What Should You Do with Your Crappy Little Services Business? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/24/what-should-you-do-with-your-crappy-little-services-business/ <comment><USER2> This was heartening to read. It presents exactly the attitude and frame of mind that I've developed over the last year with my service business.

A year ago, I was getting impatient. I wanted to find some funding so that we could more quickly develop the products that we were ready to develop. What I found instead is that businesses like mine are the bastard children among entrepreneurs: it doesn't scale, it probably won't make millions _next year_ , it's not sexy, nobody cares.

So, then I decided that the next best thing would be to talk to a bunch of business advisers, and see if there was a way to ramp the business up more quickly. All of them save _one_ failed to "get" what the business was about, and gave us advice that amounted to, "don't do what you're doing, do it the way everybody else does instead."

I went through a short period of disenchantment and self-doubt, until I started looking at where the business had started and how far it had already come in just a couple of years. I took a second look at things like advertising and realized that, despite throwing a lot of money into marketing and the like, word-of-mouth had continued to be the number one source of new customers by far. So, the advertising and marketing budget got slashed to close to zero, and we doubled-down on what we were good at: taking care of our customers. I picked up another person who brought some more really great talent with him, and things are pretty great all 'round now.

I'm OK with slow growth now, and not getting a piece of the sexy SV action. I think we're growing like a freight train: r-e-a-l-l-y slow to start, but almost unstoppable once we get going.

In a few years, maybe I'll be able to do some seed stage funding of my own. That would be fun, and I'd love to focus on the people that so many others are ignoring: those that are passionate about their business, and want to reach as many customers as possible, without giving up all of the qualities that makes them unique.

<comment><USER3> The way I think about it, you can either take your pain up front or at the end. At some point you have to ask yourself whether your goal is to impress Mike Arrington, or whether your goal is to make money.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I tried a slightly different approach - doing services work that turned into a business to try to underwrite doing product development.

The idea was to do enough services work to fund living costs while working on product development.

But the problem is that customers are (understandably) demanding when you do paid work for them, so you spend your entire time doing client work and never get to focus on the product development.

So you hire staff / team members so you can focus on the product development.

But then you have to spend even more time managing a team and running the business. So you still never get to spend any time doing product development. And at this point, it becomes difficult to change course.

Based on my experience, I think it is very difficult to build a product when doing client services work. It takes disproportionate effort to get and stay focused and you have a mountain of distractions. The services work becomes all-consuming.

[edit for clarity]

<comment><USER4> We're actually doing well with this model using a couple techniques to reduce the all-consuming tendency of contracting:

* Contracting stays at 50% of our hours (or less.)

* Contracting is always hourly. Any overtime or extra hours mean 1:1 extra funded hours for product.

This approach has a lot of nice side effects. The tighter supply of your hours will drive up your hourly rate (if you're good) and will maintain the financial motivation to put out some awesome products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gosh I've been around this block a bunch of times -- I've over 20 years in the services business, and I've worked like a dog trying to launch a product business. I've worked with the big consulting firms, and I've worked with companies who were selling dynamite products.

There's so much for me to say it's difficult to limit the scope. Most of this was dead-on.

For me, I find the services sector to be a huge weight around my neck. Yes, those in the services sector look longingly at the product guys and get easily seduced over there, but the story is a bit deeper than that: if you're in services, you either scale by adding people, increasing rates, or adding something else to the mix. Running large groups of people may be fine for some guys -- I've never been a fan, at least in the services environment. Quality is always an issue, as is divided loyalties. Prices can only go so high, so you're left with either hiring more folks or selling a product. That's the situation whether your Andersen with a huge workforce or Daniel Markham with his mom-and-pop consulting shop.

I know the people running the 50-person shops, the 500-person shops, and larger. It doesn't look like so fun from where I sit. Every person you send out to help somebody is a potential stick of dynamite waiting to go off and ruin your reputation. Clients say they want one thing but actually need something else. Any time you have lots of people, you have lots of headaches: sickness, death, family issues, personality conflicts, life values conflicts, etc. As you grow, either in income or in people -- or worse, in both -- the government gives you more and more hoops to jump through. Meh.

So the allure of products is not limited to the big guys -- there are logical reasons why anybody in the services business needs to augment their income.

But the core of his thesis is correct -- products are a completely different world. What looks like an easy switch is anything but.

<comment><USER6> Create tools that are useful for your own service delivery and particularly for scaling your particular service business.

These tools are built from what you're already using to address the problems that your customers are experiencing.

Then solidity, test, and package them, and use them to reach other customers in your target business.

Even if the products don't work out profitably (or if you decide not to sell them separately), these products still solve issues you're having, and to deliver your services more efficiently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a lot of wisdom in this article. Some things that really needed to be said. But the perspective from which it's written isn't typical of those he means to advise, I think.

He talks about "building meaningful businesses that are both fun and economically rewarding". But the great majority of services businesses are not fun and not that profitable.

And those I know with "product envy" aren't generally motivated by "crazy valuations" and acquisitions. Rather, we have a burning desire to make our own mark and the best of our potential. Pouring our creativity into another person's vision is rewarding to a limited degree.

</comment><comment><USER8> 1 - Create a service others are willing to pay for.

2 - "Productize" your service, making it so any idiot can run it.

3- Instead of selling the new product, keep charging for the service fees but hire people in house to run the product.

Edit: Now you can charge $200/month instead of $19.99, and one person can probably run 30 accounts.

Examples: ReachLocal and Yodle.

<comment><USER9> Thats not a service business as this article is talking about. We are talking about services that cost $1000 a day and dont scale without good people. $200x30=$6000 a month is not enough to run a really profitable service business either.

<comment><USER8> I think ReachLocal does this to the tune of 40M/year in revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Service and product companies typically have a different mind-set. Service- based businesses typically do more waterfall-style development. Product-based companies do more agile development. Service-based businesses build what the customer asked for. Product-based businesses build what the customers will ask for.

While some service companies have made the transition, I think it is a very different focus and mindset. While some companies like 37signals have made transition, it is not easy for many.

</comment><comment><USER11> Two things to add:

\- Service businesses in the tech sector have grown into multibillion-dollar valuations, but often take decades to do so. Infosys and some of the other large Indian outsourcing companies spring to mind.

\- There is a well-established pattern of enterprise software product companies turning into services businesses (IBM), or at least deriving a majority of their income from services revenue as margins on software products/licenses decline (Oracle, starting in the late 90s).

<comment><USER12> There's also an established pattern, the cynical might say, that goes a little like this:

1\. Sell product to enterprise.

2\. Realize there's more money in consulting to them.

3\. Continue development of said product, but now motivated not by ease-of-use or effectiveness, but by how much it can add to your consulting business, resulting in the bloated, out-of-the-box unusable enterprise software that we're all familiar with.

<comment><USER13> I used to work for one of these business and it's nowhere near as nefarious as you make out. In their case at least it happened accidentally and gradually.

For example the product starts out simple but grows in complexity, so suddenly you notice the 1 hour install that your consultant used to start his usually 4 day client customisation work with has turned into a whole day and you're now charging for 5 days of consultant time. This leads to the perverse economics that writing an installer, which costs you money in dev time and impacts the development schedule, will actually lose you money. So the installer never reaches the top of the priority stack until it's a real pita as you can recoup the costs compared to the lost opportunity of not working on a new client module.

Also it's the client themselves that demand the extensibility of software. It's almost impossible to perfectly model someone's unique workflow in any non-trivial system.

Say a client has a risk rating they give every new project. Obviously they want to be able to record that rating in their project management software. And then they want particular directors emailed when that project is moved from tender to won. And then they also want accounts notified. And then they want a team auto-assigned. And then, and then, and then.

Enterprise software has to be flexible and extensible for many businesses. Because virtually every business is different.

We may mock it, but getting it right is very, very difficult. And many of these businesses end up with consultants just to manage extensibility and tailoring because getting it wrong severely impacts the usefulness, and thus ROI, of the new software.

I don't think there's any greed motivation as you seem to paint it, I think a lot of enterprise software started with a good, simple product and then gradually got forced into complexity by client sales requirements, big support contract clients and over promising in sales (quite often by accident).

The directors of the company I worked for were proud of their product and genuinely wanted to deliver value to their customers. They did, growing amounts of consultant time was not caused by greed but because every client ran their company differently and so wanted their software to be slightly different. Maybe the 37signals type approach is better, but don't mistake it for a nefarious desire to constantly grow the billable hours.

<comment><USER12> (I spent 2 years in the sector, and my employers didn't want to create complex software either. But they did want to make money - optimizing things to take less consulting time, as you say, wasn't always a top priority.)

