff from the other two distracting groups, but it just might make this place a little nicer as well. Everybody wins.

<comment><USER9> What amazes me is that in 2012 we still haven't found a decent auto-moderation tagging system that would allow these demographics to emerge naturally and we have to hope for someone to leave.

I just want 2 moderation buttons : "insighful" (make this contribution more visible) and "relevant to my interests" (make the things this user tags as insightful or relevant more visible to me. May include a partial transitivity of the "relevant to my interests" operator)

Does such a system exist? Is it flawed.

<comment><USER10> It's tempting to install such a system, but it would establish a strong tunnelblick for users. Also, what if I change my interests (interest reset button?)?

I could imagine an opt-out system, like "funding stories don't interest me at all", but then, Facebook's IPO would fall into that category and I followed it with interest.

<comment><USER11> I would assume you could tune or adjust your interests over time, similar to any other user specific preferences.

To your second point it is merely a matter or design choice. Does "funding stories as a whole" trump your more specific interest of Facebook IPO or does your specific interest in Facebook's IPO trump your desire to opt out of the funding stories as a whole.

The problem I see is making such a system intuitive to your user base and clear. It seems the more complex the system is the more complex the user preferences become.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I want a site for discussing software development news that has the equivalent of a kill file. There are a handful of prolific users at Hacker News who post multiple low-quality messages every day. I avoid Hacker News because of users such as these.

I honestly believe that at least a few of these users are secretly employed by the companies that they promote and defend daily. I don't know if they're paid to post here or that they're simply blind loyalists. Either way, they deserve to be plonked.

Below are two examples (posted by a prolific user) of the type of messages I would like to see less of, which could be filtered by a kill file feature:

"HN is going to hell because its overrun with people who practice an ideology of socialism -- pro-google because its "Free" and anti-Apple because they actually innovate and have the audacity to charge for their products."

"Apple has done far more to make the world a better place than any corporation I've ever heard of. Far more than any government in history ever has. Far more than any charity every has or ever could."

<comment><USER13> +1 for a kill file. I'd also love a 'follow' mechanism. Only a small subset of HN users post deeply insightful posts and if I could see only their posts and comments, that would be a great time saver.

<comment><USER14> Follow mechanism: <http://hackerfollow.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> According to <https://jcs.org/projects/> "Lobsters (2012 - present) - A link aggregation site that I created after I was banned from Hacker News."

EDIT - also found <https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters> which explains some features

<comment><USER16> JCS was banned from Hacker News? What the hell?

<comment><USER17> I got the same treatment he did -- and have on accounts I have made since -- and we exchanged emails during development. We both went through each others' posts and couldn't find any rational reason for the treatment (slow banning and hell banning, in both of our cases).

Lack of transparency is a pretty big deal on this forum, and once you've crossed Paul -- without knowing how -- it's scorched earth on any account you make. That's why Josh developed Lobsters, and why I'm user #2, and why I'm glad to see it's gaining traction as a community.

This site is more threatening to opinion and discourse than any on the public Internet, and that isn't hyperbole. The irony is that this is a hacker community, and most hackers would be appalled at slamming the door and creating a curated garden of ideas. I've posted as jsprink_banned and jsprinkles on the topic, if you're interested; won't spam this thread with it.

<comment><USER16> Graham allows the dumbest people on the Internet to come onto this site to berate startups he all but begged people to create, but hellbanned a guy who pooped out a better version of HN in his spare time, for nothing. For fuck's sake.

<comment><USER18> I honestly can't tell if you are agreeing with what the parent wrote or disagreeing.

I'm leaning toward disagreement.

<comment><USER18> Not sure what the down vote was for, it was a genuine question. The parents comment IS ambiguous and I would be interested in a clarification.

Sometimes it is difficult to pickup on sarcasm in the written word. This post is not being sarcastic. Neither was my one above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Explanation for the site being invite only:

"Not for exclusivity, but rather, invitations will be used as a spam-control mechanism. New users must be invited by a current member and invitations will be unlimited (unless scaling problems temporarily prevent new accounts). If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as needed."

Seems basically sane, though I imagine the site would be pretty cliquish at first. You do have a pretty strong disincentive for inviting people you don't know.

