Uber's Vision of Self-Driving Cars Begins to Blur - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/19/technology/uber-self-driving-cars.html <comment><USER3> I have no idea what's going on internally at Uber ATG, but they weren't doing well before the killing of Elaine Herzberg. There was a pattern amongst Autonomous driving outfits funded by well-heeled and impatient companies jumping in to the game late, going balls-to-the-wall, and mostly just wasting a lot of cash and resources on a gigantic clusterfuck. We can include Apple, Baidu and Uber in this category. Baidu has since done a reboot. I have no idea where Apple is at in terms of tangible progress, and then there's Uber.

The companies doing well are Waymo, Cruise, and Zoox, and one thing common to all three of these is that they started small a few talented people and scaled up in stages when it appropriate.

A testament to the whole 'just because 1 woman can make a baby in 9 months doesn't mean 9 women can make a baby in 1 month' analogy.

<comment><USER4> Very true.

The over-exuberant business version of this is money-men types who see companies as a collection of investments and cash flows. This leads them to think of business problems in "resource allocation" terms. If company X's is bad at UI, customer service or whatnot than this will be fixed by "investing" more in it.

Here they see a big juicy prize: first to market with self driving taxis. They understand that it's risky but they still assume a very strong correlation between the amount of money going in, and the probability of their big juicy prize coming out.

The whole approach is a bad idea in new technology. Instead of thinking in expiremental, creative-discovery terms, they have a very precise destination and they try to brute force a way to that destination with money.

<comment><USER5> It worked pretty well for the Manhattan Project and the Apollo missions. I think that you're romanticizing technological progress a bit if you don't believe that more money (often) leads to more progress.

<comment><USER6> Both of your examples where government-run "monopolies" \- that is, if you were a physics or rocketry expert, you didn't have much of a choice of which organization to join in order to build an A-bomb or rocket.

<comment><USER7> And it's likely you got kicked out of the competition's country for being Jewish. America got super lucky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I posted this a while ago

        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14317214#14317443

> 1) Drop self driving cars completely. YOu aren't getting there first, > second, or anywhere close to third, just partner with a car company and call > it a day.

> 2) Settle Google's lawsuit, hopefully 1 will help

> 3) Hire a new CEO, Sheryl Sandberg is almost certainly not available but > someone who can show that change will and is happening internally.

They've completed 2 of the 3 things I thought they needed to go public. Dropping their own self driving car program was the third.

They need to have their story figured out when they go public as investors will want to know if they are all in or all out on developing their own self driving cars.

I can't see them going public with their current strategy for self driving cars, its a huge money pit with not much to show for it currently.

<comment><USER9> The problem is they need a story like self-driving cars to maintain the (inflated) valuation long enough for existing investors to get out. Taxi rides alone are not nearly enough.

I think they are aware that they don't have a chance at it long-term. A partnership isn't as sexy, but might be enough to eek out a $50B valuation.

<comment><USER10> >The problem is they need a story like self-driving cars to maintain the (inflated) valuation long enough for existing investors to get out. Taxi rides alone are not nearly enough.

This is pretty much it. Making an Uber clone is absolutely trivial, and they are being outcompeted in every single international market which has one. They also have zero customer loyalty, people will happily switch to another app the moment there is competition.

<comment><USER11> It seems like it would be difficult to clone their terrible GPS usage and mapping. Most drivers use Google maps in my experience.

And now with Uber express pool it is pretty much guaranteed it will tell you the wrong location. If it says northeast corner, just go to the south west corner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would never trust an Uber backed autonomous car system. They should have been shut down after it came out that they were cutting corners on safety and tech to get the program as far along as they could before it caught up with them. I can't believe Uber still exists at all with the negativity and corruption associated with the brand.

<comment><USER13> > I would never trust an Uber backed autonomous car system.

I agree, and it makes me wonder how this is going to shake out. In the automotive industry it's very common to have the tier 1s provide LOTS of tech to the OEMs, but it's typically isn't branded. Interiors, infotainment, brakes, etc. It feels like self-driving subsystems will be the same thing.

So, I might not trust Uber-branded systems, but I might trust Apple or Microsoft (Just to use some common brands as placeholders). Would we trust those systems more than the OEM-branded systems?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Uber seem to have two really key problems:

The first is that self-driving is super difficult, they don't really have the expertise, and a lot of their progress seems to have come from being able disregard proper safety procedures. So to move forward with it they'd need to fess up to investors that it'll take much longer than anticipated and it'll be much more expensive. That'll damage the company value significantly, and it's not really relevant to what the core of the business is doing right now. I actually find it fascinating - Uber has built an app that disrupts the traditional taxi marketplace. Separate to that they've got a division working on a produce to disrupt Uber's current market place.

The second problem is that if they choose not to do autonomous driving their entire business proposition needs re-establishing. Can they actually make money doing what they're currently doing? Or are they doomed to sink huge venture capital sums into acquiring market shares, only to fail to reach a dominant enough position to actually raise prices and make bank. And part two to that question: Can they achieve that profitability and a good enough return to be worthwhile for investors before someone who does succeed in disrupting the taxi business with self-driving cars.

<comment><USER15> One problem I can see is that they're trying to implement autonomous cars too fast, and secondarily they're trying to replace Uber X with them. If they treated auto-cars the same way they treated Uber Black, and make it a more luxury choice with a higher price, they could slowly implement this into their business over time, one car at a time. I personally would pay more for an auto-car. But the big crux is your first point, and the solution in my mind is for them to just be way way slower and ensure full safety precautions. I don't think they have to dismantle the division nor do I think autonomous cars are out of the realm of possibility.

<comment><USER16> Why would one pay a higher price on a driverless ride?

<comment><USER17> I mean if the data says they're safer on average, I'd pay a bit more? And it'd do away with loud blasting of the driver's favorite genre in the car, turning off the AC and rolling down the windows when I'd prefer it on, aggressive acceleration, etc. that you see with some UberX drivers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Self driving cars are not going to happen in established cities for a very, very long time.

The only thing that could make it happen is a giant like Google/Alphabet investing enough cash to lobby governments to repurpose existing transportation infra to only belong to self-driving cars. But that's also the doorway to a dystopian future where megacorps run entire countries.

<comment><USER19> By the time you're building self-driving car-exclusive tunnels and the like, you really are getting very little benefit over a train system to justify doing it, especially when you take emissions into account.

<comment><USER20> Right. We already have a great solution to many of the autonomous vehicle problems. Trains and busses.

<comment><USER21> As a European living in the states. Trains and buses are not a substitute for a car, not even in Europe.

<comment><USER19> How many Americans drive to and from an office in a city center at the same predictable hours every single day? We're certainly underutilizing trains.

<comment><USER20> Even shared bus services can made into something desirable with the right marketing and investment. The large tech companies provide luxuary coach services with WiFi to their workers and the people riding them are seemingly very happy with the services.

<comment><USER19> I mean, let's be honest here: a lot of people don't want to ride the bus because they associate it with poor people and don't want to share a vehicle with them. There's a lot of legacies of America's social problems getting tangled up with this question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Uber is way way far out of their league here.

Imagine being a software and services company trying to build one of the most mechanically and electronically complex items that humans have ever built with a team that has only built prototypes and not having the war chest of continuing positive cash flow to fund development.

Not even looking at the strategy of it all, this program sounds like it needs to be dumped in favor of partnerships.

<comment><USER23> > with a team that has only built prototypes

This is normal for research isn't it? If someone before you has already built a working version of something, then it isn't research any more. And Uber hires extraordinarily qualified AI researchers doesn't it?

<comment><USER24> I think what they're saying is that usually teams don't go that far out of their industrial strength. In a way, Uber here is going from being cell phone app developers to making automotive hardware, which is a big shift. Shipping hardware past the prototype phase is __HARD__ in ways that shipping a software app/building a marketplace isn't (not saying the latter aren't hard, but the two tasks take very different types of organizations).

<comment><USER25> _Uber here is going from being cell phone app developers to making automotive hardware_

But why would they do that, instead of hiring other developers? Surely Levandowski would have an idea of who to hire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's amazing how fast and radically the narrative shifts.

An year or so ago self driving cars would be here _anytime now_.

Now it's almost consensus that it's not for going to happen in the next decade.

<comment><USER27> Counterpoint, it's happening now with Waymo.