It's not necessarily conscious or nefarious, but the pattern is clear. You can say you don't want to do this, and mean it, but actions speak louder than words, and the incentives are compelling.

<comment><USER14> _optimizing things to take less consulting time, as you say, wasn't always a top priority._

It only becomes a top priority if you're trying to do more with the same consulting time.

With straight hourly billing multiplied by people involved, as is common in enterprise, that's never an issue--in fact, in many cases quite the opposite.

However, lower down the totem pole of gullibility lie people who feel burned by the enterprise model and insist on fixed-bid projects, which shifts the risk onto the consultancy. Now the incentives are to get the most done with the fewest people in the least time, at least if you have more work than you can handle. In this situation, automation, installers, scripting, etc. become a big win.

There are other business-relevant incentives for this type of automation, of course. The biggest one I can think of is to make the deployment process even "stupider," thus theoretically allowing for the possibility of employing even cheaper people to perform it. The second biggest one is standardisation (removing individual customs and habits out of the install process), consistency, and reduction in human error.

On a less directly economic level, some manual processes are so tedious that if you don't automate them, your employees will grow demoralised from having to do them over and over. Lord knows we've run into that one a lot. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have been reading about this for long time, and one of the good sources are Michael Cusumano works. He assert that a hybrid model is the most strategic approach:

[http://ebusiness.mit.edu/research/papers/197_Cusumano_ProdSr...](http://ebusiness.mit.edu/research/papers/197_Cusumano_ProdSrvcsBusMod.pdf)

<comment><USER16> I like the fact that the paper provided a definition of what is meant by "products company" and "services company".

Even though very interesting, the main article had been even more useful if that had been clearly defined.

The paper uses these definitions:

 _Products company_

"... the majority of a firm's revenues come through sales of standard offerings." 1)

"Product companies ... generally want to sell as many copies as they can of their product as is – that is, without adding special changes such as one-of- a-kind features for individual customers. 2)

 _Services company_

"If firms go in this direction of providing more customized features, services, and maintenance than they do standardized products, then the more people the company is likely to need, the more unique projects or labor- intensive work it will probably undertake, and the more the firm leans toward becoming what I will call, for short, a services company."3)

It is interesting to note that some of the things the paper defines as "products", like products created by Microsoft, Adobe and Intuit, now in many cases can run as a service on the web.

Is it then still a product, or has it changed to a hybrid or a service?

Sources, all from: [http://ebusiness.mit.edu/research/papers/197_Cusumano_ProdSr...](http://ebusiness.mit.edu/research/papers/197_Cusumano_ProdSrvcsBusMod.pdf) 1) Page 3 in the pdf, 2) and 3) Page 4 in the pdf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > it is far easier to persuade a business to pay you for your services (a > concept they readily understand) than it is to persuade them to buy a > totally new product concept and pay for that product.

That's contracting/consulting, not "a service business". A real service business is where you have people working for you who are working for clients a high percentage of their time. Creating and managing that is, IMO, a very different skillset than simply selling your own services.

If you can hack that kind of thing, more power to you, but in some ways, I think a product business is more hacker friendly, in that the service business requires more management and sales skills early on.

</comment><comment><USER14> Finally, someone says it:

       This thinking is largely driven by the venture capital industry

Yeah, that's definitely the truth. Aside from the improbable, but magnitudinal valuations and exits, I can't think of another reason why "startup" has come to be synonymous with "product company" in the popular narrative.

The article touched directly on many of the reasons why I find consulting as a steady state much more lucrative and rewarding, but the one about services as a bridge to product strikes me as most salient. The difference is, my preference and strategy is to never fully cross that bridge. We do maintain fairly sophisticated and feature-complete product codebases, not just SDKs or frameworks or scaffoldings, but--critically--I see the sweet spot as addressing a market where they are mostly, but not quite ever deployable in just a stock, as-is configuration. There is _always_ some customisation, tweaking, domain-specific configuration, etc. to be done, but not to the point where it's anything like a one-off; 90% of the fundamental needs have been met and core problems have been solved. I suppose an appropriate analogy would be: do on a small scale what SAP and Oracle do on a large scale, with their ERP/CRM/PRM packages. This commonly goes by the name "consultingware."

The beautiful thing about specialised consulting is that one can bill a lot of things as services that really have a product-like consistency underneath. This achieves a few things that are not compatible with the general trajectory of a product company:

\- Wrapped in a service packaging, these "products" are a lot more opaque, thus more resistant to direct price comparisons and direct commensurability with your competition, _especially_ if the service aspect of deployment is an indispensable part of the value proposition. It's an imperfect, but formidable weapon against commoditisation.

\- As the author astutely points out, there are _considerable_ margins to be made in customisation/configuration/setup.

\- More opportunities for price segmentation, since what every customer pays will inevitably vary with their needs to begin with.

\- You can bill more for your "product." Some of that is indebted to specialisation, not just the fact that it's a service company, of course.

\- But it's a lot easier to do specialised stuff this way. Building a product --together with all the trimmings of product fabric in which you have to wrap it for mass use--for a very idiosyncratic, small addressable market is not worth it in many instances unless you can charge a lot, and if you're competing on price with vastly larger competitors with more economies of scale and sales muscle, that can lose big. Unless, of course, they charge even more than you do, in which case coming up from the bottom works just fine.

\- Recurring revenue is easier to capture than with off-the-shelf products sold one time, since there is always support and maintenance on anything non- trivial. That said, it's not nearly as easy to get as subscription revenue for SaaS stuff, obviously, but when you get it, it tends to be higher-dollar.

\- More flexibility & agility in business concept. When you start a company around a specific product, you're pretty much staking everything on that product, that product line, or that concept.

A service business is a lot easier to remake. Sure, that gets harder as it grows bigger and inevitably becomes more foundationally tied to earlier core technology investments, but I would still say a lot easier than Zappos turning around and becoming an industrial machine parts distributorship.

The last point is really important. Higher margins and higher pricing are sustained by resisting direct comparisons to competing options, and thus avoiding competition on price (this is not to say that you are not broadly competing with conceptual alternatives, or that there is no price-level competition; it's just a matter of degree and impact on individual sales cycles).

Staking everything on a product concept links your fate much more to the manoeuvres of your direct competitors, Scrum sessions and Olympic sprints and customer-driven development and continuous integration be damned. Keeping a mostly-product tucked away inside a thick tuft of service and integration allows you to confront changing market dynamics a lot more obliquely on the plane of marketing and politics.

That said, there are definitely some downsides.

\- Fundamentally, service business is still a linear proposition. One can combat that linearity with reusable assets of the aforementioned nature, and with business processes surrounding them replicated at decreasing marginal cost.

Still, if it has any kind of non-trivial marginal cost, you're never going to have the kind of multiplier effect or economies of scale that selling a marginal copy of almost "frictionless" off-the-shelf software or hosted service is going to have. You need to make peace with that.

At the worst extreme, it's kind of like a barber shop; if you want to make about twice as much money, you have to cut about twice as much hair. Hopefully you can do a little better than that, but results vary.

\- Specialisation is a fairly indispensable ingredient to the formula, mostly as a price support. I can't really see how one can make more money doing something fairly generic as a service than putting out a product in the same space. If you're selling something with a really low price ceiling and no opportunities for substantial upsale or upward price segmentation, more marginal cost vs. less marginal cost is not a hard decision.

\- Getting consistent results out of very inconsistent people on a large scale as an integral part of every iteration of your sales cycle is really hard, especially if you're doing something very esoteric.

You may be brilliant, but hiring copies of yourself is neither easy nor cheap. And many of the most qualified people are going to want a pretty big cut of the action, which is why you see so many consultancies structured as very multilateral partnerships, as with law firms, accountants, and other professional services companies.

Unless it makes sense to dilute yourself, in most cases, there will be an unavoidable movement toward mediocrity as part of your efforts to standardise using lower-skilled, lower-paid employees. The good news is that it may not matter once you're entrenched, but it's almost always bad news for your customers. Still, any kind of non-trivial business growth requires some compromises with reality.

Effectively cutting yourself out of the loop and building a process that is more effectively self-sustaining will either work or it won't, depending on just what it is you're doing. Still, this will probably be the biggest problem you'll face: "Yeah, I've got money to hire another somewhat competent guy, but I'm still going to have to do 90% of the heavy lifting unless I want to see everything go to shit." For the control freaks among us (me), some of that is about learning how to let go and delegate, but most of it is just reality.