Any member want to break up the cliquishness by inviting me? If you trust metrics, my high average karma means I'm probably less of a risk. Probably.

<comment><USER20> I'll invite you, but you'll have to put your email address in the "about" section of your HN profile first. (The address in the "email" section of your profile is not publicly viewable.) Or you can just write your email in a comment reply if you'd prefer.

<comment><USER21> Anyone able to invite me?

<comment><USER21> Thank you, I now have an invite :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> After 4.6 years of using HN obsessively, I'm surprised to find that I'm really hoping this takes off (I was ready to hate on it).

After hearing the JCS story and remembering my own experience of PG manipulating headlines + killing my own frontpage submission, I'm all for this.

I'm also tried of the YC job listings from companies that launched 4yrs ago flooding the homepage.

<comment><USER23> _cough_ HeyZap _cough_

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> When it comes to learning, sharing, and growing together, online or otherwise, there are no competitors, winners, or losers. Just a bigger pie.

(Good luck to lobste.rs, but I'll probably be staying right here on hn.)

<comment><USER25> I disagree with that notion.

I've been a contributor on HN for around 5 years and over the period of time I've seen a constant decline in the quality of comments, community support (read some of the 'Show HN' posts) and to an extent even the quality of the stories submitted.

A new improved hacker/startup community can be a serious contender for replacing HN (in its current state), just like Reddit is/was to Digg and others.

<comment><USER26> I'm relatively new to HN (<1year) and the one thing I notice on here is a HEAVY amount of cynicism. Perhaps the tech industry needs that to keep itself in check, but I feel like a lot of argumentative comments can sometimes be REALLY nasty.

I understand that in a competitive, fast paced and big money industry there will be massive egos, but I could sure do without some of the jerks

<comment><USER27> Well a real problem is the fact that it takes no effort to by cynical. It doesn't take intelligence or facts to be cynical, only doubt under the cover of pragmatism.

<comment><USER28> Nice!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This reminds me of a tale from the Internet of yesteryear...

Long ago, circa the year 2000, I was a member of the very first niche social network, makeoutclub.com (MOC)[1], a site originally about indie rock music. One day, a group of members got tired of gibby's (the owner) benign dictatorship and mutinied. The group started lipstickandcigarettes.com (L&C), which is now a parked domain. At the time, L&C targeted the same demographic, but was very restrictive on which hipsters could join and had a more savvy GUI than MOC. It had great early success in attracting members interested in indie rock from MOC. Eventually, though, the proprietors of L&C lost interest and let the community there dissolve in order to pursue other interests (there were rumors of drug addiction at the time, IIRC). MOC, on the other hand, is still going strong and presumably making money for gibby.

I suppose the moral to my story is this: unless your social network fiefdom actively feeds your pocketbook (as MOC does for gibby and HN does for pg), expect to lose interest in maintaining it once the novelty of protest has worn off.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makeoutclub>

</comment><comment><USER30> This looks pretty good but a few things come to mind:

\- no comment collapsing, long comment threads will become a problem just like they are here which ends up sucking, I'd love to see something like reddit's threading / collapsing and I'd really love to a see a whole other forum-ish way to browse stories as well so discussion is even more emphasized

\- no registration sucks, there are easier ways to identify spammers such as their obvious affiliation with particular website(s), auto-submission honey pots, even a manual glance at submission and other stats can be pretty revealing

The biggest concern though is the site's own affiliations ... digg needed their widget everywhere which ensured the quality was locked into a downward spiral. HN gives TC traffic in exchange for publicity, and of course all the preferential treatment and posts by YC startups is less interesting now that their batches are so large. What happens when it's time for lobste.rs to pay for itself?

I really do think it's time to replace HN though, it's mainstream and it's targeted by rubbish publications and it's full of users who are here to exploit it or to be exploited by rubbish sites who manipulate them with stunning precision.

I'd love an invite if someone's giving them out.

</comment><comment><USER31> This headline does seem unusually misleading. I already came across this site 10 days ago, it doesn't seems like it was "launched" in any fashion? And it's not by Yehuda Katz, and also doesn't seem like a HN "competitor" since it probably doesn't want to attract as big an audience.