<comment><USER3> Waymo's initial commercial deployment is imminent but is now a good 6 months behind their initial announcement last November. Waymo is still using safety drivers most of the time, and the commercial deployment will likely be confined to members of their EZ rider guinea pigs. It's very exciting seeing how far they've come, but for every new region they hope to roll out in there's going to be a ton of work. AI can interpolate but it cannot generalize.

We're past peak hype and sliding into the trough of disillusionment.

<comment><USER28> Why is 6 months behind if they said that they will launch a commercial service this year?

<comment><USER3> Last November Krafcik said "In a few months". A few months later in March it was changed to "Later this year." Rumours circulated that they had planned for this month, August, which were corroborated by a big Bloomberg puff piece and a ballyhooed partnership announcement with the Valley transit authority, that came out late July, but still no deployment. They're hung up on something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> To me it looks like self-driving problem turned out much harder than anticipated by most players at first(10 years ago?)

<comment><USER30> Which kind of amazes me that it wasn't obvious. When I start to think of vision recognition issues, poor conditions, missing signs, markings, etc., unpredictable human drivers... then all of the edge cases I alone have seen in 30 years of driving... I would definitely have put the problem on the very edge of what might be solvable. And that's today, not 10 years ago. What amazes me more is that companies like Google have come as far as they have. My kudos to those who sought to tackle it.

<comment><USER31> Yeah... Just yesterday I was driving at night, through road construction, with a torrential downpour, and nowhere to pull off, and it was freaking scary. And I remember just thinking, "This kind of thing happens to me maybe a few times a year and there's no way in 30 years that we're going to trust autonomy with this"

<comment><USER32> but isn't that part of the point? I doubt any automated system would consider driving in those conditions 'safe', so it would deal with the situation by pulling over to a safer spot and stop driving. Humans make terrible risk decisions in cases like that - continuing to drive in horrible snowstorms, etc, when the risks a way higher than our already-risky roads in normal conditions.

By not having the human make that decision, you save lives, even if some people arrive home late.

It does raise the point of 'rescue' in certain dangerous conditions like winter storms. Extreme rain in the dark can probably normally be waited out, but snowstorms and other road-closure type conditions probably warrant a different proactive rescue type response if we'll have riders with no driving ability in self-driving cars.

<comment><USER33> "Not driving in the insane conditions when humans are foolish to do so anyway" would IMHO allow routine drives in good weather in known terrain without roadworks, about half the year. Which is a great and magnificent improvement, in all honesty - that is, once we can get the marketing types to cool down from their current hype "it drives itself, full autonomy, everything and a pony*!!!!!!!"

<comment><USER30> I think this is a critical point. We need to reign in the customer's expectations that have already been set too high. They're already expecting to just get in and go anywhere while watching things on their phone or reading a book... soon. We already see this with people posting videos of sitting in the passenger seat while their Tesla rips down the highway in traffic.

Like anything it should be a graduated phase in. It will handle some of the conditions some of the time, and in time it will get better. It would be like me being frustrated I can't carry on a conversation about philosophy with my Google Home. "... but you said I could talk to it and ask it questions!!!"

<comment><USER33> Expecting a conversation on philosophy would be completely understandable - <USER2> the vendor sold it to you with the tagline "it has all the parts it needs for a philosophic conversation!" Google Home doesn't do that, Tesla does. (Musk doesn't even try to weasel around it: says "full self-driving features", Tesla marketing materials repeat. That is, in my opinion, a blunt lie.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Did Uber figure out that if anyone can buy self-driving cars that their golden utopia vision of booting all drivers and simply maintaining a fleet of self- driving roving vehicles doesn't make sense? Did they figure out that someone else can run servers just as well as Uber and offer people the opportunity to lease out their self-driving cars, utterly destroying Ubers market (they would have to charge far more to maintain the whole lifespan of the self-driving car where someone only renting theirs out for a few hours a week would happily take far less)? Or have they just generally realized self-driving cars will never work because no company in the software space is capable of dedicating the years of testing necessary to make a truly reliable product, while those willing to cut every corner will be first to market.... and will proceed to destroy the market by turning society against them after some of their poorly- designed vehicles smear a few toddlers across the sidewalk.

</comment><comment><USER35> Wasn't Uber's autonomous program basically a bunch of Carnegie Mellon researchers? My initial thought was that they actually had some of the best people in the field working on this problem. I vaguely even remember some criticism of Uber because they had plucked so many of the prominent researchers that there was brain drain at the university. What happened?

</comment><comment><USER36> I personally think there are so many flaws in these self-driving cars safety features. There are quite many review by car owners on Youtube, forums, etc. I have also read an article that talks about this at [https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car- accid...](https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accident- injury-lawyers-attorneys/). I think until car companies fix these flaws, I myself will not try one of these cars.

</comment><comment><USER37> The article states:

>"The company, valued at $62 billion, has racked up billions of dollars in losses since it was founded in 2009 and needs to persuade investors that it can eventually create a sustainably profitable business. The self-driving efforts, which have been losing $100 million to $200 million a quarter, do little to help that case."

Can anyone say or speculate what percentage or Uber's losses are a result of the ATG efforts? Would they be profitable without it now?

</comment><comment><USER38> What I don't get is why Travis thought whomever developed self driving cars wouldn't sell them to all comers? And even if the first guy didn't, under the guise hoping to create a vertically integrated monopoly, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th ... vendor would.</comment>


Fed Signals Interest Rates to Stay Near Zero Through 2023 - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/fed-signals-interest-rates-to-stay-near-zero-through-2023-11600279214 <comment><USER2> HN may be interested in my dashboard for visualizing these forecasts.

[https://christopher-russo.github.io/dashboard/sep/](https://christopher- russo.github.io/dashboard/sep/)

If you're new to Fedwatching or need a refresher, here's the accompanying explainer.

[https://christopher-russo.github.io/sep-dashboard- launch/](https://christopher-russo.github.io/sep-dashboard-launch/)

Feedback welcomed!</comment>


My product failed - <AUTHOR> http://www.ironconversions.com/blog/post/My-product-failed

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure of what "Iron Conversions" is going to be, but it'll be depressing if this is another story of someone trying to build a product, and then failing, and then building a meta-product around building products and trying to sell that to people on HN who are still trying to build products. There seems to be a huge influx of things like this: books on how to sell books or build apps after their "real book" or "real app" failed to sell, sites for vetting ideas built by people whose "real idea" was bad, customer development tools for people who failed to do good customer development with their "real idea". I enjoy patio11's posts and talks immensely, but even he admits that most of his income is now from the product of teaching others how to build products, not building products himself. Necessity is the mother of invention, but the meta-product trend is getting tiresome. It kind of feels like an intellectual ponzi scheme at some point.

<comment><USER3> As someone developing a "customer development tool" (<http://www.petriapp.com/>) I'm confused why you would label this "meta"? I (for one) am not building it because I failed to do customer development in the past. I'm building it because I want to do much more of it, and there are large parts of the process that are tedious, time-consuming, and easily automated. Even more time-consuming is the process of educating and coaching others, which freelancers and consulting shops frequently end up doing.

Whenever someone can take one of these pieces of the start-up/product puzzle and simplify it with a tool or a pre-packaged or curated resource, that's a good thing. If it provides value, the rest of us can pay for it and re-invest the time we've saved doing "higher-level" (e.g. more domain-specific) work. If it doesn't provide value, we'll stop buying it.

<comment><USER2> I consider tools/books made explicitly to help with selling, marketing, or coming up with ideas for software products as per the startup-trend of the Lean Startup, etc, as meta-products. This isn't a bad qualifier on its own, mind you, it just means that its a tool to help sell products/bootstrap startups/etc.

I'm not willing to single out specific products (like yours) and criticize/praise them since that is getting into the weeds, I'm just pointing to the larger trend of tons of HN posts where the author tells a story about their failed startup and then you realize, no, they are not just telling a story and sharing their lessons, they are pitching you to buy their (unproven) product so _you_ , humble entrepreneur, can avoid the same tragedy they did.

If something doesn't provide value and people stop buying it, that doesn't mean the (hypothetical) snake oil salesman doesn't make off with a mint before people realize the fact that it's smoke and mirrors and didn't provide any actual value. It doesn't even have to be malicious, it could just be someone making promises they end up being unable to keep and people giving them money in the hopes of those problems being solved. Everyone has the urge to try something for a few months to see if it works if they are struggling. Why should I trust any fresh-on-the-scene meta-product with even my time (nevermind my money) other than the ones that come from a credible source: someone who built and used it to launch a separate non-meta product.