Joel Spolsky condenses this issue very well here: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html>

\- As the author said, nobody's going to fund consultancies in any serious way. Small investments to bolster cash flow are about the most you can hope for. As a result, your growth path is going to be quite linear and incremental, and certainly much less impressive than that of someone who just got VC afterburners. That may account for a lot of the product envy; "if only we could get funding to hire 20 sales people at once!"

</comment><comment><USER18> Never thought I'd say this, but, "this TechCrunch article is a must read". Really good advice and useful context to really understand the advice.

<comment><USER19> tl;dr

Guest post from a VC giving candid advice to those running services businesses & considering making the transition to a product business in order to attract VC funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I just forwarded this to two friends who are outside the valley and valley- envy is f'ing up their great business. One in particular is spending about 40% of their resources on this exact identity crisis.

If you didn't read all the way to the end, do it. There are some great tips on how to use products in a services biz to close sales or boost margin.

Mark, as usual, you're the man.

</comment><comment><USER21> According to this article, would Amazon be a product or service?

<comment><USER22> Amazon is a product: Bezos built a website and logistics tail to be the world's largest bookstore. When you give Amazon $$, you are paying for a book.

In a services business, when you give someone $$, you are paying for a person's time.

<comment><USER21> >>In a services business, when you give someone $$, you are paying for a person's time.

But if we're talking about what was said in the article, and what others have said in this thread, if you're doing a service company, eventually you want to get the point where your service is automated. In this case, a user is not paying for your time as much as they are paying for the tool you built to encapsulate your service.

I see Amazon as more of a service, then. Everything they currently offer (having your own store, payments processing, order fulfillment, etc.) they are able to offer because they can give to their customers via the web what normally a brick and mortar bookstore would have to do manually, and now their only constraint is scaling.</comment></comment></comment>


Taking Mastodon security to the next level - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/tanker/taking-mastodon-security-to-the-next-level-part-1-encrypt-your-toots-2p00 <comment><USER2> Seems like a technical ad for their product. If the thread model includes malicious admins then all bets are off as admins can change both server-side and front-side code.

Some measure of security could be achieved using browser extensions (c.f. Mailvelope or [https://stosb.com/blog/signed-web- pages/](https://stosb.com/blog/signed-web-pages/)).

<comment><USER3> It's also part 1 of 2 and part 2 isn't out yet, which renders it basically useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting, and I bet you could do a browser plugin to handle some of this on sites that don't support this. I wonder if OTR has a browser plugin.</comment>


You rock my hello world_: Developer greeting cards - <AUTHOR> http://blog.takipi.com/2013/05/26/you-rock-my-hello-world_-developer-greeting-cards/

<comment><USER2> hehe, liked the ascii heart

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool greeting cards!</comment>


Hints for Computer System Design (1983) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://bwlampson.site/33-Hints/Acrobat.pdf <comment><USER3> I used to re-read this every couple of months, until I had memorized it. Despite its age, almost everything in it remains relevant and fresh.

</comment><comment><USER4> Posted many times but without much discussion. This from 2017 contains a link to Lampson's talk updating the paper: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14154898](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14154898).

</comment><comment><USER5> Lots of quotable quotes in here!

"generalizations are generally wrong" - <USER2>

"We are faced with an insurmountable opportunity." - W. Kelley

"Algol 60 was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors." (C. Hoare)

Etc. - I won't go through the whole thing now :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> > Bob Morris suggested that a shared interactive system should have a large > red button on each terminal. The user pushes the button if he is > dissatisfied with the service, and the system must either improve the > service or throw the user off; it makes an equitable choice over a > sufficiently long period. The idea is to keep people from wasting their time > in front of terminals that are not delivering a useful amount of service.

This is a great idea.</comment>


Blind Taste Test Shows XP Users Love Vista - <AUTHOR> http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Blind_Taste_Test_Shows_XP_Users_Love_Vista <comment><USER2> All I have to say is, no up button in the file manager == unusable.

Not that that is the only problem, it's just that is the final one that drove me over the edge to Linux full-time.</comment>


Show HN: Now.me – Get to the meeting you're supposed to be in - <AUTHOR> https://now.me <comment><AUTHOR> After we integrated meeting support into [https://team.video](https://team.video) we made this to allow us to instantly go to the right meeting we're supposed to be in. For example, if I have a zoom meeting happening right now all I have to do is go to [https://now.me](https://now.me) and I get redirected to the right place.

</comment><comment><USER2> Where's Webex?

<comment><USER3> > We currently support meetings on Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, > Whereby, team.video, Skype, BlueJeans, GoToMeeting, and Cisco Webex

I think there _is_ support for Webex, even though there's no logo there above the fold.</comment></comment>


Modern Fertility (YC S17) is a proactive way to test fertility at home - <AUTHOR> https://modernfertility.com/blog/launch/ <comment><USER2> An excellent, important product — and stellar branding! While this product is a massive technical improvement, its biggest value might be getting couples to think about fertility earlier.

I admit as a career-minded professional, I underestimated how quickly the reproductive window closes biologically and how much higher the risks are for Mom and baby as the years pass.

My wife and I went through IVF and learned quite a bit, e.g.: You may have to wait a year before an insurer will begin to cover treatments or you may have to scrounge for cash to pay for them. Once you find a clinic, there's a multi- month process to get started. Maybe you miss a dose of the IVF drugs due to an illness and have to postpone for a cycle or two. In the case of IVF, you may not get viable embryos or they may not implant. If they do implant, there's a scarily high risk of miscarriage.

And if you want to have more than one child you need to factor in the 40 weeks of pregnancy, recovery, and adjusting to sleep deprivation before you get to start the whole process again. On their own, these are small delays, but compounded they can take up years, and if you're starting in your mid-30s and working with a five-year window, they can make the difference.

It took my wife and me two years of financially and emotionally draining treatments before we had success. Our second run was smoother, but our first child was diagnosed with Leukemia (she's good now) at the start of my wife's 2nd trimester. Had we waited another quarter, it's very likely we would only have had one child. I can say unequivocally in my career there has been no bonus, promotion, or professional recognition that comes close to matching that value.

Despite our challenges, we were lucky. We met a couple that struggled with infertility. Turned out after a lot of testing, the husband was sterile. The wife wanted to carry a child from an egg of hers fertilized by a donor. The man didn't want to raise a child that wasn't his biological offspring, so they split and she had to renter the partner market in her mid-30s under extreme time pressure.

Apologies for the overly personal PSA, but I wish I had this information in my twenties. If you want children, you need to treat the process with all the seriousness you treat your career. This product is a great tool to do so.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow- really appreciate you sharing your story (and thanks for the kind words). The main reason we started Modern Fertility was to give women the tools to start the conversation about our reproductive futures.

I think it is so important for stories like this to be shared and to start a transparent dialogue. We see celebrity pregnancies on the cover of magazines but typically no backstory about what went into them. Thank you.

<comment><USER3> I love what you're doing, but a piece of advice - please don't oversell and mislead women by suggesting you can tell them 'how many eggs they have' (text taken from your home page).

You know well that this is not possible at all. 'High/medium/low' is about the best you can say. Please don't mislead people in this way and diminish what is otherwise a really good product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for digging in! We share exactly where the science is and what these tests can and cannot tell you. We can't count the exact number of eggs, and we do report in buckets which are impactful and have clinical utility. One of the hormones we measure is AMH which is a well validated proxy of ovarian reserve. There is a lot of literature on AMH but Hansen et.al.2011 is one of my favorites- they counted the number of eggs (primordial follicles to be specific) in the ovaries of women who were already having their ovaries removed for other medical reasons and found the their AMH levels strongly correlated with follicle count.

<comment><USER3> I repeat: you're misleading women by telling them you can tell them 'how many eggs they have.' (These are the words you use on your website)

There is no way to count the number of eggs exactly but your statements seem to suggest you do this. This is just wrong - the best you can do is give a very wide range.