So basically there are three things that are flat-out wrong with this headline.

<comment> why-el It _is_ a HN competitor. The person who built says they did so out of frustration with HN.

<comment><USER17> The motivation for creating something is not necessarily its primary purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Exclusionary tagging seems nice.

More than giving why you're downvoting, I wish HN didn't ban/banish-to- purgatory people for low karma, but for upheld flagged posts. Someone can be horribly wrong, often, and still learn, and become worthwhile to the group. At least in theory.

</comment><comment><USER33> Seems to solve my biggest HN complaint, downvotes without reasons. I'd love to give it a spin and see how that works in practice.

<comment><USER34> Slashdot also had upvotes with reasons, and I personally think that is just as important if you agree with downvotes with reasons: it lets you differentiate between things that added new information, made good arguments, or was simply funny.

That said, the problem with downvotes with reasons is that it now feels much more harsh. I'm downvoting something that is clearly an insulting comment that should not have been made on the site, and yet I'm wondering "do I really want to use the term 'troll'? that seems harsh".

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Interestingly, you can see the user invitation tree here:

<https://lobste.rs/u/>

So if you want an invitation, you should see if you know anyone on that lists.

[edit: "If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as needed." If your parent gets banned, do all children get banned?]

</comment><comment><USER20> Can an existing user of Lobsters please send me an invite? (My email is in my profile.)

According to <https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters>, the only reason Lobsters is invite-only is to prevent spammers from signing up. So if you want to check that I'm not a spammer, just glance at my past comments (<http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=roryokane>) and submissions (<http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=roryokane>).

If you still want another reason to send me an invite, I support the idea of an improved Hacker News – pg seems to barely care about improving HN. I might contribute to the Lobsters code at <https://github.com/jcs/lobsters>.

<comment><USER20> Someone sent me an invite – thanks!

<comment><USER36> That's awesome - any chance you could pay it forward? My email is also in my profile. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I would really love an invite to this. Competition is good regardless of whether or not it was created out of spite. I often wish there were more competing sites to HN because the quality of the moderation and the way things work around here has really deteriorated as of late.

I don't know the reasoning of Paul Graham hell-banning people on this site for merely questioning the way it's moderated or for whatever reason, but the lack of transparency on HN is a big issue that needs to be fixed.

As much as I love HN, I think it's time for a change and whether it be Lobsters or another site, I am really hoping a successor breaks the ranks and perhaps PG and the moderator team will then make an effort to fix this place.

</comment><comment><USER38> Honestly Prismatic is so very good at content curation -- at least for me and my friends -- that a "tech/startup/general geekery news" content aggregator is superfluous. I come to HN now to see the comments on the articles I read on Prismatic.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's invite only. Tried a few different urls and got this one: <https://lobste.rs/signup>

<comment><USER40> So it's not actually launched, but more of a ShowHN.

<comment><USER41> It's very much launched. Been out for a month and a half now. And I don't think OP has any affiliation.

<comment><USER40> Why ever would it be appropriate to post this here, not to mention with the (now-edited) false headline, in read-only mode?

<comment><USER41> People can still check out what's happening there. It's nice to hear about a new site (I wouldn't have heard about it otherwise). Also, I'm not sure what the title (used) to be so I can't comment on that.

<comment><USER40> "Yehuda Katz launches Lobste.rs" where he is only a user and not involved behind the site at all. As noted elsewhere, it is run by someone who was banned by HN because they were banned from HN, so, to me, a presumption of bad faith is warranted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I hope this doesn't split the HN community, I hope it also serves as a wake up call that HN needs to improve or it will die. Some parts of Lobsters are really really good for solving some of the problems that HN has:

\- invite only to prevent spam and increase accountability

\- tags are ideal for the problem where not everyone cares about everything - getting to be a major gripe you see a lot ("oh my god, do we have to have another discussion about X")

\- HN needs significantly better transparency in bans, title rewrites, etc. I don't believe that PG has an agenda or needs to protect YC companies, but the issue comes up so much that it needs to be addressed

\- reasons for downvotes are genius

\- private messages are worthwhile IMO

\- the domain indicator is actually useful (sick of seeing co.uk or github.com instead of myblog.github.com)

Other things HN needs:

\- to work: the fact that "more" barely works is astonishing

\- an API for all the apps that want to provide a better or different experience

\- comment collapsing - an essential feature for actually reading past the first comment thread

\- a meta site where we can actually discuss this stuff without violating guidelines (meta.stackoverflow.com is one of the most innovative and important community tools ever, IMO)

I've heard "there are no technical solutions to social problems" as reasons not to do a lot of these, but the same argument could apply to the downvote. HN needs to innovate to keep its community, and I hope it does.