(The problem, of course, is if someone really has a compelling solution to a problem that provides a competitive advantage, they are disincentivized from selling it!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oh boy - disagree with the premise. It's been four months since you _started?_ You haven't failed. It looks like you've been trying to market it to the Internet at large and not targetting your likely user base. Go see some local businesses and see if they are in the mood for a better inventory management system. Get one business using it. Then another. Then another. Build your user base one person at a time. Businesses tend to talk to each other. You say have one paying customer? Great! That proves that _somebody_ is willing to pay for it. Just reconfigure your marketing and target the people who are likely to do so - those with whom you already have a personal connection.

<comment><USER5> I agree. 4 months is way too short to call it quites and shift to a new product.

In terms of customer validation it sounds like you have some but it hasn't been exhaustive by any stretch. Trying to get Adwords-generated revenue with such a small budget isn't going to prove anything either way. Articles written by people from Fiverr.com isn't much better.

Pound the pavement and find 20 people who have inventory management problems, email 200 people who you think are in your target demographic. Find out what they hate about inventory management and if your solution can fix their problem.

<comment><USER6> I'd be happy to take articles that have already been researched and written by people on Fiverr and rewrite them using grammatically correct English while keeping the original SEO keywords. Contact me at the email address in my profile if interested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let me give you some advice from someone who's been on the customer side of SaaS inventory systems for the past couple years.

1\. Inventory systems very rarely live in isolation. If you're a medium/large business, you quickly discover the need for integration with accounting, procurement and manufacturing or production. If you're a small business you may only need accounting -- but nevertheless selling this by itself might be difficult.

2\. You're using strange terminology that unfamiliar to those dealing with inventory day-to-day. What is a 'sheet'? Why is more sheets better than less when it comes to pricing? Fix your terminology or at the very least clarify what it means.

3\. You're charging too little. You're competing with a bunch of companies that won't even list prices on their websites (which means it's in the 5+ digit range per month). Your dirt cheap pricing gives the impression that you're a tiny app that has little value. I'd suggest you consider pricing based on number of users, similar to Atlassian.

4\. Sorry to be blunt, but your website sucks. You need more screenshots. Pricing should be on the front page. There's an overwhelming amount of text on your front page, as a customer I probably won't read all that so don't bother.

5\. Stop emphasizing that you're a one-man team. That is not attractive to business customers. They want to know that there is firepower behind the product and it's not a fly-by-night operation, both to handle issues when they come up as well as grow the product down the road.

Your big advantage here is transparency. Be up front about your pricing and your features, this sets you apart from your competition by leaps and bounds. Your competition requires a phone call with a sleazy salesperson and then they price based on your revenue. You're in a good market, but it will require you to be a lot larger than you think. You're actually competing in the ERP space. That's actually a good thing though, because nobody likes working with those companies, they're horrible. Use that to your advantage and sell your customers on your advantages.

<comment><USER8> You should email this directly to the guy. Information like this is priceless for someone in his situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm still here! HN is throttling my comment submission rate though, so I can't reply to very quickly right now.

I agree, this advice is priceless.

<comment><USER8> If you stick it out, I hope you'll update the community in the coming months!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it might be too early to talk about failure, I think 4 months from start to finish is a very short period of time for building and launching to deciding that no one wants your product.

Your product has been exposed to a tiny tiny tiny percentage of those who it could be. 1 customer out of 1,000 potential is a very low conversion but who's to say you're getting the right type of traffic?

Take a few days to speak to small business owners (in person maybe, or on the phone) and maybe consider a change of tack to a smaller niche that have a specific problem.

Maybe convert to a Shopify plugin? We pay for 3 for our business and they are both very feature light but they solve a specific need.

Also, look at companies who sell online but make product to order. Tracking raw materials against a final product sell is a real nightmare and not one that any of the big shopping cart players manage (3 years ago they didn't at least).

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, four months when compared to other SaaS products (or any product in general) is a laughably short amount of time to judge anything a success or failure.

I probably should have explained a bit more in depth about why I'm calling it a failure:

I'm simply not interested in the product I built anymore. Inventory for small businesses is something that doesn't hold my attention as it used to when I built the product, and I'm not sure it ever did.

Right now it's hard for me to load up my IDE and start working on the product. I feel like I don't know what to do with it as it is, and that stems from the lack of interest.

I'm taking a couple weeks to go over my options, and I think I've got a decent plan to revitalize it.

I haven't given up on the product itself, or the core problem it solves (inventory management). I've only given up on who it's marketed to.

Like you said, I think the best option is to change to a smaller niche. The one I have in mind will radically change how the product looks and functions, but it will still be inventory management.

<comment><USER10> This all sounds very familiar. I also built a SaaS for small business owners in France (professional filesharing) but I realized I didn't care enough about the product and the audience I was serving (among other problems)

I even wrote a post-mortem here: [http://www.sparklewise.com/post- mortem-5-mistakes-i-made-wit...](http://www.sparklewise.com/post- mortem-5-mistakes-i-made-with-my-first-online-product/)

For me, caring about the product and the people you're serving is the most important thing. Don't choose a project because it sounds like a good idea, but choose a project because it's a part of a bigger goal, a bigger mission.

However, there's also something to be said for persistence and not giving up at the first obstacle. Finding out where the limit lies is not easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I would pull each of your headings up a level so you can take lessons into the future:

 _I built the entire thing before ever announcing it_ = I didn't talk to customers.

 _I built a huge feature for my only customer_ = I didn't have a vision.

 _I wasted too much money on AdWords and Fiverr_ = I had no marketing plan.

 _"If it had @thisAmazingFeature, then I would buy it"_ = I didn't stick to my vision (because I didn't have a vision to stick to).

 _Most importantly, I can't relate to my target demographic at all_ = I don't care about the project.

 _A plan of action_ = What I should have had in the first place ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great advice. I admit I had no plan of action when I started building my product.

My line of thought was: "Okay, I'll build it. People will somehow hear about it and start using it. I'll make money which I can then put into marketing the product".

I'm now developing a clear plan of action before I take another step with my product. A lack of one in the first place was crippling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One problem i can see is you build an isolated system. People when look for a solution like inventory, hopes that in the future they can intregrate it into a bigger system. Someone talk in this discussion about ERP, but i think that build an ERP require too much resources and time, about all for an startup, but is desirable to have a product that have more than just an inventory system. I think you have two ways, first integrate your system with some big alternatives of market [some one mention shopify] or create more systems and integrate them [consider see openerp or openbravo]...

</comment><comment><USER13> Are you going to try to save it?

I have some ideas, but they are just ideas, probably more wrong than right.

Your site could probably use some a/b testing for conversion rate increase. see funnel charts. I wouldn't mind seeing a demo as a video either. I also wouldn't mind seeing a feature comparison chart (?) comparing your features to the top 3 inventory systems, and why yours beats theirs.

Or even for a free extra N sales, you can claim on your landing page, "the inventory system that blows SuperInventory1 out of the water!!" (if there was a competitor selling SuperInventory1). (and then of course you buy on all their adwords if you want to needle them a bit)

I think your ads are just hitting the wrong audience.

Instead of a blog talking about small business, you would probably do better in this space blogging about living a ridiculously baller lifestyle, and blogging about women and gambling... you want to attract customers with successful small businesses.

I can suggest marketing to a group of customers have a problem, say buying adwords for "sugarInventory bug" or "I hate inventory".

Maybe give out some licenses free to bloggers or small businesses? (like 10 as a test pilot? I am not sure)

My hunch is this industry is not consumer facing, and most industry stuff recommended is word of mouth, magazine, trade show, or by sales pitch. Typically a for-a-business product has a sales team, with people who hunt leads and make calls, not sure what you can do to beat the competitors who do this, but I would start on the phone.

Gluck

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This seems to be a common theme so I'll post this here instead of replying to each comment with the same thing:

I probably should have named the blog post "I've lost interest in my product" instead of calling the whole thing a failure, as that may have been more accurate.

To me it is a failure, but not because I've only gotten 1000 visitors over four months, or because I've only had one paying user.

Instead, I call Rakasheets (the product) a failure because I've lost interest in what it was built for. I built it to solve inventory management for small businesses, but small business inventory does not interest me any longer (if it ever did).

I find it hard to open the project in my IDE and work on it, or even to think about it at all.

With that said, however, I haven't given up on the problem I built it to solve (inventory management). Instead I've given up on who it was built for (small businesses).