Also you say AMH levels are well validated as a proxy for ovarian reserve - the science on this is far from what I'd describe as 'well validated'. Please speak to 5 gynaecologists and let me know if all 5 agree with your assertion. (That it is the best measure available is not the same as saying it's wdlk validated, please be clear on this).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback on the AMH language. We are always trying to find the best way to simplify the science. In regards to AMH, great question! AMH is known by the clinical community as the best marker for ovarian reserve. I know everyone doesn't have access to peer reviewed journals so here are a few quotes: Podfigurna et al 2017: "AMH level is recognized to be the one of the most reliable markers of ovarian reserve [60–65]. AMH is mainly produced by granulosa cells of the pre-antral and small antral follicles and AMH levels decline with age. AMH level, especially in comparison with FSH level, was considered to be very stable across the menstrual cycle, but more recent studies have shown a slight decrease in AMH concentrations in the luteal phase [56,57]. Moreover, unlike other tests of ovarian reserve, such as AFC and FSH, it has sufficient specificity and sensitivity [58]. AMH concentration correlates with age and AFC" // Leader and Baker 2014:"Hundreds of clinical studies confirm that adding serum AMH testing to a complete ovarian assessment provides a powerful tool to help provide better healthcare for women. The benefits of this testing can optimize fertility treatments; help lead to earlier diagnoses of PCOS, POI, POF, and certain autoimmune conditions; provide the opportunity for better planning for procreation and menopause; and allow for better medical decision-making by monitoring ovarian damage from exposures to medical or surgical therapies. Although challenges with variability in AMH results make the provided practical steps a prerequisite for appropriate interpretation of the testing, the clinical benefits of testing more than justify this additional effort." We have a great post on the science behind ovarian reserve testing here: [https://modernfertility.com/blog/ovarianreserve/](https://modernfertility.com/blog/ovarianreserve/)

<comment><USER3> > We are always trying to find the best way to simplify the science.

Please don't.

Just be honest and try to actually solve the problem of explaining science in layman terms rather than doing away with the explanations and complexity altogether.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How are you thinking about the increased growth of egg freezing? Is this something that is going to tell more women to freeze their eggs? From what I'm told by doctor family members, it's expensive and not necessarily a guarantee.

<comment><USER5> > How are you thinking about the increased growth of egg freezing

The actual number of babies that have been born worldwide from frozen eggs is only around 2,000, and most of those were done either to prove out the concept or else due to some specific medical condition (e.g. about to get chemo). Despite the fact that you read about it in the news all the time and it feels like everyone is doing it, the number of babies born to women who decided to just pre-emptively freeze their eggs is probably only a couple hundred, accounting for literally 0.00% of babies born each year.

<comment><USER3> Nonsense. Where are you getting your stats from?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Markets have been really bad at coming with solutions (a) for chronically vulnerable groups, (b) for problems which develop over too long a time period to become urgent, and (c) by replacing reactive efforts with proactive efforts. MF seems to check all three of those boxes, while making sense as a business. Cool.

Can you say anything about how you expect these kinds of proactive diagnostics to interact with the existing insurance ecosystem, which tends to pay for diagnosis but varies a lot on treatment?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words! Infertility is not federally reimbursed and if a company happens to cover infertility as a benefit, women have to wait until they are having issues (and "try" for 9-12 months) before these types of tests are covered. We started Modern Fertility to bring these tests to women earlier in life at a much more accessible price point. Some HSA/FSA plans cover Modern Fertility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It just needs to be made clear to people that no matter how much else may have changed, 35 is not the new 25 when it comes to having kids.

The only message I got when I was in my early 20s was "you have plenty of time! Make sure you're established first!" Now it's very unlikely that I'll have as many children as I would like, and if I do they'll have to come in much more rapid succession than I would prefer.

</comment><comment><USER8> The age range of 21 to 40 needs to be expanded greatly in both directions. Well, really the limit should go away.

This fall my wife goes over the limit. She might be pregnant with a 12th kid already though, so she'd be excluded. We'd like an estimate of how many more kids we'll end up with.

A histogram would be great, for example: 17% chance of no more, 40% chance of 1 more, 23% chance of 2 more, 11% chance of 3 more, 4% chance of 4 more, 3% chance of 5 more, 2% chance of at least 6 more...

<comment><AUTHOR> We are working on it! No matter what age you are, the tests are the same. We worked super hard to have age specific content for the range of 21-40 but are excited to expand this. Women need information about fertility through their entire lives because it impacts so many aspects of health and wellbeing. Our next step is to expand our age range to over 40.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Its a good idea, but I wonder how accurate your results will be. HCG tests (done via blood samples) are notoriously bad as a predictor for how many eggs are actually in the ovaries. Its a very broad indicator yes, but nothing more than that.

This is really quite different from say testing a mens sperm where you can accurately count the exact number to the nearest million.

Have you compared your accuracy with an HCG test? What is the delta between your home test results and an HCG test?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Are you referring to human chorionic gonadotropin (hcg)? If so, HCG is used in pregnancy tests not an ovarian reserve test. We do not test for HCG.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a great idea. I work in clinical diagnostics at a large academic health care center and the prices billed to patients are absurd once you see the actual costs of the testing. What's your strategy to decrease the testing cost compared to reproductive endocrinology clinics? Is it simply a lower markup?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Totally agree- this was my exact experience (billed $1500). Today, women typically get these tests when they are having issues and we are making them available to women before they start trying to conceive. There are only ~500 infertility clinics in the US so when you think about the volume of testing they do vs. a general healthy population being able to access these tests, we get different economies of scale and can pass on these savings. We have invested a lot in our processes to support this scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Congrats on the launch! I'm a big fan of the candid and fair discussion of fertility literature on your site. More healthcare startups should be doing exactly that.

</comment><comment><USER11> Given that you are dealing with medical data that falls outside of HIPAA what are you doing to ensure that PHI remains secure?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question! All of our data is securely stored and we take privacy very seriously. Modern Fertility employees can only access user data via an internal administrative portal to which access is strictly controlled and monitored and two-factor authentication is required. Access is reviewed on a regular basis. Data is stored in a de-identified manor. All Modern Fertility employees who handle PHI are required to complete a HIPAA training hosted by HHS.gov.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Quick note: "Millenial women" should be "Millennial women" (note the missing "n")

</comment><comment><USER13> Great product! Are you talking to companies who might want to offer this as a benefit to their employees?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! We are already working with a few companies who are offering Modern Fertility as a wellness benefit. If you are interested you can email email@example.com and we will schedule a quick demo and get you setup in <20 minutes. Thanks so much for asking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Any plans for a male version?

<comment><AUTHOR> Male factor is 50% of the equation and it is really important for both women and men to understand that from an education perspective. We are customers ourselves for our female fertility test and understand the female market well, but are interested in learning more about if males would proactively test / store their sperm.

<comment><USER3> Happy to chat with you about this. I've been through 4 IVFs and have severe male factor infertility, so sadly I know this space all too well. Mens market is trickier - the existing method for home testing for men is too clunky. You need to produce a sperm sample into.. a test tube. Then put it in warm water. Then wait. This is too dirty and too much work.

There is a roundabout way to do this without a sperm sample. Pen prick, blood in a container, ship it out to a lab and then do a karyotype test on it. That'll pick up around 50% of infertility cases. To cover the rest, you'll need to do a sperm test. Also, the 'hook' that gets men in has to be more than just 'check your sperm count'. Men mostly couldn't care less about their sperm count. Something like 'check if you're at risk of passing on a rare blood disease' is a much better hook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> congrats guys :)</comment>


Exposing young girls to STEM: Roominate Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/369073015/roominate-make-it-yours?ref=category

<comment><USER2> Amazing. Finally someone is putting actions to there words. So many people have complained of this gender-specific toy issue and no one, until now, has really done anything about it (as far as I know). This is one kick starter project I can see really taking off.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's an ambitious project with a hard-working team behind it. Glad to see them get more exposure!</comment>


Twitter suspends Deadspin, SBNation accounts over apparent copyright violations - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2015/twitter-suspends-deadspin-sbnation-accounts-over-apparent-copyright-violations/ <comment><USER2> I get that this is upsetting because the NFL is such a large company, but ultimately this is just standard procedure. Content producers have the right to only distribute their content in the way that they choose; that's the whole point of DMCA.</comment>


An AI that helps with your fantasy football draft? Yes please. - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/artificial-intelligence-gets-own-fantasy-130000347.html <comment><USER2> But can UNU determine if Joe Flacco is elite?</comment>


Show HN: Shakespearean Insult Generator Web App in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bruston/insulter

<comment><USER2> Love it! I'll send this to my Theatre buddies - we actually have the last showing of a modern reinterpretation of Midsummer's night dream and as you like it tonight - I'm sure they'll love it too!</comment>


Sundar Pichai: Let's not let fear defeat our values - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sundar_pichai/let-s-not-let-fear-defeat-our-values-af2e5ca92371#.z9ib1meul <comment><USER2> Nicely written! Also interesting how this essay is on medium and not on a Google owned property. Medium has become a place for serious long form essays.

<comment><USER3> exactly. Wonder when Blogger is getting can'd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I mean, obviously, I may be wrong, I am bad with people, etc, etc... but my feeling on the matter is that this isn't really fear. It's hate. We use the language of fear, the language of defense, because that's how you do war these days, but this isn't about safety, not even a little bit.