</comment><comment><USER42> Some stream of consciousness thoughts on the history of internet communities, particularly those centred around tech.

Usenet had immense value in well defined subgroups prior to the Eternal September (and for some time after, regardless of what people may say). IRC ha(s|d) similar values, and remains a force within niche communities on the tech side. Slashdot was an early mover in the moderated community space which had to arise from the newfound populist web.

I still think /.'s comment moderation was superior to the HN system (pre and post-visible comment scores), but the firehose was too late and too poorly implemented to solve editorial issues.

In the middle of this, Kuro5hin rose and fell, metafilter grabbed some component of the serious moderated discussion which it still retains. Fark came and went. Boingboing, SA, b3ta. All significant for a time but not names on people's lips today.

HN cannibalised a significant portion of /., but failed to convert the greybeards - the discussion here is noticeably different because of it (and lacking the perspective sometimes).

Digg suffered greatly from demagogues (as does HN to an extent), descended too rapidly into linkbait and celebpop trash, and fell to Reddit. The redesign was just the nail in the coffin of an already dead community.

Reddit became a very granular experience from its initial tech focus, with a current frontpage of dubious intellectual interest, but their popularity speaks wonders for the ad-hoc community created by diverse interest groups with a common central park. They struggle with discovery for new members, and an apparently descending base age group.

Communities come and go. Small herds migrate towards the latest point of interest and some stick. Groupthink is a large driver of community malaise, certainly within the tech discussion arena. Individuals dominate submissions and discussions and evolve to minor demagogue status. Some communities evolve to tackle a smaller arena than just the general topical discussion field, but topicality remains critical.

Quora has tackled 'big answers'. StackOverflow 'correct answers'. These are some minor elements of the value of the larger communities, much in the same way that Hipmunk, AirBnb etc have abstracted value away from Craigslist. Hyperlocal is the next big thing with FrontPorchForum and NextDoor tacking non-technical local discussion.

I still view the approaches to these problems as relatively unsolved and ripe for disruption, in particular the algorithms related to subject and comment popularity, user 'karma' (for better or worse), and approachable comment threading when a userbase grows beyond the 'scan a single page' scale. I'm not convinced that a one-size-fits-all approach will ever work, but even within niche tribes there remains a problem with staying 'current' while avoiding alienating the 1-2% who drive much of the discussion.

I fully expect a new dominant discussion forum to arise in the tech scene in the next couple of years, but Lobsters seems to be a kneejerk reimplementation of HN that even if it claws some traction would have to evolve rapidly to solve problems rather than dangling the 2013 model of a 2012 carrot.

<comment><USER43> _Communities come and go. Small herds migrate towards the latest point of interest and some stick. Groupthink is a large driver of community malaise, certainly within the tech discussion arena. Individuals dominate submissions and discussions and evolve to minor demagogue status. Some communities evolve to tackle a smaller arena than just the general topical discussion field, but topicality remains critical._

I agree with this, but this is also why I have now come to seriously question why anyone would be interested in investing in any community-based site. Let's not mistake that for social networks (which in of themselves have their own potential issues). But regarding community-based sites, I can't ever see any as having long-term value, not after all the carcasses I see lying in decay on the web. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I Like it. Needs some modern design, minimalist and clean.

It would be sad to see HN die, but if you don't water your plants...

<comment><USER44> It definitely needs some background, cue from /r/apple might be a good idea.

Also a distinctive header in a different color.

A footer.

Remove bold from links in front page and

        Font-size 1.2em
        Line-height 1.2

Hmm, I'll work on something tomorrow. You guys should open a contest just to let the good vibe flow.