I'd like to give more details about that but for now I'd rather build a plan of action before talking about what I'm going to do.

On another note, I completely agree that four months is far too short to call anything a success or a failure. If I were still interested in the product I'd never admit it was a failure simply out of pride.

(Also, thanks for commenting. I really appreciate the advice. If I didn't reply to you it's only because HN throttles comment submission rate. I was unaware.)

<comment><USER14> Seems to me like you would get customers for this sort of product the old fashioned way, by cold calling businesses and setting up meetings with businesses etc as opposed to internet marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> First of all, declaring failure at this point is so ridiculous that I'm pretty sure that the only purpose of your blog post is to advertise that "Iron Conversion" thing.

Second, Reddit and adwords aren't the only marketing strategies out there, especially when it comes to small businesses. I mean, C'mon, how many small businesses owners turn to reddit in search for "inventory management app". Even more than that - how many business owners actually turn to the web to look for solutions?

I don't know how you imagine them, but small businesses owners aren't hackers. They want solid solutions and they surely would be interested in something that solves a problem and is cheaper than their current solution.

As I see it, your only marketing strategy is phone calls. I mean, hundreds of them. Just open Yellow pages and start making them calls.

Pitch your product, ask business owners about their problems with their current system, describe how yours would solve their problems. Try to get business owners interested, offer a free trial, ask for email addresses, do follow up -phone calls-.

I'll reiterate - small businesses owners aren't hackers.

Edit: I just saw this - "Online Inventory Management without the suck"? Seriously? I really want to know how you imagine your average customer (genuinely interested)

<comment><AUTHOR> "Small business owners aren't hackers" is what I've learned recently, and I wish I learned it months ago. In hindsight I know I went about finding my problem-to-solve in the wrong way.

Instead of interacting with my potential customers, I only read what they were talking about from afar, and somehow divined that "real time inventory management" was the solution.

I didn't ask them what they thought, and I didn't validate the product. That was a big mistake and could have saved me months of effort building something I'm no longer interested in.

Re: "Online inventory management without the suck". All copy so far has been written in a vacuum. I have had literally zero feedback from random internet visitors (until today, from HN). My only way to gauge if my copy was working was by the amount of trial signups I was getting each week.

It happens that that was one of the last messages I tested before losing interest. Trust me, the copy has gone through numerous iterations over the last few months trying to find something that sticks.

I've tried long copy, short copy, "hybrid" copy, screenshots, no screenshots. I didn't just stick that message up there and call it good for a few months.

This might sound like I'm irritated or angry, I'm not. I genuinely appreciate all of the feedback I've been getting. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Thanks for sharing your story and post-mortem. I enjoyed it a lot.

This line jumped out at me:

> Sidenote: Judging by my AdWords clicks, Inventory Management is very popular > in India

Was this meant to suggest click fraud was occurring, or was it legitimate interest? Or is it one of those "email me my final project plz" phenomena? (<http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/plz-email-me-teh-codez.aspx>)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually that was a bit that should have been cut out. I previously had a paragraph in there that said most of my mailing list subscribers were from India (according to MailChimp).

I then went on and said that the people on my mailing list weren't very interested in opening the emails I sent or responding to them. I took the line out however because there's no correlation between being Indian and not opening my autoresponders.

I've got Americans and Europeans on there too and they don't open or respond just as much as people from India.

Another sidenote, this probably suggests that what I'm sending isn't all that enticing to anybody and could use some work.

<comment><USER11> Or it means that a lot of developers in India are working on inventory management.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've actually built a custom inventory system for a customer, so I know the challenges you face from the engineering side. I'm also (co-)founding a startup, so I know your challenges from the product development side. However, my gut tells me that neither of these are your problem. Your problem is very clearly your website.

Your first image is nice and somewhat explanatory, but there's no call to action until the user scrolls at least once, and even then it is small and rather unnoticeable. I would say that the worst part is the wall of text that follows. No screen shots, nothing to play with, just a wall of text listing the features.

You have to draw the customer in with your coolest and/or most useful or unique features first. If they want to learn more, have a way for them to do that (take them to a "features" page or something), but your current layout is just way too intimidating.

And to reiterate what others are saying here, small business owners aren't always the most tech-savvy. Maybe your angle should be how dead-simple easy it is to use (way easier than anything out there, of course :)

I hope this helps, and good luck should you attempt to revive this project!

</comment><comment><USER18> I know little about the space or problem you are solving, but will echo the sentiment that although 4 months may seem like a long time (even given the effort) it really is a drop in the bucket of what it takes to build a successful product/company.

My unsolicited advice is this: don't write it off as a failure unless you really don't care about the problem you are solving -- in which case go work on something you do.

</comment><comment><USER19> _Before I ever got another pair of eyes on the product, I had built every single feature. It took nearly a month to get it all together and ready for users._

So the product has only been around for 4 months, it only took a month to piece it together and get it ready for the public? Doesn't sound like you've failed to me, you've only just started. Starting a new company with no rapport with anyone isn't just going to burst onto the scene and people throw large amounts of cash, trust and praise at it. Marketing to small businesses isn't easy, you've got to build trust first.

And by the way just by launching the product instead of burning through savings and investment capital for a couple of years you've succeeded in that I've seen tonnes of ideas and startups fail because they couldn't get a product finalised and out the door for people to use. You've launched something, be proud and keep working at it.

</comment><comment><USER20> I agree, 4 months to build, market, and sell. That's nothing. Remove the dev time and you're looking at what, 1-2 months? And considering your marketing isn't very strong and its all new to you, you can't expect results that tae. Adwords alone costs at least a thousand just to start getting an idea. And at least 3-6 months of experience.

If someone was coding for only a few weeks you'd probably tell them they just have the basics at best. A bit more than hello world but not much. The same is true with marketing ;)

It took me a year just to figure out marketing. The overnight successes you see on techcrunxh are either very lucky, its not their first time around (ie lots of experience), or have been working at it for a long time and you only see the last and exiciting part. Don't be fooled into thinking you can build something AND sell it in a few months.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think it's lovely that a startup can go from fruition to abject failure in 4 months. If you really don't believe in the product any more, that's that and you should be happy you got out so quickly.

That being said, 4 months isn't a lot of time although it sounds like you've spent considerable energy on this product. If the software works you might consider unwinding this business through a sale or a partnership. If what you need is sales, find a motivated sales person. I definitely agree with other posters that you could use a motivated marketing person as well; you might still be able to make a go of it.

When we were starting out we definitely fell victim to the custom request bug, but as you grow you'll realize that no client is worth upending your whole business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, four months definitely is not enough time to be calling this a failure.

I've explained my motivations for calling it a failure elsewhere in this thread if you're interested. I probably should have named the post "I've lost interest in my product" as that may have been more accurate.

As for your other point, a motivated marketer would help me immensely. I'll be the first to admit that my marketing sucks. However, hiring another person to help with this project is simply beyond my meager income. I make enough to live comfortably with my girlfriend, but I can't afford too much beyond that.

Even with the issue of money aside, my core problem is that inventory management for small businesses no longer motivates me, I find it hard to work on the project as it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think the problem here is that your just not good at marketing. I read your entire post, you mentioned that you were pivoting yet you failed to capture my attention or interests by not expanding on what the idea was. You also concluded your post without giving me an option to signup for your emails, I thought the post was done so I stopped reading at the thanks for reading section, which I didn't read. Only going back I saw that there was a signup box all the way at the bottom - if you want me to signup for your emails, make it easy for me to do so, don't make me hunt. Good read regardless.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, thanks for the feedback. I'm not a great writer, and my marketing skills definitely leave something to be desired. Nevertheless, it's something I've been trying to improve recently.

When comparing the copywriting I have on my product's website (Rakasheets, not Iron Conversions) it's leaps and bounds better than what it was when it first launched. Originally, my "copywriting" was a rant against using Excel sheets for inventory.

And personally, after re-reading this blog post I feel it was a bit jumbled and jumped around too much. Like I said, it's something I'm trying to improve.

<comment><USER23> The copy on the Rakasheets site also stood out to me as a problem. As hahla stated, your customer is likely not a hacker. The other vendors they give their money to do not say things like, "... without the suck" or "Benefits - lots of 'em."

The value of the inventory you're tracking could be a significant chunk of your customer's life savings, so I'd want to convey professionalism and trustworthiness.