After the far more serious 9/11 attack, we decided to attack a country full of people who.... looked a little bit like the people who perpetrated the attack on us.[1] To the best of my knowledge, there was no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with the 9/11 attack, and most of the justifications at the time seemed to focus on "weapons of mass destruction" \- something that I don't think is traditionally a legitimate casus belli. Even before it was shown that said weapons were largely fantasy, I don't think there was a coherent non-race based reason to attack Iraq. In spite of this, the move had extremely broad public support at the time.

A lot of people conflate hate and fear, probably out of some attempt to make those who hate look "less manly" or something equally ridiculous, but I think you have a better handle on what is actually going on if you call a spade a spade. Maybe it's just me not being able to understand normal people, but I don't think we're actually afraid of something that kills fewer Americans than sharks most years.

I think that a lot of the American political landscape makes a lot more sense if you understand that for many people, _how_ someone dies is way more important than how long they live.

Both sides of the isle do this. Cars kill more people than guns, and _way_ more people if you remove the obvious suicides from the statistics[2], but while the left goes on about guns forever, they never talk of, say, increasing the requirements for operating a far more dangerous motor vehicle.

All that said, I don't have anything like a solution. I'm just saying that I don't believe that it has anything to do with fear. Fear is what I feel when I bicycle on the same road as cars. This is different. There's very little danger actually involved, from the American side.

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

[2]I think you can't really understand the "pro" side of the gun debate until you understand that for many people, the right to own a gun is actually the right to a suicide they control; the right to death on their own terms. It puts "From my cold, dead hands" in a whole new light, doesn't it? The difference between suicide with a gun and doctor-assisted suicide is an interesting example, because in America, the people who think one should be a right usually think the other should be illegal and vis-a-vis

<comment><USER5> I suggest that hate is an emotion generated by fear and for every scenario involving hate, you'll find one or more fears it owes it's existence to. This is why the underlying fear is what needs to be addressed to eliminate hate.

<comment><USER4> I don't believe that the two are as connected as people think.

I mean, we're talking about hatred of "the other" here, right? I could argue that this supposed fear is nothing more than a rationalization to try to make the hate more palatable, more excusable...

(you may point out that it's the opposite of the rationalization I used in my previous comment. but my point is just that people relate hate and fear, when I think that the strongest hates have little to do with fear.)

<comment><USER6> Nope, we seem to be hardwired from the monkey inheritance to fear the "other" or "stranger".

It may be harder to notice in a more "metropolitan" society though, as the definition of "other" depends on childhood experiences.

<comment><USER4> > Nope, we seem to be hardwired from the monkey inheritance to fear the > "other" or "stranger".

again, hate is different from fear. It's similar, I know. but it's not the same emotion. I think we're wired to _hate_ the other, not to fear them.

Fear is the emotion I feel when I'm bicycling on a busy street. I'm afraid that one of the giant trucks six inches from my left shoulder will make an error and leave me as a thin, red, road-paste, or as a head with no functional arms.

Fear, it has to do with danger.

Hate, well, I think I kind of understand the in group out group hate, but my out group is a little different. I hate salespeople. I know they pose zero physical threat to me, and they only pose a monetary threat when I talk with them, but I still feel hatred and anger that they are in my industry, that I need to see them every day.

If you want to analyze it, it probably has to do with growing up as a nerd when that was something you really didn't want to be. Generally speaking, I have a mild negative reaction to anyone who seems too smooth, too socially skilled, anyone who seems to fit in too well.

Hate, hate is an irrational emotion you feel when you see someone you don't like.

Now, I could write a paper about how salespeople have negatively impacted my life, and how they are destroying everything good, rational and beautiful about Capitalism, but it would all be a post-hoc rationalization; Hate of the other is a fundamentally irrational emotion, and while it's usually not hard to graft on some post-hoc weak-sounding fear, it's still post-hoc rationalization. If I actually want to understand my feelings on the matter, I think that they are shaped more by my idea of who "my people" are, by who I felt was oppressing and/or threatening me during my childhood.

Now, I also think that having an irrational feeling and recognizing that the feeling is irrational is way better than having an irrational feeling and coming up with a rationalization for that feeling, and I think most people disagree with me there; most people would much rather come up with a rationalization for the feeling they are having, and that's probably where this confusion of hate and fear comes from.

(to be clear, I recognize my feelings here are irrational, and I try pretty hard to look past it. Any remaining effects that get past my filter, I'm sure, are smallish. I'm just giving it as an example, because I believe it's very similar to the way racist people feel. Hell, I even have that one salesperson friend who is a really good guy even though he is in sales.)

<comment><USER5> In my earlier response, note that I didn't say that hate doesn't exist or that it isn't real. Neither did I say that it was the same as fear. I said it is an emotion that is _derived_ from fear. Usually the connection is easy to see. Other times it is more subtle and concealed - but I argue it's always there. I don't believe in irrational behaviours. People behave the way they do for a reason.

When you hate someone, it's always because they represent something that you can't remain at peace with. Usually because of something that you are threatened by in one way or another (either physically or psychologically). Of course, I might be wrong, but I think that in the same way there's no smoke without a fire, there's no hate without fear.

This is a theory though, and one counterexample is all it takes to bring it down.

<comment><USER4> >I don't believe in irrational behaviours. People behave the way they do for a reason.

I'm assuming you are speaking of evolutionary psychology; personally, I think that most evolutionary psychology explanations are post-hoc rationalizations; it's usually difficult to actually test.

That doesn't mean that it's valueless or uninteresting, just that evolutionary psychology should be treated more the way we treat history and less the way we treat experimental psychology or neurology or what have you[1]. Yes, we can come up for reasons why the crusade happened, and we can come up with historical evidence for and against it, and that can be really interesting, but we're still building a narrative from the bits of history that remain, and have a bunch of obvious biases (in history, the biggest is that the surviving written evidence is usually, well, written by someone with their own narrow biases.)

I thought I gave a pretty good example of hate without fear (or hate where the fear is pretty secondary to the hate) from my life, which you seemed to ignore? I'm not going to come up with another example, because I work pretty hard to remove my own irrational hates, and speculating about other people's irrational hate is, well, it's much less likely to produce reasonable results.

[1] neurology and experimental psychology have their own, very different problems, of course, but it's a different sort of thing from history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wonderful message. I agree 100% with Pichai's stance on diversity.

</comment><comment><USER8> Lovely essay.

</comment><comment><USER9> Written as Google eases its stance on operating in China [1],[2].

It's not ok when fear erodes our values, but, by the same token: it's not ok for profit/growth-potential to erode our values.

"That is why it's so disheartening to see the intolerant discourse playing out in the news these days — statements that our country would be a better place without the voices, ideas and the contributions of certain groups of people, based solely on where they come from, or their religion."

^^ China's "toleration" of Tibetan monks, the truth (just Baidu 'Tianamen Square' (from a Chinese IP)), and basic encryption/privacy [3], etc manifests in ways that land countless people in political prison or worse - and should inform Pichai's stance on (not) working with that government.

Google is the flag-bearer when it comes to keeping the web (and information at large) open and accessible: let's hope it doesn't cave for a third of the world's population. We'll see in 2016.

[1] - [http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/02/26/exclusive...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/02/26/exclusive- sundar-pichais-plan-to-keep-google-almighty/3/) [2] - [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-china- idUSKCN0T91...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-china- idUSKCN0T91K420151120) [3] - [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/business/international/chi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/business/international/china- cuts-mobile-service-of-xinjiang-residents-evading-internet-filters.html?_r=0)</comment>


U.S. to force out foreign students taking classes fully online - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-visas-students/u-s-to-force-out-foreign-students-taking-classes-fully-online-idUSKBN2472TT <comment><USER2> I spent 8 years of my life (from 16 to 24) under Ahmadinejad presidency in Iran. Every morning you would wake up to another horrible news that affects your life directly. A new rule, a new stupid speech, a new enemy, a new idiotic decision.An unstable demagogue. The news was depressing, concerning and demotivating. I decided to come to US.To a country to stable and progressive they had moved past racism, they had a black president (how wrong was I). I arrived in 2015.Had a whale of time. Didn't need to check the news at all. Then 2016 happened. I've been living the Ahmadinejad life for the past 4 years. Every day a new decision that affects my life directly (starting from the first day with the travel ban, and now this). So... may be Canada??</comment>


Dams for Water Supply Are Altering Earth's Orbit - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/03/news/dams-for-water-supply-are-altering-earth-s-orbit-expert-says.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm <comment><USER2> I'd never seen the theory laid out so, so thank you soundsop.