<comment><USER45> > It definitely needs some background, cue from /r/apple might be a good idea.

Please, please no. Its fine the way it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> My favorite forum feature is 'the blender'. I first saw it on nuclearphynance.com(and not since). Once a critical number of people blend a thread it gets deleted so as not to pollute the list of threads.

In practice it worked very well. The overwhelming majority of blended threads were from new users who were still getting a hang of the quality standards for posting in the forum.

<comment><USER47> What are 'blended threads'?

<comment><USER46> When speaking about forums each topic and its associated posts are referred to as a thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> About Lobsters: <https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters>

This isn't linked anywhere obvious on the site itself.

</comment><comment><USER49> Quite good, e.g. enforced SSL, responsive layout, tag, built in search, feed ordered by time ...

</comment><comment><USER50> This has to go down as the biggest missed opportunity ever.

The name _has_ to be in Lobster (<http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Lobster>). This is not an optional thing. Come on.

</comment><comment><USER51> One thing I liked right off the bat was a good mobile experience. The fact that you still can't get this on HN is quite appalling to me.

</comment><comment><USER52> There is also the open sourced clone Lamer News (<http://lamernews.com/>) by antirez.

</comment><comment><USER53> Huh, this looks pretty cool. I like the transparency. JCS, can I get an invitation?

<comment><USER54> Me too. I'm not a member of a startup community (outside of this forum), so unless they are given out/open up soon, i guess i will be excluded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I wonder if this article will be removed...

</comment><comment><USER56> Ha, I was just thinking about how to architect a discussion forum (ala HN) this morning.

</comment><comment><USER57> It's much faster than HN. No long pauses when loading pages.

<comment><USER58> That may mean you've been slowbanned from HN. If you slightly annoy a moderator around here they'll flag your account so you see very long page load delays.

Try logging out of HN, and see if the long pauses go away for you.

<comment><USER57> Oh, there's almost zero doubt I've annoyed a moderator at some point.

There's no list of moderators anywhere is there? I could tick off the ones I haven't annoyed.

<comment><USER58> Nope, no list of moderators. You'll never know who, and you'll never know why, and you probably won't be able to get it reversed.

Also, Macro: The step beyond slowbanning is hellbanning, where nobody can see your comments except you, and users with "show dead" on. You've been hellbanned for over a year. As to why...maybe some mod thought your first comment was a bit content free. Maybe they were just having a bad day. I'd recommend getting a new account.

<comment><USER53> Haha, poor Macro. Look at his comment history: <http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Macro>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I remember how much I really enjoyed seeing points...

</comment><comment><USER60> Hell-banned and slow-banned? I didn't know that mods for HN would do that to users they disagree with.

Spammers, I can understand....but users you disagree with.

Wow....just wow.

</comment><comment><USER61> It's about time.

</comment><comment><USER62> Looks cool. But what about people like me who don't have any friends but still have interesting ideas?

<comment><USER63> I would like to see an invite only site that had an application process where an inviter can pick out applications they like from the pool. This way the people of value but without networking are fine.

<comment><USER64> I think that's how Dribbble works, and it's quite a good way of doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> If somebody would be kind enough to invite me, it would be much appreciated. Email in profile...

</comment><comment><USER66> It's a shame there isn't an about page that suggests what will be different (or better) about lobste.rs from HN. If it's just a clone site where a different set of people post the same articles and similar comments, I won't waste my time.

<comment><USER20> There is an about page, though there's no link to it on the site: <https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters>

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> So it's like a country club for hackers? No explanation of what it is (scope/core philosophy) other than the links. No sign-up, or even an indication of how to join or why there isn't a general sign-up form.

Somewhat off putting, elitist first impression.

<comment><USER67> OK, to be fair, it does look like there's a normal sign-up/application feature that was just quickly disabled/commented out:

[https://lobste.rs/s/senl3p/lobsters_discussion_on_hacker_new...](https://lobste.rs/s/senl3p/lobsters_discussion_on_hacker_news/comments/eiuvbl)

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Now if he can implement the multi-root voting system that would be way cool.

</comment><comment><USER16> Neato.