Regarding copywriting in general, I've never tried it, but if you need help you might try something like <https://draftin.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The piece that seems wrong to me is your CPC with Adwords. 15-35 cents per click? It looks like Adwords is charging $3 - $6 per click for closely related terms. Yes, this is 10x what you're used to paying, but these are the customers who are the most likely to want exactly what you're selling.

Get a signup page in there and see what converts the best. For B2B, the sales cycle is longer than consumer-oriented businesses, so it's best to start by building some sort of relationship first: e-mail newsletter, free trial, etc. rather than tracking absolute sales based on the first click.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, the online inventory management bidding for AdWords clicks averages far more than I spend per click. I haven't checked recently, but $3-$6 sounds about right.

I started to bid as cheap as I could, figuring it'd be better to get 15 clicks a day at 20 cents or whatever, instead of 2 clicks a day at $1 each.

My total AdWords budget is around $75 per month, and I spend $1.5 - $2.5 a day. My math is probably off here, I'd need to double check.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't know anything about inventory management but the idea of a free inventory management product is kind of interesting. What if you made it free, how could you make money off it? Would suppliers be able to bid for ads, so that when it came time to re-order their deals were shown preferentially? Who would find the information about the inventory of hundreds of small businesses commercially useful, and who would be willing to pay for that?

<comment><USER26> That is a interesting plan, it will require a few things though. Firstly you need a lot of clients to make it worth their while. Secondly you need the business ability to negotiate with medium to large companies.

<comment><USER25> Agree, it isn't without issues. But if you've built the app and there are lots of people wanting a free solution then that is two out of three (with the third, and only, missing piece the people willing to pay...which is kind of where he is now). Still, at scale this would give you a lot of interesting data I'm sure you could make money off of somehow - e.g. shorting P&G because you can see their orders are down 20% or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I like your article because you show "how to fail" instead of the common "how to win". We started a product/company (took a year to build), have a similar situation, and are still debating closing everything completely. If we do end up shuttering, I'll just try to sell to a competitor for a little computer money. Anyway, I think your product sounds cool (would b good for a bookstore) and I think your story could be ebook worthy.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, books might be a good niche for a product like this. There is a market for software targeting people selling through Amazon who really need just inventory management and not customer lists and the other features mentioned in the original article. The custom barcode scan stuff is spot on, it would be interesting to have a Android or iPhone application that integrates potentially in real-time with a web app (look at the Roller demo that Google just released to see how simple integration can be) and is used as a barcode scanner. Supporting ISBN, QR, other custom barcode formats could be a valuable feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you plan on just building a product and waiting for small business owners to float by your web site to buy it then you are wasting time. Small businesses, at least initially until you become a well known brand, need direct marketing. And that will mean you have to pick up the phone and start calling. If you have a particular niche you are targeting then getting list of those businesses should not be hard.

</comment><comment><USER28> You seem to be a good writer and very articulate. However, therein lies your problem. Your blog, too long. Your product page ... way to long.

My suggesting is before throwing money at marketing, get some feedback from some local business managers on your product page. Cut it down to something that takes 1 min to get the gist of. Put more images/icons to help explain or highlight certain points.

<comment><USER11> Looks like standard engineer writing to me. I noticed "Mobile Ready!" takes the lead _twice_ on the product page, but I don't think mobile is a tier-1 need for inventory management.

<comment><AUTHOR> By a fluke I noticed that "mobile inventory management" and variants brought me tons and tons of clicks from AdWords for incredibly cheap.

Attempting to capitalize on that, I did my best to make the product "mobile ready" and started flinging some of the traffic at a special mobile landing page.

Having not converted any of that traffic, I've ascertained that they're probably looking for a native inventory app rather than a web app.

Edit: "tons and tons" is relative to the clicks I was getting before this discovery.

<comment><USER11> > _I've ascertained that they're probably looking for_

Not to beat a dead horse, but why not talk to some potential customers about that rather than trying to extrapolate from questionable data?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm just going to leave this here in the hope that @Rakathos reads it. It's all about why "small business owners" are a _terrible_ market: <http://www.erica.biz/2013/new-business-ideas/>

I cite some good examples of markets in there, as well, so you can see the difference between a good market and a bad one.

</comment><comment><USER30> Implement the fucntionality of Gnucash around your inventory system, and voila, you have a complete ERP. And now you can offer us something.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what nearly all of the feedback I've gotten has been. "It needs to be like X or do Y".

I fought that for a long time but I've been forced to see that inventory management by itself is not something that many businesses can use. They need inventory + X.

<comment><USER11> Nuanced difference between what you're saying and what the GP is saying. GP isn't saying _inventory + $random_feature_ , he's saying make it a complete solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How many phone calls did you have with potential customers?

<comment><AUTHOR> A grand total of zero. With all of my projects I've been adamant about not doing phone marketing, phone calls, or phone anything.

I realize that that is a crippling problem, especially when my target demographic is small business owners who seem to do everything by phone.

<comment><USER31> I hate phone calls too, but you need to get over that. You don't need to cold call people - you can email first, set time for the call etc - but you can learn SO MUCH more about your potential customers from actually talking to them.

In person meetings are even better (and much more comfortable if you don't like calls) but they don't scale as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What tech stack is Rakasheets built on?

<comment><AUTHOR> The entire backend of Rakasheets is built in C#/Asp.Net.

For the real-time technology I'm using SignalR, which I highly recommend. It's like websockets for .Net and it's very simple to use.

Sidenote: While I love SignalR, "real-time inventory" has added zero value to the product from my customer's point of view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Your rite small business needs a complete package not focusing on automating one part of their business. I developed a crm/erp for the small business, covering from attendance, payroll, followups, lead management, production, vendor management, accounting, competitor analysis and many more feature that's is not avaliable in current crm/erp industry. www.bizsol.co and I'm from India</comment>


Scale Out Multi-Tenant Apps Based on Ruby on Rails - <AUTHOR> https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/01/05/easily-scale-out-multi-tenant-apps/ <comment><USER2> One word of warning about choosing a partitioning scheme: if you select something like customer (as recommended in the article's example), you might get to a point down the road where you realize that some customers are much, _much_ bigger than other customers. This can put you in an awkward place as a single tenant is approaching the bounds of their shard because you may not have a lot of choice but to figure out how to further subpartition their data.

That said, per-customer/user partitioning might still be your best bet given the advantages that it conveys around isolation. If I understand correctly, Citus can guarantee atomicity, consistency, and isolation (ACI*) within a transaction localized to any single partition which is a _huge_ benefit for building apps that are more tolerant to failure and problematic edge cases with very little effort on your part (compare this to Mongo, which in its latest versions is just starting to give you the "consistency" part and nothing else).

Anyway, nice work from the Citus team!

<comment><USER3> We actually have something on the roadmap to help address the case of a very large customer. In future versions of Citus you'll be able to isolate a single very large tenant to their own shard so their resource consumption won't compete as directly with other smaller users, and then if needed you could scale them out to their own physical node with no changes to your app.

<comment><USER4> You'll need multishard table for big clients. And with ability to split shards to grow more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you don't have to share data between users, a multi-database setup is the way to go. I wrote a post about how I do it a little over a year ago...

[https://tomschlick.com/2015/11/29/lessons-from-building- mult...](https://tomschlick.com/2015/11/29/lessons-from-building-multi-tenant- apps-part-1-databases)

<comment><USER6> What is your experience with doing schema upgrades across many databases? Is it usually possible to break up schema changes in small pieces, so that it works across multiple versions of your software?

<comment><USER5> Yeah we try to minimize the changes that would require a lock. For those cases we have a flag where we can turn off each tenant individually for maintenance.

For long running / many record migration we shove those into a queue to they can be done in the background in parallel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An important aspect of the infosec philosophy my employer pushes is "blast radius". If you assume you will be compromised then you want to ensure as little data as possible ends up in that compromise.

Coupled with the opportunity for things like mass assignment vulnerabilities (i <3 the strong params pattern on rails) I am a little perturbed by the notion of my data being housed next to other customers. If that customer is a more attractive target, and a compromise is found, now I'm just along for the ride.

That all said, I'm not well appraised of what problem Citus Data is solving -- so maybe I've just read this wrong?

</comment><comment><USER8> As someone who's seen too many gems get abandoned, I'm hoping that this one sticks! Fortunately, it seems ultimately aligned with the underlying business so that's usually a good indicator.