Regardless, this is from 2006 when Deadwood was on the air. So just for kicks, reread the headline in your head as if Al Swearingen were saying it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Rotation != orbit.

</comment><comment><USER4> article from 1996

<comment><USER5> I'm amazed everytime one of these is posted. Can't think of much else that's still available from that time.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Could somebody reccomend me a hosting service for personal use? - <AUTHOR> I need to practice infra related concepts that I am not able to do in my current job and also host my personal webapps apps.
Requirements
1. Need only 1-2 machines max. 2. Easy to cancel the subscription and cost management. 3. Easy and faster to attach DNS. 4. Enough storage and reliability
I can see a pro of using AWS as I will have access to wide range of services already present, but is there anything cheaper for personal use? <comment><USER2> Many people will have opinions on this, including me. :-) From my own experience, reliable VPS providers that are less expensive than AWS would be Linode and Vultr. Vultr natively supports iPXE if that is something you want to learn as well. Both have pay-as-you-go plans, meaning if you want to destroy the VM's after 5 days, then you only pay for 5 days. Both have very fast VM's.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, so I am collecting as many names I could from experienced folks for my research :)

<comment><USER2> For learning infrastructure related tasks and methods, I would also suggest reading all the questions and answers on serverfault. [1] Use care when posting questions on that site, as they expect everything to be related to your profession in a professional setting (vs Hobby / Lab settings)

[1] - [https://serverfault.com/](https://serverfault.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I spend $10/mo for digital ocean. Easy. I could do more or save more with more effort or though AWS stuff, but DO works well for me. I run a couple of side projects there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I need to downgrade it, I took 15$ machine and 5$ space but yeah things are good. There is already a Terraform provider.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Found some benchmarks here - [https://rickyhewitt.dev/blog/2019/10/scaleaway- vs-digitaloce...](https://rickyhewitt.dev/blog/2019/10/scaleaway-vs- digitalocean-vs-vultr-vs-hetzner-benchmark-revised-october-2019/)

Overall DigitalOcean looks very promising, both performance and product wise.

</comment><comment><USER4> Google App Engine has been great for me and it's free. I've hosted several personal sites on it since its early release for python, but you can now use many languages. I host now [https://www.appblit.com](https://www.appblit.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> App engine is great. But I am looking for a Server. My use cases will vary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> OVH Public Cloud? They have 40% DEAL40 discount now and cheap test servers. Cancel anytime.

</comment><comment><USER6> You can get a $3.5/Month Amazon lightsail VPS or a $3.5/Month VPS with vultr.com. I personally prefer DigitalOcean VPS which starts at $5/Month even though vultr.com has been good as well when I used them.

</comment><comment><USER7> I use Linode and I've had great experiences with Digital Ocean and Prgmr.</comment>


The Incompetence of MT GOX-How it all began - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yw037/the_incompetence_of_mt_goxhow_it_all_began/

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if this is the truth : [http://i.imgur.com/xMeW43a.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/xMeW43a.jpg)</comment>


Ask HN: How can you make a user experience addictive? - <AUTHOR>

What factors and techniques contribute to making a user experience addictive? <comment><USER2> I have users that spend nearly all of their free time on my site. One recently asked me to ban them so they could kick the habit. I asked him what part of the site was addictive and he said, "Basically everything."

One of the key things, I think, is having lots of little things to do that you can get immediate feedback from. e.g. Check the forum for new replies, rate new content, see what kind of response their content is getting, etc.

Kathy Sierra has a great article on this kind of thing: [http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/0...](http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/05/finegrained_tre.html)

Having strict moderation keeps the general quality high, which means it's usually worth checking back to see what's new. There are also multiple tracks of achievement, like hitting 500 comments, etc. so there is always a new badge within striking distance.

You don't even need to have permanent badges. I have a list on the front page of the people who have submitted the most ratings that day. You don't get anything from being on the list, but people try to get to the top anyway. People like seeing their own names.

Having a friendly community is also a big help, since it means that other users are a direct source of positive feedback. That's a bit harder to develop, though.

<comment><USER3> Is your site a gaming site? because I always thought that this type of addictive usage is only on games

<comment><USER4> Almost every successful(and even some which are not so successful) forum has a number of people who are addicted to that particular site.

In fact, I would wager that a number of us here on HN are engaging in highly addictive behaviour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Any "reward" for interaction will help.

      - WOW: experience
      - T61: karma for hearting songs you like
      - Every forum ever: titles for number of posts
      - HN: karma for comments / submissions others like
      - StackOverflow: practically everything

<comment><USER6> I'd say validation from others replying to your posts is probably more important then karma or titles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Last summer, I had the privilege of attending a talk by Mark Pincus at Startup2Startup. One of the tips he gave that really resonated with me was to "gamify everything."

For example, if users have to enter information to make your service more usable, give them a progress bar. In general, let the user "grind" - give them small, repetitive, mindless actions that are easy to accomplish and give instant, positive feedback. Above all, make the experience simplistic enough that they know what to focus on but interesting enough that they don't leave.

Reputation systems that have an effect in a community can also make people come back. Just look at HackerNews ;)

</comment><comment><USER8> \- Set the difficulty level correctly. In an app, it should be ridiculously easy to do stuff. In a game, the challenge should be scaled appropriately so the game is neither boring nor frustrating, and so that players continue to develop and use new skills as the game goes on.

\- data, stats, and awards. People like to see how many posts they've made, how much karma they've accumulated, how many songs they've listened to, or how many zombies they've killed. They like to be given titles or trophies for passing milestones.

\- feedback from friends. Even better than getting that 10,000 zombie trophy or that new forum rank is getting congratulations from your friends on your accomplishment.

\- tickle the senses. Pretty graphics or sounds make for a neat experience in games or certain social apps. (The game "Auditorium", at playauditorium.com, is fantastic for this!)

\- replayability. The experience should remain fun time after time. In a game, the challenge should have some variability. In any app, the "rewards" -- karma, titles, pretty graphics, or what have you -- should update often enough that users are consistently reminded of them. For socially-focused sites, it should be easy for users to generate good content for each other so that each visit seems rewarding. (Example: Grandma finds it rewarding to see new pictures of my baby. Facebook makes it easy for me to upload new pictures, and easy for her to view them, so she gets new pictures fairly often. Therefore, Grandma is addicted.)

</comment><comment><USER9> The single most important factor is one I'd take from gaming, a medium where addiction is a frequently sought-after element: Playability. Do things flow in a pleasing way? Do your actions feel like they have weight? Is the environment responsive? Do you feel like you can explore?

Strive for a "playable" UX and addictiveness will come naturally.

</comment><comment><USER10> Supposedly, if the rewards are _randomly_ reinforced, they will be more addictive. Ie., if the same action sometimes creates positive feedback and sometimes negative, people will keep coming back because they are looking forward to the positive ones and can't predict when they will happen.

I don't know whether it works in practice though.

<comment><USER11> I read an article on Gamasutra a long time ago about this kind of experiment with mice (sadly, my google-fu was weak.) The researchers compared how much effort mice would put into pushing a lever N times to get food vs. pushing a lever that had a 1/N chance of giving food. What they saw was that, if they had a fixed goal, their "motivation" would follow a seesaw pattern: right after they got their prize, they would ignore the lever for a while, but when they were a few pushs from getting food, they would go nuts on it. The random lever got constant attention at a higher average. The author translated this to Diablo: the player has leveling up, which is a fixed, visible goal that the player can strive for, and random equipment drops, that keep him hooked even when other incentives are one or two hours away. Another game to consider: Civilization. I know you all experienced the just-one-more-turn, why-are- birds-chirping-outside effect. It does it by interleaving minor and major goals in different areas, so you don't have motivation valleys, only peak after peak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I find HN addictive. It's earned a button smack in the center of my bookmark toolbar.

If I had to quantify why it's because of quality content. Especially with regard to comments. The headlines change relatively quick.

And come to think of it, +1 for cloudwalking's comment. There's reduced friction here. eg. minimal visual noise.

</comment><comment><USER13> Download Peggle for Mac. You will find your owner, though I am unsure of it's relevancy. I guess the takeaway is offer instant visual gratification. Divvyshot does a great job with this in a more subtle manner.

Tell people exactly how to proceed to a next step. At that next step, reward them beyond what they could have expected.

</comment><comment><USER14> Reduce friction. Make it as easy as possible to do any given task.

</comment><comment><USER15> The first one's always free?