</comment><comment><USER69> What is really needed, is a HN for other domains outside of technology.

</comment><comment><USER70> I prefer HN's background.

</comment><comment><USER71> I support this. It's kind of ridiculous to see YC company's job postings on the front page all the time. And there's no reason to conflate the cult of YC with actual hacker news.

</comment><comment><USER72> It looks like a cool site, would be nice if we could register.

</comment><comment><USER73> Can anyone spare an invite? I'd really like to join up!

</comment><comment><USER74> It's unfair to blame Paul Graham for every moderation decision made on HN. It's been stated that YC funded founders help with moderation and editing on HN, and it's a safe bet that YC partners also have elevated permissions here. If you're like me, a normal HN user, then you will never know all the details. If you find yourself having a bias based on knowingly incomplete information, then you need to stop and rethink your position.

The most any normal user can say for certain about jcs getting hellbanned is, he did _something_ annoying enough that _someone_ did something about it!!! --Unfortunately, if you believed the previous sentence, you are mistaken.

The reality is, a lot of stuff on HN is automated. If you do bad stuff, bad things happen to you (your account) automatically. For example, if you get into a flame war and pass the "posting too fast" threshold, you could get warnings initially, and if you still don't stop, you could hellban yourself. In other words, you simply never know if a human being with moderator privileges did something, or if you did it to yourself. Also, you don't know if it's permanent or temporary.

The most I can say with real certainty is, pg is smart enough to design a system which merely gives users enough rope to hang themselves. I would do the same, and if you've studied the problem in depth, you would too. Eliminating human moderation through computerized automation is the only sane way to design a discussion forum.

Now if you were a long time, active contributor like jcs, and you ensnared yourself in the sites protective automation, and you thought _someone_ was doing it to you, then ya, you might be miffed. You would probably _react_ harshly, and by doing so, make matters even worse for yourself and give yourself even more "reason" to be upset.

Have you ever watched someone get absolutely livid at a chat bot?

It's hilarious. It may be a wee bit sadistic to let them keep trading increasingly heated insults with a machine, but it's still fun to watch. At the end, they might learn a valuable lesson.

With pg, there's one thing I've come to rely on; he means well. There is no requirement to agree with him on everything, but if over many years you've watched him carefully, studied the things he's said and done, or better, interacted with him, then you can be reasonably certain that he means well.

If you know anything at all about Y-Combinator, then you already know that Paul has far more important things to do than mess around with HN. If you don't know the history of HN, you're at a disadvantage; it was started as a for-fun side project to test out the ARC programming language, and HN was originally called "Startup News" for a very good reason -- to attract people with an interest in startups. The name was eventually changed to "Hacker News" due to the retrospectively obvious oversight; a lot of the best coders haven't really thought about doing a startup, and the people interested in startups are often already doing one. Broadening the scope of appeal with the name change makes sense.

If you haven't read everything Paul has written, then you don't about the massive amount of time and effort he's put into thinking about the interactions between people on (open) forums, and how to encourage beneficial exchanges between (potentially conflicting) people. HN is now, and always has been, an ongoing experiment to improve the ratio of beneficial exchanges in discussions, as well as reduce human moderation overhead. It's fun watching it evolve.

And lastly no, of the small bits of HN secret sauce I've discovered over the years, I absolutely refuse to give you the details. If the details were public, then some people would use them to game the system.

<comment><USER75> I DO blame PG for the mindless enforcement of the "Title MUST match the linked page's title" rule. Sometimes this is a good rule but there really are exceptions!

EXAMPLE: This very post was actually submitted with the title

Yehuda Katz launches HN competitor - <USER2>

but then some mod just changed it to 'lobsters' which means absolutely nothing. How is that an improvement?

EDIT: Please invite me to Lobsters!

<comment><USER74> Well, it's an improvement on the basis of stopping the spread of false information; Yehuda Katz did not create lobsters. jcs did.

Sure, the edit could have been both more correct and more informative, but most people have better things than endlessly (re)correct trivial and inconsequential stuff like titles that might matter for only a handful of hours.

My question for you is, "When you're on your death bed with fleeting time left in your life, will you consider the time you spent on this issue of title editing to be well spent or wasted?