Another problem with these model<->database gems is that they're impossible to mix and match. In particular, if you use something like octopus ([https://github.com/thiagopradi/octopus](https://github.com/thiagopradi/octopus)) for selecting replica databases, then you're out of luck when trying to match it with this gem, at least at first glance.

</comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for sharing - author here.

I've been working on this library for 2-3 months now, if somebody gives it a try let me know how it goes :)

I'd be happy to answer any questions as well.

<comment><USER10> Does this have easy support for some kind of sub-tenant setup?

Following your example, let's say that most customers have multiple departments and that most tables have both a customer_id and a department_id.

Oh, and this looks solid. Nice work :)

<comment><USER9> Thats a good question - there is nothing explicit for it, yet.

You could probably do it nonetheless with Rails' own has_many/belongs_to relationships for that sub-tenant, but the automatic adding of department_id into queries wouldn't happen.

Depending on what storage you end up using, that might matter or not. For example with Citus, you'd typically take the top-level tenant (customer_id) as a shard key, and just have all the departments of that tenant on the same node - so it would work fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's the benefit of this approach vs doing scoped queries? i.e. current_user.pages.find(params[:id])

<comment><USER12> My experience is that it's easy for a developer (new or not) to forget to scope some query. So, by using a gem like this or tenancy, your infrastructure prevents the tragic mistake of missing it.

A middle ground solution might extend active record to warn you whenever a query doesn't have current_user / current_customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've used the gem 'tenancy' which extends ActiveRecord to set a where statement for the tenant on every query of every object that belongs to the tenant.

<comment><USER13> What about objects belong to objects belong to the tenant? Or further levels thereof?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I see in the readme that the gem is based on acts_as_tenant which I currently used; what has been changed/added? I'm wondering if it's worth the switch.

<comment><USER9> There are a few things, the most important ones:

      - Including the tenant_id in modification queries as well (e.g. UPDATE/DELETE)
      - Support for specifying the current tenant as an ID (through `MultiTenant.with_id(123) { ... }`)
      - Helpers for multi-column primary keys in your migrations
      - Specific integration with Citus as a distributed multi-tenant data store (it'll just work without modifications)

I've considered contributing these back to acts_as_tenant, but it seemed easier to have a clean-cut, since the shared lines of code only ended up being about ~50 lines - mostly to set a default scope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How is this different from existing multitenacy gems like `apartment`?

<comment><USER9> Let me start by saying that apartment is great - but it takes a different approach.

The most important difference is that apartment shards by database or schema, vs activerecord-multi-tenant puts all your data into the same table, and then relies on a PostgreSQL extension like Citus to do the distribution.

There is trade-offs to both, but part of the reason we prefer the latter approach is that schema changes become a lot easier, and you can do shard- splitting based on a shard count, as opposed to just by tenant, effectively grouping smaller tenants together on a node.

I'll also give a shout-out to acts_as_tenant, which our library is based on, although we've deviated a bit since then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> can't the same be achieved with has_many :through association?

<comment><USER9> Its a bit more complex than that unfortunately.

Since Rails isn't used to include something like a tenant_id, and doesn't support composite primary keys either, you'd have to always hand-write your SQL.

Feel free to take a look at the source - it effectively ends up being a default scope with some additional glue code.</comment></comment>


Do you have the Learners Syndrome? - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/do-you-have-the-learners-syndrome-169c8158ec16 <comment><USER2> >> _Sure, you can learn new technologies but spend one hour a day or less on them. Make sure it's a hobby and not an addiction_

This. I don't think "the Learners Syndrome" is necessarily a bad thing.

My process is usually something along the lines of

-See articles or mentions of some new technology on HN,Reddit,etc.

-Spend a half hour to understand what it's for, what's new about it, what are the pros/cons either via videos or articles.

-If it looks super interesting, work on their tutorial or some intro throwaway project (to do lists being a good example that the author mentions). For me this is very rare. These should take at least an hour and can take multiple hours

-File that technology away and then know that it exists. Usually something like, "Okay, [new technology] exists for solving [X] problem, the next time I need to solve [X] problem, don't forget to evaluate [new technology] as an option."

<comment><USER3> And with this comment, nothing more need be said on the topic. I don't need to intimately know how most stuff works, I need only know of it's existence and why I might want to use it. If I do need to use it, I can learn about it then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Of course, the hacker ecosystem would be out-of-balance without Learners to play Fraggles to CADTs' [1] Doozers. [2]

[1] [https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html](https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html)

[2] [http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Doozers](http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Doozers)</comment>


Xerox ending hostile takeover bid of HP - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/xerox-to-end-hostile-takeover-bid-for-hp-11585684800 <comment><USER2> Story is paywalled. Anyone got an alternitive link?

<comment><USER3> morningstar.com reprints just about everything in WSJ as f far as I can tell.

[https://www.morningstar.com/news/dow- jones/2020033114017/xer...](https://www.morningstar.com/news/dow- jones/2020033114017/xerox-to-end-hostile-takeover-bid-for-hp)

There's a Lucifer's syndication joke in there somewhere. I'm just a bit too tired to tease it out.</comment></comment>


Possible detection of a black hole with a mass thought to be impossible - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-black-hole-so-big-it-should-not-exist-20200902/ <comment><USER2> Discussion about this article last year:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20819902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20819902)

However there is an update to the article posted today:

 _[Update: On September 2, 2020, researchers confirmed_ [1] _that the colliding black holes had masses 65 and 85 times that of our sun. The resulting black hole was 150 times more massive than the sun.]_

[1] [https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...](https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.101102)

</comment><comment><USER3> It was less "should not exist" and more "should only form when black holes merge," and apparently the "black hole mergers fill the mass gap" hypothesis is now supported by evidence. Nobody was claiming that there is some physical reason black holes of such mass could not exist, only that the best understood process of black hole formation should not allow for such masses (but other processes can).

<comment><USER4> The title is bad, but...

> Chris Belczynski, an astrophysicist at Warsaw University, previously felt so > sure that such a large specimen wouldn't be seen that in 2017 he placed a > bet with colleagues. "I think we are about to lose the bet," Belczynski > said, "and for the good of science!"

LIGO has existed for decades and by 2017 had already detected a merger. My guess is he considered black holes in this range rare enough that we were unlikely to detect any. If he believed they were impossible the article certainly doesn't elucidate on that fact.

<comment><USER5> This was a key feature of the bet. It's within the first 100 gravitational wave detections. They're betting against an unknown distribution.

Neither side was saying that they wouldn't be found.

<comment><USER6> Is there a sampling bias involved?

I presume that different masses of black holes result in different frequency waves, and that LIGO is not uniformly sensitive to all frequencies. Depending on the actual numbers, this would make these intermediate sized mergers either over or under represented in our data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > For cores with a mass between about 65 and 130 times that of our sun > (according to current estimates), the star is completely obliterated [via a > pair-instability supernova]. Cores between about 50 and 65 solar masses > pulsate, shedding mass in a series of explosions until they drop below the > range where pair instability occurs. Thus there should be no black holes > with masses in the 50-to-130-solar-mass range.

> The million- and billion-solar-mass supermassive black holes that anchor > galaxies' centers formed differently, and rather mysteriously, in the early > universe. LIGO and Virgo are not mechanically capable of detecting the > collisions of supermassive black holes.

</comment><comment><USER8> When two black holes with a near-circular orbit and similar size merge, they should both be going close to the speed of light about their common center shortly before the merge. (Right?) Do close orbits tend to become more, or less, eccentric?

After the event horizon surfaces contact, does it become spherical in minimal time, or does it keep a complicated shape for an extended period? (E.g., until gravitational waves carry off enough energy?) And does the very large rotational momentum affect properties of the resulting black hole?

<comment><USER9> I'd think binary systems made up of similarly sized objects where the orbits are in some sense "close" are almost by definition not eccentric. To get to that point from a previously eccentric orbit they convert the eccentricity to spin. Check out this out for an example with neutron stars: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JZBmgOEfdo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JZBmgOEfdo)

As to the second part, I'd think it becomes axially symmetric in very minimal time. I don't have a good answer as to why, except that my intuition says the GW signature of blackhole mergers at the point of the merger has a frequency that appears to get infinitely fast as it radiates away the axial asymmetry.

<comment><USER8> Thank you. Searching for "Hypermassive Neutron Star" turns out to be very informative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While this is interesting, the article and graph within are misleading and clickbaity.

This black hole is big enough to fall into a mass RANGE that shouldn't exist, but isn't the largest found (which I feel the title of the article implies).