</comment><comment><USER16> Game. Check out this talk from Amy Jo Kim at startup2startup: [http://startup2startup.com/2009/01/09/jan29-amyjokim- shuffle...](http://startup2startup.com/2009/01/09/jan29-amyjokim- shufflebrain/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Accessibility, ease of use, satisfaction, and pleasing aesthetics.

I use Google Calendar instead of iCal because it's integrated with my browser through Google Toolbar. I can add add an event by highlighting some text and clicking in the toolbar twice. Bringing up my calendar takes one click.

</comment><comment><USER18> Fresh content (user generated or not), low friction, and growing stakes as the user becomes more engaged.

</comment><comment><USER19> Content, fresh content and user-created content.

1) Content needs to be an look interesting for the target audience. 2) Content needs to be fresh and look fresh. 3) Users need to be able to add and enrich the content, in natural way.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think points (and badges) are basically the crack cocaine of the 21th century. Reward every positive action with points and you're halfway there.

</comment><comment><USER21> StackExchange's karma points and badges have made me quite addictive.

</comment><comment><USER22> 1) game mechanics

2) Something new every 15 minutes</comment>


Ask HN: Article from 2016 that graphed college major vs. prestige vs. salary? - <AUTHOR> Does anyone know it?<p>IIRC, it did the rounds on "tech twitter," and seemed to show that degree was a better predictor of salary than college prestige <comment><USER2> I think this is what you're looking for - [http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21646220-it- depe...](http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21646220-it-depends-what- you-study-not-where)

<comment><USER3> Bottom line, if you want to earn more get an STEM degree. These Art degrees can't do much with all those fanciness.

<comment><USER4> > These Art degrees can't do much[...]

This pretension is exactly why there is so much animosity towards "techies" who sneer at anyone not working in a technical discipline.</comment></comment></comment>


Paul Allen tries again with (patent) suit against Apple, Google, Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/technologybrierdudleysblog/2013788347_paul_allen_tries_again_with_su.html <comment><USER2> While a shark tries to hurt other sharks, doesn't matter me. The problem comes when a human is injured by a shark.</comment>


Yes, just like manufacturing facilities and call centres, health care is moving offshore. - <AUTHOR> http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/mar/25hospital.htm

<comment><USER2> I just talked to a musician from Nashville who came to Thailand for some expensive dental work. Saved many $1000's and had a fantastic vacation to boot (I met him in a remote cove of an island, where he was playing guitar all afternoon for a few lucky bystanders...).

Mediocre article, good topic, big opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER3> So when are we going to see a user generated directory for medical tourism.

<comment><AUTHOR> i would love to see how much a medical procedure / surgery cost in different parts of the world with the ranking for each medical service provider combined with regular tourism information...

<comment><USER4> I'd think that dental work would be a huge opportunity. When I engaged my dentist, he drove a Mustang. Now he drives a Mercedes.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does Google create their Google Developers tutorials on YouTube? - <AUTHOR> I'm launching an education app and my screencast tutorials are kind of baseline. Google is doing an outstanding job on theirs.
Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FRBDXBs30Y
Does anyone know how Google creates these engaging and well-developed tutorials? I'd love to find out the software and tools behind theses. My screencast productions look like amateur-hour compared to these masterpieces. If you don't know, do you have any tips for how to incorporate the on-screen drawing like they do?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Don't know the details of Google's setup, but they're creating a screencast with a tablet. There are several ways to do that depending on your hardware, but if you search for 'creating screencast with tablet' you'll find several examples.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but I've been through that without a solid answer. It appears they're doing a standard desktop screencast then running it through a stylus-based app to write on top of the video.

Would have been nice to hear from anyone who's familiar with this.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I agree, I'd love to know the details as well.</comment></comment></comment>


Mou is one year old - <AUTHOR> http://chenluois.com/blog/mou-is-one-year-old/

<comment><USER2> Mou is the single best purpose-built Markdown editor I've ever used. I've tried all kinds of Markdown-centric workflows, but keep coming back to Mou. Split-screen editing and preview windows make all the difference, and Mou doesn't seem to ever have any performance issues.

Mou has become essential. Donated $50, worth every penny and then some.

</comment><comment><USER3> I also think Mou is by far the best Markdown editor I ever used. But even better is it's creator @chenluois. I asked him if he was to support Math Syntax, and ~2 months later it came. As he writes on this post;

> __That's why donated users' suggestions are on my highest priority, because > it is them who are supporting Mou's development. __

Thanks so much, and I really hope ppl keep donating for every feature that ships (if they benefit from it). I know I will.

</comment><comment><USER4> I just started using mou for my lecture notes. But I have a question, when I export it to html it looks awesome, for some reason when I export it to pdf to print, texts get bigger it looks all different than html. What would be the reason for that

<comment><AUTHOR> You can write a PDF specified custom CSS inside the @media print rule, assign the font size you want.

Take this post as an example: <http://chenluois.com/blog/mou-pdf-export-page- break/>

It's talking about the page break, but the principle is the same.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, I actually just printed 15 pages a minute ago. I will definitely try it.

P.s. I actually spent so much time on that css. and I was thinking about a live showcase/gallery for different markdown css files. I am sure people are using Mou because of it's beauty and simplicity. Do you think that kind of website would be useful?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are planning to make a CSS showcase website? Then go ahead and make it, I think it would be useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love Mou. I _could_ use textwrangler for markdown work, but Mou's simple interface and live previews make it a snap. It's a great middle point between a general text editor and a markdown focused document editor.

</comment><comment><USER6> I love Mou. I've been using it for several months as I've been getting accustomed to using Markdown (which I'm fairly new to) for my class notes. It just keeps getting better and better. Thanks Chen Luo!!!

</comment><comment><USER7> Happy birthday. I also love Mou! Keep up the good work.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a great Markdown editor.</comment>


Douglas Crockford: The JavaScript Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://ontwik.com/javascript/douglas-crockford-the-javascript-programming-language/

<comment><USER2> Thanks goes to Ontwik for bringing these videos up again, but there doesn't appear to be any credit given to YUI Theater for bringing these to us. Given Yahoo's recent organizational troubles, I think it's important for developers to recognize the contributions they make to our community.

<http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I already put the credits for Douglas Crockford at the bottom of videos, and now i puts the credits to YUI for every video .Thanks for your interest to mention about this

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That's a great resource recommended to anyone who has to write any javascript.

There are two more lectures, sort of a series when put all together:

Advanced JavaScript <http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=111585> (3 parts)

An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM <http://video.yahoo.com/watch/111582/992708> (3 parts)

</comment><comment><USER4> This google tech talk is pretty good

Introduction to JavaScript and Browser DOM

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljNi8nS5TtQ&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljNi8nS5TtQ&feature=youtube_gdata)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd really like to download these and watch them on the go. What's the best way to get these from Yahoo Video?

<comment><USER6> In Safari you can click play on the video, open the Activity window (Cmd- Alt-A), then snag the URL the actual .flv file is being pulled from.

<comment><USER7> Could you paste the URL here? I tried finding the .flv file in the activity window, but I couldn't locate it.

<comment><USER8> Search for "Crockford" on the YUI Theater homepage. The videos are available for download in M4V format, along with zipped PowerPoint slides.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mexico's 7.2 Earthquake from a transit camera - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/webcamsdemexico/status/914050026208464896 <comment><USER2> The strategy of the 3 people huddling into a circle was interesting. I'm impressed they came up with that on the fly.

<comment><USER3> It looks weird to me. I think I would just sit down, but seeing what happened after maybe it's better to be on feet.

<comment><USER4> I was pretty close to a group of low to mid 6.x earthquakes in eastern California in 1980, across a couple of days.

For the strongest, I distinctly remember not being able to stand up. I tried, but kept falling down right on my ass each time. The amount of ground movement was quite surprising.

This is curious since I've seen people standing (kind of) and even running (kind of) in even stronger quakes, on video, as we see here.

I was in a deep canyon (with >4000 foot mountain walls around), so I'm sure the geology was interesting from an earthquake point of view.

The sounds were titanic; there were enormous rocks slides all around, and the mountains largely disappeared in dust, even as you could hear intense crashing and tearing sounds echoing back and forth.

If memory serves, nobody was killed, likely because of the parse population of that area, and also the stringent building codes. Also a lot of people got lucky, with so many rock slides going on.

<comment><USER5> "and even running"

Well when you are running you are mostly in the air, so you are only influenced by the movement of the earth while your feet touch the ground (which is still obviously a little problematic).

<comment><USER4> That makes perfect sense.