If I don't reply, at least you'll know why.

<comment><USER75> When you are on your deathbed, will you be happy with the time you spent editing titles?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> It's frankly embarrassing to have to ask this in public but if anyone would care to invite me, it looks like my kind of place.

</comment><comment><USER77> I feel it's pretty hard to look at. HN is simple, but still designed well. This, on the other hand, feels cramped.

</comment><comment><USER78> Variety is what makes HN so engaging. If I wanted to read exclusivly about computers, I would just hit usenet.

</comment><comment><USER79> I'd be interested in trying this out. Can anyone offer an invite? My email is available via my profile.

</comment><comment><USER80> I was trying really hard to register so I could make some votes and comments, but could not.

</comment><comment><USER81> * clone HN

* put a link to it at the top of HN

* expect something different to HN?

</comment><comment><USER60> I would like an invitation also - if someone is monitoring this and giving new ones away.

Thanks :)

</comment><comment><USER82> Oh no, invitation only.

</comment><comment><USER83> I'd like an invite...

<comment><USER84> Me too please! Pretty please? ^_^

I promise to behave!

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> I'd like to register on the site

</comment><comment><USER86> can anyone spare an invite? :)

</comment><comment><USER87> An invite would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER88> Where's the about page?

</comment><comment><USER89> Did he use emberjs for the interface? If not, why Not?

</comment><comment><USER90> dont like the white background. at all.

</comment><comment><USER91> if reddit and HN had a child, it would look like lobster.

</comment><comment><USER17> Some thoughts from user #2:

\- Joshua Stein developed Lobsters by himself. Yahuda Katz was, to my knowledge, uninvolved.

\- The site is invite only because, and I'm speaking for Josh here and mostly guessing (he'd be a better person to ask), it's still trying to identify itself. Communities are grown organically and I gather Josh is letting Lobsters grow slowly, intentionally. I don't think he has "launched" it, per se.

\- I emailed Josh to support him when he was hellbanned (as my HN story parallels his), and a couple months after that exchange he invited me to the site. I don't participate much at all -- heads down on a product -- but I think it has potential.

\- I have 5:1 odds the headline will not be fixed, even though there are three factual errors in that tiny bit of text (Katz, HN Competitor, Launched).

</comment><comment><USER92> is it possible to get invited? or do I need to have a mac book pro and be a ruby fanboy?

</comment><comment><USER93> Great, another a site with ruby on rail kids discussing shiny web design.

<comment><USER85> whats wrong with that?

<comment><USER93> It's great if you're a kid, but when you grow up you should work on solving cancer or making spaceships.

<comment><USER75> Which of those are you doing?

<comment><USER93> both</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to find ideas for SaaS products / B2B web apps? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN.
I know the 'idea' topic comes up a lot here, but I'm asking this from a totally B2B perspective.
I'm going with a market-driven approach on my next project, but I'm having trouble finding SaaS products that are needed.
The only few ideas I have now are very general, like 37signals' products (group chat, project management) - but that's not really something I want to go up against for this project (although if I don't find anything else...).
I'm not looking for new or unique ideas, I'll happily improve on existing offerings.
Any advice on where to find pain-points or businesses in need of SaaS products? <comment><USER2> If your not doing trivial applications like 37signals but rather more niche based applications it can be very hard to find areas to move into unless you have personal experience in that area. Most applications you see from startups are based around managment/collaboration/communication/helpdesk because although these are hard problems to solve it is fairly easy to become at least moderately knowledgeable in these spaces. There are TONS of needs for SaaS products, mostly to dethrone enterprise solutions. SaaS apps could exist for any level of business: accounting, procurement, logistics, managment, etc, etc. Building these and selling them can be very hard however. That is why people say build something for yourself. If you worked in procurement for 10 years I am sure you could make a great SaaS for it and solve many pain points, but you probably haven't.

If you don't have this experience well start asking people who do. There exist many niche blogs on enterprise software. Reading these will give the creative mind tons of ideas. Execution can be hard, and sales can be impossible though.

You say you don't want to up against 37signals, well look at it this way:

If you are going for the enterprise type apps the competition may suck, but it is there, big, and well entrenched.