Supermassive black holes are on the scale of BILLIONS of solar masses.

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

<comment><USER11> Doesn't really make sense that the range wouldn't exist either, unless I'm confused.

Obviously black holes are colliding otherwise we probably wouldn't have supermassive black holes, so it doesn't seem unexpected that two smaller black holes would collide and form one bigger than the limit imposed by pair- instability supernova, except as a statistical improbability.

<comment><USER12> It's not clear how the gap between solar-mass scale black holes and supermassive black holes was traversed; was it a build up from small black holes, or did they start out as seeds of a few million solar masses in the early universe? What about the dearth of intermediate sized black holes (tens of thousands of solar masses)? Is this just because they are just hard to see to begin with, or is there really a gap? This is intimately related to the Salpeter time, which is how long it takes to grow black holes if they accrete at the Eddington limit, and can also be inferred from the quasar luminosity function. IIRC this favors the massive seed scenario, but there's no shortage of clever explanations around it.

<comment><USER13> Black holes get less dense as they gain mass - assuming I didn't drop a factor of 2 or τ, a 1 solar mass black hole has a density of 147 quadrillion tons per cubic meter. A black hole of 100 million solar masses had density of only 14.7 tons per cubic meter (for reference, lead is 11.3 Tn/m3 and osmium is 22.6 Tn/m3). So a sphere of 100M (actually >81M) solar masses of osmium would collapse into a black hole without even having to compress under it's own gravity first. You'd need 384 million solar masses for something with the density of water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why are LIGO and Virgo not mechanically capable of detecting the collisions of supermassive black holes?

Is it because the amplitude is so big it "pegs the needle" above its limit?

<comment><USER15> LIGO and VIRGO are sensitive to gravitational waves within a specific frequency range. The bulk of GW energy is emitted at a frequency that is twice the orbital frequency of the objects emitting the gravitational waves. Supermassive black holes are sufficiently large that they merge before they could have an orbit compact enough to emit gravitational waves at high enough frequencies for LIGO and VIRGO to detect them. Less massive compact objects are smaller and so can reach higher orbital frequencies before merging.

<comment><USER16> There seem to be projects for lower frequencies/longer wavelengths underway: [https://youtu.be/GlmMxmWHEfg?t=3733](https://youtu.be/GlmMxmWHEfg?t=3733)

<comment><USER14> Cool!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there an "upper" limit on the mass of a black hole?

I would guess "no" but then again I'm not a physicist, maybe there's a surprise down the road.

<comment><USER18> No. In fact, the entire observable universe is a black hole: the Schwarzschild radius of the mass of the observable universe is greater than the observable size, meaning by the technical definition of a black hole we are living within one: light from Earth sent into the darkest region of the sky will not escape the gravitational pull of the whole universe, even before considering expansion rates.

<comment><USER19> The Schwarzschild radius for the mass of the observable universe is about 13.7 Billion Light Years while the observable universe is about 93 Billion Light Years across (radius ~46 Billion Light Years). So the universe is not itself a black hole (until you take expansion rates into account)

<comment><USER18> I think you have that backwards--you have to take expansion into account for the "observable" universe to be that large, since the age of the universe is only 13.7 billion years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd like to point out and give props to this article for providing a picture of the actual hand written bet that led to this research!

Humorous and rarely shared in science articles and gives some great context for the personalities involved!

<3s!!!

</comment><comment><USER21> 142 solar mass black hole: [https://www.ligo.org/detections/GW190521.php](https://www.ligo.org/detections/GW190521.php)

<comment><USER5> Yes, that was this event.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> what's the reason for discarding a merger between, say, a black hole and a supermassive star? I guess then the wave signature would be different.

<comment><USER23> Your guess is correct. The signature is _very_ different.

In order to reach LIGO's frequency band, the objects must be very compact. If they are too large, they touch before they can orbit each other at sufficiently-high (audio!) frequencies.

The Schwarzschild radius of the black holes in question are less than 100km in size, while the size of a star as small as our Sun is ~700,000 km in size.

Moreover, the compact objects (neutron stars, black holes) that LIGO can observe are exceptionally dense ( > 3x10^17 kg/m^3), while stars have roughly the density of water (1000 kg/m^3) on average, and much less at their extremities. Compact objects can disrupt nearby stars long before they could touch, spreading the "merger" across many, many years (many, many millenia, I suspect), rather than the fraction-of-a-second typical of a LIGO black-hole observation.

For a visual image of the interaction of a large/fluffy star with a compact object, have a gander at a few of these images: [https://www.google.com/search?q=roche+lobe+accretion](https://www.google.com/search?q=roche+lobe+accretion)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well that was a silly bet. Of course we were bound to find something in between a just formed black hole and a supermassive black hole.

<comment><USER5> > Of course we were bound

Absolutely, the question was only how frequently it happens. The bet was within the first 100 detections — with one side only saying they're rarer than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> off topic but still "Impossible is Nothing" by Divine Heresy for nerds who like Metal: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFeoVCFdQ6k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFeoVCFdQ6k)</comment>


Bill Joy Finds the Jesus Battery - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/bill-joy-finds-the-jesus-battery/ <comment><USER2> "Because of Joy's earlier history as a legendary computer scientist—a co- founder of Sun, a co-inventor of Java, and a visionary who was working on the Internet of Things two decades ago—his views have weight, separate and apart from his financial interest in the company."

No. His background in computer science basically gives him just as much credibility in material science as I have. So the story here is famous guy leverages his fame to plug one of his investments, which is fine, but rich famous guys invest in dead ends all the time, because they can afford to. This might turn out to be the real thing, but the odds aren't in his favor.

</comment><comment><USER3> A rechargeable alkaline will be cheap and have a high energy to weight ratio, but someone still needs to improve alkaline high power capability before it can be used in cell phones, power tools and electric cars. The article doesn't address this, so calling it a Jesus battery is hyperbolic.

<comment><USER4> yeah aren't the standard AAA's like 1.5V vs. Lithium at 3.6V. Big difference in power. Although admittedly 0-60 in 2.3s isn't really necessary.

<comment><USER5> Cell voltage does not equate cell power. NiMH cells have a higher drain performance than alkaline cells even though they have a cell voltage of 1.2V.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It comes back to life after it's been dead for 3 days?

</comment><comment><USER7> > things go into [the] solution

Fire that editor.

("into solution" is correct, whoever added the "[the]" was wrong. WRONG!!!)

</comment><comment><USER8> I genuinely checked if today is April 1st.</comment>


NYT profits up 85% - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7d58fcba-7789-11de-8c68-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1

<comment><USER2> Strange how two stories on same day don't get analyzed together. Consider how Techcrunch reports that _online_ ad revenue is off by 85%:

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/23/online-ad-revenues- at-t...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/23/online-ad-revenues-at-the-new- york-times-keep-dropping-like-a-rock/)</comment>


Founders of Amazon and Microsoft funding little-known fusion energy companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160428-the-secretive-billionaire-backed-plans-to-harness-fusion <comment><USER2> I have some friends at General Fusion and I've been following them relatively closely from the beginning. I had an opportunity to invest some in the beginning and decided not to - mostly because the problems they're trying to solve seemed so hard.

They've pivoted a little bit on their approach since then. In the beginning it was all about focussed pressure waves. Now they're starting with plasma. Fusion is _really_ hard (well, at least for power generation, perhaps the "level a city" kind is easier). I think it's harder than self driving cars (for example) or landing rockets on barges (as another example). There are many fundamental problems in different areas that have to be solved and not all these areas are well understood.

I'm pleasantly surprised they are still going strong and that they were able to raise money to continue their progress. Obviously if they are successful the business opportunity of all power generation in the world is a pretty big one...

<comment><USER3> How does the design process for these reactors work? How much design is done in simulation vs experimentally and how high-fidelity are the simulations?

<comment><USER4> This is not my field (just an enthusiast) but consider that a typical fusion plasma has a density of 10^20 particles per cubic meter. Even if your plasma is 1 cubic centimeter, that's still 10^14 particles! Thus a full-on EM simulation, where every charged particle interacts with every charged particle, is not practical. A full-scale simulation is still unrealistic even if you typically cheat by breaking the problem up into cells and ignoring the Coulomb interaction beyond cell boundaries.

Fusion machine design is a combination of hard-won experimental knowledge and theoretical guesswork. I'm skeptical of the current wave of fusion startups simply because they don't have the weight of the decades of experimental work that have gone into tokamak research. But hey, they might make a breakthough, who knows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has anyone since reasonable explanation of what the future would look like with fusion?