So, the next time I need to move my body somewhere during a large earthquake, running as quickly as possible should provide the best outcome. (:

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why did the guy in the car come out? Wouldn't it be safer to stay in the car as protection against things falling on your head?

<comment><USER7> I think the guy was a police officer, and it looked like he was calling for pedestrians to run away from the buildings before they fell.

<comment><USER8> Yes, he was. The comments are praising him for the amount of lives he saved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's the original tweet, instead of a retweet:

[https://twitter.com/Excelsior/status/913961924181630976](https://twitter.com/Excelsior/status/913961924181630976)

</comment><comment><USER10> That dude's black car rocking back and forth was interesting.

<comment><USER11> Park gear with no handbrake on, I would guess.

<comment><USER12> reading this I wondered two things:

        - will Elon Musk come up with an earthquake mode for autopilot
        - could you use kinetic oscillation to charge your battery

ps: if you align all cars along the wave's normal, and use regenerative breaking, would this absorb the quake ?

<comment><USER13> A magnitude 7 earthquake releases approximately 5 PJ over less than a minute, so let's say 100TW. A Tesla supercharger provides 120KW, so even if the braking system is equivalent, you'd need 1B cars.

<comment><USER14> > _you 'd need 1B cars._

Now there's an investor pitch I'd love to hear.

<comment><USER12> If y'all buy my 1B cars you get quake-free life and faster charge !

\-- Salesman

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's the appropriate reaction in a situation like this ? Do you stay outside and risk falling trees, buildings and electrocution ? Or do you go inside the nearest building and find something to hide under ?

<comment> et-al [https://www.ready.gov/earthquakes](https://www.ready.gov/earthquakes) is probably going to be a better resource than anecdotes from mixed sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any way to counter being electrocuted by overhanging wires in an earthquake?

Seems pretty hopeless

<comment><USER17> A chainmail suit will direct the energy around you. They make more pedestrian looking versions of these which folks who work with high voltage often wear as protection

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Now I'm on a natural disaster video kick. Here's the tsunami in Japan.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_0rQ9hnP84](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_0rQ9hnP84)

<comment><USER19> Incredible video. Apart from the conspiracy theory they snuck in at the end…

<comment><USER18> lmao, hadn't gotten to that part yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This video was taken at the intersection of Calle Amsterdan & Calle Laredo in the La Condesa neighborhood of CDMX: [https://goo.gl/maps/21xm3yfo1Su](https://goo.gl/maps/21xm3yfo1Su)

Here's a high resolution version of the video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jYOn3uvj_w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jYOn3uvj_w)

</comment><comment><USER21> How will self driving cars handle this, or other fast moving emergencies such as a tornado? Is it hooked in to earthquake and weather monitoring systems and just shuts down or what?

<comment><USER22> I imagine when the telemetry is all way out of expected parameters, it could go into a safety mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It has to seem routine at first, especially down South in that area, but when the building falls, that must have been utterly terrifying.

</comment><comment><USER24> Title should have a [video]

<comment><USER25> Right. But "camera" does the thing. I didn't expect an article or an image; video is what I expected to be at the end of the link.</comment></comment>


Apple Passes Microsoft in Market Capitalization - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2010/05/26/apple-passes-microsoft-to-become-second-largest-u-s-company-by-market-capitalization/

<comment><USER2> Did yesterdays departures from Microsoft have the effect of lower expectations for the future?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you name your side projects? - <AUTHOR> Any particular name scheme you adopt? Some way of generating project names?<p>Question inspired by mpj [1], who has some amusing ways of thinking of names for projects in his videos.<p>[1]: https://www.youtube.com/c/mpjmevideos <comment><USER2> If you are looking for terms related to your core idea, please try NiftyWord.com[1]

Word discovery happens through related words (not restricted to synonyms), Associated/Collocated Words (words that go together), Words formed by prefixing, suffixing etc.

A handy feature could be the 'No of Syllables' Filter in the "Associated Words" section. This is mighty important as shorter names are more memorable.

Disclaimer: This is a service I built for my own necessity. It has been a great learning in shipping a product.

Love to have feedback/critique that can help niftyword.com grow.

[1] [https://www.niftyword.com](https://www.niftyword.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> I try to make it related to the functionality but not too direct.

In the scene where I develop, the discoverability is fairly bad so sometimes super-direct names works best.

There was a trend recently where people basically took any random "cool sounding latin word" because.. I don't know.

</comment><comment><USER4> Eliot ([https://eliot.readthedocs.io](https://eliot.readthedocs.io)) is a causal logging library: it tells a story. Named it after George Eliot, whose novel Middlemarch was in part an attempt at telling a story about a whole society.

Benefits:

* It's nice and short.

* It's relevant.

* I get to give introductory examples, and make inside jokes, based on a classic novel: [https://eliot.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.0/introduction.html](https://eliot.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.0/introduction.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Depends on the target demographic.

If the product needs to be something a bit more serious, e.g. fintech product, then take an existing term in the industry or something that clearly relates to it, and put some small spin on it, and a .co and you're ready to go.

If the people I'm targeting are younger, trendier etc, then take any loosely related word, check Google Translate to see if there are any cool sounding translations of it, find something that is short and catch, add a .io and you're good to go. :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> At first, I pick a placeholder name. Really what ever comes into my head at first that's remotely associated (notes app ==> jot, etc). Could even just be a few characters. I revisit the name when I launch or prove to myself I am actually interested in working on it.

Naming is tough because it's easy to fall in love with the name and delude yourself about the actual project/progress. That's why it's one of the last things I do. (You could always go with Pied Piper though.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I choose several words describing the project and look them up in a Latin dictionary. These are already a natural sounding words, so you may tweak them a little.

Pros: the domains are almost always available, sounds classy and trustworthy

Cons: it usually doesn't describe what you do just by the name of it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Pokemon name because I like pokemon, you can see a compiled list of Github repo using pokemon name here : [https://cheeaun.github.io/repokemon/](https://cheeaun.github.io/repokemon/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I just use a random name generator until I find one that's memorable.

The main benefits to this are there's a high chance a good domain will be available and you've got less chance down the line of running into copyright problems with an existing company / brand.

</comment><comment><USER10> I made a list of capital cities in the world and work through those backwards alphabetically.

</comment><comment><USER11> As wingerlang said, "I try to make it related to the functionality."

I do this completely. Every. Time. But on the condition that the name is catchy and the domain is available. If I cannot come up with a good name for it or if the domain is not available, I forego the side project.

[https://mypost.io](https://mypost.io)

I think I wanted mypost.com originally or post.io but they were taken. After thinking about it, I figured: My Post IO (Input/Output) I spend a few minutes on GoDaddy and usually stop by this website to check domain availability across the board: [http://www.domainsbot.com/](http://www.domainsbot.com/)

I might spend days thinking about the name of it.. if its just not catchy, I really can't continue. Just to name a few that I had come up with that are projects "in the works" and not yet available ... GoMenu, MyBiz, etc.

I used to be afraid to "share the idea" of my side projects with people, or Hacker News, but honestly, I'm pretty sure if you tell two developers to develop the same application.... this application will likely have the same functionality, but the UI and the approach of how it works will almost always be different.

So for example GoMenu is just an idea for restaurants to be able to create menus and put them up online. I brainstormed it and I was thinking, "Menu To Go? Go To Menu? MenuGo? GoMenu?" And I figured: People want a menu on the go and restaurants want to get discovered.. why not? Anyways, this concept is not anything at all out of the ordinary. A search will reveal to you that plenty of these types of websites already exist. So why would I even bother? Because I tend to focus on UI, user-friendliness, and affordability when developing apps.

Got to love that capitalism and competition! At least 3 billion people are currently using the Internet.. if you could get a few thousand to use your web app and pay for it, isn't that enough motivation for you do something? I'm not saying that anyone should build the next Facebook, because you can't. Sure, you actually can, but you cannot become as popular and used as Facebook. And that's totally okay! But you can certainly be the competition! Even if less than 1%.. lets just say, 0.1% of Facebook users decided they did not like Facebook anymore and decided to use your product because it offered something unique, wouldn't that be a win for you to become the competition?

I tend to buy up domain names and most of the time, I do use them, though I have had a bunch that just fell through the cracks, or honestly, I just thought the domain names were not as catchy as I had hoped. So when it comes to my side projects and naming them...

1\. the functionality must be in the domain name

2\. the domain name must be easy to remember

3\. The extension of the domain name must be a fairly common one that is also easily memorable. (while .com is the one I usually try to get, I've been fond of some TLDs like .xyz, .io, .cc, .biz, .blog, .online, etc.)</comment>