If you are going for the 37signals type apps/helpdesk the competition is fierce and the apps are well made. You can compete because there is always room for a good product but you better be good.

When it comes to b2b if 37signals is your competition your not really in that bad a place. Many companies compete directly, and succeed in the space.

This all being said, I would look into analytic type software for improving sales/leads/conversions because there are many creative approaches yet to be uncovered and with apps like these the proof is in the pudding, and if the pudding tastes good people will buy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Talk to people who work in large businesses. Ask them what troubles them. Ask them what their bosses complain about.

Look at successful existing SaaS apps (including 37signals', which are not by any means perfect) and see if you can't make a "quanta" of improvement. Talk to the people who gripe about the product and build what they wish they had.

There are no easy solutions here - just a willingness to ask questions and a quest for making things more useful and convenient.

</comment><comment><USER4> For me domain experience counts for a lot - and is crucial at all points in the process... from problem discovery + solution development through to how you go sell and market your service.

What domain experience in the b2b-facing world do you have? Have you worked in a corporate environment and been part of processes that could be made more efficient via technology? Perhaps you have worked in a specific vertical like retail, real estate, accounting etc and can think of pain points there.

Or perhaps you haven't. And that's also my point. If you haven't experience any of these pain points then how can you _really_ put yourself into the place of the user or the person who will decide to purchase your service. How will you even know how to market it - use the correct language, know which places to advertise, how to create word of mouth, etc?

When things are really low and the business is struggling, etc where will you find the passion and the drive to wake up in the morning and still be pumped up about what you are building? How will you keep the fire in the belly burning if you've never had the problems you are building for?

</comment><comment><USER5> The best way to find a problem is not to ask for it, but to observe users and see their frustrations yourself. To be specific, look for weird behavior - things that a kid wouldn't understand (software so badly designed, you need to train people to use it OR awkward learned behaviors that exist to get around a non-obvious problem). You might see an employee who sits on a ball instead of a chair, in which case the problem is that chairs are not comfortable and healthy.

If you want more help/tips, contact me at ssebro at stanford dot edu.

</comment><comment><USER6> The best way to find a good SaaS service that needs doing is to find something that bothers you, or which you want to have available, and then make it happen. Mine grew out of my hobbies, and was first just a solution to my personal needs. Having a solution in search of a problem is a somewhat silly way to approach it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've got a SaaS product that I'd like to build, but I'm a pretty novice programmer. This is a new idea that fills a need, but it's kind of a niche market. If you're interested let me know and I'd love to talk more about building it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Look for places that are using antiquated systems (I know my dentist was still on Window 98 last I noticed), those are potential markets in the waiting.

</comment><comment><USER9> checkout episode 5 of startups for the rest of us podcast, they address this exact question. [http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-5-how...](http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-5-how- to-find-niche)</comment>


Waymo is way, way ahead on testing miles–that might not be a good thing - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/01/waymo-is-way-way-ahead-on-testing-miles-that-might-not-be-a-good-thing/ <comment><AUTHOR> Oh.. arstechnica always finding a way not to talk about Tesla.

<comment><USER2> The author explained in a comment why Tesla wasn't included. tl;dr They reported 0 miles and agree that they shouldn't be included.

> _" I see Tesla as being in a separate category. Right now Tesla's autonomy > stack has much more limited functionality than Waymo's (or Cruise, Argo, > Zoox, etc.). And it's overseen by ordinary customers, not professional > safety drivers. That means that Tesla doesn't get the kind of annotated > feedback Waymo gets. If a customer deactivates Autopilot that _might_ mean > that it made a mistake, but it also might just mean that the driver decided > to pull over to buy a cup of coffee. Tesla agrees with me—they reported 0 > miles of on-road testing in California in 2018.

"I think you can see Tesla as pursuing a third strategy alongside the Waymo/Cruise taxi strategy and the Voyage/Nuro 'low-speed services first' strategy. I'm personally not optimistic about Tesla's strategy but I can't rule it out."_

<comment><AUTHOR> This is like some expert explaining how Apple's approach to smartphones is not good as Nokia's. The tech is in its infancy. There are no experts other than the players themselves.</comment></comment></comment>