To me, there will never be enough energy, this effort is about control, not power; even if there was (relatively speaking) an unlimited source of energy, the bounds of it's use would quickly be found, and as such, would not be "universally" available.

<comment><USER6> My first thought was that an electricity cost at maybe 20% of what it is now would be result in a good economic uplift but not a seismic change.

But the interesting cases are those where much cheaper electricity unlocks new opportunities. Imagine the coast of sub-Saharan Africa transformed by the agriculture enabled by cheap desalinated water.

<comment><USER7> Electricity already makes up around half or less of the cost of desalination. Even free electricity would at best halve the cost.

<comment><USER8> Assuming current designs. There may be less energy efficient designs that are, ignoring the cost of energy, cheaper to builder and operate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Serious question for those with actual knowledge of Controlled Fusion Economics:

Does the smaller size of this reactor design mitigate the challenges that the Tokamaks face with material radioactivity? With the level of neutron bombardment those pistons undergo what material can they be made of to assure an economically viable operational lifetime?

I remember this being one of the bigger challenges for all of injector and heating equipment in Tokamak designs. After a point the devices are composed of different radioactive isotopes and have to be replaced/disposed of, making the economics... challenging.

Is it possible for this project to be successful without a Materials breakthrough? I don't think the Physics challenges are insurmountable with enough time, but finding new materials can be a rabbit hole.

<comment><USER10> Aneutronic fusion[1] releases 100x fewer neutrons, but requires 10x higher temperature, among other challenges:

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

<comment><USER11> I thought it was also proven that it couldn't be energy positive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm really proud of General Fusion, they're a rare Vancouver success story. And good on the Trudeau government for backing them!

I just hope that Christy Clark doesn't sabotage GF with her goal of turning mining, LNG, fracking and real estate into BC's economic engines.

</comment><comment><USER13> I know Michel Laberge, he's from my home town of Bowen Island, BC. I went to school with his son, and my earliest memory of his mad scientist work was when his son brought in a mechanical hand controlled by a glove for his grade 6 science project. I think I was experimenting with lemons as a power source...

Of course we didn't learn until much later that he had rented the old gas station in the middle of town to conduct experiments with nuclear energy.

I still believe General Fusion's approach to be the most practical of the solutions I've seen. I'm continually following their progress, and am hoping for great news to come from them. I would love to be able to tell this as the story of how we accomplished nuclear fusion.

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe it's just me, but I wish our society's future wellbeing wasn't placed at the whim of a handful of oligarchs.

<comment><USER15> I think it's debatable, do you prefer our energy future being at the hands of lobbyists? Because that's what's happening today in the US and Europe as far as I can tell.

EV were always dubbed too complex and impossible in Europe until tesla came around and made it happen.

I follow the general skepticism about money and control of mankind's future (space resources, energy, water, etc) but also have to keep faith in a certain humanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> We are just 20 years away...

</comment><comment><USER17> Hey, if they can pull it off, good on them.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's really pathetic how HN has degenerated from an actual community of builders / startup founders / creators to reddit-style vitriol and populist complaints about the 1%.

Every comment right now is complaining about billionaires and the problems with of capitalism. Not even about the technology, much less being happy about this being funded.

Genuine question -- is there a community somewhere which is actually full of not-shitty people? I would like an invite.

<comment><USER19> I checked your post history, of about 9 top-level comments on the first page (not including this one) I see seven normative posts and two technical ones.

<comment><USER18> Very few of those are actually top-level comments. I usually only comment as a reply when a top-level comment makes me angry.</comment></comment></comment>


Collecting insects from dead bodies (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2014/04/maggots-bring-the-heat/ <comment><USER2> What I could see from the (paywalled) article is a graph with data points to which a linear regression was applied.

I sur hope that the article explains why such fit and that there is a _biological_ theory for a linear relationship between the variables.

Fitting everything linearly is an early sign of misunderstanding of statistics and quality of the conclusions.</comment>


Chinese Spyware Pre-Installed on All Samsung Phones (& Tablets) Claims Redditor - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ektg8u/chinese_spyware_preinstalled_on_all_samsung/ <comment><AUTHOR> Another commenter reviewed decompiled code from the APK:

> I also did a quick passthrough of the decompiled code. There is logic there > to upload log files and send phone information (IMEI, MAC, AndroidID, > SerialNo). What's really nice is that most of their APIs use HTTP, not > HTTPS!

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ektg8u/chinese_spy...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ektg8u/chinese_spyware_preinstalled_on_all_samsung/fddq5ib/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Unless you can catch it sending sensitive information it could just be jet another normal crapware doing crapware things (some telemetry, bloaty updates etc.) but nothing truly malicious, no?

</comment><comment><USER3> Can Google release a patch to prevent it?</comment>


TechCrunch Tokyo Startup Battlefield: SmartHR Takes the Top Prize - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/19/techcrunch-tokyo-startup-battlefield-smarthr-takes-the-top-prize/ <comment><USER2> Is it just me? I find all of these companies doing me too things. Even Bonx is just an app which makes it slightly easier to up a group call with a bluetooth headset. The whole video is just a group of guys having fun.</comment>


SVG graphs on timetric.com - <AUTHOR> http://blog.timetric.com/2010/07/05/svg-graphs/

<comment><USER2> Protovis is an excellent javascript library for making interactive SVG graphs: <http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. The advantage of this approach is that it also works in IE 6-8 using VML.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The work they've done combining Raphael's SVG and Flot's plotting is ace. Will be using!

</comment><comment><USER2> Where did the page go?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, back now!</comment></comment>


Crittercism rides the growing mobile app services boom - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/07/12/crittercism-rides-the-growing-mobile-app-services-boom/

<comment><USER2> So they did YC, and now they're doing AngelPad? I'm curious to hear more about that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats Crittercism team! It was great to have you at AngelPad. I love what you are doing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Congrats... Looking forward to hearing your pres at Sunfire this week.

</comment><comment><USER5> Awesome job guys!</comment>


Show HN: FuncyTag JS/PY HTML generator - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/BrentNoorda/FuncyTag

<comment><AUTHOR> jQuery does provide great ways to generate dynamic HTML. In fact, the FuncyTag quick example from <https://github.com/BrentNoorda/FuncyTag#quick-example>

        t = div( { id:'animal-'+id, class:genus },
              p( { cssColor: endangered?'red':'green', cssFontSize_pct: endangered?120:undefined },
                'The', b('species'), 'is a', genus, 'and looks like this:',
                img( { width:imgSize, height:imgSize, src:'/pix/' + id + '.jpg' } )
              )
            );

can be written in pure jQuery in a very similar fashion:

        t = $('<div/>',{ id:'animal-'+id, class:genus }).append(
              $('<p/>').css({ color:endangered?'red':'green', fontSize:endangered?'120%':'' }).append(
                'The ', $('<b/>').text(species), ' is a ', genus, ' and looks like this:',
                $('<img/>',{ width:imgSize, height:imgSize, src:'/pix' + id + '.jpg' } )
              )
            );

So I don't claim any tremendous FuncyTag breakthrough if you're accustomed to the jQuery style.

There's a few differences in FuncyTag that I've found work better for me: 1) treating tags fully as functions means I can read it and write it easier 2) set css/Styles the same as setting attributes (through cssCamelStyle), instead of using css() versus attr() 3) setting the css units as part of the name (e.g. cssMarginLeft_em:2) 4) creating html strings with indentation, so alert(t) helps me see the HTML when I'm debugging

I just find one of the above approaches easier to read than the other, and keep going back to it so thought I'd finally document and share. (Maybe the FuncyTag approach is easier, or maybe I'm just so familiar with it since that's how I've most enjoyed creating HTML from javascript since about the mid 90's.)

</comment><comment><USER2> Can you please elaborate on its use cases? Personally I think jquery gives a great way to generate dynamic HTML.</comment>


This is the tech bubble we have been waiting for - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/cryptocurrency-ico-bubble-2017-11 <comment><USER2> the author fails to mentions the cryptocurrency total volume is roughly $7B while the dotcom bubble volume was $170B, i.e only 4% (without even removing inflation which would lower is to 3%). It's tiny, not a bubble right now, but it is true things can get out off hands pretty quickly. Sometimes these things can affect the overall mindset of investors signaling them to stop investing for now</comment>